Will Someone Die If They See A Woman's Nipple?
Chelsea Handler posted a photo of herself bare-breasted on the top of a horse (making fun of a similar Putin photo) and the eye nannies at Instagram yanked it down.
Via ETonline:
Instagram did take the photo down, as per their guidelines, prompting this response from Handler: "If a man posts a photo of his nipples, it's ok, but not a woman? Are we in 1825?"After her first photo was removed, Handler reposted the pic again only for Instagram to remove it again.
"We removed your post because it doesn't follow our Community Guidelines," Instagram posted to Chelsea's page. "Please read our Community Guidelines to learn what kinds of posts are allowed and how you can help keep Instagram safe."
Handler once again posted the pic, writing, "If Instagram takes this down again, you're saying Vladimir Putin has more 1st amendment rights than me. Talk to your bosses."
Um, Chels, a private business has the right to decide what does and doesn't go up on their service -- and we have the right to disparage them for it, which I'm doing and I hope you'll continue doing.
Free Speech In America? Hah, That's Funny (We're Much Too Prissy)
We're now the land of the prissy, or hadn't you heard?
In the latest bit of evidence of this, check out what happened when two kids posted a photo on a Facebook of themselves dressed up -- and holding Airsoft rifles (which only shoot plastic pellets). Cute, aren't they? 
Predictably -- these days -- their school administrator got his panties triple-bunched. Jon Street writes at The Blaze that they were suspended:
Tito Velez and his girlfriend Jamie Pereira did not bring the guns to campus and said they never intended to do so. But according to Bristol Plymouth Regional Technical School, the photo's caption, "Homecoming 2014," ties it a school activity."These students know what is provocative. To tie that to one of our school events kind of puts it over the top which brings us into it," Superintendent Richard Gross said.
Police would have cancelled the homecoming dance if they had known about the Facebook post on Friday, Gross added.
Oh how ridiculous.
I shot BB guns when I was a kid.
Notice how I'm not living out my life in jail?
You Aren't Citizens; You're Prey -- Or Cash Cows
By lowering the yellow light time without announcing it, Chicago made nearly $8 million off of red-light cameras -- which I contend make our streets more dangerous because drivers often stop short to avoid getting a huge ticket via camera.
The full story from Odette Yousef at WBEZ:
Chicago's red light cameras are under increased scrutiny, after a Chicago Tribune investigation found glitchy cameras may have issued thousands of tickets in error. The report also found many yellow lights are slightly short of the city standard of three seconds.WBEZ has been looking into yellow lights too -- and we've found something else. Many traffic experts say Chicago flouts industry best practices with how it programs its traffic control devices -- and one engineer says it may be "entrapping" drivers into running red lights.
Oh, and no, "Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration will not refund $7.7 million in red light camera tickets it collected after quietly lowering the yellow light standard," reports Hal Dardick in the Chi Trib.
Chicago as usual!
Limpy
Little washraggy links.
Best "Inappropriate" Halloween Costume -- And The Argument For An "Inappropriate" Halloween
And the winner for the costume is...Edgar Allan Ho. Missing only the fishnets.
Some argue against trampy Halloween costumes (at least when women wear them) or twisted ones for men or women, but let's try to remember that is the national holiday of bad taste and ease the hell up.
Sure, ladies, you might want to rethink twice about whether it will help your career for the sales staff to see that mole on your left breast when you dress up as a serving wench. But that's something to look at on an individual basis. It might humanize some bosses. Especially if it's a man dressing up as a serving wench.
Some people get upset seeing costumes that use humor to deal with things we're afraid of -- like death. Laughing at the stuff we're afraid of, mocking our fears, makes them smaller. Wearing a zombie costume doesn't mean you think your neighbor should have his brain eaten by zombies. And going as an Ebola patient doesn't mean you think it's funny that countless people are dying in Africa.
We are going too far in squashing free expression these days -- to the point where college professors are supposed to print trigger warnings in the syllabus for The Iliad. We've gone from "the land of the free" to the land of the free to demand a life without upset or offense. This creates an environment where there's a chill on speech, which negatively impacts all of us, and supports the continuing erosion of civil liberties in this country. And it makes us a nation of prissies.
There's mistaken thinking that having good manners means never saying or doing anything that offends anyone who is sensitive. We need to care about that. At the root of manners is empathy -- if you are going to a hospital ward, don't dress up as a disease. And wherever you're going, maybe rethink that zombie Robin Williams, outfit complete with the noose, because there are people you may run into on your Halloween travels who've lost people to suicides.
But free expression is also really important. The economy's still in the pooper and a lot of people are having a hard time making ends meet, and we're going to have Downton Abby Rules in effect? How about we don't?
And I'd like to advise something I've suggested before -- that people wear Halloween costumes on, oh, May 6 or February 17th. A furry pair of dog ears with an attached nose worn without remark at the drugstore will make people smile and laugh. This is a good thing.
Appalling Child Support Injustice: Man On The Hook For $30K In Support For Kid Everyone Agrees Isn't His
From WXYZ in Detroit, yet another case of paternity injustice. Or rather "paternity" injustice, since this man -- Carnell Alexander -- ordered to pay tend of thousands of dollars in back child support, did not father the child in question.
If he doesn't pay, he'll go to prison -- which is absolutely disgusting and sick. De facto debtors' prison.
Alexander learned of the child support order in a traffic stop:
"I knew I didn't have a child, so I was kind of blown back," said Alexander.The state said he fathered a child in 1987, and ignored a court order to pay up. It was the first Carnell had heard of the court order. He'd never even met the child.
"And when you were telling them in court - that it was not my child?" "They told me it was too late to get a DNA test," said Alexander.
It also was not easy to get a DNA test. Alexander didn't know where the woman was that had claimed he fathered a child. He only had an 8th-grade education, off-and-on employment at the time, and no money to hire help.
He asked the court for help, but the court couldn't help him in the way he was asking. Friend of the Court employees are not allowed to give legal advice.
Alexander explained to the judge and court again and again his situation. He says in hindsight, he didn't understand the formal legal steps necessary to make things right.
Eventually he, by chance, ran into someone he knew would know where the woman was, and got a DNA test. It proved what he had been saying all along: the child he had never met was not his.
The mother had realized that, and the real father was in the child's life. Alexander took this information to court. The judge was unmoved.
"Case closed. I gotta pay for the baby," said Alexander.
Even though he was in prison when the summons came.
Even though the actual father is in the kid's life. Even though the mother admits that he is not the father. It doesn't matter to the court.
It's the lawmakers who made this possible who should be in jail.
This is slavery under another name, and if it were happening to women, there would be an outcry and "ribbons."
Men? We've decided they're disposable.
(Tell me again about "male privilege"?)
RELATED: Father still paying child support for 3-year-old son he says died 25 years ago.
via @overlawyered
Arrogant Ebola-Infected Or Potentially Infected Healthcare Workers With Cabin Fever
At The Faculty Lounge, a blog post by Michelle N. Meyer on the defiant healthcare workers with Ebola or who have been around the infected who are all "screw the quarantine!"
A few examples from her post:
(2) Ebola Doctor 'Lied' About NYC TravelsThe city's first Ebola patient initially lied to authorities about his travels around the city following his return from treating disease victims in Africa, law-enforcement sources said. Dr. Craig Spencer at first told officials that he isolated himself in his Harlem apartment -- and didn't admit he rode the subways, dined out and went bowling until cops looked at his MetroCard the sources said. "He told the authorities that he self-quarantined. Detectives then reviewed his credit-card statement and MetroCard and found that he went over here, over there, up and down and all around," a source said. Spencer finally 'fessed up when a cop "got on the phone and had to relay questions to him through the Health Department," a source said. Officials then retraced Spencer's steps, which included dining at The Meatball Shop in Greenwich Village and bowling at The Gutter in Brooklyn.
(3) Ebola nurse in Maine rejects home quarantine rules [the WaPo headline better captures the gist: After fight with Chris Christie, nurse Kaci Hickox will defy Ebola quarantine in Maine]
Kaci Hickox, the Ebola nurse who was forcibly held in an isolation tent in New Jersey for three days, says she will not obey instructions to remain at home in Maine for 21 days. "I don't plan on sticking to the guidelines," Hickox tells TODAY's Matt Lauer. "I am not going to sit around and be bullied by politicians and forced to stay in my home when I am not a risk to the American public."
Maine health officials have said they expect her to agree to be quarantined at her home for a 21-day period. The Bangor Daily News reports. But Hickox, who agreed to stay home for two days, tells TODAY she will pursue legal action if Maine forces her into continued isolation. "If the restrictions placed on me by the state of Maine are not lifted by Thursday morning, I will go to court to fight for my freedom," she says.
She makes some important points about what we do and don't know about the disease:
Consider the common refrain that it's "impossible" (not just unlikely) to contract and therefore transmit Ebola after 21 days from exposure, that 21 days is "the virus's maximum incubation period." This isn't so (one might even say that this isn't "grounded in science"). Here's a recent article with background on where this number comes from (pretty good, but not perfect, data), which suggests that the tail of the distribution of onset of symptoms includes somewhere between 0.1-12% of Ebola patients who exhibit initial symptoms after 21 days. And here's a recent WHO report concluding that the mean incubation period (which did not differ across countries or between HCWs and other patients) was 11.4 days (see Figure 3), with 5% of patients becoming symptomatic after 21 days from exposure. So, policies that focus on 21 days are rough justice: they are grounded in science but also reflect a decision to balance the costs of quarantine, controlled movement, and even self-monitoring with the low risk of transmission by not requiring these public health measures after 21 days. Much the same is true of claims that someone has to have a fever before he or she can infect others with Ebola.Our knowledge of this strain of Ebola, as it operates in our urban environment, is good, but imperfect. Based on that imperfect knowledge, the risk of returning HCWs transmitting Ebola to others is low, but not zero. As long as the risk is not zero, it requires a value judgment to decide what degree of individual liberty is reasonable to require returning HCWs temporarily to sacrifice in order to protect the public from that risk. Support for quarantines and other public health measures can certainly be rooted in scientific error or ignorance. But they can also be rooted in scientific disagreement around the edges and/or value-laden trade-offs with which others disagree. These kinds of value judgments are ones we entrust to our elected officials (God help us), to expert agencies, and sometimes to courts.
Meyer, finally:
There are ways of protesting laws and policies with which we disagree, and it is especially troubling to see members of a profession that so critically depends on trust so willing to undermine it by choosing methods of protest that involve deception and disobedience. Indeed, aside from differing values, I think the resistance to more "liberal" public health responses to Ebola is primarily rooted not in a disbelief or ignorance of science, but in a distrust of those who speak authoritatively about that science. Early, overconfident and absolutist pronouncements by CDC and other officials helped create that crippling distrust, politicians faced with reelection challenges responded to it, and now HCW deception and disobedience threaten to stoke it. We are caught in a distrust death spiral of our own collective making.Healthcare workers who risk their lives by traveling to west Africa to fight Ebola at its source are heroes, and when they return, they deserve better than being stowed away in a tent and given little information about what officials have in mind for them. But neither this heroism nor HCWs' knowledge of Ebola facts license them to ignore or undermine public policies that are based on much more.
via @cfchabris
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I just had an important meeting and I made the mistake of wearing Makeup Forever's gel eyeshadow -- and ended up with raccoon circles of makeup under my eyes, which I hope developed as I walked home and weren't there the entire time at lunch. (I joked afterward, "They should call it 'Makeup For 20 Minutes.'" The Maybelline has much better staying power; however, I like the L'Oreal gel eyeliner
It's Amazing People Like This Are Running Colleges And Get To Keep Their Jobs
TheFIRE.org just got a college to backtrack on the "Game of Thrones" case -- an absolutely astonishing case in which New Jersey's Bergen Community College (BCC) placed an art professor, Francis Schmidt, on leave and forced him to undergo a psychiatric evaluation for posting a picture of his daughter wearing a Game of Thrones T-shirt. From a post at FIRE:
Schmidt's ordeal began in January when he posted a picture on Google+ of his young daughter wearing a T-shirt with a quote from the hit HBO show Game of Thrones: "I will take what is mine with fire & blood." After Schmidt posted the picture, an automatic email was sent to his Google+ contacts, including one of BCC's deans. She reported it to other administrators, who summoned Schmidt to a meeting to explain his "threatening email."Even after Schmidt and other BCC personnel assured the administrators that the quote on the T-shirt came from a popular TV show, they continued to insist it posed a danger. According to the head of security, the word "fire" in the quote "could be a kind of proxy for 'AK-47s.'"
In response to the posting, BCC placed Schmidt on leave without pay until a psychiatrist attested to his mental fitness. Even after he was reinstated, BCC placed an official warning in his file and threatened him with "suspension and/or termination" if he made "disparaging" remarks about the college or acted in any way BCC determined to be "unbecoming."
Under pressure from Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, BCC expunged the reprimand from Schmidt's record in late September, stating that "any penalty or restriction" Schmidt suffered is now "rescinded and acknowledged to be null and void." The letter confirms that Schmidt "will be in good standing with BCC as if the Incident never occurred, and BCC's records shall so reflect."
FIRE Legal Network member Derek Shaffer, a partner at the law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, and Gabriel Soledad, an associate at the firm, defended Schmidt.
Thank you, Derek and Gabriel, for making unfree speech a little more unwelcome.
Who's The Obama Admin Calling "A Chickenshit"?
David Harsanyi points out at The Federalist, about a senior admin official telling The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg that Benjamin Netanyahu is "a chickenshit":
It's worth noting that the person being repeatedly being called "chickenshit" by an anonymous officials volunteered for the Israeli Defense Force, saw combat, and was the leader of an elite special-forces unit deployed on numerous missions, including the freeing of hijacked Sabena Flight in 1972, where he was shot. Granted, this might not be as courageous as hopping the Amtrak from Delaware to DC each day or rallying the troops at a fundraiser in Greenwich, but God knows we can't all be heroes.
From Goldberg's piece, the US-self-serving nature of that comment:
This official agreed that Netanyahu is a 'chickenshit' on matters related to the comatose peace process, but added that he's also a 'coward' on the issue of Iran's nuclear threat. The official said the Obama administration no longer believes that Netanyahu would launch a preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities in order to keep the regime in Tehran from building an atomic arsenal. 'It's too late for him to do anything. Two, three years ago, this was a possibility. But ultimately he couldn't bring himself to pull the trigger. It was a combination of our pressure and his own unwillingness to do anything dramatic. Now it's too late.'
Harsanyi explains:
At the United Nations a few years, Obama reportedly offered to do whatever it took to prevent Iran from producing atomic weapons in exchange for Israeli assurances that it would not attack Iran's nuclear sites before the presidential election in 2012. (And to think, Obama officials have the audacity to whine about Netanyahu's "near-pathological desire for career-preservation.") One side kept its promise. Obama has repeatedly vowed, since his first run for president, to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Maybe that promise that never should have been made. Now, though, the administration claims it's too late. Now it claims American pressure helped dissuade Israel from defending itself. And now, there is nothing Israel can do about it.Knowing this, why anyone would expect Israel to trust John Kerry or Barack Obama to forge a peace deal with a Fatah-Hamas unity government is a mystery.
The TSA Losers Stole His Belt Buckle -- For "Safety"
Sean W. Malone writes at Logicology that the TSA at LAX took his favorite belt buckle because they claimed it was a "replica" of a gun (photo at link):
What kind of a gun, you might ask?A 1950s Flash Gordon-style RAYGUN!! A fictional weapon. A child's toy.
Because he was running late, he didn't have the time to battle up the chain of command, so he was forced to just leave it.
Previously, the TSA geniuses had almost taken it at DCA:
But this is honestly my favorite belt buckle, and I'm me, so - realizing I was speaking with a woman with the brainpower of a block of Parmesan cheese - I looked at her and said, "You understand that this is a belt buckle, right? It is not a danger to the safety of anyone nor is it against the law to carry. I have also traveled with this belt buckle all over the country and it's never been a problem. So please explain to me how exactly you would justify taking it."Her response was to suggest a hypothetical scenario. "What if", she postulated, "you take this object out of your bag and point it - like a gun - at a police officer? He would have no choice to assume that it was a gun, and take action against you."
Now... Let's leave aside for a second that the entire premise behind this argument is that police officers are too dumb and hopped up on their own power that they can't recognize a dangerous weapon from a belt buckle in the shape of a 1950's toy ray gun. I'm glad she recognized this reality, but I don't think she really processed what it says about law enforcement in America. But leaving that aside... Why in the hell would I ever take my belt buckle and point it at a police officer?
To this, she had no answer.
She also had no answer to the point that even if I did that, it would represent a danger to me and not, say... an airplane full of people.
At this point, she got red in the face and loudly declared that she wasn't going to argue with me or "have a debate about this". "You have two options. That's it," she said. So I asked to speak with *HER* supervisor. Fine. She took the belt buckle and walked it over to some other guy far out of earshot and talked to him for a bit while someone else came over and talked to me. Also seemed like a fairly reasonable guy.
Eventually the woman came back, curtly handed me the buckle and said, "Here you go. Have a good flight, sir.""
He sums up:
But seriously wrap your minds around what this means. Our "Transportation Security Administration" cannot recognize the difference between the following things:1. A belt buckle and a prop replica.2. A fictional/toy gun that has never existed in human history outside of sci-fi & fantasy stories, and a firearm/weapon that actually exists.
3. An object that poses a danger to others... and... a goddamn belt buckle.
Yes, as he puts it, "The TSA is busy protecting you from the scourge of novelty belt buckles."
Government Makes You Fat And Unhealthy
Nina Teicholz, author of "The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat & Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet" and recently heard on my radio show discussing her book, has an op-ed in the WSJ on how the low-fat diet Americans have been told to eat for decades is based in bad science -- and the USDA has been lax both in recognizing that and putting the word out:
The Dietary Guidelines for Americans--jointly published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) every five years--have had a profound influence on the foods Americans produce and consume. Since 1980, they have urged us to cut back on fat, especially the saturated kind found mainly in animal foods such as red meat, butter and cheese. Instead, Americans were told that 60% of their calories should come from carbohydrate-rich foods like pasta, bread, fruit and potatoes. And on the whole, we have dutifully complied.By the turn of the millennium, however, clinical trials funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were showing that a low-fat regime neither improved our health nor slimmed our waistlines. Consequently, in 2000 the Dietary Guidelines committee started to tiptoe away from the low-fat diet, and by 2010 its members had backed off any mention of limits on total fat.
Yet most Americans are still actively trying to avoid fat, according to a recent Gallup poll. They are not aware of the USDA's crucial about-face because the agency hasn't publicized the changes. Perhaps it did not want to be held responsible for the consequences of a quarter-century of misguided advice, especially since many experts now believe the increase in carbohydrates that authorities recommended has contributed to our obesity and diabetes epidemics.
Such a humbling reversal should have led the expert committee preparing the 2015 Dietary Guidelines, which holds its next-to-last public meeting Nov. 6-7, to fundamentally rethink the anti-fat dogma. But instead it has focused its anti-fat ire exclusively on saturated fats. Recent guidelines have steadily ratcheted down the allowable amount of these fats in the diet to 7% of calories "or less," which is the lowest level the government has ever advised--and one that has rarely, if ever, been documented in healthy human populations.
The most current and rigorous science on saturated fat is moving in the opposite direction from the USDA committee. A landmark meta-analysis of all the available evidence, conducted this year by scientists at Cambridge and Harvard, among others, and published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, concluded that saturated fats could not, after all, be said to cause heart disease. While saturated fats moderately raise "bad" LDL-cholesterol, this does not apparently lead to adverse health outcomes such as heart attacks and death. Another meta-analysis, published in the respected American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2010, came to the same conclusion. The USDA committee has ignored these findings.
Limpet
Mollusky links.
Who Isn't Complaining About "The Redskins"?
Well, the other "Redskins" team from Red Mesa High School -- a school with a population that is mostly Navajo.
It's kind of like "queer." It used to be a term of disparagement. Gays reclaimed it.
Not only do the kids on the Red Mesa team not view it as racist, they seem to love it. Check out their mascot -- a painted-faced "brave" in a horse carrying a spear.
Ian Shapira writes at the WaPo:
Beyond Red Mesa's campus is a national movement against that name and logo. Across the country and on Capitol Hill, Native American activists, lawmakers, civil rights leaders and sports commentators have denounced "Redskins" as deeply offensive -- a position rejected by team owner Daniel Snyder, who contends that it honors Native Americans. He has vowed never to change the name.One of the country's most prominent anti-Redskins activists, Amanda Blackhorse, is the lead plaintiff in a legal case that threatens the Washington Redskins' trademark protection. Blackhorse is a Navajo and lives about an hour's drive from Red Mesa.
But most in the Red Mesa community dismiss Blackhorse's cause, or barely know who she is."I don't know what she means that it's a racial slur," said Mckenzie Lameman, 17, a junior who is Red Mesa's student government president. "It's not a racist slur if it originates from a Native American tribe. . . . It's always used in the context of sports."
There were 62 high schools in 22 states using the Redskins moniker last year, according to a project published by the University of Maryland's Capital News Service. In addition to Red Mesa, two others are majority Native American: Wellpinit High School in Washington state and Kingston High School in Oklahoma.
At Red Mesa, there was excitement when students and faculty were offered tickets and transportation to the game between the Arizona Cardinals and the Washington Redskins. About 150 students and faculty signed up.
Blackhorse, who was organizing a protest of the name at the game, said she called a Red Mesa school official and urged him not to let his students be used as props by Washington's team. "I told him they'd be mocked and treated as tokens and pawns," Blackhorse said.
But the school participated anyway, because administrators thought the disadvantaged students would appreciate the opportunity to attend an NFL game.
"We just let [Blackhorse] talk," said Al Begay, Red Mesa's athletic director, sitting in his office. "This protest feels like it's coming from one person."
Lameman (there's a name!) has a point: Nobody is using "redskins" as a term of disparagement for Native Americans. It's used proudly -- as the name of the sports team (one that the Post's Shapira points out wins more often than the team in D.C.).
More about the Washington Redskins name controversy.
Think Scientology Isn't Creepy As Fuck? Think Again
They stalked, spied on, and machinated to try to hurt my friend Mark Ebner. Gawker's John Cook blogged the story. A bit from their stalkage report -- their secret surveillance files -- confirmed, says Cook, by scientology defector Marty Rathbun:
CONFIDENTIAL ATTORNEY CLIENT PRIVILEGEDMarch 27, 2006
RE: MARK EBNER
Mark Ebner does not show up in any of the PI databases or on Nexis with a current residence. The last place that we knew he had been was with a woman by the name [REDACTED], however, checks of her apartment showed that he has not been living there.
Through a media source we learned that Ebner is currently living at [REDACTED]'s house - which is located on North New Hampshire about five or six blocks north of the complex, near Los Feliz. Ebner's van was not at [REDACTED]'s house late last night but was found there this morning. He was there all day, in and out of the house either letting his dogs outside or talking with Derrick. Ebner also received a delivery of a large envelope and was seen carrying around various documents when he came outside the house.
[REDACTED] is a friend of Ebner's who picketed with him around the time period of 1997/1998 (but has not done anything since). She used to work at New Times - which is not in business anymore. As of 2002, [REDACTED] was married to [REDACTED], a character actor, and the house on New Hampshire is in his name. Per Nexis search, he appears to also still be living there at the house - so [REDACTED] appears to still be married and Ebner is just a friend who is living at the house. This will be verified.
The special collections at this location will be done, which will give us further information on Ebner and [REDACTED] and what he is currently doing [Note: "special collections" is a euphemism for searching through trash]. He is still driving the old 1972 VW van which he used to have plastered with anti-Scientology posters and bumper stickers but these have now been stripped off.
In putting together the data on his connections and a time track, Ebner is part of a clique of low class writers/bloggers who hang out in the LA area. For example, he is friends with Peter Collum, a writer for the LA Weekly and Hollywood Reporter with whom he co-authored a book. Ebner and Collum went to "Porndance 99" about six years ago to cover / review porn movies. He is friends with Luke Ford (a writer / blogger) who also covers porn. Both Ebner and Ford have written attack pieces on the "velvet mafia" the powerful gays (like Geffen) in Hollywood.
While we are getting the current scene on Ebner, his files are being gone through for his past connections that he may still be associated with. He listed some of these out when he had the Drastic Media website ([REDACTED], Peter Collum and [REDACTED] are all listed on this site as part of Drastic Media).
A media source who knows Ebner is checking into what Ebner is working on and for whom and another resource he knows is being lined up to contact him to pull strings on his relation with South Park.
Ebner usually does freelance jobs for different media outlets, one of which is currently Star Magazine, any others will be found out. Ebner has been very protective of his writing jobs and this is a key point of vulnerability that we need to work on - as he does not appear to value much else. (When we have used his own postings and actions against him to show that he is totally biased against us, this has caused him problems with the outlets that he has been writing for i.e. he got let go at Rolling Stone and he was caused problems at Radar and made threats of suing Karin for "black PRing" him).
Could Non-Citizens Decide The Next Election?
Poli-Sci profs and researchers Jesse Richman and David Earnest write about their data in the WaPo:
Could control of the Senate in 2014 be decided by illegal votes cast by non-citizens? Some argue that incidents of voting by non-citizens are so rare as to be inconsequential, with efforts to block fraud a screen for an agenda to prevent poor and minority voters from exercising the franchise, while others define such incidents as a threat to democracy itself. Both sides depend more heavily on anecdotes than data.In a forthcoming article in the journal Electoral Studies, we bring real data from big social science survey datasets to bear on the question of whether, to what extent, and for whom non-citizens vote in U.S. elections. Most non-citizens do not register, let alone vote. But enough do that their participation can change the outcome of close races.
...How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.
...Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections. Non-citizen votes could have given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health-care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) won election in 2008 with a victory margin of 312 votes. Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota non-citizens could account for this margin. It is also possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama's 2008 victory in North Carolina. Obama won the state by 14,177 votes, so a turnout by 5.1 percent of North Carolina's adult non-citizens would have provided this victory margin.
Linkage Disequilibrium
In case you were wondering..."the non-random association of alleles at two or more loci, that descend from single, ancestral chromosomes."
Get Last Night's "Science News You Can Use" Podcast: Amy Alkon & Dr. Jennifer Verdolin With A Scientific Look On How You Can Flirt Like A Master
This is a new, very special every-other-week show -- "Science News You Can Use" Radio -- with science-based advice columnist and author Amy Alkon and animal behaviorist Dr. Jennifer Verdolin laying out science news you can use to solve your relationship problems or just improve your relationships and have a better life.
(And yes, I will still be doing shows on the best behavioral science books on weeks in between. This coming Sunday, I have Dr. Beth Montemurro discussing her book on women's sexual evolution.)
Here's the enlightening show Dr. Verdolin and I taped last night on flirting. It turns out that flirting is anything but frivolous. In fact, understanding the science of flirting and mastering the most powerful techniques is the way to both get love in your life and have it stick around. Tune in to find out all the moves you'll need.
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon/2014/10/27/amy-alkon-dr-verdolin-a-scientific-look-at-how-to-flirt-like-a-master
And don't forget to buy our science-based, fun, funny, and illuminating books -- support our show while entertaining yourself and learning a thing or two to improve your life.
Amy's new book is "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck."
Jennifer's is "Wild Connection: What Animal Courtship and Mating Tell Us about Human Relationships."
Tweetlove
Here's part of a tweet. Too few people consider this -- that there's a different way to think of the government forcing us to buy something, and it isn't with benevolence and a feeling of being looked out for:
@nycsouthpaw
Requiring healthy people to buy insurance is the end of liberty.
Wasn't There An Amendmenty Thingie To End Slavery?
At the LibertyCrier, Ron Paul calls "national service" anti-liberty and anti-American:
Former Clinton Administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich recently called on the government to force young people to spend two years either "serving" in the military or performing some other type of government-directed "community service." Neoconservative Senator John McCain has introduced legislation creating a mandatory national service program very similar to Reich's proposal. It is not surprising that both a prominent progressive and a leading neocon would support mandatory national service, as this is an issue that has long united authoritarians on the left and right.Proponents of national service claim that young people have a moral obligation to give something back to society. But giving the government power to decide our moral obligations is an invitation to totalitarianism.
The government has no right, if you have committed no crime, to take your time and your labor from you.
Paul makes a good point:
Whether or not they admit it, supporters of mandatory national service do not believe that individuals have "inalienable rights." Instead, they believe that rights are gifts from the government, and, since government is the source of our rights, government can abridge or even take away those rights whenever Congress decides.Mandatory national service also undermines private charitable institutions. In a free society, many people will give their time or money to service projects to help better their communities, working with religious or civic associations. But in a society with government-enforced national service, these associations are likely to become more reliant on government-supplied forced labor. They will then begin to tailor their programs to satisfy the demands of government bureaucrats instead of the needs of the community.
...It is baffling that conservatives who (properly) oppose raising taxes would support any form of national service, including the military draft. It is similarly baffling that liberals who oppose government interference with our personal lives would support mandatory national service. Mandatory national service is a totalitarian policy that should be rejected by all who value liberty.
As of late, I feel very few "value liberty."
Most people seem to take it very much for granted.
I've gotten to the point where, when libertarian friends have a baby, I'm extremely grateful, because there's a better chance that their kid will be raised consider a liberty-driven lifestyle rather than just shutting up and consuming things and not caring that government is growing bigger and bigger and more power-bloated.
via @LibertarianView
Tofu Eats Your Sperm
In case you hadn't heard, there's a study that finds some detrimental side-effects to the sperm of male vegetarians. Jake Smith writes for NetShark/FoodBeast:
In an experiment done by researchers at Loma Linda University, 443 meat-eaters and 31 vegetarians and vegans were monitored between 2009 and 2013. They initially assumed vegetarians' sperm would be healthy, but here's what they found, according to lead study author Eliza Orzylowska:
"We found that diet does significantly affect sperm quality. Vegetarian and vegan diets were associated with much lower sperm counts than omnivorous diets. Although these people are not infertile, it is likely to play a factor in conception, particularly for couples who are trying to conceive naturally, the old-fashioned way."
They also found that vegetarians had 30 percent lower concentrations of sperm (50 million per milliliter versus 70 million) and that their sperm was also weaker in terms of movement. For vegetarians, only 30 percent of their sperm were active, as compared to 60 percent of their meat-eating counterparts.
...One of the theories they came up with blamed vegetarians' high consumption of soy. ...Another explanation was the shortage of vitamin B12 in a vegetarian/vegan diet. B12 helps break down estrogen, which helps maintain a high sperm count. This vitamin is found mainly in beef and fish.
Think you can get B12 in your vegan or vegetarian diet by supplementation? Chris Kresser says think again -- about the B12 and a bunch of other vitamins and nutrients. For example:
Fat-soluble vitamins: A and D Perhaps the biggest problem with vegetarian and vegan diets, however, is their near total lack of two fat-soluble vitamins: A and D. Fat-soluble vitamins play numerous and critical roles in human health. Vitamin A promotes healthy immune function, fertility, eyesight and skin. Vitamin D regulates calcium metabolism, regulates immune function, reduces inflammation and protects against some forms of cancer.These important fat-soluble vitamins are concentrated, and in some cases found almost exclusively, in animal foods: primarily seafood, organ meats, eggs and dairy products. Some obscure species of mushrooms can provide large amounts of vitamin D, but these mushrooms are rarely consumed and often difficult to obtain. (This explains why vitamin D levels are 58% lower in vegetarians and 74% lower in vegans than in omnivores.) (12)
The idea that plant foods contain vitamin A is a common misconception. Plants contain beta-carotene, the precursor to active vitamin A (retinol). While beta-carotene is converted into vitamin A in humans, the conversion is inefficient. (13) For example, a single serving of liver per week would meet the RDA of 3,000 IU. To get the same amount from plant foods, you'd have to eat 2 cups of carrots, one cup of sweet potatoes or 2 cups of kale every day. Moreover, traditional cultures consumed up to 10 times the RDA for vitamin A. It would be nearly impossible to get this amount of vitamin A from plant foods without juicing or taking supplements.
Got steak?
Bozolink
Link to big floppy clown shoes.
Welcome To Kafkaville: IRS Jumps On Forfeiture Bandwagon, Seizing Your Money With No Proof Of Crime
The U.S. has turned into a country I don't recognize, where civil liberties and private property are sneered at -- before they are yanked away from us on the grounds we very well might have done something wrong.
Along with cops engaging in civil asset forfeiture -- taking money and possessions because they might have been used in criminal activity (but with no evidence they actually have), and demanding that citizens prove themselves innocent to get their money and stuff back -- the IRS has jumped on the money-stealing train.
Shaila Dewan writes in The New York Times that the IRS is seizing accounts on mere suspicion. Like this lady's:
ARNOLDS PARK, Iowa -- For almost 40 years, Carole Hinders has dished out Mexican specialties at her modest cash-only restaurant. For just as long, she deposited the earnings at a small bank branch a block away -- until last year, when two tax agents knocked on her door and informed her that they had seized her checking account, almost $33,000.The Internal Revenue Service agents did not accuse Ms. Hinders of money laundering or cheating on her taxes -- in fact, she has not been charged with any crime. Instead, the money was seized solely because she had deposited less than $10,000 at a time, which they viewed as an attempt to avoid triggering a required government report.
"How can this happen?" Ms. Hinders said in a recent interview. "Who takes your money before they prove that you've done anything wrong with it?"
The federal government does.
Using a law designed to catch drug traffickers, racketeers and terrorists by tracking their cash, the government has gone after run-of-the-mill business owners and wage earners without so much as an allegation that they have committed serious crimes. The government can take the money without ever filing a criminal complaint, and the owners are left to prove they are innocent. Many give up.
"They're going after people who are really not criminals," said David Smith, a former federal prosecutor who is now a forfeiture expert and lawyer in Virginia. "They're middle-class citizens who have never had any trouble with the law."
On Thursday, in response to questions from The New York Times, the I.R.S. announced that it would curtail the practice, focusing instead on cases where the money is believed to have been acquired illegally or seizure is deemed justified by "exceptional circumstances."
Richard Weber, the chief of Criminal Investigation at the I.R.S., said in a written statement, "This policy update will ensure that C.I. continues to focus our limited investigative resources on identifying and investigating violations within our jurisdiction that closely align with C.I.'s mission and key priorities." He added that making deposits under $10,000 to evade reporting requirements, called structuring, is still a crime whether the money is from legal or illegal sources. The new policy will not apply to past seizures.
So, this woman, for the "crime" of not taking credit cards, has now "borrowed money, strained her credit cards and taken out a second mortgage to keep her restaurant going."
A warning I've made before: This could be any of us. Own a food truck? Make $8,000 and worry about that sitting around? Deposit it in the bank and you could lose that money and all your money unless you hire a lawyer and go through an expensive legal battle to prove that you've done nothing wrong.
Anybody here want to live in this kind of America?
via @Doug_Bandow
Short One Stork: Optimism Bias In Egg Freezing
Humans are optimistically biased -- tending to believe that we'll get the good outcome and ignoring the risks as things that happen to other people.
This is not a helpful bias when it comes to egg freezing.
Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos has one of the sad stories -- in a piece on the "sobering facts" about egg freezing at WIRED:
It has been 36 years since the birth of the first in vitro fertilization (IVF) baby. We've since been led to believe that science has mastered Mother Nature. This is not true. I know. I am a former patient of three clinics in the Bay area, all of which were happy to sell me services as long as I could pay the bill. I had multiple fresh and frozen embryo transfers. Instead of taking home a baby, I came away with tremendous heartache. And my experience is not unique. Around the world, there are an estimated 1.5 million IVF procedures each year, and 1.2 million fail.The very latest whizzy reproductive 'product' being marketed and wrapped into lucrative employee benefit packages at companies like Apple and Facebook is egg freezing. Lost in all the cheerleading about empowerment and liberating women from their biological clocks is a more buzz-killing, underreported set of facts, which women and families would benefit tremendously in understanding. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) do not endorse the use of egg freezing to defer childbearing. The ASRM's decision to lift the 'experimental' label from this still young procedure in 2012 only applied to medically indicated needs, such as women with cancer.
Moreover, there is no long-term data tracking the health risks of women who inject hormones and undergo egg retrieval, and no one knows how much of the chemicals used in the freezing process are absorbed by eggs, and whether they are toxic to cell development. Furthermore, even with the new flash freezing process, the most comprehensive data available reveals a 77 percent failure rate of frozen eggs resulting in a live birth in women aged 30, and a 91 percent failure rate in women aged 40.
...The Bottom Line
Today service providers and clinics cavalierly market egg freezing to fertile women without fully understanding or communicating the risks. Though I am neither for nor against egg freezing as an idea, I believe strongly that women must be fully informed about reproductive medicine before setting their hopes on it. ... And this science, particularly where egg freezing is concerned, is still in its infancy.
via @instapundit
Minneapolis Is Trying To Force People To Eat Healthier And Restaurants And Drugstores Are Paying For It
Baylen Linnekin writes at reason:
A law on the books, which voters may very well repeal next month, requires restaurants to prove that food sales make up at least 70 percent of their total food and beverage sales. The law also bans restaurants from serving alcohol to customers who are waiting for a table in the restaurant.Earlier this year, the city council adopted a City Healthy Food Policy that mandates "healthful food in vending machines, in city cafeterias and at meetings with city-funded food."
The vote was by no means unanimous.
"I'm a little bit mortified that we have a whole staff team that spent god-knows-how-many hours talking about whether or not there could be carrots in a vending machine," said councilwoman Lisa Goodman.
These silly laws hardly appear to be outliers in the city. After all, Minneapolis was the first city in the country to adopt a law, the Staple Foods Ordinance, that requires many small stores--including convenience stores and gas stations--to stock fresh produce and other "healthy" foods. The city adopted these rules in 2008. Violators face fines of $200.
"Now," reports the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, "city officials are looking to double down on their efforts."
The proposed rules would expand the stores covered under the ordinance to include not just corner stores and gas stations but dollar stores. They'd all be required "to stock 30 pounds or 50 items of at least seven varieties of fresh fruits and vegetables.... [and] at least 3 varieties of meat, poultry, fish or vegetable proteins, at least 6 containers of a dozen eggs, at least 192 ounces of canned beans and four packages of dried beans and lentils[.]"
Why is the city looking to expand the program? That's not entirely clear. It's certainly not because it's been a success.
For example, small pharmacy owner Justin Pacult reported in 2012 that participating in the program caused him to lose "about $1,000 in eight months."
Swanky
Cufflinks.
How Far A Child Is Allowed To Walk On Their Own -- Then And Now
A tweet from Ben Southwood.
Nobody Needs To Protect Speech About How Kittens Are Cute And Bunnies Are Furry
Check out the short-sightedness of a student at UNC-Chapel Hill at a First Amendment Day celebration where Gregg Lukianoff of theFIRE.org (the Foundation for Individual Rights In Education) presented some alarming findings.
Jesse Saffron summarizes the report by Lukianoff in a piece at PopeCenter.org:
The demographic group most hostile to free speech is not baby boomers or other generations, but millennials, those in the 18-30 age range.
And Saffron notes:
One of the panels earlier that day, "Speech that Hurts and the First Amendment," suggested that he's right. At least for some college students, freedom of speech takes a backseat to sensitivity."I am a fan of the First Amendment, but I do step in when the speech is hurtful," said Destiny Planter, vice president of UNC's Black Student Movement. One of three undergraduate students on the panel, she was not alone in her view. The other two students were also concerned that unfettered speech can create victims who, due to past negative experiences, will be psychologically and even physically affected by certain songs or books or disrespectful protesters or coarse words.
Much of the panelists' discussion related to "trigger warnings." Those are warnings that precede a reading assignment, class discussion, or campus event. They are designed to protect students from experiencing traumatic reactions to the content.
All three student panelists said that such warnings are necessary on college campuses.
No, these warnings are necessary for people who are too psychologically fragile to go to college -- a place designed for free speech and free inquiry -- and thus should not be there.
There's more:
Wilson Hood, managing editor of the Siren, a feminist magazine associated with UNC, discussed a recent anti-abortion protest that took place on campus. He described his attempts to "make the space as safe as possible" for students who didn't want to see graphic images of aborted fetuses.
I have Facebook friends who post disturbing images of abused animals. I'm not sure why. I will not see the picture of the abused dog 2,500 miles away and go do something. I will just find the image upsetting. So, when I notice the top of one of these posts, I hurry past it. Same as I do for some of people's shares of stuff I find dull, inane, or politically not my cup of tea.
Wow. Looking the other way instead of trying to shut down speech, imagine that.
Greg and I agree on something -- that people who have grown up more comfortable than most people on the planet, ever, find it hard to deal with the slightest bit of discomfort. In fact, I think they are outraged by the prospect.
Grow up, entitled brats.
via Old RPM Daddy
The Centers For Substitute Mommying (Formerly The Centers For Disease Control)
Walter Olson blogs at Cato that the CDC have gone off-mission, shifting focus in recent years "to supposed public health menaces like beltless driving, gun ownership, social drinking, and suburban land use patterns."
The United Nations-run WHO is not far behind:
The ideology behind this is driven by ideas fashionable in the West, particularly that of rolling out the "tobacco control" model to other consumer goods like food and alcohol. This summer in Nature, for example, much-quoted Georgetown law prof Lawrence Gostin outlined such an agenda under the headline "Healthy Living Needs Global Governance." According to the abstract of his article, "researchers have identified a suite of cost-effective NCD [non-communicable disease] prevention measures" and now it is time for international regulatory bodies to step forward to impose them.
These measures include nannying moves like restricting alcohol and tobacco marketing and altering the environment to promote physical activity.
I altered my own environment to promote physical activity -- by getting a used exercise machine on eBay some years back and by getting weights -- and I alter it with some frequency by opening the door, walking out it, and going for a long walk with Aida.
Does government really need to be involved in this? Or is it just a jobs program for bureaucrats?
Miffy
Huffy links.
Vegan Interrupts Lunch
How many diners do you think she persuaded to eat tofu the next time?
By the way, you can put out whatever form of protest you want in the public sphere, but it's theft to march into a business, step on your soapbox, and turn all the customers there into your captive audience.
Your Tax Dollars: Keeping Kansas City Safe From The Scourge Of Illegal Panties
Jenée Osterheldt writes in the KC Star that two baboons from Homeland Security confiscated underwear with a hand-drawn Royals logo on it that a woman, Peregrine Honig, made to sell in her underwear store.
I understand defending copyrights -- but is it really making our homeland more secure? Shouldn't this be matter for civil court, like it is if somebody starts publishing my column in their paper without paying for it?
The panties, with "Take the Crown" and "KC" across the bottom, were set to be sold in Honig's Birdies Panties shop Tuesday. But Homeland Security agents visited the Crossroads store and confiscated the few dozen pairs of underwear, printed in Kansas City by Lindquist Press."They came in and there were two guys" Honig said. "I asked one of them what size he needed and he showed me a badge and took me outside. They told me they were from Homeland Security and we were violating copyright laws."
She thought that since the underwear featured her hand-drawn design that she was safe. But the officers explained that by connecting the "K" and the "C," she infringed on major league baseball copyright. (The officials involved could not be immediately reached for comment.)
They placed the underwear in an official Homeland Security bag and had Honig sign a statement saying she wouldn't use the logo.
via @radleybalko
How Sexy Is "Affirmative Consent"?
Conor Friedersdorf, at The Atlantic, blogged an email from a guy who "began college determined to ask women for explicit verbal consent during sexual encounters, but abandoned that approach over time." The guy writes:
I was raised by a left-leaning, feminist family who (at least I thought at the time) were relatively open about sex. But while I arrived at college with a healthy respect for women, I was totally unprepared for the complex realities of female sexuality."Oh," sighed one platonic female friend after we had just watched Harrison Ford grab Alison Doody and kiss her is Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, "Why don't guys do that kind of thing anymore? Now days they are all too scared."
On our second night together, one of my first partners threw up her hands in disgust. "How am I supposed to get turned on when you keep asking for permission for everything like a little boy?" She said. "Just take me and fuck me already."
She didn't stay with me for long.
This would be a recurring theme. More than once I saw disappointment in the eyes of women when I didn't fulfill the leadership role they wanted me to perform in the bedroom. I realized that women don't just desire men, they desire men's desire―and often they don't want to have to ask for it. I also realized that I was in many ways ashamed of my own sexual desire as a man, and that this was not healthy.
...One night I ended up back in a girl's room after a first date (those do happen in college). She had invited me in and was clearly attracted to me. We were kissing on her bed, outer layers of clothing removed, but when my hands wandered downward she said, "No, wait." I waited. She began kissing me again, passionately, so again I moved to remove her underwear. "Stop," she said, "this is too fast." I stopped.
"That's fine," I said. I kissed her again and left soon after, looking forward to seeing her again.
But my text messages received only cold, vaguely angry replies, and then silence. I was rather confused. Only many weeks later did I find out the truth from one of her close friends: "She really wanted you, but you didn't make it happen. She was pretty upset that you didn't really want her."
"Why didn't she just say so then, why did she say we were moving too fast?"
"Of course she said that, you dumbass. She didn't want you to think she was a slut."
Talk about confusing. Apparently in this case even no didn't mean no. It wasn't the last time I've come across "token resistance" that is intended to be overcome either. But that's a line that I am still uncomfortable with testing, for obvious reasons.
But I have learned not to ask when it clearly isn't necessary, or desired.
There's a name for a guy like this -- at least on college campuses: "rapist."
via @KateC
Linkberg
Like an iceberg, but less dangerous to an ocean liner.
Be A Sick Jerk Who Dresses Up Your Pet
Like me. Check out some of the truly hilarious and hilariously cute Howl-o-ween costumes at Amazon
20 percent off
To shop elsewhere at Amazon and give me the credit, which helps support my writing and this site, here's a link: Search Amy's Amazon
Every purchase you make through my links helps and is much-appreciated. And don't forget to throw in a copy of my book, "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," for only $9.48 so you can get free shipping! Also because I worked hard on it and people tell me it's helpful, funny, and good.
Proudly Defacing Our National Parks
I've got a thing for civilization, and mostly stay ensconced in it, but I understand that people who go out into nature want to see nature and not be forced to see somebody's "art" mucking it up.
Well, per Modern Hiker's Casey Schreiner, a woman took it upon herself to go all "Kilroy was here" with acrylic paints, sticking her "art" up on rock faces and such all over the great outdoors:
Casey Nocket ... had traveled to the west coast from New York for a few weeks. Ms. Nocket had been enjoying her time in the outdoors so much that she decided to document her trip on Instagram. And apparently Nocket was so moved by all the natural beauty she saw that she just had to paint all over it.
Photos at the link.
via @DeborahBlum
Sometimes, You Should Feel Free To Shut The Hell Up
Free speech is an essential right. However...
Another fine quote from "Good Manners For Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck": 
Can you think of any remarks some person in your life just had to get out that, really, would have been far better kept in their cage?
Following The Overheard
Overheard at a gallery opening, Beverly Hills, from a slim little elderly woman with white hair in a French twist and wearing hot pink semi-skinny jeans and a fashionable bright print jacket:
"If only I could meet a rich 89-year-old. But men die...they all die..."
Viral Video Seeming To Show Muslim Profiling By NYPD Was Staged
The motive seems to be killing two birds with one stone -- the larger one of them being greed.
The Smoking Gun has the story:
OCTOBER 21--In a cynical and duplicitous attempt to capitalize on New York City's documented racial profiling problems, a pair of bloggers have created a video purporting to show an NYPD officer stopping and frisking a pair of Muslim men for the crime of wearing traditional Islamic garments.But the viral video is a sham, a staged production aimed to go viral and pile up views and YouTube channel subscriptions for its young creators, Brooklynites Adam Saleh and Sheikh Akbar, who get a piece of the revenue generated by ads that run before their videos play.
TSG asks the right questions about the supposed cop on the video:
Oddly, the officer never bothers to remove the item to confirm that it is a phone and not a deadly weapon. Also, the cop does not appear concerned that Saleh's friend is hovering directly behind him.
If you know anything about cops or even watch a cop show or two, you probably find these actions a little unbelievable -- especially the friend hanging out behind the cop doing the frisking.
10/21 TSG UPDATE:
In an interview yesterday with Capital New York, a spokesperson for Saleh and Akbar claimed that he had "behind the scene footage" proving that the profiling episode was not faked. Asked for additional details, the flack told reporter Azi Paybarah, "We can't give out details for follow ups--it breaches confidentiality."However, despite that shaky assurance, the videographers copped to their perfidy (albeit sneakily) after TSG exposed their hoax this morning. They edited the video's YouTube description to report that the clip was a "Dramatization of previous events that occurred with us in our tradition clothing while filming in NYC. This video is not against the NYPD." The video's original description claimed that Saleh and Akbar were prompted to expose the NYPD after "we kept getting followed by Police. So we decided to film this social experiment on racial profiling." The duo added that, "Too many innocent people get stopped and frisked" daily due to their clothing and skin color.
The "Emotional Support Animal" Scam
I'm not a fan of the way pets are automatically kept out of restaurants and cafes in the US. I used to take my late Yorkie, Lucy, to a number of Paris cafes, where she was welcomed as an honored guest -- and promptly curled up in my lap, as she was trained to do, shortly after we sat down.
My wee Chinese Crested, Aida, is cleaner and better-trained -- and better-behaved -- than many children. But it wouldn't be fair of me to cause a restaurant or cafe to get a health code violation by bringing my dog in.
And no, because I committed to being ethical, I'm not willing to lie and call my dog a service animal. Instead, because she is joy on four legs and is very attached to me (and vice versa), I hate to leave her. So, I mostly stay home with her instead of going out to write at my favorite cafe on non-deadline days, like I used to. And when I do go there, Gregg stays with her for the day.
Patricia Marx writes in The New Yorker about those who lie to get their pets in to restaurants and museums and more. (Not to be missed is the part about her testing out the acceptance of an "emotional support alpaca" and a turtle.)
People with genuine impairments who depend on actual service animals are infuriated by the sort of imposture I perpetrated with my phony E.S.A.s. Nancy Lagasse suffers from multiple sclerosis and owns a service dog that can do everything from turning lights on and off to emptying her clothes dryer. "I'm shocked by the number of people who go online and buy their pets vests meant for working dogs," she told me. "These dogs snarl and go after my dog. They set me up for failure, because people then assume my dog is going to act up."...Carry a baby down the aisle of an airplane and passengers look at you as if you were toting a machine gun. Imagine, then, what it's like travelling with a one-year-old pig who oinks, grunts, and screams, and who, at twenty-six pounds, is six pounds heavier than the average carry-on baggage allowance and would barely fit in the overhead compartment of the aircraft that she and I took from Newark to Boston. Or maybe you can't imagine this.
During check-in, the ticket agent, looking up to ask my final destination, did a double take.
She said, "Oh . . . have you checked with . . . I don't think JetBlue allows . . ."
I rehashed my spiel about the letter and explained that days ago, when I bought the tickets, the service representative said that I could bring Daphne, my pig, as long as she sat on my lap.
"Give me one second," the agent said, picking up the phone. "I'm checking with my supervisor." (Speaking into phone: "Yes, with a pig . . . yeah, yeah . . . in a stroller.") The agent hung up and printed out boarding passes for me and the pig's owner, Sophie Wolf.
"I didn't want to make a mistake," he said. "If there's a problem, Verna, at the gate, will help you. Does she run fast?"
I'm pleased to report that passing through security with a pig in your arms is easier than doing so without one: you get to keep your shoes on and skip the full-body scanner.
Related: "The bullshit disabled" with their handicapped placards.
Icky
Link you stepped in and need to clean off the bottom of your shoe.
Violating The Rights Of The Religious By Treating A Wedding Chapel Like A Car Wash
I am an atheist and a strong supporter of gay rights (including the right to marry the one consenting adult of one's choice and get all the benefits that ensue from that), but I am also a civil libertarian who supports religious freedom.
I don't have to believe in god to think that people who do believe in god should not be forced to violate their beliefs to serve customers they are opposed to -- providing they don't run the only hospital in town or some provide some similarly critical service.
Law professor Jonathan Turley lays out the case in Idaho that "could be a critical showdown between anti-discrimination laws and freedom of exercise of religion":
At the heart of the controversy are two Christian ministers, Donald and Evelyn Knapp, who own a Coeur d'Alene wedding chapel. They have been told that they must either perform same-sex weddings or face a $1000 fine. It raises a legitimate claim of the encroachment of state laws into areas of faith -- a question that has been previously raised in less direct ways involving bakeries, photographers and other businesses that has refused for religious reasons to service same-sex marriages....The city has an ordinance passed last year that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation in matters of housing, employment and public accommodation. As a for-profit business, the ordinance does not treat the Hitching Post Wedding Chapel any different from a car wash.
Of course, it is different in the character of its work. The controversy however has played out in a variety of different contexts. This is an issue that we previously discussed when Harvard banned men from workout areas to satisfy the demands of Muslim women as well as other accommodations at other universities. Conversely, cities have banned the boy scouts because they exclude gay scout leaders and were thus discriminatory organizations. We have also seen private businesses who have been forced not to discriminate against homosexuals such a bakeries, florists, and photographers. I have previously written on the growing collision of free exercise of religion and anti-discrimination laws. Where does one draw the line where a florist cannot bar a homosexual but a grocery can bar males? The inherent conflicts in these cases leaves us without a single cognizable rule.
That is why this case could be so important. While I have long supported gay rights and same-sex marriage, I am sympathetic with the Knapps. I have great concern over the state telling a religious business to violate the core of its religious values.
...I believe that the couple has a strong argument under the First Amendment as well as Idaho's Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Regardless of one's view of the merits, however, this could be a defining moment for constitutional law.
Does the fact that a business earns a profit really decimate their First Amendment right to also refrain from speaking -- to not perform a ceremony that violates their beliefs?
Annie comments at Turley:
This is not a church. This is a for profit corporation. It doesn't matter if they are religious. They will need to become a church in order to be able to legally refuse to marry same sex people. I've never heard of a church (which is tax exempt) compelled to do anything which went against its religious tenets. If the religious baker and photographer can't claim their faith as a means to discriminate, why should these people? I think it's going to end up after the cout battles, an all or nothing doctrine. All bigoted business owners everywhere can discriminate against anyone they please, or none can, OR they can all apply for tax emmett status become ordained ministers and become churches who bake bread, or take photos, or sell shoes, thusly destroying the true meaning and redefining the meaning of a CHURCH.
The Land Of The Free To Be Thrown In Jail Even If You Aren't Convicted Of A Crime
Radley Balko asks in the WaPo:
Think the government must convict you of a crime before it can punish you for it? Think again.Most Americans probably believe that the government must first convict you of a crime before it can impose a sentence on you for that crime. This is incorrect: When federal prosecutors throw a bunch of charges at someone but the jury convicts on only some of those charges, a federal judge can still sentence the defendant on the charges for which he was acquitted. In fact, the judge can even consider crimes for which the defendant has never been charged.
Balko writes about a jury that found three men guilty of selling small amounts of cocaine but acquitted them on racketeering and other charges (of being part of an extensive drug conspiracy). Hey, but never mind those acquittals!
Balko quotes the National Law Journal, from a piece reported by Tony Mauro:
Yet, when U.S. District Judge Richard Roberts sentenced the three, he said he "saw clear evidence of a drug conspiracy," and sentenced Ball, Thurston and Jones to 18, 16 and 15 years in prison, respectively -- four times higher than the highest sentences given for others who sold similar amounts of cocaine, according to filings with the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court just declined to hear this case. On a more positive note, Balko reports that Scalia, Thomas, and Ginsburg filed "a rare dissent" to the Court's refusal. An excerpt:
We have held that a substantively unreasonable penalty is illegal and must be set aside. ... It unavoidably follows that any fact necessary to prevent a sentence from being substantively unreasonable--thereby exposing the defendant to the longer sentence--is an element that must be either admitted by the defendant or found by the jury. It may not be found by a judge....Not only did no jury convict these defendants of the offense the sentencing judge thought them guilty of, but a jury acquitted them of that offense. Petitioners were convicted of distributing drugs, but acquitted of conspiring to distribute drugs. The sentencing judge found that petitioners had engaged in the conspiracy of which the jury acquitted them.
Don't think that because these chappies are drug dealers that this judicial abuse can't be used against you.
Just Ghost (How To Leave A Party)
I learned this from my friend (and a wonderful host) DL -- the "French Leave."
Instead of interrupting the host's conversation to say goodbye, just "ghost" -- quietly disappear from the party.
That said, when I'm invited to a party, I send a thank-you note afterward -- one that arrives by mail. So the disappearance isn't wordless -- the words are just postponed, and generally arrive on an antique postcard or piece of antique hotel stationery the day afterward.
There's a piece on this on Slate, by Seth Stevenson, in favor of what's also sometimes called the "Irish Goodbye." Why make leaving harder than it has to be, he asks?
One recent evening, I celebrated my birthday in the outdoor courtyard of a bar. As the night wore on, and friends fell by the wayside, each departure occasioned a small ritual. A pal would sidle up to whichever conversational circle I was in; edge closer and closer, so as to make herself increasingly conspicuous; and finally smile, apologetically, when the conversation halted so I could turn to her and say goodbye.Nothing but good intentions here. To some small extent, I appreciated the politeness of this parting gesture. It was not a major imposition to pause for a moment and thank folks for coming.
But there's a better way. One that saves time and agita, acknowledges clear-eyed realities, and keeps the social machine humming.
Just ghost.
Ghosting--aka the Irish goodbye, the French exit, and any number of other vaguely ethnophobic terms--refers to leaving a social gathering without saying your farewells. One moment you're at the bar, or the house party, or the Sunday morning wedding brunch. The next moment you're gone. In the manner of a ghost.
...Let's free ourselves from this meaningless, uncomfortable, good time-dampening kabuki. People are thrilled that you showed up, but no one really cares that you're leaving. Granted, it might be aggressive to ghost a gathering of fewer than 10. And ghosting a group of two or three is not so much ghosting as ditching. But if the party includes more than 15 or 20 attendees, there's a decent chance none will notice that you're gone, at least not right away.
UPDATED: A bit on thank you notes to party hosts from "Good Manners For Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck", which I hope you'll buy! The above link is to Amazon; here's the one at Barnes and Noble.
The senseless death of the thank-you noteSomebody spends hours cleaning their house and even more shopping, cooking, and laying out the spread for a party, all of which probably cost them a bunch of money, and your response is . . . calling out "Bye!" and maybe adding a "Hey, thanks!" as you go out the door? E-mailing a thank you the next day is the minimum you should do--and is fine if somebody simply put out beer, chips, veggies, and dip.
When somebody has you to dinner, a little more effort seems in order. This isn't to say that you need to pluck a goose, sharpen a quill into a pen, and write a 1,000-word letter waxing on about the stuffed mushrooms in a spidery longhand. I like to send antique postcards I buy in bulk on eBay (150 for $34 last time I bought 'em).
Best of all, there's just enough room to scrawl some thanks for the fab grub and maybe an amusing aside. But what the antique postcard lacks in space for verbosity it makes up for in groovy-osity. As the late crime writer Elmore Leonard admiringly put it after he got my postcard thanking him for having me at his Christmas party, "looked like it got lost in the mail for 75 years."
I also like to buy antique hotel stationery on eBay. It's like getting a present in the mail to get a thank-you note on stationery from some long-gone hotel in Hong Kong.
Lucky
Four-leaf linky.
Government Is Ridiculous: The Minor Pain Relief Version
I have 500 mg Naproxen from 1998 that I discovered can shove a migraine back into its ugly hole and let me function instead of writhing in pain in the dark with brief interruptions to throw up.
Fabulous!
The fact that it's 16 years old...not so fabulous. Maybe it's lost some of it's pow, but maybe it's also degraded in bad ways.
I looked it up and found that Naproxen can now be purchased OTC as "Aleve." Yay!
Gregg is coming over tonight, and I asked him to stop at the drugstore on his way.
Gregg calls me: It turns out it's only sold OTC in 220 mg pills.
If you want 500 mg, you have to get a prescription.
Or, whir the little wheels in your pretty little head to add 220 and 220 -- which is in the neighborhood of 500 mg. Vaguely, anyway.
So, does some government nitwit think I might snort the stuff and get high?
What's with restrictions on adults trying to buy their way out of a migraine with a drug that will not cause anyone to start seeing giant purple bunnies flying and trying to eat jetliners?
The Deadbeat-In-Chief
No wonder the President seems to think nothing of sticking more and more stuff and programs we can't afford on the national credit card.
From Daniel Halper at The Weekly Standard, an excerpt from the President's speech (talking about "unpaid bills" on his desk in Chicago, which he left behind after he moved to The White House following the 2008 election):
"One of the nice things about being home is actually that it's a little bit like a time capsule. Because Michelle and I and the kids, we left so quickly that there's still junk on my desk, including some unpaid bills (laughter) -- I think eventually they got paid -- but they're sort of stacked up. And messages, newspapers and all kinds of stuff."
Somebody at The White House later thought better of including that bit about his unpaid bills and scrubbed it from the transcript.
via @instapundit
Women Don't Freeze Their Eggs Because They're Pretty
A writer in New York Magazine, Kat Stoeffel, says if companies cover egg freezing -- as was recently in the news -- they should also cover day care:
Being able to plan fertilization independent of one's biological clock won't help women once they're pregnant and mothers, which is when the real leaning out begins. After giving birth, women still have to contend with a workplace designed for men in two-parent, single-earner households, not to mention discrimination for even wanting to be there instead of at home with their baby. Leveling the playing field between men, women, parents, and nonparents would require a lot of things. Health insurance that covers birth control, abortion, and maternity care without co-pays, for one. Paid maternity, paternity, and family leave, for another. Nursing rooms, on-site child care, flexible work schedules, telecommuting -- the list goes on.
I just don't understand why all these things should be covered without co-pays -- unless we all get that for our, say, dermatology appointments, so we can clear up our adult acne and go out and meet a partner.
She continues:
Apple and Facebook already offer above-average family benefits. Apple recently announced that mothers can take up to four weeks before delivery and "upwards of 14 weeks after giving birth," while fathers and other non-birth parents can take six weeks. Facebook offers four months of parental leave for birth parents and non-birth parents alike during the first year, plus flexible work hours, telecommuting, $4,000 in "baby cash," subsidized laundry, and a child-care reimbursement (the company is only able to offer full-time on-site day care for employee dogs). Making sure employees feel secure enough to take advantage of these benefits -- and aren't mommy-tracked upon their return -- is another story.
There are choices in life and they come with costs. I work constantly -- because that's my priority. As I've written before, if you choose to subtract your time and effort from your employer and put it toward your child -- or maintaining your backyard Hot Wheels track -- that is your choice, but you shouldn't expect the same promotions, money, or other benefits as employees who are more devoted to their jobs.
More from her piece:
By adding egg freezing to the mix, employers signal their recognition that the demands of the workplace aren't always compatible with child rearing. But they also risk sending the same message as Lean In: that women need to adapt to meet the demands of an (often hostile) workplace, not the other way around. And if we look to egg freezing as a solution to the question of work-life balance, then we risk conceding that women probably shouldn't dare get pregnant until they're important and rich enough to either demand or pay for the rest themselves. We risk agreeing that mothers are inherently less-than-ideal employees (something most people who have witnessed firsthand the time- and human-management powers of working moms would probably contest). Offering egg freezing, Extend Fertility founder Christy Jones told NBC, "can help women be more productive human beings." That doesn't seem quite right -- raising children, after all, is a very productive human behavior. But egg freezing can help women be more like men.
I recently hired a new assistant to replace my beloved and wonderful assistant who lost his mind (aka decided to go live off the grid...which I love to tease him about). The new guy, who's terrific, has an obligation until the end of October on Fridays, which is an important work day for me -- basically, the prep day for my deadline days.
Well, because he's terrific, I decided to make this work, though it's hard for me (for various boring reasons).
That's what employers do -- if they have employees who are worth sacrificing for on some level, they do that. But the fact that you have a vagina and want to fill it up with a baby doesn't necessarily make you valuable.
That's not the PC truth, but it's the honest one.
A counterpoint from the comments at NYMag -- a remark by alexandrasuhner:
Maybe companies should actually invest in some REAL research into how female/mother employees affect the workplace. I had a friend high up the corporate ladder in media and he said the best employees were new Moms. He accepted that they had to leave early occasionally to deal with problems with their kids, but as a result, they were extremely hardworking while they were at work, and very grateful for their jobs. He said that generally they worked harder than the men, and he knew that there was no chance they would leave for a business lunch at 12 and come back drunk at 6pm. Plus the female employers are more likely to stay in a job rather than move around. Maybe it is time employers look - statistically - at how mothers affect the workplace and they might be pleasantly surprised.
Recent Feminist Jell-O-headedness In Academia: Feminist Computer Code
Arielle Schlesinger writes at HASTAC, Humanities, Arts, Science, & Technology Alliance Collaboratory:
As a student of Technology and Social Change, I am currently exploring what a feminist programing language would look like for my thesis.
She explains in her post:
Feminism and Programming LanguagesIn the scope of my research, a feminist programming language is to be built around a non-normative paradigm that represents alternative ways of abstracting. The intent is to encourage and allow new ways of thinking about problems such that we can code using a feminist ideology.
The first commenter, Barry Peddycord III, says it (unintentionally, it seems) -- while seeming to high-five her later in his post:
Oh my gosh yes this is awesome.For the longest time, I've been thinking about programming languages as a computer-human interaction problem: the purpose of a language is to make its features (affordances) obvious to its users.
Um, yes.
A friend of a Facebook friend posted this comment on this ridiculousness -- apparently gleaned from this page:
"The traditional binary foundation of 1s and 0s is deeply problematic: 1 is inherently phallic and thus misogynistic. Also, some 1s are 0s, and some 0s are 1s. It is not fair to give them immutable labels. Instead, we have 0s and Os as our fundamental binary logic gates. They symbolise/-ize the varying, natural, and beautiful differences of the female vaginal opening."
Uppity
Linkity.
The Age Of Overprotective Idiocy
A mother practically coughed up an organ in horror after her 10-year-old son came home from Tesco supermarket with a purple mini-knife in a pumpkin-carving kit.
10, not 2.
From Metro/UK:
'I couldn't believe that he could pick that sort of thing up as a child - there should have been an age restriction on it.'
I had access to knives from probably the age of 6 or 8. Or before. (As did kids throughout human history.)
Whoops, seems I forgot to slit anyone's throat or...what, exactly, would the danger be here? Give it to the nearest toddler as a play-toy?
I think some mothers look for a reason to act out in fear and horror. It makes them feel like they're being mother-y and responsible, when actually, they're just coddling their kids out of growing up, which involves taking on increasing responsibility.
(What does this lady give her kid at dinner-time, a plastic spork to manage the food she puts through a blender for him? Do she and her husband, if any, keep some intense watch over the children to make sure none off themselves or each other with a steak knife before dessert?)
The Tainted Treats Myth Lives On
If you spend $5 on a marijuana lollypop, are you really going to give it out to the kiddies?
Unlikely.
This would serve what purpose, exactly? The joy of thinking, "I got some 5-year-old high?"
And frankly, as a kid, we weren't going to eat some weirdly wrapped off-brand candy. We wanted Snickers, the Hershey's Miniatures dark, etc.
Jacob Sullum writes at reason that the folk tale of people giving kids pot-laced candy lives on -- despite a lack of evidence that anybody actually does that:
Last week the DPD posted a video in which Patrick Johnson, proprietor of Denver's Urban Dispensary, warns that "there's really no way to tell the difference between candy that's infused and candy that's not infused" once the products have been removed from their original packages. The video illustrates Johnson's point with images of innocuous-looking gummy bears and gumdrops. He advises parents to inspect their kids' Halloween haul and discard anything that looks unfamiliar or seems to have been tampered with.Det. Aaron Kafer of the DPD's Marijuana Unit amplifies that message in an "Ask the Expert" podcast, saying "there's a ton of edible stuff that's out there on the market that's infused with marijuana that could be a big problem for your child." Noting that "all marijuana edibles have to be labeled," Kafer recommends that parents make sure their kids "avoid and not consume anything that is out of the package."
CNN turned these warnings into a widely carried story headlined "Tricks, Treats and THC Fears in Colorado." According to CNN, "Colorado parents have a new fear to factor in this Halloween: a very adult treat ending up in their kids' candy bags."
Actually, this fear is not so new. For years law enforcement officials have been warning parents to be on the lookout for marijuana edibles in their kids' trick-or-treat sacks. And for years, as far as I can tell, there has not been a single documented case in which someone has tried to get kids high by doling out THC-tainted treats disguised as ordinary candy. Since 1996, the year that California became the first state to legalize marijuana for medical use, the newspapers and wire services covered by the Nexis database have not carried any reports of such trickery, although they have carried more than a few articles in which people worry about the possibility.
After the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) raided a San Francisco manufacturer of marijuana edibles in September 2007, for instance, the agency claimed it was protecting children, especially the ones who dress up in costumes and go begging for candy on October 31. "Kids and parents need to be careful in case kids get ahold of this candy," said Javier Pena, special agent in charge of the DEA's San Francisco office. "Halloween is coming up." According to the Contra Costa Times, medical marijuana advocates "dismissed Pena's Halloween reference as an 'absurd' attempt at 'pure publicity.'"
Sullum notes:
There is a cost to such bogeyman stories, and it goes beyond needlessly discarded candy. These rumors portray the world as a darker, more dangerous place than it really is, which is probably not conducive to a happy childhood or a successful adulthood. At the same time, the credence that public officials lend to such fanciful fears makes any reasonably skeptical person doubt other warnings from the same authorities, an unfortunate result when those warnings happen to be accurate and useful.
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
(And it's making your children high!
Before you know it, your daughter will be turning tricks on the street corner and your son will be making meth out of your shed!
P.S. Pot was plenty available growing up and it was plenty available before medical marijuana.
Yawnies.
Just Bend Over A Little!
Ars Technica's Robert Lemos's blog post headline:
FBI director to citizens: Let us spy on you
Excerpt from the piece:
The increasing adoption of encryption technologies could leave law enforcement agents "in the dark" and unable to collect evidence against criminals, the Director of the FBI said in a speech on Thursday.
Better that there's difficulty collecting evidence against criminals than ease collecting evidence against all of us.
Don't think it can't be used, won't be used.
The erosion of civil liberties, which has gone on at an increasing pace over the past five years and over the past decade, is exceptionally dangerous.
Especially because so many Americans can't be bothered about it.
Not Living With Your Nose In Your Phone: It's A Choice
There's yet another article -- this one a blog item in The New York Times by Jenna Wortham -- about somebody being ruled by their phone. Wortham writes:
My phone has transformed my life for the better. It has made me a more efficient worker, enabled a healthy and loving long-distance relationship and allowed me to keep up with friends.Even so, I'm as guilty as anyone of using my phone as a crutch, either to avoid talking to people I don't know at a party, or to stave off boredom while waiting for a friend in a bar. I'm also easily distracted by the various pings and vibrations coming from my iPhone, and often find myself drawn into an endless loop of checking alerts, reading my social media streams and replying to non-urgent email and text messages. Often, I can't resist sneaking a peek at the screen during movies or other outings. And as much as I hate to admit it, I've occasionally been so preoccupied by a text message that I've almost bumped into someone on the street.
I realize the pull of the phone -- to chimp-like, click the button and check email. But I choose to live life in the moment rather than with my nose in the phone.
It didn't take much to do this. I just realized the value of talking to strangers in bars and letting your mind wander while you're in line and taking in the flowers as you walk the dog.
I also choose to not be one of the self-absorbed assholes making everyone leap around them as they text on the sidewalk, crossing the street, and stopping stock-still at the bottom of escalators. This didn't take some major move on my part -- just a decision and a decision to stick to it, same as I stick to my "no doing stuff on your phone while the car is moving."
Monkey
Eep-eep-eepy links.
Two Male Strippers Would Have Done A Better Job Running The CDC
Male strippers Axl Goode and Taylor Cole decided to self-quarantine (though it was not required by the CDC) after they flew seated several feet from Amber Joy Vinson, the nurse who was diagnosed with Ebola, but allowed by the CDC to fly.
Here's the story about them in the NY Daily News.
Mary Katherine Ham writes at Hot Air:
The two dancers are self-quarantining for the three-week incubation period of the deadly disease, citing a desire to take a "proactive approach to protecting people," and are surprised the CDC didn't require it. Here's hoping they just get three weeks off work and 15 minutes of fame, and not Ebola.The experience of these men speaks to the CDC's larger problems in gaining trust with the American people to fight an Ebola outbreak. The agency, whose approval numbers are falling precipitously, has routinely made assurances that were later proven untrue, failed to be as proactive as Axl and Taylor, and made moves so obviously reckless that humble, normal Americans look at the agency's conduct and quite rationally conclude it's not to be trusted.
This is not panic or the result of some political campaign to undermine the CDC. This is self-inflicted. For instance, the CDC told Vinson, who has been exposed to Ebola and had a slight fever, that she could jump on a plane to the Midwest.
It also failed to anticipate the need to monitor a nurse who may have handled an Ebola patient's samples. That nurse is now isolated in her cabin on a cruise ship, which are of course infamous hotbeds for contagious disease outbreaks.
Vinson, for her part, asked the CDC if she should fly and made a mistake in trusting their advice. Axl and Taylor aren't making the same mistake, and many Americans will be inclined to be wary as well. Again, that reaction is a direct result of the CDC's actions in handling Ebola.
Why Almost 50 Percent Of Doctors Give Obamacare A "D" Or An "F"
(Perhaps because a "G" -- which I'd give it, per my experience related below -- isn't an actual grade.)
At The Hill, Jeffrey A. Singer, M.D., counts himself among the discontented:
Obamacare has harmed too many of my patients.It has done so by disrupting the doctor-patient relationship and thereby worsening the quality of patients' care. This is the heart and soul of medicine, as I have learned in in my 33 years as a practicing physician. The doctor-patient relationship is critical for positive health outcomes because it allows both parties to work together to identify and ultimately treat medical problems. Simply put, a relationship of trust and continuity is essential to our professional mission.
Obamacare's assault on the doctor-patient relationship first manifested this time last year, when my patients began receiving cancellation letters indicating that their plans didn't meet the law's minimum requirements.Some of my patients were transferred to plans that did not include me in the physician network. In some cases this meant they had to find another surgeon to assume care while they were recovering from the first stage of a multistage surgical course. Others were enrolled in one of the Medicaid plans in which I participate. These plans make it difficult for me to coordinate with other specialists when treating cancer and other complex surgical patients because of the scarcity and distance of other specialists in the plan. And some could only afford plans that significantly limited their health care options.
No matter which option they chose, Obamacare forced my patients to make trade-offs between pricing, access, and quality of care.
Read also how patients are forced onto Medicaid, where they get substandard care.
In The New York Times, Abby Goodnough and Robert Pear report a piece, "Unable to Meet the Deductible or the Doctor":
Patricia Wanderlich got insurance through the Affordable Care Act this year, and with good reason: She suffered a brain hemorrhage in 2011, spending weeks in a hospital intensive care unit, and has a second, smaller aneurysm that needs monitoring.But her new plan has a $6,000 annual deductible, meaning that Ms. Wanderlich, who works part time at a landscaping company outside Chicago, has to pay for most of her medical services up to that amount. She is skipping this year's brain scan and hoping for the best.
"To spend thousands of dollars just making sure it hasn't grown?" said Ms. Wanderlich, 61. "I don't have that money."
About 7.3 million Americans are enrolled in private coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, and more than 80 percent qualified for federal subsidies to help with the cost of their monthly premiums. But many are still on the hook for deductibles that can top $5,000 for individuals and $10,000 for families -- the trade-off, insurers say, for keeping premiums for the marketplace plans relatively low. The result is that some people -- no firm data exists on how many -- say they hesitate to use their new insurance because of the high out-of-pocket costs.
Insurers must cover certain preventive services, like immunizations, cholesterol checks and screening for breast and colon cancer, at no cost to the consumer if the provider is in their network. But for other services and items, like prescription drugs, marketplace customers often have to meet their deductible before insurance starts to help.
This is what's happened to me. A breast surgeon ordered me to get breast MRIs every couple of years a few years back. Before we got the "Affordable" Care Act shoved down our throats, I did this -- paying a $50 co-pay. Now, with Obamacare, my health care payment is not only unaffordable but I also have some multi-thousand-dollar deductible. So now, those MRIs will sock me for $700 -- which I can't afford to pay. I'm hoping eating low-carb and almost no sugar and leading what's probably a pretty healthy lifestyle will keep the cancer away.
So, I went from having very good care I could afford to not having the care doctors ordered for me because the "Affordable" Care Act made it unaffordable for me.
Thanks so much for voting for Obama. I'll name my tumor after you.
Hill link via @instapundit
Rodeo
Bucking links.
Scary Deals
Indoor and outdoor Halloween decor, including some deals good from Oct. 13 to 31, at Amazon
Amazon's kids' Halloween store here.
Costumes and candy and stuff for all here.
Search Amy's Amazon here.
Hey, Cheesy Marriott, Pay Your Maids Instead Of Guilting Customers Into Doing It
Tips are the expected way waiters earn a living; as I explain in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," waiters make a government-allowed lowered wage (typically $2.13/hr) because they make much of their income through customers' gratuities.
Not so for hotel maids. Some people leave money for the maid at a hotel but many don't. Also, as I note in my book, per the research of Cornell's Michael Lynn, although people believe they tip solely according to service, much of what motivates the amount people leave is a need for "social approval," including that of their server.
People will feel the pressure of the need for "social approval" when they are face to face with the worker and when they're in a public environment like the floor of a restaurant, where their behavior is visible.
This is not the case in terms of some tip interaction with the maid. Hotel guests often never see the person who cleans their room. This also diminishes any empathy they'd feel for that person.
The inspiration for this post?
Marriott, not exactly a cheap motel, is calling for customers to tip their cleaning staff. (Should we also be leaving tips for the guy who fixes the boiler and the lady who puts fresh flowers in the lobby?)
Claire Zillman writes at Fortune, "Marriott to hotel guests: Please pay our maids for us":
Starting this week, the hotel chain will encourage guests to tip their maids, becoming the latest company to ask consumers to directly shoulder an even larger portion of worker pay....On Monday, the hotel chain announced that it would start placing tip envelopes in its hotel rooms to encourage guests to "express their gratitude by leaving tips and notes of thanks" for hotel room attendants.
The initiative is part of "The Envelope Please," a project by A Woman's Nation, a nonprofit organization founded by former California first lady Maria Shriver that advocates for the recognition and respect of women at home and in the workplace. The idea behind the tip envelopes, which will appear in 160,000 guest rooms at participating Marriotts this week, is to give hotel guests the opportunity to acknowledge the "behind-the-scenes" work of housekeepers, which often goes unnoticed and unappreciated because room attendants are not as visible as front-of-the-house employees, according to a release.
...Karl Fischer, Marriott's chief human resources officer for the Americas, told Fortune that the hotel "takes seriously the need to pay [the housekeepers] competitively." The tip envelopes encourage "a voluntary action on behalf of customers...based on their experience as guests," he says.
But to a fatigued public living in an economic environment where corporate profits are at their highest level in at least 85 years and employee compensation is at its lowest level in 65 years, Marriott's well-intentioned tip envelopes seem like yet another case in which a corporation is relying on consumers to pay workers' wages instead of investing in employees directly.
...Nevertheless, if what Marriott really does want--as CEO Arne Sorenson said in Monday's release--to "shine a light on the excellent behind-the-scenes work our room attendants do," why not offer an across-the-board hourly wage increase, like Ikea and The Gap, instead of leaving it to the whims of hotel guests?
Socialists Succumb To "Capitalist Greed"
Love this -- the Freedom Socialist Party is pushing for the minimum wage to be $20 an hour...but just posted an ad for a web developer who'll be paid $13.
Zenon Evans posts at reason:
Although the average annual salary of a web developer in the U.S. is around $62,500, the Freedom Socialist Party only wants to pay $13 an hour, which would be $26,000 a year. Except that the party won't hire someone full-time, so their next web developer's total compensation won't even be that modest chunk of change.
CDC Blames Budget Cuts For Ebola Outbreak -- After Handing Out $25 Million In Bonuses
There's no accountability like government "accountability." If you're a government official, you just point the finger (from the hand you've just used to cash some big check made out to you).
That's how it worked for CDC bigwigs.
At Wash Times, Kelly Riddell writes:
Top public health officials have collected $25 million in bonuses since 2007, carving out extra pay for themselves in tight federal budgetary times while blaming a lack of money for the Obama administration's lackluster response to the Ebola outbreak.U.S. taxpayers gave $6 billion in salaries and $25 million in bonuses to an elite corps of health care specialists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since 2007, according to data compiled by American Transparency's OpenTheBooks.com, an online portal aggregating 1.3 billion lines of federal, state and local spending. The agency's head count increased by 23 percent during that time, adding manpower and contributing to higher payrolls despite relatively flat funding.
From 2010 to 2013, all federal wages were frozen because of budgetary constraints, but CDC officials found a way to pay themselves through bonuses, overtime, within-grade increases and promotion pay raises.
There's frozen and there's frozen. Frozen for thee is different than frozen for people in charge at government agencies.
For example:
Donald Shriber, deputy director of policy and communication at the CDC's Center for Global Health, received the highest bonus in the six years analyzed -- $62,895 in 2011 -- netting $242,595 in take-home pay in a year when wages were supposed to be frozen.
Nice! Can I please get a wage freeze that pays me $63K?
Meanwhile, there's this from Oliver Darcy at The Blaze: "Texas Hospital Releases 'Low-Risk' Patient 'Reporting Ebola Symptoms' Because Person 'Wanted to Leave the Hospital.'"
UPDATED: Via @instapundit, a Michael Walsh piece at PJM, "Ten Things The Ebola Crisis Tells Us About The Obama Admin." A few of them:
1. If a retread party hack like Klain is the best Obama can do, then the Democrat talent pool is incredibly shallow. Naturally, though, Obama wouldn't think of going outside it.2. The President considers Ebola a political/messaging problem, not a medical problem. Klain is an an insider process guy, not an expert in the field.
3. The fact that we need a "Czar" to cut across federal agency red-tape and make things happen expeditiously is an indictment of the federal agencies themselves, although no Democrat would ever dare to suggest such a thing. The choice signals that, as Ronald Reagan said, government itself is the problem, not the solution.
5. This is a government devoted to process, not results. Its most deeply held belief -- a by-product of its quasi-Marxist belief in the "labor theory of value" -- is that putting in hours and hitting "metrics" is the job itself, not whatever it ostensibly happens to be about; hey, even if you die, they get paid. In this sense, bureaucrats are similar to to the education majors who teach our children in the public schools, with no particular expertise in anything but theory. And the results speak for themselves.
Schmucky
Jerky links.
Wear-Tech
Wearable technology at Amazon.
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How Academic Feminism Screwed Up Heterosexual Relationships
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Feminism: It's Now The Victim's-Eye View
Check out this line from an Amanda Hess piece on Slate:
Men who enter female spaces without an explicit invitation may intrude on feminists seeking "a break from their everyday encounters with men."
Now apply that to those golf clubs that don't want women.
Hmmm, right?
Hmmm.
If you don't feel like you are some lesser human compared with men, you don't view every encounter through the lens of being victimized -- as feminists do.
So, for example, when some blowhard in a bar takes off about some area of science I know very well, or about dietary science, which I also know pretty well, I don't think of this as somebody "mansplaining" to me. It's not about their thinking I'm some twit who knows nothing. They have no idea what I do or don't know; they're just trying to sound smart, interesting, and worthy.
Accused Rapists Have Rights, Too
And we protect all of our rights by standing up for the rights of the accused.
For example, we have a presumption of innocence until proven guilty and the standards of evidence and due process that we do have -- or did have, before college campuses established kangaroo courts for accusations of sexual offenses -- come out of how we have been a society founded on the protection of civil liberties.
The more civil liberties are eroded, the more they can be further eroded.
In The New Republic, Judith Shulevitz clearly lays out what goes on now on college campuses in the wake of a sexual assault accusation, and the subtitle of her piece is important: "The victims deserve justice. The men deserve due process."
Yes, men are sometimes rape victims, too. But mostly the accusers on college campuses are women and the accused are men.
Shulevitz writes:
This August, Columbia University released a new policy for handling "gender-based" misconduct among students. Since April, universities around the country have been rewriting their guidelines after a White House task force urged them to do more to fight sexual assault. I was curious to know what a lawyer outside the university system would make of one of these codes. So I sent the document to Robin Steinberg, a public defender and a feminist.A few hours later, Steinberg wrote back in alarm. She had read the document with colleagues at the Bronx legal-aid center she runs. They were horrified, she said--not because Columbia still hadn't sufficiently protected survivors of assault, as some critics charge, but because its procedures revealed a cavalier disregard for the civil rights of people accused of rape, assault, and other gender-based crimes. "We are never sending our boys to college," she wrote.
Columbia's safeguards for the accused are better than most. For instance, it allows both accuser and accused to have a lawyer at a hearing, and, if asked, will locate free counsel. By contrast, Harvard, which issued a new code in July, holds investigations but not hearings and does not offer to obtain independent legal assistance. But Steinberg, like most people, hadn't realized how far the rules governing sexual conduct on campus have strayed from any commonsense understanding of justice.
Most colleges that do allow lawyers into sexual-misconduct hearings or interrogations do not permit them to speak, though they may pass notes. Students on both sides must speak for themselves. This presents a serious problem for a young man charged with rape (and in the vast majority of campus cases, the accused are men). On one hand, if he doesn't defend himself, he'll be at a disadvantage. On the other, if he is also caught up in a criminal case, anything he says in a campus procedure can be used against him in court. Neither side may cross-examine witnesses to establish contradictions in their testimony. A school may withhold the identity of an accuser from the accused if she requests anonymity (though it may choose not to). Guilt or innocence hinges on a "preponderance" of evidence, a far lower standard than the "beyond a reasonable doubt" test that prevails in courtrooms. At Harvard, the Title IX enforcement office acts as cop, prosecutor, judge, and jury--and also hears the appeals. This conflation of possibly conflicting roles is "fundamentally not due process," says Janet Halley, a Harvard Law School professor whose areas of expertise include feminist legal theory and procedural law.
...What's happening at universities represents an often necessary effort to recategorize once-acceptable behaviors as unacceptable. But the government, via Title IX, is effectively acting on the notion popularized in the 1970s and '80s by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon that male domination is so pervasive that women need special protection from the rigors of the law. Men, as a class, have more power than women, but American law rests on the principle that individuals have rights even when accused of doing bad things. And American liberalism has long rejected the notion that those rights may be curtailed even for a noble cause. "We need to take into account our obligations to due process not because we are soft on rapists and other exploiters of women," says Halley, but because "the danger of holding an innocent person responsible is real."
Lippy
Back-talky links.
Thug U
Head TSA thug Pistole to retire from crumpling up the Constitution at the airport door. Will pursue position in the rights-eroding academic sector.
The Criminalization Of Everything: Woman Serves Jail Time For Falling Behind On Yard Work
A woman in Tennessee was jailed for having a messy yard, reports WVLT. Yes, we've put a woman in a cage intended for people who are dangers to society because her trees and bushes around her house didn't look so nice.
Karen Holloway was cited by Lenoir City officials for not keeping up her yard.She says this all started over the summer, when the city sent her a citation, claiming her yard wasn't properly maintained.
"With my husband going to school and working full time, me with my job, with one vehicle, we were trying our best," she said.
Holloway, who has two kids still at home, says she'll be the first to admit this yard needed some attention. But she feels the city has gone too far by imposing jail time.
"[The bushes and trees] were overgrown. But that's certainly not a criminal offense," she said.
She was shocked at a hearing last week, when Judge Terry Vann handed down a five-day jail sentence.
"It's not right," she said. "Why would you put me in jail with child molesters, and people who've done real crimes, because I haven't maintained my yard."
She says she was never read her rights nor told she could have a lawyer present.
A commenter, Max 1, points out:
In the city I grew up in I mowed and shoveled snow for about a dozen people in the neighborhood. Sure they paid me five bucks to do it, however it was more of a lesson about building relationships through doing things for other people. Correct, the community failed her. Being neighborly went out of fashion?
Another, Geri Harper, wrote:
This is how they treat the wife of a military veteran with children, both while this veteran served overseas and after he returned home? What are these people? Why didn't they donate time and help on this yard out of respect for this veteran?
The scary thing is, as a country that was about escaping tyranny and providing freedoms, we now find myriad reasons to take away citizens' freedoms. We all should be afraid -- and protesting.
The video:
"Mrs. Clooney" Causing Global Feminist Pantywadding
Feminism once again shows that it has become a form of authoritarianism.
Just check out the latest thing to have all the wymyn atwitter.
Yes, that's right -- "Amal Clooney's name change divides women on a key feminist issue," as Nicole Lyn Pesce reports in the New York Daily News.
And as Wochit posts at Yahoo [annoying autoplay video]:
George Clooney and Amal Alamuddin got married in late September, and everyone gushed. Amal Alamuddin changed her last name to Clooney on the website for her law firm Monday, and the town that is the Internet lit torches and tried to chase Mrs. Clooney through the streets, claiming she was "giving up a fundamental human right" and renouncing "her feminist credentials." One site called it silly, and said the human rights lawyer "is doing the world a disservice by demonstrating that even very powerful and successful women are still less important than the men they marry." Another chided the newlywed, saying she has reduced her status from person to "actor's wife," and even went so far as to say "you have lost your marbles."
Really? Really?
If ever there were a trophy husband (and I mean that in the big game sense), it would be George Clooney.
Quite frankly, when you bag one of the biggest animals on the hunt, it seems only natural to want to mount the antlers on your hood.
Or...maybe you just think it's nice to signal "My life has changed" by going in for an old tradition and taking your husband's name. This is especially appealing if your name used to be Ahmadinejad...or...something, and your husband has a nice, easy, roll-off-the-tongue name like Clooney.
But, Noooooooo!...this absolutely cannot be, according to the dictates of the fundamentalists populating feminism. And, in case you were wondering, that's because feminism isn't about women having choices -- it's about feminists bullying women into making the choices feminists think they should.
And, back to Mrs. (now) Clooney, let's get real about what real power is -- as opposed to the weakness hidden by angry bluster from feminists.
Ultimately, when you're a world-renowned human rights lawyer, maybe, just maybe, you can feel powerful and even badass -- even if you tape the name of the man you married over the name you grew up with.
Just Hours Old, And If You Were Born in Connecticut, You're Already $28K In Debt
That's how pension expert Adrian Moore put it on Twitter (@reasonpolicy). He linked to this piece at Reason Foundation about pension liabilities, reported by Truong Bui:
The unfunded gap has expanded since 2002, as shown in "Chart 1" of the study. The funded status saw a miniscule rise in 2008, but then it deteriorated afterwards. That improvement was largely the result of the state government's issuance of $2 billion in General Obligation Bonds (GO) for the Teachers' Retirement System (TRS) to make up for the funding shortfall. Essentially, the state borrowed money to fund the pension, reflecting an attempt to engage in "risk arbitrage": putting the borrowed money in high-yield investments that earn a higher return than the interest of the bond. The implied logic is that the use of GOs would profit the pension without imposing any extra cost on the state. That logic is specious, as evidenced by the worsening funded status after 2008. What the state of Connecticut did was not arbitrage, but gambling with money that posed considerable risks. As the authors of the study put it, "this is the equivalent of homeowners taking a second mortgage on their houses to invest in the stock market in the hope that the investments pay more than the cost of the mortgage."If Connecticut's pension funding is bad enough, its Other Post-Employment Benefits (OPEB) system, which includes healthcare and life insurance obligations, is in a direr state. The OPEB funded ratio in 2013 was 0.6 percent. The state has set virtually zero assets ($144 million) to cover $22.7 billion in OPEB obligations (see "Chart 2" below). Add that to the previous estimate of the pension debt and the state owes almost $100 billion in unfunded pension and benefit liabilities, which calculates out to be $27,668 of debt for every man, woman, and child in Connecticut.
You were just born, kid? Well, don't just lie there in the ICU! Get a job!
Snoopy
Peanutty links.
Boohoo, Pakistan Portrayed On TV As Sort Of Place Where They, Oh, Stone Women -- Which, In Real Life, They Actually Do
A Pakistani woman writes to complain about the portrayal of Pakistan on "Homeland," the Showtime show starring Clare Danes as a CIA agent dealing with Muslim terrorism.
Gregg and I have been complaining, too, about the show lately -- that the recent episodes have been slow as hell and focused on this boring baby angle.
But novelist Bina Shah writes in The New York Times:
I'm a writer of fiction, so I know about imagined worlds. You look not for complete truthfulness, but for verisimilitude -- the "appearance of being true" -- so it can give your art authenticity, credibility, believability. And we in Pakistan long to be seen with a vision that at least approaches the truth.Pakistan has long been said to have an image problem, a kind way to say that the world sees us one-dimensionally -- as a country of terrorists and extremists, conservatives who enslave women and stone them to death, and tricky scoundrels who hate Americans and lie pathologically to our supposed allies. In Pakistan, we've long attributed the ubiquity of these images to what we believe is biased journalism, originating among mainstream American journalists who care little for depth and accuracy. By the time these tropes filter down into popular culture, and have morphed into the imaginings of showbiz writers, we've gone from an image problem to the realm of Jungian archetypes and haunting traumatized psyches.
Whenever a Western movie contains a connection to Pakistan, we watch it in a sadomasochistic way, eager and nervous to see how the West observes us. We look to see if we come across to you as monsters, and then to see what our new, monstrous face looks like. Again and again, we see a refracted, distorted image of our homeland staring back at us. We know we have monsters among us, but this isn't what we look like to ourselves.
Guess what: Nobody does TV shows about a mom taking her kids to school.
And you should be a little more focused on the monsters among you -- and how disgustingly commonplace stonings of women are, along with all the other human rights abuses that are part and parcel of Islam.
Okay, TV sometimes fails on what's exactly real:
Still, the season's first hour, in which Carrie also goes to Islamabad, offers up a hundred little clues that tell me this isn't the country where I grew up, or live. When a tribal boy examines the dead in his village, I hear everyone speaking Urdu, not the region's Pashto. Protesters gather across from the American Embassy in Islamabad, when in reality the embassy is hidden inside a diplomatic enclave to which public access is extremely limited. I find out later that the season was filmed in Cape Town, South Africa, with its Indian Muslim community standing in for Pakistanis.
Big deal.
What you should write a New York Times op-ed on is something important, like why, while the Catholic Church is talking about being nicer to gays and lesbians, so many Muslims are behaving like it's the Dark Ages and why reform of Islam seems impossible.
The inability for reform in Islam is due to how the Quran is said to be the unquestionable word of Allah, and how looting, raping sociopath Mohammed's actions are to be emulated by Muslims. (As I noted the other day, Mohammed ordered the beheading of hundreds of Jewish men at Banu Qurayza...Mohammed is to be emulated...and we wonder why we see Muslims on the news beheading aid workers?)
And where are her op-eds lamenting the stonings? Like this one, where a pregnant woman was stoned to death -- a most horrible way to die. (This comes out of Islam, which says that women are men's possessions, and men are in charge of them [see summary at bottom].)
From the AP, "Pakistan stoning death: Father of slain pregnant woman among 5 charged":
The case has brought international attention to violence against women in Muslim-majority Pakistan, where hundreds of women are killed by relatives each year in so-called "honour killings" carried out by husbands or relatives as a punishment for alleged adultery or other illicit sexual behaviour.
Yeah, but they wore the wrong hats on "Homeland"!
Because So Many People Are Under The Impression That A Candy Bar Is Made Of Kale
There's no area of our lives that the Obama administration will leave un-meddled.
Obamacare regulations mandate that vending machines must have the calorie counts on them. Not just on the products, which is already mandated. As John Dunham writes at REGonomics:
According to the law, like restaurants, vending machine operators must provide a sign in close proximity to each article of food or the selection button that includes a clear and conspicuous statement disclosing the number of calories contained in the article. In other words, vending machine operating companies must post the calorie content of each item in the machine somewhere near the selections themselves. They must do this even though the calorie content is already included on the product nutrition label. The FDA suggested that the implementation cost of the legislation for vending machine operators would be $25.8 million with a recurring annual cost of about $24 million. Notwithstanding the fact that most people purchasing from vending machines are likely buying soft drinks, candy, salty snacks or something other thin quinoa or kale, and probably don't care much about calorie counts, over a 5-year period, this rule will cost consumers well over $120 million dollars....If the regulations cost what FDA suggests - and regulatory impact analysis figures are always low by a huge amount - the cost would appear to be small, just under 0.13 percent. But this is the cost to the operator. When this is marked up using very conservative retail margins, the cost of the regulation to the consumer would be about 0.16 percent. So the cost to consumers over 5-years would be more like $144 million.
On top of this, consumers receive virtually nothing for their $144 million in higher overall costs. The information on the required sign is already available on the products themselves, so the regulation is repetitive. The effect of the information on consumer behavior is also murky. While activists like Mayor Bloomberg love regulations like calorie counts on vending machines, consumers really don't get much value from them. Research on whether menu labeling has an impact on nutrition suggests that while people generally underestimate the calorie count on food purchased at restaurants, but they react by increasing calorie intakes once they find out. (United States Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service). In New York, consumers reacted by purchasing more calories after menu labeling went into effect.
This is probably why the FDA was unable to quantify any benefits to the proposed rule in its own Regulatory Impact Analysis. Even so, the law is now the law, and since it was passed without ever being read, we are now finding out that silly provisions, like calorie counts on vending machines, are part of Obamacare.
via @reasonpolicy
The Medical Malpractice Industry Actually Protects Consumers
A Cato post by Shirley Svorny as a preamble to a paper posted (and free) at the link:
Supporters of capping court awards for medical malpractice argue that caps will make health care more affordable. It may not be that simple. First, caps on awards may result in some patients not receiving adequate compensation for injuries they suffer as a result of physician negligence. Second, because caps limit physician liability, they can also mute incentives for physicians to reduce the risk of negligent injuries. Supporters of caps counter that this deterrent function of medical malpractice liability is not working anyway--that awards do not track actual damages, and medical malpractice insurance carriers do not translate the threat of liability into incentives that reward high-quality care or penalize errant physicians.This paper reviews an existing body of work that shows that medical malpractice awards do track actual damages. Furthermore, this paper provides evidence that medical malpractice insurance carriers use various tools to reduce the risk of patient injury, including experience rating of physicians' malpractice premiums. High-risk physicians face higher malpractice insurance premiums than their less-risky peers. In addition, carriers offer other incentives for physicians to reduce the risk of negligent care: they disseminate information to guide riskmanagement efforts, oversee high-risk practitioners, and monitor providers who offer new procedures where experience is not sufficient to assess risk. On rare occasions, carriers will even deny coverage, which cuts the physician off from an affiliation with most hospitals and health maintenance organizations, and precludes practice entirely in some states.
If the medical malpractice liability insurance industry does indeed protect consumers, then policies that reduce liability or shield physicians from oversight by carriers may harm consumers. In particular, caps on damages would reduce physicians' and carriers' incentives to keep track of and reduce practice risk. Laws that shield government- employed physicians from malpractice liability eliminate insurance company oversight of physicians working for government agencies. State-run insurance pools that insure risky practitioners at subsidized prices protect substandard physicians from the discipline that medical malpractice insurers otherwise would impose.
Sloppy
Messy links.
The Gender Crap
Mollie Hemingway wins the tweetmatch.
First, there's this: 
Mollie: 
US Govt's Legalized Theft: Your Punishment For Wanting To Live And Work Overseas
Note how the US govt steals this man's money, despite his paying full taxes in France. It's one more way to control people -- you can live in overseas but it's going to cost you big bucks in double-taxing.
This bit on taxes is from a piece on Lew Rockwell by Ira Katz, an American who went to work in France, married a French woman and has a daughter with her and lives with them in France:
As a libertarian I have been aware of the nature of the US government for many years, but the dangers were brought home to me when I was audited by the IRS a few years ago. I had had an accountant prepare my returns with instructions to report fully and under the assumption that if I paid the full tax burden in France I would not need to pay anything to the US. In spite of this I received a huge bill for back taxes with penalties. I then had this Kafkaesque conversation with the IRS auditor.Me: Do you believe I live in France?
IRS: Yes
Me: Do you believe I work for a French company?
IRS: Yes
Me: Do you believe I pay the full French taxes?
IRS: Yes
Me: Isn't there a treaty between the US and France specifically to make double taxation impossible?
IRS: Yes
Me: And yet now you say I must pay tax in the US on my salary in France?
IRS: Yes
At the time I had read that the Obama administration was directing the IRS to hire new auditors specifically to beset expats. The interpretation of the French taxes of people like me was changed to make the haul even greater. I was forced to find a much more expensive accountant who specializes in expat tax problems on top of the taxes I must pay. So I ponder the step, but to renounce US citizenship today is expensive and time consuming and perhaps (my conjecture for the future, see Schumer) dangerous if you plan to return to the US for visits. So I must continue to pay ... twice.
It's easy to say, "Whatever...I don't live in France. His problem."
But it's actually our problem -- all of ours. This is part of a pattern. Our government increasingly makes it impossible (or wildly unpalatable) for us to do business, live where we want, travel where we want, and do a host of other things.
ISIS Explains The Justification For The Enslavement Of Women
It comes straight out of Islam.
Salma Abdelaziz writes for CNN [annoying autoplay video at link]
In a new publication, ISIS justifies its kidnapping of women as sex slaves citing Islamic theology, an interpretation that is rejected by the Muslim world at large as a perversion of Islam."One should remember that enslaving the families of the kuffar -- the infidels -- and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the Shariah, or Islamic law," the group says in an online magazine published Sunday.
Mohammed himself sent off hundreds of women into sex slavery at Banu Qurazya after beheading the men -- hundreds and hundreds of them.
Jesus: Turn the other cheek! Feed the poor!
Mohammed: Capture their women and rape them!
Gluey
Sticky links.
American Suicide Bomber Wasn't Under Surveillance After Trip To Syria
We spent a lot of money having latex-gloved mallworkers in cop costumes feel up some stay-at-home mom's hoohoo at our airports, but at our borders, it's "Y'all come right in" as aspiring terrorists return from war zones.
Floridian Moner Mohammad Abusalha, 22, lived to go back to Syria and blow himself up for Allah while driving a truck packed with explosives toward a restaurant full of Syrian soldiers. Death toll is unknown.
New York Times Is Actually Selling Tours Of Iran
From SmarterTimes, Ira Stoll writes about a travel pitch that couldn't get stupider, for the price of $6,995:
13-day tours of Iran guided by Times journalist Elaine Sciolino. Promotional material for the tour on the Times website promises "luxurious hotels" and describes Tehran as a city where "the young and fashionable adopt a new trendy joie de vivre." Also on the itinerary: "a pleasant evening stroll around the colorful bazaars," along with insights into the "accomplishments" of the late Ayatollah Khomeini....The Times promotional language says participants will "Enjoy some time haggling over spices, textiles, antiques and copper handicrafts" at the Vakil Bazaar in Shiraz before retiring to their "five-star hotel boasting stunning Persian soft furnishings." Another day is said to feature a "relaxing evening and dinner."
There's no mention at all in the Times promotional language about the tour of Iran's status as a state supporter of terrorism, of its pursuit of nuclear weapons, or of its human rights abuses. For information about those abuses, anyone considering plunking down nearly $7,000 for the pleasure of accompanying a Times journalist on a "relaxing evening and dinner" after antique shopping in Iran may want to consider, first, browsing the State Department's latest human rights report on Iran. It reports that under Iranian law, "a woman who appears in public without an appropriate headscarf (hijab) may be sentenced to lashings and fined." It also says that "The law criminalizes consensual same-sex sexual activity, which may be punishable by death or flogging."
One can understand why the Times is seeking new revenue opportunities as a tour operator, since its revenues in traditional areas such as newspaper subscriptions and advertising are not growing fast enough to satisfy investors. But there is potential for this sort of thing to adversely affect the Times' journalism. How fair will Times journalism be toward those calling for tougher Iran sanctions if the sanctions would force the newspaper to cancel its lucrative luxury tours of Iran? Why are Times journalists lending their reputations, such as they are, to promotional material that describes Iran as a kind of paradise -- "colorful bazaars," "trendy joie de vivre" -- while skipping over the reality of other parts of Iran, like, say, Evin Prison?
If you're lucky, you might even get to see some adulterers stoned or gay people hanged!
via @instapundit
Tweetlove
Loved this tweet:
@DanMentos
I wonder if Magic Johnson regrets wasting the world's best porn name on a basketball career
Photolove:
Big Plans, Little Follow-Through
Welcome to the presidency of Barack Obama. Or as Aaron David Miller calls him in the WaPo, the "disappointer in chief":
Barack Obama isn't the first president to fail to meet expectations -- and he won't be the last. But he has come to embody something else, too: the risks and travails of reaching for greatness in the presidency without the crisis, character and capacity necessary to achieve it."Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans," the new president declared in his 2009 inaugural address to a 1.8 million-strong crowd on the Mall. ". . . What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply."
From pledging an Earth-moving transformation, Obama has been reduced to hitting singles and getting his lonely paragraph right . After drawing early comparisons to Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy all rolled into one, Obama has fallen so low that journalists wonder whether Jimmy Carter is not a more appropriate parallel.
...Obama certainly wants to do big things; behind his detached demeanor is the combustible drive of a man who seeks greatness. That is no transgression: He saw a nation in great peril and has sought to transform it, while battling the nastiest economic crisis since the 1930s and waging wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan and against terrorism.
But that kind of ambition requires a leader to see the world clearly as it is before trying to refashion it the way he wants it to be. Not reading the terrain accurately, failing to assess whether his administration had the muscle to negotiate it, and missing what the public expected and wanted can lead to unhappy consequences.
Whatever your judgment of Obama's policies, there is a vast gap between the expectations he set for himself and his supporters and the realities of his presidency. Obama reached for greatness but has disappointed many of those who voted for him once or even twice because they so badly wanted to believe; those who thought he would end partisanship and change Washington when he could not; those who believed he could transform the country and America's foreign policy, too, when he did not; and those who believed he would somehow become the Kennedy-like president of their dreams.
In fact, there seems to be a walk-of-shame-like aspect to having voted for Obama -- even for some dyed-in-the-wool Democrats. Again from the WaPo piece:
During Obama's first term, the New York Times' David Brooks wrote that to be an Obama supporter was "to toggle from being uplifted to feeling used."
Finky
Ratlinks.
Daydream
If I had my own TV show and I could have any set I wanted, it would either be Jules Verne or a decaying French apartment.
Tweetlove
A tweet I loved.
Collect 'em; post your faves!
Where Not To Go On Vacation
In case you were wondering.
Union Boss Making $154 An Hour Pushing For Minimum Wage Hike
Jason Hart writes at Watchdog.org:
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is pushing for a $10.10 federal minimum wage as a show of union support for low-income workers, but Trumka is paid 15 times that amount.Based on AFL-CIO's annual report to the U.S. Department of Labor, the union coalition paid Trumka a gross salary of $272,250 plus $49,881 in other disbursements during its 2014 fiscal year ending June 30. Trumka's total pay of $322,131 was the equivalent of a $154.87 hourly wage.
...Trumka's own thoroughly livable wage is paid for with money taken from workers in AFL-CIO member unions. Many of those unions, including American Federation of Teachers and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, take dues and mandatory fees from taxpayer-funded public employees.
via @reasonpolicy
Cops As Thieves
Strong lede on a WaPo story on legalized theft, AKA "asset forfeiture," as pointed out by @EdYong. Robert O'Harrow, Jr., and Steven Rich write:
Police agencies have used hundreds of millions of dollars taken from Americans under federal civil forfeiture law in recent years to buy guns, armored cars and electronic surveillance gear. They have also spent money on luxury vehicles, travel and a clown named Sparkles.
The story continues:
The details are contained in thousands of annual reports submitted by local and state agencies to the Justice Department's Equitable Sharing Program, an initiative that allows local and state police to keep up to 80 percent of the assets they seize. The Washington Post obtained 43,000 of the reports dating from 2008 through a Freedom of Information Act request.The documents offer a sweeping look at how police departments and drug task forces across the country are benefiting from laws that allow them to take cash and property without proving a crime has occurred. The law was meant to decimate drug organizations, but The Post found that it has been used as a routine source of funding for law enforcement at every level.
Spending included:
$5,300 worth of "challenge coin" medallions in Brunswick County, N.C.; $4,600 for a Sheriff's Award Banquet by the Doña Ana County (N.M.) Sheriff's Department; and a $637 coffee maker for the Randall County Sheriff's Department in Amarillo, Tex.Sparkles the Clown was hired for $225 by Chief Jeff Buck in Reminderville, Ohio, to improve community relations. But Buck said the seizure money has been crucial to sustaining long-term investigations that have put thousands of drug traffickers in prison.
"The money I spent on Sparkles the Clown is a very, very minute portion of the forfeited money that I spend in fighting the war on drugs," he told The Post.
The problem is, this is very much a case of the fox guarding the henhouse, with a huge incentive on the part of police to call any money suspicious and to yank away citizens' rights -- forcing them to go through the expensive and painful process of proving it was earned lawfully, even when there is no evidence it was earned unlawfully.
More on what the seized money bought:
One task force used the money for a subscription to High Times, a magazine for marijuana enthusiasts, at $29.99 for a year.Several departments bought custom-made trading cards, complete with photos and data about their officers. Some, including police in Chelsea, Mass., share them with children in their communities.
"We have found that this is a great way to build trust and foster long-lasting relationships with the youth in our community who get to know officers on a first-name basis," said Chelsea Police Chief Brian Kyes.
"Hi, I'm Brad, and I'll be violating your rights tonight!"
Burpy
Gassy links.
Have You Taken Your Vitamins?
Coupons with savings on vitamins and other supplements at Amazon
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Get free shipping by adding my book to your order -- "Good Manners For Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck".
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Helpful Human Behavioral Hack: The Silent Stare
My book, "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," which I hope you'll buy, is largely about hacking our behavior and that of jerks, bullies, and the semi-conscious to make life go a little better.
I loved this behavioral hack from an anti-TSA blog, that of a guy who did some sort of activism and property damage years ago that had the government dub him a "terrorist." His name is now on "The List," and he is now four-S -- with "SSSS" printed on his boarding pass. And he now searched pretty much down to the short and curlies every time he flies.
Jetsetting Terrorist writes:
A consistent theme through this site is the TSA having no idea what they're doing and just making up rules to flex their muscles. The most pathetic example of this came early on in my jetsetting terrorism career, shortly after being added to The List.He got through the gate -- one of those where you board the plane from the tarmac -- and then:
Right where the canopied portion of the walkway ended, a sole TSA agent was waiting.
"Mister ____, I need to see your ID."
"No," he said. "Passport. I need your passport."
"Domestic flight." I said.
"I need your passport."
"Domestic flight." I said.
"I need a passport before I can let you board this plane."
You know when someone is so objectively wrong and their retarded request is so objectively baseless that you aren't even inspired to dignify it with a response? It was one of those times.
I laughed at him. Then I folded my arms and stared.
Not speaking is among the most powerfully intimidating things you can do to a challenger. You should try it. Bullies can't stand it.
I was sort of intentionally blocking passage to the tarmac, and as a line of people formed behind me, pressure mounted on this bozo to make a move.
He handed me my ID back and scurried off. What a clown.
Hey TSA doofus: Now your feeble attempt at bullying has a worldwide audience. Wave to your mom.
And no, as an aside: I'm not for people damaging property as a form of activism. Speech, not destruction of others' goods, buildings, or lands, is how you get to protest.
The More Ginormous Government Gets, The Worse It Gets At Protecting Us
As somebody with a libertarian outlook, I see government's job at protecting us from rights violations, not "protecting" us from salty food.
A particularly timely example of the wrongheadedness in our bloated government from Glenn Reynolds at USA Today:
As The Federalist's David Harsanyi writes: "The CDC, an agency whose primary mission was to prevent malaria and then other dangerous communicable diseases, is now spending a lot of time, energy and money worrying about how much salt you put on your steaks, how close you stand to second-hand smoke and how often you do calisthenics."These other tasks may or may not be important, but they're certainly a distraction from what's supposed to be the CDC's "one job" -- protecting America from a deadly epidemic. And to the extent that the CDC's leadership has allowed itself to be distracted, it has paid less attention to the core mission.
In an era where new disease threats look to be growing, the CDC needs to drop the side jobs and focus on its real reason for existence. But, alas, the problem isn't just the CDC. It's everywhere.
It seems that as government has gotten bigger, and accumulated more and more of its own ancillary responsibilities, it has gotten worse at its primary tasks. It can supervise snacks at elementary schools, but not defend the borders; it can tax people to subsidize others' health-care plans but not build roads or bridges; and it can go after football team names but can't seem to deal with the Islamic State terror group.
Multitasking results in poorer performance for individuals. It also hurts the performance of government agencies, and of government itself. You have one job. Try doing it.
Oh, and if you think your Obamacare premium is bad now, wait till you're paying for all the Ebola patients.
Slinky
Like blimpy, but after fasting for 26 days.
In Some Places Across US, Rape Vics Forced To Pay Cost Of Their Own Forensic Exams
Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes in reason:
It sounds almost too unbelievable to be true, doesn't it? We don't ask home-invasion victims to cover the cost of dusting for fingerprints or the families of homicide victims to subsidize blood spatter analysis. But rape victims are being billed for the cost of collecting forensic evidence in the crimes against them.This runs contrary to federal law, which says states or municipalities must fund investigating rape allegations as they would any other crime. When the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was reauthorized in 2005, it stipulated that all states must either provide a free forensic medical exam directly or provide reimbursement for such an exam, regardless of whether a victim ultimately decides to press charges or cooperate with law enforcement. The 2013 reauthorization (which takes effect in 2015) specifies that victims can't be charged up front for the exam (also known as a "rape kit") and asked to seek reimbursement from insurance later.
But they say the devil is in the details, and the VAWA doesn't provide many, leaving it up to states and municipalities to work out who covers what. Thirty-four states pay for forensic exams using money from their general victim compensation funds, according to a May report from Urban Institute. (These funds are generally built from fines and penalties paid by convicted offenders, not tax dollars.) Eleven states leave it to local law enforcement or prosecution funds; some use a combination of special funds and money from state public safety or health and human services departments; and three, including Louisiana, leave it to the county or parish to cover the cost.
In Louisiana, local coroners are supposed to provide the free forensic exams. "But in many cases, such as in New Orleans, cash-strapped coroners outsource that responsibility to another entity" such as local hospitals, The Times-Picayune reported in September. And these hospitals vary greatly in how and whom they bill. Some eat the whole cost themselves, or did until recently. Some cover testing for forensic evidence but bill victims for things like pregnancy and HIV tests. Some send patients the full tab, some bill insurance companies, and some bill the state. Some require anyone seeing a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner--the only hospital staff qualified to collect forensic evidence from rape victims--to be admitted through the emergency room, which adds hundreds of dollars to the total tab.
The cost of collecting forensic evidence tends to run more than $1,000. Some states cap compensation for testing at a few hundred dollars.
Nolan Brown adds:
With rape, the victim's body may be the only crime scene, and collecting forensic evidence & receiving medical care are part of the same process. It's not that states have some totally nefarious or mysogynistic plot to treat rape differently than other crimes; but it does show that we still don't know how to treat rape in the criminal justice system and there's a lot of room for discussion and reform.
College Now Indistinguishable From Nursery School
The part where the nursery school aides tell all the little children what they can and cannot say.
Brendan O'Neill writes at Spiked about the "moral McCarthyism of the war on lads":
The refusal to tolerate jokey, blokey, laddish speech on campus has reached epic proportions. This week something truly shocking happened at the London School of Economics, that supposedly liberal school that allows all sorts of ideas to be aired and discussed: a student rugby club was banned, physically disbanded, after distributing what some considered to be an offensive leaflet at the freshers' fair.The leaflet, highlighting the rugby club's social events for the forthcoming year, referred to the 'beast-like' nature of female rugby players and advised social-event attendees to avoid women who are 'mingers'. It also made a joke about gays. Silly, juvenile stuff. But ban-worthy? Seriously? For the rugby club to have been disciplined, broken up, hurled into disgrace and banned from representing the LSE for a whole year simply for handing out a leaflet with some offensive terms on it is outrageous. No matter how the LSE tries to spin this - it is describing its disbanding of the rugby club as an attempt to 'safeguard and enhance inclusivity' - this is a pretty clear-cut case of students being silenced simply for holding views that offend against mainstream sentiment. The exact same thing that was done to Communist and other radical students at Berkeley 50 years ago: they, too, were silenced for holding what were decreed to be foul and dangerous views.
...Earlier this year the National Union of Students held a Lad Culture Summit - seriously - to devise a 'national strategy' for tackling 'lad culture' on campus. Its targets include 'banter' and 'misogynistic jokes' among young male students, which are apparently especially prominent in 'the social side of university life'.
Banter, jokes - this is speech. Just words. Commentary and discussion among students. What earthly right do student-union officials or university authorities have to devise strategies to eradicate certain forms of speech among students or to ban things that certain students like reading or listening to? No matter how many PC words get attached to these lad-cleansing initiatives - with phrases like 'improving inclusivity' and 'fostering diversity' being bandied about - there is no escaping the fact that this is intolerance. Intolerance of the speech, and fundamentally the thoughts, of a particular section of the student body.
The comparisons with what happened in early 1960s America are striking. Yes, back then it was radical hotheads who were targeted with censure, whereas now it is blokeish hotheads, but in both cases the speech of certain students is depicted as so depraved, so potentially polluting, so likely to inflame instability and violent behaviour, that it must be squished out of existence.
We must challenge this cultural cleansing of lad culture on campus, this all-out moral assault on the speech and ideas of certain young men. No, not because their ideas are particularly enlightened or interesting - many of them are in fact daft - but for the simple reason that individuals' speech should never be the business of officialdom, whether government officialdom or university officialdom.
via @adamkissel
Linkieloo
Lookie, lookie...
Women Again Demanding To Be Treated Like Eggshells, Not Equals
That's my description, as of late, of the new feminism, the one that sees men as perps (guilty of something or other, surely) until proven otherwise (by their standards of proof), and that sees "safety" no longer as something physical but protection from hurty words.
Ashe Schow writes at the Wash Ex in concord with this, "Feminist hysteria is causing the infantilization of women":
Women once were encouraged to be strong and independent, to brush aside insensitive words and actions and to emerge stronger. But now, politicians, pundits, even celebrities are feeding an outrage machine by telling women they should be offended by anything and everything.The latest example comes from actress Lena Dunham, famous not only for her HBO show "Girls" but also for a 2012 political ad comparing voting for the first time to losing one's virginity. Last week, Dunham told NPR that the phrase "too much information" -- "TMI" for short -- is a sexist phrase that "trivializes female experiences."
What Dunham doesn't appear to realize is that by claiming common phrases are sexist, women are actually being told that they need to be protected from free speech and that they should be offended more often because they are somehow being oppressed by that speech. This reinforces the idea that women are overly fragile and sensitive -- an image that feminists supposedly have been fighting for decades.
TMI is just the latest word or phrase being flagged as sexist. In 2012, the Women's Media Center created a list of more than 100 words and phrases that are harmful to women, including "aggressive" and "complain."
Singer Beyonce and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg added a new word to that list in March -- "bossy." Suddenly women were told they were being marginalized if they were called bossy, even though some men are called far worse (far too colorful to mention here).
I'm "bossy," and proud of it, and I use the term as a compliment to describe my friend KateC, who, after my boyfriend's boss died, pushed him and a magazine editor together at a party and said, "Here's the late Elmore Leonard's researcher; you need to have him write for you."
When I saw a friend who's an entertainment editor at a cafe -- when a former movie critic friend was there -- I copied her. I hope it results in some work for my friend and a great freelancer for my other friend.
If you aren't a wounded duck of a person, words don't wound; in fact, you can take possession of supposedly negative words and use them as positives. As I did with bossy. It never occurred to me to get all butthurt about the word. And wouldn't. Because my orientation to the world isn't as a woman who's walked on by men or anyone, but as a person who has power because I present myself that way.
And the notion that TMI is a woman-bashing term -- if you feel that victimized by an innocuous bit of slanguage, well, we'd best shove you back in the kitchen where none of the muffins you bake will do anything to offend your terribly tender-ass self.
Why Has Classical Capitalism Devolved Into Crony Capitalism -- "A Ponzi Scheme Of Epic Proportions"?
We're in deep trouble...of the un-dig-out-able kind.
Charles Hugh Smith asks at California Policy Center, how "classical free-market capitalism become state-cartel crony-capitalism, a Ponzi scheme of epic proportions that is entirely dependent on ceaseless central bank perception management and interventions on a scale never before seen?"
He answers:
We can start with these six factors:1. Those who control most of the wealth are willing to risk systemic collapse to retain their privileges and wealth. Due to humanity's virtuosity with rationalization, those at the top always find ways to justify policies that maintain their dominance and downplay the distortions the policies generate. This as true in China as it is in the U.S.
2. Short-term thinking: if we fudge the numbers, lower interest rates, etc. today, we (politicians, policy-makers, money managers, etc.) will avoid being sacked tomorrow. The longer term consequences of these politically expedient policies are ignored.
3. Legitimate capital accumulation has become more difficult and risky than buying political favors. Global competition and the exhaustion of developed-world consumers has made it difficult to reap outsized profits from legitimate enterprise. In terms of return-on-investment (ROI), buying political favors is far lower risk and generates much higher returns than expanding production or risking investment in R&D.
4. The centralization of state/central bank power has increased the leverage of political contributions/lobbying. The greater the concentration of power, the more attractive it is to sociopaths and those seeking to buy state subsidies, sweetheart contracts, protection from competition, etc.
5. Any legitimate reform will require dismantling crony-capitalist/state-cartel arrangements. Since that would hurt those at the top of the wealth/power pyramid, reform is politically impossible.
6. Understood in this light, it's clear that central bank monetary policy--zero-interest rates, asset purchases, cheap credit to banks and financiers, QE, etc.--is designed to paper over the structural problems that require real reform.
We're pretty-well fucked. Anybody feel differently? Anyone seeing any light at the end of the sphincter?
via @MarcDanziger
Linka
Binka bottle of ink...
Sad And Moving Story
Brittany Maynard, a woman with brain cancer will end her life November 1, surrounded by her husband and others who love her. Watch the video at the link. If I were in her circumstances, I would take the same path.
Maynard and her family moved to Oregon, where assisted suicide is -- as it should be -- legal. It is your life -- it should be yours to live (and end) as you wish, and if you need assistance dying, the person who you choose to assist you should not be prosecuted.
And yes, of course there should be safeguards, but people often use the argument that there can be abuses to argue against people having the most important sort of autonomy over their lives.
Billy Hallowell writes at The Blaze:
Maynard's decision is certainly a controversial one, leading to moral and ethical questions surrounding the decision to end one's life. But she insists that she wants nothing more than to live and that she isn't suicidal."I've had the [end-of-life] medication for weeks. I am not suicidal," Maynard wrote in her CNN op-ed. "If I were, I would have consumed that medication long ago. I do not want to die. But I am dying. And I want to die on my own terms."
She went on in the piece to argue that it's important for people in her shoes to be given the option to control their own destinies.
"When my suffering becomes too great, I can say to all those I love, 'I love you; come be by my side, and come say goodbye as I pass into whatever's next,'" she said. "I will die upstairs in my bedroom with my husband, mother, stepfather and best friend by my side and pass peacefully. I can't imagine trying to rob anyone else of that choice."
Cabaret License Law Challenged In NYC
A Brooklyn bar owner is challenging New York's "cabaret law," which prevents dancing in bars unless the owner has a special license.
A dancing license? Yes. It's that absurd.
Adam Janos writes in the WSJ:
If a customer at Muchmore's in Brooklyn so much as busts a move, owner Andrew Muchmore could be busted.New York City prohibits dancing in a venue unless it has a cabaret license, and Muchmore's--like lots of bars and restaurants across the five boroughs--doesn't have one.
Now, Mr. Muchmore, who is also a lawyer, is challenging the city's nearly 90-year-old cabaret law in federal court on the grounds that it violates freedom of expression and due process guaranteed by the First and 14th Amendments, respectively.
A band is onstage nearly every night at the North Williamsburg bar, which caters to a mostly young, hipster crowd.
But the fear of a fine has Mr. Muchmore steering clear of booking acts that might encourage his customers to sway.
"The only practical effect of the cabaret law is to prohibit dancing" in the majority of the city's eating and drinking establishments, the 33-year-old Mr. Muchmore wrote in a lawsuit he filed last week in Brooklyn's U.S. District Court.
In a statement, the city Law Department said it would review Mr. Muchmore's claims when it receives the lawsuit.
The city Department of Consumer Affairs enforces the cabaret law and is "currently reviewing rules, laws and regulations, many of which are in need of reform, including the cabaret law," a department spokeswoman said.
The law, though, has supporters. They maintain the law is meant to ensure safety conditions at venues before dancing is allowed.
Oh, bullshit.
If you have a wet floor and people are dancing and slip, your ass will be sued. That's what protects customers. Not some piece of paper handed over in the wake of legalized extortion by the city.
Oh, and check out the history:
According to historian Michael A. Lerner, the law was "really a response to interracial mixing."During Prohibition, "the police didn't care so much about drinking. What they cared about was white women dancing with black men," said Mr. Lerner, who wrote "Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City."
Attorney Paul Chevigny challenged the cabaret law twice, once successfully.
In 1988, a state supreme court ruled that venues should be allowed to host live music without licensing restrictions on the grounds that music is protected as free expression.
The question should be: Are you somehow keeping people who live near the place from sleeping and the "quiet enjoyment" of their homes?
I use this standard in conjunction with a loud bar near me. They are jerks who play music with the entire front of the bar open -- so I can hear it in my pillow. This is wrong.
However...
My ultimate position: I don't care you have an orgy and light yourselves on fire. If you aren't disturbing my sleep, it's really none of my business what you're doing.
via @sentientist
The Aunt Jemima Suit: Should I Also Sue The Egyptians For Chasing My Ancestors Across The Red Sea?
Okay, truth be told, I'm an atheist and I don't actually believe the Big Man In The Sky saw all his cute Jews on the run from the mean Egyptians and then went, "Yoo hoo, over here!" and cut a nice little trail for them through the water.
But the point is, at a certain point, there has to be a cutoff of sue-ability. Cato's Walter Olson points it out in this tweet: 
This is about a lawsuit filed by the heirs of the woman who portrayed Aunt Jemima -- a character who became a subject of contentiousness as a "black mammy" figure and was afterward cleaned up:
Debbi Baker writes at U-T San Diego about the suit:
Shortly after the famous pancake mix debuted in 1889 the Aunt Jemima character was brought to life by former slave Nancy Green who served as the R.T. Davis company's "mammy" mascot, a role she continued until her death in 1923. Anna Harrington, the daughter of sharecroppers, began her career as Aunt Jemima in 1935.After the Quaker Oats Company bought the brand in 1926 it made Aunt Jemima its registered trademark in 1937. The image helped make the product a popular and trusted brand.
Now, heirs of one of the women who portrayed the Quaker Oats advertising icon have filed a class-action lawsuit against the manufacturer and its parent company PepsiCo Inc. for $2 billion and a share of future sales revenue.
The lawsuit claims that the company exploited Green, Harrington and other women who played Aunt Jemima by using her image and recipes without proper compensation.
"Aunt Jemima has become known as one of the most exploited and abused women in American history," said D.W. Hunter, one of Harrington's great-grandsons.
The company responded by saying that the lawsuit had no merit and that no contracts between Aunt Jemima models and their pancake bosses exist.
Last Heard Of Telling Gore To Wear Earth Tones; Now Claiming ISIS Beheadings Faked
Naomi Wolf, having either lost her mind or finding herself very much in the mood for a little quick attention, is strongly suggesting that the savage recent murders by ISIS of Americans and Brits were staged by the U.S. government and that the victims and their loved ones are actors. Max Fisher writes at Vox about "the insane conspiracy theories of Naomi Wolf":
Her initial posts on ISIS repeatedly stated that confirmation of the authenticity of their beheading videos "has not happened yet." Wolf said that the media was ignoring "journalistic red flags" in that the sole source of the videos had been "SITE, which is run by an anti-Muslim activist with half a million dollars in US funding in 2004." (In fact, the videos were widely distributed on open-source jihadist online outlets. Maryland-based nonprofit SITE monitors extremist social media.) She also detailed an alleged incident, which I was not able to confirm, of a website "based in Doha, address registered at a private intelligence firm in the UK" that she said had spread news of a Canadian journalist, who turned out not to exist, taken hostage in Syria....Like many other journalists who cover the Middle East, I had previously met both murdered American journalist James Foley and his parents (in my case, in 2011) and can attest, although I deeply regret that it is necessary to do so, that they are not actors.
Wolf deleted the post at the urging of New York Times foreign correspondent Rukmini Callimachi, who commented beneath it on Facebook. Callimachi, who has reported extensively on these cases, later explained on Twitter (I've cleaned up the abbreviations that are common Twitter shorthand), "What she fails to understand is that the kidnappings -- 23 in total -- have been under blackout for much of the past two years because ISIS told families of Henning, Foley, Kassig, etc., their sons would be killed if it became public."
After deleting her post at Callimachi's request, Wolf posted again, reiterating her earlier accusations and promising to "repost" with "new reporting." She also posed a series of questions to the New York Times implying that the newspaper was complicit in fabricating the story. She focused her criticism on the idea that all information on the ISIS kidnappings and videos had been sourced only to SITE, which she again noted had once received a US government grant. She implied that the media had been unable or unwilling to find a second source because the entire story had been staged. (In fact, the kidnappings and murders have been reported based on dozens of sources, including Syrians in the ISIS headquarters of Raqqa and a number of fellow hostages who have been released.)
Later, Wolf scolded the New York Times for not answering her questions and accused it of failing to meet "basic j-school two source journalism." In another post, Wolf stated, "I stand by what I wrote today" about ISIS. She then described a "Pakistani lawyer who is a fourth-generation scion of a major Pakistani political family" who had told her that ISIS was funded by the United States and Israel, along with Saudi Arabia. She described the lawyer as a "credible source" and uncritically presented his claims as "the news behind the news."
More from Wolf:
Wolf published a separate Facebook post, also on Saturday, suggesting that the US was sending troops to West Africa not to assist with Ebola treatment but to bring Ebola back to the US to justify a military takeover of American society. She also suggested that the Scottish independence referendum, in which Scots voted to remain in the United Kingdom, had been faked.
Strangely, she never mentioned the moon landing.
Meow
Cattywompuslinks.
What Henry Kissinger's Ladies Tell Us About What Men Want
Sorry, gender warriors, men and women are not the same, and they have different priorities in dating.
On the other hand, men will date a hot barista but women are a little more discriminating on job description. As I write in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck" (which I hope you will buy!):
Although women will go for man babes if they can get them (and studies show that most do at least want men who are taller than they are--by about six inches), they prioritize seeking men with status and power.In one of the more hilarious studies reflecting this, anthropologist John Marshall Townsend and psychologist Gary Levy showed women photographs of attractive and homely men wearing business attire or a fast-food worker outfit.
The women overwhelmingly went for the ugly man wearing a Rolex over the handsome guy in the Burger King uniform, whether they were pairing up for the long haul or the short roll.
In other words, if you're a man seeking a woman, your first step should be seeking extremely gainful employment, which tends to be far more productive than lying on the couch in your parents' basement pounding a six-pack and whining about how "shallow" women are.
The Swingset: A Childhood Death Trap
I'm so lucky that of all the hundreds of times I rode the swings in the park by my parents' house, in our backyard, and at the playground at our elementary school, that I lived to tell the tale.
The truth is, I did lots of things as a kid that got me injured -- all of which taught me to not be such a reckless dumbass the next time.
Well in the latest in the panic to protect the children, they're getting rid of the swings in a Washington State area, calling them "the most unsafe of all playground equipment."
Zach Noble writes at The Blaze:
Schools in Richland, Washington, will soon be swing-free, KEPR-TV reported, as school administrators worry that children walking by could get whacked in the head by the feet of their swinging peers."As schools get modernized or renovated or as we're doing work on the playground equipment, we'll take out the swings," said Richland School District's Steve Aagard. "It's just really a safety issue, swings have been determined to be the most unsafe of all the playground equipment on a playground."
While they're at it, they should also drain all the lakes.
I nearly drowned in the lake at Sleeping Bear Dunes. Some girl saw me -- I'd walked off a ledge on the lake bottom -- and she plucked me out of the water and returned me to my parents.
I suggest just keeping children in large jars until they're 40.
Unsustainable Government Pensions
Susan Edelman writes in the New York Post of a retired CUNY professor who gets a New York CIty pension of $561,286 a year:
Retired Queens College history professor Edgar J. McManus, 90, gets a city pension of $561,286 a year, newly released figures show.His payout is the highest by far in both the city and state teachers retirement systems, according to data obtained by the Empire Center for Public Policy, an Albany-based think tank.
The city Teachers Retirement System, or TRS, administers pensions for 80,300 members, mostly former employees of the Department of Education and some from CUNY.
The city's second-biggest pension, $308,358, goes to Alvin Marty, a Baruch College economics professor who retired after 55 years in 2008.
Fifteen other retirees collect more than $200,000 a year -- including city Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña, who gets $208,506.
And 1,796 retired educators get more than $100,000 a year.
...McManus, who has written groundbreaking books on slavery, retired in February 2012 after teaching history and constitutional law for more than 50 years. His final salary was $116,364.
Check out how crazy it is in California.
Many states and municipalities are in the same bind.
Solutions, anyone?
Nutsy
Mixed links.
Margo Kaplan: Pedophilia Should Be Treated As A Disorder, Not A Crime
Kaplan, an assistant professor at Rutgers School of Law, writes in The New York Times:
By some estimates, 1 percent of the male population continues, long after puberty, to find themselves attracted to prepubescent children. These people are living with pedophilia, a sexual attraction to prepubescents that often constitutes a mental illness. Unfortunately, our laws are failing them and, consequently, ignoring opportunities to prevent child abuse.The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines pedophilia as an intense and recurrent sexual interest in prepubescent children, and a disorder if it causes a person "marked distress or interpersonal difficulty" or if the person acts on his interests. Yet our laws ignore pedophilia until after the commission of a sexual offense, emphasizing punishment, not prevention.
Part of this failure stems from the misconception that pedophilia is the same as child molestation. One can live with pedophilia and not act on it. Sites like Virtuous Pedophiles provide support for pedophiles who do not molest children and believe that sex with children is wrong. It is not that these individuals are "inactive" or "nonpracticing" pedophiles, but rather that pedophilia is a status and not an act. In fact, research shows, about half of all child molesters are not sexually attracted to their victims.
A second misconception is that pedophilia is a choice. Recent research, while often limited to sex offenders -- because of the stigma of pedophilia -- suggests that the disorder may have neurological origins. Pedophilia could result from a failure in the brain to identify which environmental stimuli should provoke a sexual response. M.R.I.s of sex offenders with pedophilia show fewer of the neural pathways known as white matter in their brains. Men with pedophilia are three times more likely to be left-handed or ambidextrous, a finding that strongly suggests a neurological cause. Some findings also suggest that disturbances in neurodevelopment in utero or early childhood increase the risk of pedophilia. Studies have also shown that men with pedophilia have, on average, lower scores on tests of visual-spatial ability and verbal memory.
The Virtuous Pedophiles website is full of testimonials of people who vow never to touch a child and yet live in terror. They must hide their disorder from everyone they know -- or risk losing educational and job opportunities, and face the prospect of harassment and even violence.
...A pedophile should be held responsible for his conduct -- but not for the underlying attraction. Arguing for the rights of scorned and misunderstood groups is never popular, particularly when they are associated with real harm. But the fact that pedophilia is so despised is precisely why our responses to it, in criminal justice and mental health, have been so inconsistent and counterproductive. Acknowledging that pedophiles have a mental disorder, and removing the obstacles to their coming forward and seeking help, is not only the right thing to do, but it would also advance efforts to protect children from harm.
Tweetlove
As in, a tweet I loved.
@juleslalaland
Do I want to be beheaded or die bleeding from every orifice? Election 2014.
Outrage On Campus: A Shrill A Minute
A regular commenter writes:
As I might have mentioned, my middle daughter has just started her first year at college. She's at Bryn Mawr, a women's school just west of Philadelphia. Well, she's not been there six weeks, and already she's getting a taste of earnest righteousness one sometimes sees from people that age.She told me that not long after the term started, a couple of young women living in the dorm starting displaying a Confederate flag. Outrage ensued! Demonstrations were held (in which faculty participated)! A hashtag campaign was started! The campus was, apparently, aghast at the entire episode.
My daughter told me she was bothered by the student and faculty reaction. Not so much because they were wrong; my daughter thought displaying the flag was kind of tasteless and unnecessarily provocative in an environment like her college. What upset her was the reaction, which she thought was over the top in its indignation. If people react with such shrillness, she wondered, doesn't that give the provocateurs the attention they desire?
She sent me some pictures of the student demonstration. I'm looking at one now -- a young woman carrying a sign reading, "Unsafe for Any/Unsafe for All." Considering the Paglia discussion on your blog the other day, I wonder just what the student considers "unsafe."
At any rate, a couple of links. The first one, from Philadelphia Magazine, is more-or-less straight news, and the comments are fairly sober. The second is from a site called Liberaland, and is a little more opinionated, with comments reading like a dorm debate.
His daughter added on to his email to me:
Yep, this was also reasonably close to what I had to say. In the documentary, I also talked about how those two girls made a dumb move - but it was just that. It's really easy to demonize those you don't know. If the campus had met the two girls, who were genuinely sorry for what they did, I bet their opinion would have softened. I don't know if you also want to mention this, but I told the camera people that in order "for our campus to move forward, we need to forgive." Apparently, forgiveness wasn't anywhere on their radars. :(I thought they were acting rather thuggish.
The "safety" reference reminds me, this is a good time to mention theFIRE.org president Greg Lukianoff's wonderful and sharply-argued new book, Freedom From Speech, in which he explains that "safety" has been co-opted. When people used to talk about being safe, they meant physically safe. Now, on campus, it means being safe from ideas that might cause one the slightest bit of discomfort.
Here's a related op-ed Lukianoff wrote in the WSJ, quoting UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks:
Mr. Dirks noted that the "free expression of ideas" is a "signature issue for our campus," but he cautioned that free speech can cause "division and divisiveness that undermine a community's foundation" and may threaten the "delicate balance between communal interests." That may be true, but that's the point. Freedom of expression can shake things up and disrupt dogmas--and that's a prized feature of open discourse, not a bug.Mr. Dirks writes that "we can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so." But a right to freedom of speech that ends whenever someone on campus claims not to feel "safe and respected" is a right to little more than polite chitchat. Speech that's free-with-some-qualifications means that students and faculty are left unable to take on the big debates and questions in a way that should be expected in an academic setting.
And while students should certainly feel "safe," it is important to recognize that these days the word has wandered far from its literal meaning. Feeling "safe" on college campuses means something closer to being completely comfortable, physically and intellectually. Boundary-pushing comedian Lenny Bruce, a hero to the Free Speech Movement, wouldn't have lasted a minute in front of today's college kids.
Mr. Dirks may have thought his call for civility would be uncontroversial, but even this seemingly benign message should not be greeted uncritically. As John Stuart Mill noted in "On Liberty" in 1859, calls for civility are often a tool to enforce conformity. A fierce and angry defense of the values of the dominant class might be hailed as righteous rage, but even a milder, dissenting opinion is easily labeled uncivil.
Lincoln
Continental links, please, with swinging doors.
After The Cage-Fighting, The Reception Will Take Place...
Ah, weddings...
Criticizing Islam: The Ben Affleck Fallacy
Ben Affleck recently appeared with Sam Harris on Bill Maher's "Real Time."
Harris: "We have been sold this meme of Islamophobia, where criticism of the religion gets conflated with bigotry towards muslims as people. It's intellectually ridiculous."
As Lebanon born-and-raised, Arabic-speaking professor Gad Saad explains n an excellent post on Psychology Today, Affleck "became visibly agitated when Harris proposed that there is a double standard when it comes to the manner in which so-called liberals respond to Islam versus other religions."
Saad lays out the Jell-O-headedness in this thinking -- and please pay special attention to Saad's debunking of the oft-used "My friend Hakeem..." argument. (I'm reminded of the saying from epidemiology, "The plural of anecdote is not data"):
Affleck's position is that since the majority of Muslims do not go around beheading people, to draw links between this ideology and illiberal values is racist, gross, bigoted, and Islamophobic. This oft-repeated position is usually followed by some variant of this personal observation: "My friend Hakeem is a practicing Muslim and he is the loveliest person in the world." Ah, it's settled then. There is nothing to worry about. Move along everyone. Only racist Nazis would be concerned with Islamic tenets that might otherwise be incongruent with Western liberal values.
Let me first address the "racist" charge. In criticizing an ideology, one cannot be racist, hateful, or bigoted. These descriptors apply to positions held against people and not ideologies. It is perfectly acceptable in a free and liberal society to criticize, debate, mock, and reject any ideology. The contents of an ideology are not sacrosanct simply because they are couched in the cloak of a religion. If we were to refrain from criticizing religion, this would constitute adherence to blasphemy laws...Let us move to the "but 1.5 billion people are not violent" claim. Let me draw an analogy. Most men have never committed a rape nor will they ever commit such a reprehensible and evil act. Yet most rapists are men. Rape is a very serious issue that requires that we understand its root causes even though it is a very small minority of men who should be of concern to us. That we can all point to men who do not rape does not suggest that we should not worry about this phenomenon. Pointing to the empirical fact that rape is a largely male crime is not hateful, sexist, bigoted, or man-phobic. It is a manifestation of the fact that clear-thinking people can extract statistical regularities from the world and arrive to otherwise valid conclusions.
Returning to the issue at hand, several global and reputable surveys (e.g., Pew Research Center) have offered a glimpse to the positions held by Muslims when it comes to a wide range of foundational liberal values (freedom of speech, rights of religious minorities, gay rights, women's rights, apostasy, freedom of conscience). The picture is not pretty and it suggests that a sizeable portion (totaling in the hundreds of millions) hold views that are perfectly antithetical to the fundamental tenets along which Western values are based.
So what should we do with this information? Should we refrain from having an open discussion on the matter since the majority of Muslims are indeed kind and peaceful? Should we ignore the daily carnages that are carried around the world in the name of the faith even though most people of that faith are not actively engaging in violence? How should we go about tackling this issue if we are increasingly being told that the mere hint of a criticism of that faith is unacceptable as it is "racist and gross" (to use Ben Affleck's words)?
I should add that during Affleck's incoherent rant he dismissed the current terror group du jour (ISIS) as a small and insignificant group that is otherwise irrelevant to the discussion given that they constitute a "minority" of extremists. Think about how diabolically smug and callous this statement is. There are thousands of people who are being beheaded, crucified, and raped by this group (rightly or wrongly in the name of their religion) yet in his infinite and blind desire to appear high-brow in his tolerance, he sees no reason to examine whether their positions might be religiously-inspired (they certainly seem to think so as do countless other similar groups around the world). The only thing that matters to Affleck is to signal to the world his bona fide progressive membership card of infinite tolerance built on the back of empty, ignorant, and childish platitudes.
From a related post of Saad's:
To mock, offend, or criticize religious beliefs should never be construed as illegal hate speech lest we give up our most fundamental human rights: freedom of conscience (which includes freedom from religion) and freedom of speech. Modern-day blasphemy laws (often disguised as Hate Speech laws) are antithetical to the definitional ethos of Western liberal democracies (see here and here for two of my earlier posts on the topic).People have every right to practice their religious convictions in private (not as an intrusion on others in the public sphere) and the rest of us have every right to reject, mock, and criticize these beliefs. There is no such thing as freedom from religious offense. If you live in the West, you should accept that your religious views are not sacrosanct to those who do not share your faith.
Just to be clear, I don't think he's talking about a right under the law here (to practice religion in the public sphere), but a right in terms of what's decent. (See video here of Muslims blocking traffic with prayer rugs.)
Family And Medical Insurance Leave Act -- Smart Politics; Bad For Business
Wendy McElroy explains at The Hill about a proposed national insurance program for paid family leave, the FAMILY Act:
The program would be an independent trust fund under the Social Security Administration (SSA), which would collect money and administer benefits. Each employer and employee would pay into the fund an amount that is 0.2 percent of the latter's wages. Qualifying employees would be entitled to a family and medical leave payment for a period lasting one year, during which no more than 60 days could be taken. The payment would equal 66 percent of a person's usual monthly wage, up to a maximum of $4,000/month, and would be indexed for inflation.As with ObamaCare, what could go wrong?
The proposed act imposes costs that could sink marginal businesses, especially smaller ones. All employers would be required to pay into the fund, regardless of their size. All workers, including part-time ones, would be included. And, yet, many workers became part-time because businesses could not afford to pay the ObamaCare coverage mandated for full-time ones. Many seasonal workers would also be covered, even if they are unemployed. Businesses with thin profits, like family farms, may be unable to absorb that cost and uncertainty. The act will become an engine of unemployment.
Women, the young and the inexperienced will be harmed most. Women are the primary caregivers in most situations. This means it will be more expensive to hire them than men because they are more likely to take paid leaves that require paid replacements. The young and inexperienced often accept less pay or benefits in order to get a work background. The more expensive these workers become, the less reason businesses have to prefer them over experienced applicants.
...The opportunity for abuse is incredible. In a February 2014 FAQ, an enthusiastic National Partnership for Women and Families (NPWF) explained reassuringly, "the fraud and abuse prevention measures ... are similar to those for Social Security." But, as Fox News reported on Oct. 8, 2013, "A two-year investigation by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has found widespread fraud in the Social Security Administration's Disability Program." Moreover, the next line of the NPWF FAQ presents the wrist-tap to be used against abusers. "If a person is caught lying to receive benefits, they will be banned from the program for one year."
Finally, as Gillibrand seems fond of saying, for an employee who makes the median annual wage of $32,196, the cost will be $1.24 a week -- "similar to the expense of a cup of coffee." But the deficit-addicted federal government always understates costs; it always overspends on programs, and usually dramatically so. Assurances of coffee-money costs and "revenue neutral" spending are as likely to be true of the FAMILY Act as it is of other programs.
Sappy Sunday?
Maybe I'm just having a moment of mawkishness, but in listening to this on Pandora as I wrote, I was struck by what a moving thing of beauty Chopin and Arthur Rubinstein created. Thinking of that, I actually teared up a little listening, which is not a usual thing for me to do.
Minky
Furry little links.
Women Never Lie About Being Raped -- Except When They Do
Those who are all for the campus kangaroo courts -- basically, the student council deciding whether a "he said"/"she said" sex act is to be deemed sexual misconduct and having a guy expelled -- need to understand that "she said" should not automatically be assumed to be reliable.
Even the cops and prosecutors -- who should be the ones dealing with any sex crime accusation -- can be fooled.
In New York, a woman who falsely accused a man of rape, sending him to prison for three years, has finally come clean (after confessing to her priest).
Laura Italiano writes in the New York Post:
All this because she wasn't getting enough sympathy from her pals.Biurny Peguero Gonzalez concocted an elaborate story in 2005, claiming that a Bronx man held her at knifepoint as he and two pals raped her on a deserted street.
She lied to friends, doctors, police, prosecutors, grand jurors and jurors about how William McCaffrey and his friends kidnapped her from her parked car when she was blind drunk and attacked her.
But Gonzalez, now 27, had an astounding "facile ability to look one in the eye and offer up a falsehood," Manhattan prosecutors wrote in sensational papers released today.
Based almost solely on her testimony, McCaffrey was given 20 years in prison and spent the past three years serving time.
But Gonzalez lied -- driven by anger at her friends for not believing what likely really happened that night. She had gotten into a car with McCaffrey and his two friends and kissed him -- but grew afraid after she blew off his further advances and he erupted in anger, cursing at her and threatening to dump her out on the street, the papers said.
Yesterday, she turned herself in to Manhattan prosecutors and pleaded guilty to two counts of perjury for lying about the rape.
via @judgybitch1
The 7-Eleven Diet
If it's green, it's probably Gatorade.
The Difference Between A Side Dish And A Doobie
This is apparently a little difficult to discern for the drug warriors in Georgia, who raided an okra grower thinking they were about to seize marijuana.
Jacob Sullum writes at reason that heavily armed deputies showed up at the home of retiree Dwayne Perry on Wednesday after someone spotted his okra plants from the air:
"They were strapped to the gills," Perry told the paper. "Anything could have happened." Fortunately, no humans or dogs were killed.
Binky
Pacifying links.
Censored By Dumbasses, Banksy Mural Painted Over
Steven Erlanger writes in The New York Times about a Banksy mural, satirizing racism, that was removed by a governning council of a British town -- in the wake of a complaint that the painting itself was racist:
The mural, in Clacton-on-Sea, showed a group of dark gray rock pigeons holding signs reading "Migrants not welcome," "Go back to Africa" and "Keep off our worms," all directed at a small, more exotic green bird, possibly a swallow, that appears to be cowering at some distance on the same wire.Why the mural was interpreted as racist rather than satirical is unclear.
Stupidity, ignorance, inability to recognize satire?
The Tendring District Council said on Thursday that it had not known that the mural was by Banksy, an anonymous artist whose street art has sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
What, okay to censor regular people but not famous artists?
The mural, on a boathouse wall, was said to be worth £400,000. Graffiti has already appeared over the paint over the Banksy.
Relationships And The Right To Privacy
I write about privacy in "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," probably the only manners book ever to quote Brandeis and Warren's 1898 Harvard Law Review article on the subject.
People have a tendency to believe that being in a relationship means they get unfettered access to their partner's everything. They're wrong. Also...:
"John Malkovich Not Being John Malkovich..."
...As D.S. put it.
Wonderful recreations of iconic photos. My fave is the Arbus twins shot.
A Male Feminist On False Rape Accusations
Self-proclaimed feminist Newby Parton, who is male, writes in Princeton's Daily Princetonian about speaking up at a recent town hall meeting on the new sexual assault procedures put in place at the University. He supports the measures. However:
I voiced a single worry at the town hall meeting: that the new "preponderance of the evidence" standard will, definitionally, increase the likelihood of false convictions. Unknowingly, I had struck a hole into a dam. Cries of "rape culture" spewed forth....A student who spoke after me argued that the "preponderance" standard is necessary because evidence in a rape case is inherently shaky. If a victim steps forward a month after the rape, there may not be any evidence at all.
This is a consideration I sympathize with. However, the belief between the lines -- that verbal testimony alone should be enough to convict an accused perpetrator -- worries me. So too do the finger quotes that female speakers slashed into the air when they spoke about "rights of the accused." Their meaning was clear and powerful: Accused men do not have rights, and the best way to fight rape culture is to presume men guilty until proven innocent.
The truth is that, as with any crime, false accusations do happen. Maybe my worry -- that these new and valuable victories will come at the cost of false convictions -- is misplaced. Maybe mistakes will be rare enough that the benefit of suspending more rapists will outweigh the cost of suspending more innocent people. I don't know, and neither does anyone else. What I do know is that this same worry affects other men.
Here is my great concern: The input from worried men was not received kindly at the town hall. Rather, I was accused of being "steeped in rape culture." My accuser was not alone in her belief, for her comment set off an avalanche of smug glances aimed in my direction. Buried there, I did not dare speak again -- my ideas were not welcome.
But this is an important conversation, and all ideas should be heard. A few women have turned the dialogue into a battle against men and women, and in doing so I fear that they will turn men away from feminism. Men feel marginalized when our worries about a real, higher risk of wrongful suspension are disregarded. Attributing these worries to rape culture only distances us further because we begin to think that this is what feminism has become -- a bias against males that mistakes all male viewpoints for oppression.
Treating an accused perpetrator as innocent until he is found guilty can be an outgrowth of human decency, not rape culture. Similarly, the belief that men are guilty until proven innocent is misandry, not feminism. Keeping the two separate is important. Feminism is the struggle to reach equality for the sexes. It is not misandry, a bias against males.
via @CHSommers
Milky
Got link?
How Universities Throw Free Speech Under The Bus When It Becomes Inconvenient
University of New Mexico has a ridiculous sexual harassment policy that bans pretty much all speech related to sex or sex parts that's any sexier or more amusing than the disclaimer that comes with a box of tampons:
"[e]xamples of sexual harassment which shall not be tolerated" include "suggestive" letters, notes, or invitations. The policy also prohibits "displaying sexually suggestive or derogatory objects, pictures, cartoons, or posters," albeit with the vague disclaimer that such displays will be "evaluated for appropriateness such as art displayed in museums ... ."
Greg Piper writes at The College Fix that this is "a hoot" because:
This week, September 29-Oct 2 is "Sex Week" at UNM--a weeklong series of programs for students including "Negotiating Successful Threesomes," "O-Face Oral" and "BJs and Beyond." Sex Week is sponsored in part by the university's Women's Resource Center. Sex Week also violates the university's own speech codes, since even the titles of the workshops--and thus any Sex Week promotional materials--are "sexually suggestive."...The school gave a spirited defense of Sex Week, pointing to its Freedom of Expression and Dissent policy, which says the "appropriate response" to speech that is "offensive, even abhorrent," and causes "discomfort" is "speech expressing opposing ideas and continued dialogue, not curtailment of speech."
FIRE says this shows how "universities speak in lofty terms about the importance of free speech when it is politically convenient--and then throw it under the bus when it isn't."
Going from the merely ridiculous to the sublimely ridiculous, as @adamkissel put it in a tweet, "Catholic conversation forbidden at Catholic college."
What Feminism Has Become
I thought this was an excellent categorization over at pocketfullofliberty:
Radical (read: contemporary) feminists define the problem as men. Thus fantasies of male heroism are slated to be wiped from public consumption. Male chivalry is dead; women are the new white knights. Today's third wave feminists (or "Third Wave Frustrationists," as cleverly coined by Milo Yiannopoulos) kvetch the tired refrain, "Feminism is about equality!" It is a transparent Trojan Horse. These feminists are intolerant of masculinity, and their movement is about having power over men. They do not recognize healthy interdependence between the sexes, instead seeing a power struggle. They seek to feminize men and in doing so, masculinize themselves-- and they are succeeding, through targeting boys....In short, feminism in the West has assumed the features of an authoritarian movement.
via @instapundit
De Facto Death Panels In Canada: The Medical Staff Decides You're Too Old And Expensive To Keep Alive
Really smart piece at Forbes.com by Dr. Paul Hsieh about the de facto Canadian death panels -- a number of instances of hospital workers shifting a person's written wish to be resuscitated to DNR:
If Canadian doctors still want to make the patient a DNR despite the family's opposition, they can appeal to a judge or an "administrative tribunal" of "experts and wise community members." For DeGuerre or Rasouli, that would have been the Ontario Consent and Capacity Board, which would have had the final authority to overrule the family's wishes.As Goldenberger notes:
In Canada, with our single-payer health care system, Rasouli's situation has a very public bottom line: Should taxpayers foot the bill for his family's indefinite goodbye?... When taxpayers provide only a finite number of acute care beds in public hospitals, a patient whose life has all but ended, but whose family insists on keeping her on life support, is occupying precious space that might otherwise house a patient whose best years are still ahead.
Hsieh continues:
With respect to potentially expensive end-of-life care, most people will still have to rely on some form of insurance. Yes, insurance is a form of "somebody else" paying for your care. But in a free market (which we don't currently have), this is done through voluntary risk sharing. Willing participants pay predictable small premiums into a common pool, and receive payments under mutually agreed-to terms if they become seriously ill.The problem of paying for expensive treatments of possibly limited value can be handled by a version of Russell Korobkin's innovative concept of "relative value" insurance. As explained by Frakt and Chandra in the New York Times:
Health plans could define themselves at least in part by the value of technologies they cover, an idea proposed by Professor Russell Korobkin of the UCLA School of Law. For example, a bronze plan could cover hospitalizations and visits to doctors for emergencies and accidents; genetic diseases; and prescription drugs that keep people out of hospitals. A silver plan could cover what bronze plans do but also include treatments a large majority of physicians find useful. A gold plan could be more inclusive still, adding coverage, for instance, for every cancer therapy shown to improve patient outcomes (no matter the cost) as long as it was delivered at a leading cancer center. Finally, a platinum plan could cover experimental and unproven cancer therapies, including, for example, that proton beam.This way, nothing would be concealed or withheld from consumers. Someone who wanted proton-beam cancer treatment coverage could have it by selecting a platinum policy and paying its higher premiums. Someone who did not want to pay higher premiums for lower-value care, in turn, could choose a bronze or silver plan. This gives a different, but more useful, meaning to the terms "gold," "silver" and "bronze" than they have in the new insurance exchanges today.
The higher tiers of insurance would cost more -- but recipients would be guaranteed to receive those more marginally beneficial treatments. Other patients might prefer to pay lower premiums and forego unwanted aggressive measures at the end of life -- but instead be able to use that money now for more important personal priorities, such as buying a house or sending their kids to college.
A free-market version of Korobkin's plan would thus allow people to join risk pools with other like-minded individuals sharing similar priorities. This gives patients maximum control over their health dollars (and thus their medical care), even in the end-of-life scenarios.
Plinkey
The sound a penny makes when you drop it in the toilet.
"Not Tonight...Headache" Is Now "Sexual Violence" At The University Of Michigan
Had a challenging column to put out this week, so I'm a little behind on this story I saw tweeted by various people, but it truly is incredible. Note what the University of Michigan categorizes as "sexual violence" -- "discounting the partner's feelings regarding sex," "criticizing the partner sexually," and "withholding sex":
Sexual violence Examples of sexual violence include: discounting the partner's feelings regarding sex; criticizing the partner sexually; touching the partner sexually in inappropriate and uncomfortable ways; withholding sex and affection; always demanding sex; forcing partner to strip as a form of humiliation (maybe in front of children), to witness sexual acts, to participate in uncomfortable sex or sex after an episode of violence, to have sex with other people; and using objects and/or weapons to hurt during sex or threats to back up demands for sex.
So, at the University of Michigan, "Sorry, I'm too tired" is now a form of sexual violence.
As is, "You never wait for me to come anymore."
Well, as categorized by their "Abuse Hurts" page.
Romantic partners, if you're at the University of Michigan, you'd better be putting out. Or you're a sexually violent abuser.
It's just one more example of how college campuses are trying to rival "zero tolerance" lower-grade schools for idiotic edicts.
Really? A Secret Service Plot?
Juliette Ochieng tweet:
@JulietteAkinyi
These security breaches aren't accidents. The #SecretService is sending the president a message: "we let in what we want to let in."
Sounds more like incompetence to me. From the WashEx, Kelly Cohen writes that the Secret Service agent who stopped the White House intruder was off-duty (annoying auto-play video):
[He} was leaving for the night through the White House after seeing off the first family, sources told the Washington Post.Initially, the Secret Service said Gonzalez had been quickly stopped at the front door. Gonzalez actually made it well into the White House before being tackled on the southern side of the Eastern Room, the Post reported Monday.
From the WashEx, Susan Crabtree writes of a "pervasive culture of cover-up" (also annoying auto-play video):
Secret Service managers told agents on the ground in Atlanta not to file a written report after discovering that a convict with a gun rode in an elevator with President Obama during his visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Sept. 16, according to two sources familiar with the case.The president's Secret Service protective detail and other agents routinely file written reports if anything even mildly suspicious happens during a presidential trip or in the course of protecting any member of the first family at the White House on any given day.
Agents became alarmed during Obama's trip to Atlanta after discovering that a private security contractor working for the CDC with a criminal record had a gun within arms-length of the president, but superiors told them not to file "any paperwork" or initiate an investigation, according to two sources familiar with the case.
...The security officer with the gun attracted agents' attention and suspicion when he tried to take photos of Obama and videotape him leaving the elevator even after they told him to stop.
Secret Service agents questioned the man, alongside a supervisor who fired him on the spot and asked him to turn in his gun. The agents also ran his name through a database and discovered he had been convicted of assault.
The elevator case is another embarrassing blow to Secret Service leaders and exposes a breakdown in security protocols. One source called it a prime example of a pervasive "culture of cover-up" at the agency.
Advice Goddess Free Swim
It's Tuesday night, and I'm sleepy. You pick the topics. I'll post more on Wednesday morning.
P.S. One link per comment or my spam filter will eat your post.
