Litmus Test

Nobody ever talks about this, but feminists are mysterious and scary. Our attitude toward them is so simple, that I believe I can speak for just about everyone with a few well-selected sentences. I’m for feminism when it means women should be paid the same for comparable work — with comparable experience, qualifications and seniority. I’m for feminism when it means women should be charged the same for the same goods and services, and if you can prove women are being slighted in the field of medical care, I’m for feminism when it means fixing that.

I’m against feminism when it dictates I can’t watch porn.

Or go to Hooter’s.

Or that I should be fired from my job for nothing so a woman can have my job.

Or when it makes it easier to fire me from my job, by creating a bunch of cultural rules in the workplace nobody can fully understand.

Or when it makes it easy to convict a man for rape, for having sex that was entirely consensual on both sides until the following morning.

I think those attitudes cover the “big middle” of our society, women as well as men. So I have a litmus test to anybody who calls themselves a “feminist.” And the first person I’d like to apply my litmus test to, is Katrina George of the University of Western Sydney. Katrina George has made a career out of lecturing against the practice of euthanasia, which strikes me as a purely gender-neutral issue. She manages, however, to work into her columns a few snippets about how badly women have it.

Women’s experiences show how social and cultural biases can affect health care. Several US studies show that women receive fewer cardiac treatments and procedures than men and have worse outcomes. Women are also likelier than men to suffer inadequate pain control. Although women provide most of the care that is given to dying patients, when they need care themselves they tend to receive less assistance from family members than men and are likelier to have to pay for any care they might receive.

As feminist Susan Wolf has put it, “Dimensions of health status that may affect a patient’s vulnerability to considering physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia differentially plague women”. Is it just a coincidence that most of the prominent assisted suicide cases have been women? In the US there were Diane Trumbull, Janet Adkins and Marjorie Wantz; in Canada, Sue Rodriguez; in Britain, Diane Pretty; in New Zealand, Victoria Vincent and Joy Martin; and in Australia, Nancy Crick, Sandy Williamson, Norma Hall and Lisette Nigot.

Now, like I said, by all means if there is a difference in the health care women are receiving just because they are women, I’m all for fixing it — as is just about anyone. But in another role, spokesman for Women’s Forum Australia, Katrina George was speaking out about a recent victory for the group, apparently exerting enough pressure to shut down a beauty show.

The “Blokesworld Live” event, a spinoff of a late-night television show, had been promoted in the east-coast city for Saturday and Sunday as “the ultimate weekend for the bloke of the species”.

The group Women’s Forum Australia said the show was demeaning to women and that the council had bowed to pressure from protestors.

“It’s time to declare zero tolerance against men who treat women like recreational sex toys,” spokeswoman Katrina George told the news agency AAP.

A council spokesman denied the event had been cancelled on moral grounds, but Renee Eaves, the managing director of the event’s featured dancers, the “Flirtmodels”, said she believed the council had caved in.

Feminists like Katrina George are suffering from scope creep. They need focus. So to give them some, here’s the litmus test not only for Ms. George, but any & all feminists.

What’s better? A society that offers women substandard medical care and slave wages, but enforces “zero tolerance against men who treat women like recreational sex toys,” or a society that guarantees women equality of medical care, and equal pay, but lets horny men look at whatever they want to look at?

It’s a valid question, because it’s extremely likely that this is the choice any civilized country is facing now. One of my hypothetical societies restricts all classes from true freedom, the other makes this freedom available to everyone. Freedom to do serious things like get affordable health care, and to do silly things like stuff dollar bills into a stripper’s thong.

And society-at-large, appears to line up overwhelmingly on one side of that litmus test. “Real” people, in other words, would have no difficulty answering my question, and everyone except the True Believers would answer it the same way. People love freedom.

But feminists seem to be straddling the line. They don’t give off the appearance of knowing, with any certainty, which of those goals is more important to them.

So while we’re making up our minds how much rope to give a feminist to hang herself, trying to figure out what she’s all about…maybe that would be a good litmus test for her. Show Dracula the cross, and see what happens.

Must-Tards III

I don’t form pet peeves out of single words, but the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve come to realize that people who throw around the word “must” seem to be the source of the worst problems in the world. These are people who have boundless energy when it comes to telling you what you should be doing that you’re not doing, or what you should stop doing that you are doing. Then, when the time comes to declare what bad things will happen if you keep doing what you’re doing, or don’t do what they’re telling you to do, the energy suddenly peters out. In other words, they can never seem to state a case why you should be doing things their way. Dictating, it turns out, is about all they can do.

And a four-year-old girl can do that. If she has a one- or two-year-old brother.

And most of this bullshit — and it really concerns me to be noticing it, and to see it proven over and over again with the passage of time — comes from Europe.

Now take, for example, the case of Gudrun Schyman. Gudrun sits on the Board of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research (TFF), and in that capacity has been given primary credit for a screeching, turgid and clear-as-mud manifesto about Feministiskt initiativ, or Feminist Initiative. It seems where we’re going with all this is that in the environment that surrounds the Board of TFF, feminism has been just dandy but it hasn’t gone far enough and they want more feminism. The manifesto starts out with the tried-and-true “we’re not paid as much as men for doing the same work” that gets sympathy from everyone, and then, it launches into the really spicy, radical stuff. This is the “camel’s nose in the tent” theory, or, the “frog in a pot of boiling water” theory. You get massive numbers of people to agree to something they’d never accept otherwise, simply by showing some discretion in sequence and timing.

In Sweden, the gender-based income gap is increasing. Female-dominated professions consistently have low salaries. Much of the work performed by women is still both invisible and unpaid. Women carry out the majority of domestic chores and take responsibility for providing care, in the public as well as domestic spheres. Women are discriminated against professionally, with the motivation that we bear children – regardless of whether we actually do. Women receive a smaller retirement pension than men. Women are underprioritized in medical research and health care.

Okay, equal-pay-for-equal-worth. Something everybody likes, right? No links to any studies, no hard data, no statistics, no allowing another side to be heard, no exposure of the premise to attack by people who might be more knowledgeable and who might have facts that create problems for the stated inference. Nope, just the inference. But at least their heart is in the right place, because if Sweden does have this problem, well, just about everyone would want to fix it right?

Feminist Initiative has grown tired of insufficient measures. Nearly all Swedish political parties call themselves feminist, but women’s lives remain unchanged, day in and day out, year after year. Despite many women’s tireless efforts within party politics, women’s interests have never been given adequate priority.

Swedish gender politics have hitherto been based on a view of equality as a non-zero sum game, meaning that women’s conditions can improve without affecting those of men. Feminist Initiative builds its politics upon an analysis, which makes it clear that women’s subordination results from the privileging of men. Therefore, men must agree to relinquish their privileges. We share this analysis with contemporary women’s networks and organizations, as well as with the women’s movement, which throughout history has fought for the human rights of women.

Men must agree to renounce their privileges. Yeah, and what happens if they don’t? Why should they? And most importantly, what privileges are these?

What is this political manifesto supposed to do? If I were thinking of jumping on this bandwagon, why, I don’t have any better idea about what I’m supporting after I get done reading the treatise, than I would have before starting the first paragraph. So it doesn’t do that, therefore, what good is it?

I haven’t been to Sweden, but over here in the United States there is an enormous pool of people who can get behind the idea of equal-pay-for-equal-work, but stop short of supporting something reeking with the odor of revolution by spoiled brats. So the platform has failed to state the case to the moderates. There are no reassurances of what the Feminist Initiative will stop short of doing. There is only the assurance to the extremists, that the Feminist Initiative wants more, more, more. What the TFF board will make men do.

Goodie for you. And if I wrote such a thing in Poli Sci, or in creative writing, even a professor with pro-feminist leanings would have to flunk me and s/he’d be right to do it. I don’t know what this manifesto is trying to tell me. It’s just a list of bitching, and demands. Vague bitching. Unclear demands. And must, must, must. It would appear that one word has distracted Ms. Schyman and the other angry, bitter she-male trolls on the TFF board from what they set out to do. And they’re telling us what we must do, and we’re supposed to listen?

Sorry. The Man Show beckons.

Just Plain Petty

Bill O’Reilly has been to eighty countries. I know this, because I was listening to his radio program last night and he cited this as one of his qualifications for agreeing with a caller who laid on him the usual pissing and moaning about how America is disliked around the world, we’re arrogant and other countries don’t think highly of us for it, we’ve alienated our allies, blah blah blah.

Well it’s my understanding that when you demand to know how many countries an American has ventured into so you can attack him for his global ignorance, you’re supposed to discount Mexico and Canada to make him seem even more ignorant. According to that criteria, I haven’t been to any countries at all, so even though I think O’Reilly conceded this point prematurely, I defer to his expertise. Nevertheless, I have outstanding questions about the low esteem in which America is held on the global stage, which, I think, I ought not have. After all, we’ve been bombarded with this for how many years? We’re supposed to be how concerned about it? And yet, the people who think the USA should be more concerned about its low showing in the opinion-polls, never seem to do a clean, clear-cut job of cataloguing our problems for us.

What else can I do, but try to get it done for them?

• We’re arrogant
• The average American doesn’t know how to find other countries on a map
• When people from other countries tell our President what to do, he doesn’t obey them
• We have a lot of money and generally, have life pretty good
• We’re fat
• We have bad stuff in our history, like raping the Indians and junk
• We don’t take vacations

Does that just about cover it? I haven’t heard anything ventured outside of those.

I find it interesting that while he was conceding the point that other countries don’t like us and that this somehow means something, he also conceded the point to the other side that a lot of this has to do with jealousy. Now, I have not heard this thing about rooted-in-jealousy contested by anybody, save for those who have a vested interest in making as much out of this as can possibly be made — specifically, the extreme anti-war, anti-Bush crowd. So I take it as a given that folks sympathetic with O’Reilly’s viewpoint, which includes most of us, assert the following: 1) Resentment toward the USA is partly or wholly rooted in jealousy, and 2) Americans would be well served to take this endless complaining more seriously than we do.

I submit that these two tenets are mutually exclusive. Complaints, even entirely truthful and entirely valid complaints, are invalidated automatically when they are based on jealousy. They become just-plain-petty by default. Even suspicion that jealousy is a factor, has an effect on the credibility of the complaining somewhat akin to steaming-hot urine on a snow castle.

To demonstrate this, let us construct an everyday analogy that has something to do with jealousy. You have two neighbors on your block. The guy who lives across the street is a bachelor, six foot three, with chestnut-colored wavy hair, huge pecs, washboard abs, a Corvette, and huge feet. He makes you, as a man, question your heterosexuality. The guy who lives next door is in his late forties, kind of thick around the middle, has a lot of credit cards, drives a ’93 Honda, and a spreading bald spot. He also has an absurdly hot wife from Venezuela in her early twenties.

One day the predictable happens. Not only does the hot wife from Venezuela start boppin’ with the equally hot bachelor from across the street, but she moves in with him. The happy couple keep living there. The jilted husband keeps living where he’s living. Life goes on.

My point is, that as your next-door neighbor, the doughy, thin-haired jilted husband, confides in you his various petty resentments toward the bachelor and his ex-wife, logically you’re going to have to discount this. The David Hasselhoff look-alike, the thunder-stud, doesn’t vacation as much as he should. The stud is arrogant. The stud has too much money and doesn’t have enough challenges in life. The stud’s house is painted the wrong color. The stud’s new puppy dog doesn’t get curbed when he’s out for walks. On and on it goes.

Even before it gets tedious (which it does, at breakneck speed) you can’t take it that seriously because you know the doughy, thin-haired next-door-neighbor has deep, simmering personal resentments toward the stud. You don’t even know for sure that the new puppy dog crapped where the jilted husband said it did, if you didn’t see it yourself.

Now I don’t mean to imply that as Americans, we should automatically dismiss anything unflattering said about us, nor do I mean to imply that our foreign policies should be so dismissive of such things. There are diplomatic reasons to placate things like this, which don’t apply to my analogy. I’m just saying this: Jealousy, logically, diminishes the gravity that can be accorded to such things. People are people, and a lot of the time they’ll say bad things about you that are disconnected from, or only weakly connected to, the truth — when they know you have done something better than they have.

That’s just the way they are.

So no, I don’t think it means much. It means something. But it doesn’t mean much. Until the case against us is stated better, we’ve already paid as much attention to these petty complaints, and perhaps a great deal more, than would be productive for anyone.

Now, that’s what I have to say about this emotional stuff, like the USA having an arrogant attitude. Some of the complaints aren’t emotional, but logical. We have luxuries not available in other countries, and we don’t vacation as much as people in other countries. Waitaminnit. Are the people complaining about our vacation schedules the same ones complaining about our standard of living? Why yes, I happen to know for a fact that some of them are. That’s retarded. I have just two words for the foreigners who complain about both our work schedules and our lifestyles. Eat shit.

Did that just start an international incident? See if I care. You just do a lot of screwing around when someone else is working, and he ends up with shit you don’t have, you don’t get mad, you get even. Work harder. It’s a no-brainer. What in the hell is wrong with those people? And what in tarnation is wrong with people who would listen to that? Even for a second?

No, I don’t think Europe is filled with people who take twenty weeks of vacation a year and then get mad at other countries that have more toys than they have. I’m sure Europe is filled with people who aren’t like that — but, it should be noted, that’s an article of blind faith on my part. In other words, to go on and on about other countries that don’t like us, makes Europe look bad to the United States. That’s inherently unfair, since everyone who gets off on complaining about Europe being mad at the USA, is not from Europe; many of them are Americans. Maybe — just maybe — now that they’ve changed about as many minds as they’re ever going to, the folks who like to go on & on about other countries resenting the United States, should give it a rest. It’s like your Mom said, when you point a finger at someone, three fingers curl around & point back at you, and the endless bitching has been producing an ugly byproduct of which these nattering nabobs may not be entirely aware. Stifle for a little while, for the sake of your own cause.

Blame Clinton

I’ve got opinions with which just about everyone agrees, and some of the other opinions I have find sympathy only in very few. There are some opinions I have, with which nobody agrees, anywhere, but I’m still sure I’m right about them. And to my credit, or shame, or both, I’m not shy about them.

I have one opinion which finds no other voice in the wilderness but mine, that I’m sure will be proven more and more correct with the passage of time. It goes like this: Like a collective of ants, our country tends to hammer out strategies on a collective basis, even when we think we’re doing our thinking as individuals — and after 1998, we don’t do this with the same competence we did before. And for this, I blame former President Clinton. I do, I really really do. He’s hurt us in ways that aren’t quite evident yet, but will be harder to deny in the years to come, and I’ll bet my left nut on it.

For evidence, I cite the following. And I’m willing to consider that before 1998, such a thing might have happened, but for the life of me I don’t recall any such thing. Congressman Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania (R) has been hammering the “Able Danger” scandal which, if there’s something to it, stands a great chance of discrediting the 9/11 investigation of last year. The latest event is an announcement from the Congressman that he has a witness willing to testify to the destruction of a huge amount of documentation “that identified Mohamed Atta as a terrorist two years before the 2001 attacks.”

The employee is prepared to testify next week before the Senate Judiciary Committee and was expected to identify the person who ordered him to destroy the large volume of documents, said Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa.

Weldon declined to identify the employee, citing confidentiality matters. Weldon described the documents as �2.5 terabytes� � as much as one-fourth of all the printed materials in the Library of Congress, he added.

But a spokesman for the Pentagon challenged this — not only challenged it, but directly refuted the claims made by Congressman Weldon.

Army Maj. Paul Swiergosz, a Pentagon spokesman, said officials have been �fact-finding in earnest for quite some time.�

�We�ve interviewed 80 people involved with Able Danger, combed through hundreds of thousands of documents and millions of e-mails and have still found no documentation of Mohamed Atta,� Swiergosz said.

He added that certain data had to be destroyed in accordance with existing regulations regarding �intelligence data on U.S. persons.�

Now here’s my point: Major Swiergosz is lying, or else, goddamn it, Congressman Weldon is lying. If both of these sources are telling the truth, then one or the other is so woefully uninformed that that person might as well be lying his ass off. And that, I’m afraid, is about as complicated as the matter gets.

And this is the opinion I have, with which nobody else agrees. In January of 1998 our President at the time engaged in an act of fraud that, before then, would have been an act of political and career suicide for any Commander-In-Chief, Senator, Congressman, staffer, justice, judge, state legislator, selectman, postmaster general or dog-catcher. I don’t mean to imply that politicians got fired when they lied prior to ’98 — but they were supposed to get fired if they were caught lying. And that means lying about sex, lying about killing people, lying about eighteen-minute gaps in audio tapes, lying about eye-before-ee-except-after-see, lying about putting your left leg or your right leg in your trousers first when you got dressed. Lying about anything. That’s what I remember.

And because of that, in my recollection, even with a reputation for lying, politicians were afraid of saying anything substantial. At the time, people didn’t like it. Now I’m nostalgic for it.

Congressman Weldon’s comments are accurate, or else they’re not. Somewhere, someone knows which is which, and presumably that someone includes Weldon and Swiergosz. Why, then, is this a matter of debate? Clearly, it should not be. We continue to put up with this, and then, still, we expect to be given truthful information that is sufficiently moored to reality to mean something. But we have no reason to expect such a thing. For seven years, our leaders and spokesmen have told us whatever they figure they need to tell us to serve their masters, and we just let them.

I blame Clinton. Certainly, he’s not the first politician to lie about something. But he’s the first one, that I know of, to lie, fully expect to get caught doing it, fully expect to be let off after being caught lying, and to actually be correct about it. You’d have to be an idiot to deny his everlasting impact on our prevailing culture, and once you acknowledge that, you have to blame him somewhat too.

This is a problem. We may fix this someday. I think we will. But that will only happen after a massive bloodletting, after some kind of earth-shattering revolution, starting with the downfall of either Congressman Weldon or Spokesman Swiergosz. Whatever the truth is, this is something that shouldn’t be decided by the usual red-versus-blue cockfighting that answers all questions nowadays. He-said-she-said situations like this, raised with regard to things that aren’t completely unknown to all parties involved, represent a contempt for the truth in the higher eschelons of our leadership. For this, the blame must ultimately rest with the electorate. We shouldn’t be tolerating this.

Fly in the Fundie Ointment

I’ve come to a decision about the people who don’t want Intelligent Design taught in the schools. They aren’t “evolutionists.” An evolutionist is someone who advocates for a belief in biological evolution, and to advocate means to argue, support or plead for a certain cause. When you argue something, you allow opposing arguments to be heard.

Opponents to Intelligent Design don’t want to do that. They are Evolutionary Fundamentalists, adhering to the classic dictionary definition of “fundamentalist” in that they state their case “by rigid adherence to those principles, and often by intolerance of other views.”

Now that we’ve decided what to call these people: Noted Evolutionary Fundamentalist Daniel C. Dennett, writing for the New York Times (link requires registration), makes an argument for blocking out the Intelligent Design theory he doesn’t like. This is a must-read for anyone who has an opinion on this issue one way or the other, as well as for anyone who’d like to form one but hasn’t yet. But bear in mind what the issue is: It’s not “were we put here or did we grow here?” — but rather — “should both sides of the question be considered, or should we censor anything posed on the side of the question that we fundamentalists don’t like?”

Dennett has credentials I don’t have, and is probably a much smarter guy than I am. But his argument contains an elementary flaw. It is based on the fact that Intelligent Design fails to state a case while adhering fully to scientific principles, whereas, biological evolution states a strong case while adhering to any scientific principle any critic would care to name. That seems at first blush to be a reasonable yardstick, and to a certain extent it is. But there are problems with it that cut to the quick of the Evolutionary Fundamentalist argument he’s trying to make.

Suppose a woman is found murdered and a number of pieces of evidence are found that strongly suggest — some would say prove — that I’m the one who killed her. Let us liken the idea that Morgan K. Freeberg murdered this woman, to the traditional biblical viewpoint that a Judeo-Christian God put us here, created animals, created Eve from Adam’s rib, told Abraham to execute his son, etc. I was seen shortly after the time of death with powder burns on my hands. The woman’s body tissue was found in a wall, with a slug fired from a gun registered to me. My DNA was found in her body. I confessed. Those are four pieces.

More than four pieces of evidence — much more — make a persuasive case that we were put here by a Higher Being. This is not to say this evidence “proves” anything, or even to say that the evidence is uncontested. It isn’t. Therefore, the notion that the woman was murdered by someone else, is equivalent to the assertion that we grew here, like a fungus, without intervention from any Higher Power. My defense team says they can explain everything, just like biological evolutionists say they can explain everything. So let’s start contesting the notion that I’m guilty. My gun was reported stolen. I fired another gun that put powder on my hands. I had a date with this woman and left her place shortly after having consensual sex with her. I confessed after I was interrogated with unfair coercion. This is all comparable to the persuasive scientific evidence, validated over time, that “designed” features found in humans and other species, can develop through the evolutionary process alone. So we’re making progress toward explaining how we got here, without a Higher Power, just as we’re explaining why the woman is dead, without me being guilty of anything.

Implied in these arguments posed by my defense attorney, is the suggestion “and whatever other evidence you find, we can find a way to explain that, too.” This accurately reflects the design-versus-Darwin argument in which we’re embroiled today. With two exceptions: In my criminal trial, I have a constitutional guarantee of presumption-of-innocence. Also, I am further protected by a discovery rule which bars the prosecution from introducing new evidence in the middle of the trial.

In the scientific realm, the argument that biological evolution explains all, labors on without either one of these protections. It enjoys no absolute burden of any reasonable doubt, and current technology can introduce new evidence at any time, inconvenient as it may be to any entrenched faction.

Dennett, himself, acknowledges in his column “evolutionary biology certainly hasn’t explained everything that perplexes biologists.” And this is the fatal flaw. From where I sit with my ignorant, twelfth-grade education, and my complete lack of scientific credentials, my position is very simple and some very fine scientific minds have failed to come up with a rejoinder to it: When evolutionary biology explains everything, come back and tell me why they other side should shut up. Meanwhile, the case has not been made.

We’re in a position tantamount to prosecution introducing new evidence — “Morgan’s fingerprints, by the way, were found on the gun” — and the defense may reply with “homina homina homina, we’ll get back to you on that.” Valid scientific thinking, so far as I understand it, is equivalent for all practical purposes to legal jury deliberations. You may acquit Morgan for lack of proof of his guilt, but even while granting Morgan the benefit of every reasonable doubt, you are not permitted to let the fingerprint evidence pass on unexplained. By limiting discourse only to the adherents who agree with them, Evolutionary Fundamentalists want to do exactly that. Jurors aren’t supposed to say “I don’t know about any fingerprints on the gun because I don’t want to think about fingerprints on the gun.” They’re supposed to come up with some rationale for how the fingerprints got there. And for everything else that’s problematic as well: why I confessed; what my essence was doing in the victim; why I had powder on my hands; why the slug matched my gun. ALL that stuff. No exceptions.

That’s what they need to do to acquit me, in a court of law in which I enjoy the benefit of every single reasonable doubt.

Not to put a gag order on the prosecution — just to acquit me.

Evolutionary Fundamentalists want to stop the other side from saying anything, not only in a classroom, but in any other forum where it might resonate. They want to do this in a scientific realm that is far more hostile to what they want to prove, than a criminal trial is to arguments in favor of the defense. They want to engage in this anti-scientific tactic, because they don’t want any proliferation in the Intelligent Design ranks.

I notice that their actions are entirely inconsistent with the arguments they make. If the proponents of Intelligent Design are so poorly-equipped to defend their own theories — which, as far as I can see, more closely resemble a litany of troublesome questions than an actual theory — let the Intelligent Design proponents have their say. I’m assuming Dennett is correct, and everything the “designers” can do is simply raise these nattering objections, rather than creating a sturdy platform for their theories. What, then, could be wrong with simply cataloguing the questions? If the arguments are as flimsy as Dennett says, then that would be giving the other guy enough rope to hang himself.

Why would Evolutionary Fundamentalists not want to do this, if the evidence, once objectively gathered, stacked up so overwhelmingly on their side? Is it the questions left unanswered by the designers, or is it the questions the biological-evolutionists can’t answer, according to Dr. Dennett’s own summary of the issue?

The Evolutionary Fundamentalists who have gotten so noisy lately, are like the religious zealots of the dark ages. There are cosmetic differences. Torture racks, hot coals, pincers and thumbscrews have been discarded in favor of scientific titles. But the tactic of prevailing over opposition is exactly the same. Fear, coercion, monopoly of the establishment, and insistence that anyone who disagrees, is “possessed” and missing the credentials needed to speak. That’s not science, that’s fundamentalism — in every sense of the word — and you don’t need a higher-level education to see the difference.

Nobody Reads This…But…

My local newspaper did print it (third and last blog entry) (link requires registration). Your link to the original post is here.

The Market Could Easily Double

File this one under marketing news disguised as science — but don’t lose track of it, because it represents a real danger to our society. I think if, in a generation or two we find ourselves communicating with a primitive series of clicks & hand gestures, and beating each other over the head with clubs, our decline will be traced back to this.

Between 2000 and 2004, use of drugs that help keep ADHD patients focused doubled among adults aged 20 to 44, but rose only 56 percent among children…use rose 113 percent among women 20 to 44 and 104 percent among women 45 to 64, both far more than among men. Meanwhile, spending on the medicines quadrupled.

I’ve got to get into this racket somehow. Personal weaknesses, individual quirks, idiosyncrasies, are labeled as “symptoms,” and when noticed in normal children they represent a “disorder” for which drugs are prescribed as “medication.”

Things to notice about this particular article:

The National Institute of Mental Health, on its website, makes perhaps a noble attempt to bring some sanity to the discussion:

Is It Really ADHD?

Not everyone who is overly hyperactive, inattentive, or impulsive has ADHD. Since most people sometimes blurt out things they didn’t mean to say, or jump from one task to another, or become disorganized and forgetful, how can specialists tell if the problem is ADHD?

Because everyone shows some of these behaviors at times, the diagnosis requires that such behavior be demonstrated to a degree that is inappropriate for the person’s age. The diagnostic guidelines also contain specific requirements for determining when the symptoms indicate ADHD. The behaviors must appear early in life, before age 7, and continue for at least 6 months. Above all, the behaviors must create a real handicap in at least two areas of a person’s life such as in the schoolroom, on the playground, at home, in the community, or in social settings. So someone who shows some symptoms but whose schoolwork or friendships are not impaired by these behaviors would not be diagnosed with ADHD. Nor would a child who seems overly active on the playground but functions well elsewhere receive an ADHD diagnosis.

I’m not a pharmacist, doctor, scientist, shrink, schoolteacher, or even a school janitor, nor do I have even nominal training in any of these fields. Therefore, take it as a given: I’m going to get a lot of e-mail and other comments admonishing me, with varying levels of decorum, to refrain from “talking about stuff you don’t understand.” Well, I understand inattention, I understand being a weird kid who nobody can figure out, and I understand having a weird kid nobody can figure out. I understand coping with personal weaknesses through marshalling internal resources and becoming a better adult, versus coping with them through drugs.

And I understand women. I was just noticing this difference between the sexes, commenting on it to some people, not really writing anything about it yet, and then this article pointed it out for me. Go back and read the first paragraph I took from the MSNBC story. In a period where children have increased their ADHD medication addictions by fifty percent, adult women have doubled theirs, while men have not.

Want to know how this works? Men and women are different. Have you ever known a woman to get ahold of a book that describes a personal issue — ever — and, upon finishing with it, announce “that was an interesting book but it doesn’t appear to have anything to do with me”? It won’t happen; they aren’t capable of it. Even smart women who have demonstrated themselves to be gifted, critical thinkers, can’t seem to do this. They get hold of the book, they read it, and wham-bam: Whatever was described in the book, they got it or their kids have it, guaranteed.

Men, by & large, err in the opposite direction. What? Something that interrupts my status quo? Screw you, pal. Missing leg syndrome? What makes you think I only have one leg? There’s another leg around here somewhere, I just can’t find it. I’m hopping around the room because hopping is something I like to do. Just leave me alone.

So no matter what your priorities are, we have a problem here. You may be worried about our society over-medicating itself into oblivion, as each new personal quirk is categorized as a “disorder” and normal, albiet quirky, people are turned into drug addicts. If you are one of these people, know that as a longtime advocate of women’s independence and women’s rights, I will oppose with my last breath your attempt to stop women from reading books. That is, after all, the only thing we could do that would address this issue; a woman reading a book about a personal problem, is a woman who will, upon finishing the book, in her own mind have that problem. Let them keep reading, and the ADHD caseload will skyrocket.

Or, you could be one of the people who are worried that ADHD profiteers aren’t making enough money. In that case, you worry too much. You can see from the MSNBC article that all the “experts” interviewed, have at least one financial interest — often many more than one — in more ADHD cases being diagnosed and treated with prescription drugs.

�The market could easily double,� as more of the drug makers receive regulatory approval specifically to market ADHD drugs to adults, said Albert Rauch, pharmaceuticals analyst at A. G. Edwards & Sons.

There is no critical thinking applied to this anywhere. Marketing the drugs? Investment analysts predicting a market will double? Where is the traditionally-obligatory dissenting expert, having kittens over the hot new trend described in the story? When it comes to ADHD, the dedicated MSNBC reporter can leave him out of the story, sticking the microphone only into the faces of interested authors, advocates, investment analysts and other stakeholders.

If anybody read this blog, which of course nobody does, they would recall a pattern of questioning science — or to put it more accurately, calling out that “science” has metastasized into a school of thought far less accustomed to criticism, dissenting viewpoints, and general intellectual challenge than any religion ever has been. The current debate on “Intelligent Design” is one example of this. Now, keeping your own opinion on evolution versus design on the back burner for the time being, answer me this. Is it healthy for a society’s cloistered hallways of “science” to get into the opinion business, expurgating the less orthodox viewpoints with greater and greater vigor and hostility, while — simultaneously — that society starts to consume greater and greater doses of drugs, in a trend that can only be described as “skyrocketing,” specifically designed to eliminate personal traits considered by some to be abnormal?

Both of these trends are assaults on our cultural ability to question things. To check our societal course. To weigh, among a large, democratic audience, the pros and cons of whatever direction it is in which we’re moving at a given time.

I think we’re losing it.

I wish I could stop it. But failing that, I wish I could make money off it. The mind fairly boggles at how much money we’re talking about. Something to think about, next time you hear someone piss and moan about “corporations,” “greed” and “Halliburton.”

Juggy Suzanne

This is a memo-for-file thing.

The “Juggy Dancers” include in their ranks a prettiest-one, a cutest-one and a most-appealing-one. The most-appealing-one is the second-cutest, and I’ve always been at a loss to understand this. I don’t like chicks with big noses. I like a cute nose on a woman. The most-appealing-one, however, has this enormous honker, and yet, any time there’s a Man Show rerun my eyes are just drawn to her. In a good way. And I can’t explain why. She looks the best out of all the JD’s in a schoolgirl outfit, in a bikini, or in any other costume.

Well after getting my filthy hands on Season 2 from Amazon, and applying some diligent research to the project I’ve figured out it is Juggy Suzanne. >Suzanne Talhouk is her name, and perhaps she has this visual appeal because she has the most acting experience out of any of the other Juggies.

And yet she has not yet been in anything you can actually see. I’m sure that will change soon.

I wonder if she’s older than I am? That would make me feel good. But I kind of doubt it.

News?

Casey Sheehan was KIA in Iraq; he has this mother, whose name I do not mention anymore because she got way too much press without any help from me. His mother either does, or does not, want to have a meeting with President Bush. As last month burned away the final days of summer, you may recall we were absoutely consumed with day-to-day coverage of this woman wanting, or not wanting, to meet the President. To this day we’re mostly unclear, in spite of the relentless coverage, whether she wanted to meet the President or not.

It is pretty well established that nothing done by this woman, or any of her supporters, will ever have an impact on our presence in Iraq or on any schedule for ending that presence. Therefore, so far as anybody knows this woman is unrelated to anything that could have an impact on me, anybody I know, or anybody or anything cared about by anybody who reads news. Certainly, she has no relationship at all to a terrorist someday bringing down a passenger jet using a shoulder-fired rocket launcher. Why, then, did the saga of Hemant Lakhani pass under our collective radar, mostly un-commented-upon throughout the summer?

He was just sentenced to nearly half-a-century in prison for his attempt to smuggle in a rocket launcher, a crime for which he was convicted this past spring. I found the story buried on Page A6 of my local paper, but this isn’t my local paper’s fault. Anyplace I find this, it gets about two inches of print, maybe a whole lot less.

He was stung, which is to say, his arrest wasn’t directly related to any actual terrorists trying to buy equipment from him. Nor does he appear to have any direct connections to Al Qaeda or any other terrorist group.

But how did he get into the get-missile-launchers-for-terrorists racket?

Are there leads involved in this arrest?

What is being done to pursue those leads?

Does Al Qaeda, or any other terrorist group, have a plot going to bring down a passenger jet with a shoulder-fired missile? Outside of classified information, what can be learned about this? What’s being done about it? Do we have nothing to worry about here? Or is it so fantastically easy to get ahold of a surface-to-air missile launcher, that it’s not worth worrying about and we’re playing Russian Roulette every time we fly a plane?

If anybody has answers to this, they’re better newshounds than I am.

I know one thing for sure…speaking for myself, I’m much more interested in this than I am in some aging-hippy war-protester using her bereaved-mother status to try and get a (second) meeting with the President. Or not trying to.

Turn Your Brain On When You Read This

This is one of those things where two people can look at exactly the same thing, one with a brain running on all eight cylinders and the other thinking kind of half-assed, and by consuming the same information they’ll come away with one-hundred-eighty-degree opposite interpretations of what it is they just saw.

United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) is hiring temp workers in Las Vegas to picket Wal-Mart’s labor practices.

My favorite part of the story was this gem:

The group has no transportation to go elsewhere�they are dropped off by a union van and picked up later. On weekends, they have to find their own transportation, Greer said.

There are tons and tons of people who are fully capable of reading this story, and come away with the feeling this is nothing more than another chapter of noble, ragtag rebels doing battle with the evil empire. Hypocrisy? What hypocrisy? I didn’t see any. Just good-hearted union people standing out in the unbearable heat to raise the standard of living for poor, victimized Wal-Mart “workers.”

Well read the article again. This is an intelligence test. Who is actually standing out in the unbearable heat?

How much do they make an hour?

How much does the average Wal-Mart associate in Nevada make an hour?

This whole business of striking needs a thorough re-visiting. I’m among the people who believe that you do indeed have a right to strike; you have the right to do it, without being paid for it, and then if you choose to strike your boss has the right to interpret it as absenteeism, fire you for it, hire somebody else, and then give you a crappy reference if contacted by future prospective employers.

If enough people are striking, that boss would be cutting his own throat. Therein lies the legitimacy of striking – it’s like the fish voluntarily jumping into the fisherman’s rowboat, hoping that thousands of other fish will jump in with him and thus sink the boat. Maybe it’ll work, and maybe it won’t. But if this is the moral underpinning of striking, is it legit to outsource the striking to temp workers? Allowing for the extravagant idea that it somehow is, then shouldn’t the union be providing those temp workers with the same working conditions upon which it is insisting from the employer?

How in the world could anyone argue otherwise?

And yet…some people will.

For The Anti-Death-Penalty Types III

People are opposed to the death penalty because they feel it is applied disproportionately across racial lines. Other people are opposed to it because once you impose it, there’s no way to undo it if you find the convicted person was actually innocent. Still others oppose it for financial reasons. I don’t have anything to say to those people within this post, but there are people who are opposed to the death penalty because all living people are God’s children and there is an innate goodness, however deeply it may be buried, within all of us. Those are the people to whom I’d like to direct this story.

A 15-year-old boy and a 50-year-old man have conspired together to kill the boy’s mother and carve her up into little pieces.

Buffalo Police say they have solved the case of the human body parts found inside a suitcase in the Black Rock Canal just over 2 weeks ago. Officials say that a 15-year-old boy has been charged with the murder of his mother and a 50-year-old man may have put him up to it.

Police identified that the body parts belonged to 46-year-old Madeline Irene of 500 Fargo Avenue in Buffalo. Detectives are still trying to piece together all the details but say what they have discovered so far is very disturbing.

Police believe 50-year-old Edwin Gimenez moved to 26 Sherwood from California about a year ago and established a relationship with Madeline Irene�s 15- and 12-year-old sons. Throughout that time, Giminez psychologically influenced Angel, the 15-year-old, to kill his mother. Once Irene was dead, Giminez kidnapped and sodomized the 12-year-old boy, who he claims is his son. Police have no evidence of that claim.

Gimenez is a convicted sex offender, but because his conviction took place before the creation of the New York sex offender registry, he is unlisted. Police believe a concrete-filled drum at his home contains more body parts, apparently the difference between the torso already discovered and the entirety of what once was Ms. Irene.

Just think. If Gimenez received a “Sin City” punishment for his crime twenty years ago, that’s three lives that today might have continued and had a chance of being normal. Today, based on what they say they know, police want to make sure he will “never see the light of day again.” Assuming that the facts convincingly support the theories offered here, why exactly would this guy get three-hots-and-a-cot? The time-honored “There but for the grace of God goes you” argument falls on deaf ears, to those of us who haven’t been raping 12-year-old boys and chopping up women into pieces.

Anti-Gun is Pro-Anarchy

The thought of a scalpel slicing into my skull doesn’t make me feel very good, but if you are a brain surgeon and it’s your job to give me brain surgery, I want you to have a scalpel. I don’t like to think about hot tar, but if it’s your job to fix my roof I want you to have hot tar.

Why then do we assume it makes sense, to deny firearms to people who need the firearms to do their jobs, just because some among us don’t feel good about guns?

Unlike their American counterparts, Canadian border guards do not carry guns but they have been pressing the agency for the right to arm themselves.

This is a partial explanation for why Canadian border guards along the U.S.-Quebec border walked off their jobs when reports came in that a deranged lunatic might have been heading their way.

New York State Police, who described the shooting suspect as armed and dangerous, captured Vladimir Kulakov, 48, early Saturday afternoon.

Border guards returned to work soon after.

Kulakov was allegedly driving a stolen pickup truck when he was stopped by New York state Trooper Sean Finn, 34. Police allege Kulakov ran into a wooden area fired at Finn, hitting the officer’s hands and the side of his head.

Finn is in stable condition in a New York hospital.

Kulakov, who has been living in the U.S. for more than 10 years, is said to have been is a highly trained weapons expert with the Russian army.

What is really disturbing, is that the Canadian article gives some polite lip-service to the “should they be armed” question at the very end. Earlier in the article, and in a number of places throughout, it seems to ponder the far weightier issue of the customs agents actually walking off the job. The message seems to be that union rules have blazed the trail to enlightenment, and it’s the border guard’s right to walk if they think the job is dangerous.

Well I agree with the unions, insofar as it’s kind of useless to turn a border post into a suicide mission. But what is actually going on with the argument about arming the guards? Who is against this, exactly? Where are those people, and what do they have to say about a trained Russian army weapons expert lunatic shooting yankee troopers, and then rushing to Canada? Do those people live in places where this prospect is somehow guaranteed to not be a personal danger to them, or are they just short-sighted?

Either way, it would appear they’ve got more “pull” on this issue than logic would permit. Guarding a border means being ready, and responding to force with force in kind. The article indicates this is a semi-regular occurrence. Clue? Just by itself, this incident is proof-positive: Anti-gun is pro-anarchy. It really doesn’t get any more complicated than that.

16. A man’s determination to punish the guilty tends to wax and wane with his prospects for living amongst them.

Skirts for Guys

A skirt has been invented for beer-drinking men. What an innovation. Yawn.

The skirt-for-guys movement is nothing new. The image linked below is from a 1998 article, and of course people have been trying to pressure guys into wearing skirts since long before that. I’m afraid I don’t understand this. There’s no mad rush to bring back Roman numerals or sundials, so why does everyone want to get guys into togas and then claim credit for it?

I just love this quote “…once one everyone realises how comfortable they are, I think they’ll really catch on.” Haven’t the Scottish Highlanders been wearing kilts since the dark ages? They haven’t “caught on” and here’s the reason why: Comfortable as they may be, as sleek and stylish as they may look when you’re walking around, you can’t do guy stuff in a skirt. About the only guy-thing a skirt makes easier is peeing, and even that is something you can’t do & look manly at the same time.

This blog has a tradition of pointing out “hey, there’s an elephant in the room” when few other commentators will do so — especially in the realm of gender relations. Here’s the elephant in the room: Men and women are different, and this difference makes some people uncomfortable. Wherever people try to coerce men to act like women, that’s what’s going on and with very few exceptions, that is all that is going on. Meanwhile…since life must go on, there are ladders to be climbed & leaves to be cleaned from gutters — motorycles to be driven, coffee tables waiting for just one foot to be put on them, sailboats to be jumped on from docks, etc., real men are going to be leaving the skirt-wearing to the women.

There are lots of things women do better naturally, than any man, even when the man has been practicing at it. Wearing skirts is one of them.

Someone Did It

Robert Giroux / Getty Images – via freerepublic.com

Today, put a liberal you know & love on the path to recovery. Don’t start any arguments. Keep any subjective matters of opinion corked up tight. Don’t raise your voice. Don’t defend anything about FEMA or Katrina.

Simply assert, and re-assert as many times as it takes, with absolutely no value-judgments whatsoever, that what we memorialize today was somebody’s work. Words like “disaster,” “tragedy,” “what happened,” and “people died” fail to capture this, and were concocted in a focus group laboratory because they gloss over this. It was an act of mass murder, affecting some people, executed by other people, and that’s a fact.

If the liberal wants to say George Bush and Dick Cheney were among the people planning it, or that persons of Jewish faith were given a heads-up so that none of them died in those flaming buildings that day, or that this was on Halliburton’s drawing board for months, my suggestion is to ignore the red herring entirely. “What happened on September 11, 2001” was an Act. That is today’s conversion project. See if the liberal can admit it wasn’t a natural disaster. Just that much. The liberal might learn something. And if he doesn’t, you definitely will.

Soft-Bellied Arguments

Somewhere between cogitating on the claim that FEMA caused thousands of deaths in New Orleans through an ingrained hostility toward black people, and chewing over the still-unfounded prospect that America is becoming a �theocracy� (link requires registration; fourth letter down), I hit upon a realization. Leftist arguments, by and large, aren�t simply weak; they are incubated in such a way that they can be nothing else. Like anything in life that has to do with homo sapiens, other animals, or for that matter anything organic, ideas enter the realm of maturity with a strength proportional to the environmental hostility in which they grew. And leftists tend to incubate their ideas in extraordinarily friendly environments. This leads to some soft-bellied, domesticated talking points that are not only weak, but malignant. Which is to say, over the long haul, they do the ideology that hosts them, substantially more harm than good.

Perhaps the best example of this in recent memory is the �training ground� argument.

It goes like this: Ever since our national unity dissolved in the wake of the September 11 attacks, we have been told there is �no connection whatsoever between Iraq and Al Qaeda.� The two regimes did not collaborate and they would not collaborate, since the leader of one was fundamentalist and the leader of the other was secular. Talking points were put out that Saddam and bin Laden �hated each other,� although notably, nobody with a reputation to protect stuck their neck out & actually said as much. After our international coalition invaded Iraq and evidence was produced that substantial connections existed and therefore the referenced hatred was lacking, the talking point slowly morphed around to �no connection between Iraq and the September 11 attacks,� or �no connection between Iraq and 9/11.�

By the time the election season heated up, it could no longer be concealed that among the �insurgents� in Iraq who even today are responsible for the rising body count among our troops, many were Al Qaeda. This creates an obvious problem: What interest did Al Qaeda have in Iraq? We had been told there was no connection — could be no connection — between the two regimes. And yet if you have a leadership role in Al Qaeda, somehow it�s worth the time, trouble, risk of exposure, casualties, and financial expense to get your guys into this country — in which you have no stake.

Now this is not to say process-of-elimination proves an Al-Qaeda/Iraq connection; other possibilities, after all, do exist. The above-referenced �training ground� talking point, awkward as it may be, implores us to believe that Al Qaeda is sending its grunts into Iraq for shooting practice exercises; said grunts, perhaps, to position themselves on both sides of the rifle. That does help to address the issue of �stakes�; the suggestion is that Al Qaeda is not squandering trained resources, but rather, squandering a bloated class of freshmen just begging to be thinned out. Perhaps for the Al Qaeda recruit, the ticket to seniority is an initiation ritual in Iraq? A survival-of-the-fittest exercise built to toughen-up the ranks by means of sheer attrition?

Fair enough. But for what, one might ask, are they training?

Flying planes into buildings, poisoning water supplies, setting off dirty bombs � tactically, these threatening activities don�t seem to be strongly related to a firefight with a platoon of soldiers in Fallujah. These things appear to have even less to do with laying an IED by the side of a road so that a truckload of marines can be sent home in body bags. Could you possess a rare talent for sidestepping airport security, but suck big green ones when you look for cover in a firefight? Absolutely. Could you be a natural-born reservoir-poisoning savant, and at the same time, unfortunately, be the first man detected and shot during the IED-planting exercise? That actually seems pretty likely. So for lack of overlap between the “training” and the “production,” we see the entire �training� angle doesn�t pan out. Therefore, to maintain the premise that terrorists nurture unrivaled apathy toward the fate of the old Iraq regime, and somehow see fit to trek their way inbound to attack those who toppled it, the only place left to go is the political angle. Al Qaeda�s plans depend on the United States entirely losing its national will to continue the War on Terror.

That makes a lot of sense to me. Terrorism has long been held to be a political endeavor, not an exercise in exterminating people as a primary purpose. It is entirely in keeping with that viewpoint of terrorism, to surmise that our enemies intend to bombard Dover AFB with coffins, one by one, until our leaders are pressured to withdraw and fight the terrorists no more. This is entirely plausible.

But it flies in the face of a number of other leftist talking points, and is a tacit endorsement of the more controversial conservative ones. If the political angle is the only possible motive, then logically, it is true that anti-war protesters are causing injury to our troops, and the more they talk — their dismissive comments notwithstanding — the more injury they do. It�s intellectually impossible to support one premise while simultaneously rejecting the other.

Such is the weakness nurtured when arguments are incubated in overly-friendly environments. Once the soft-bellied, overly-domesticated arguments reach maturity, the few that pass the most mildly hostile scrutiny, turn out to conflict with each other. And they conflict irreconcilably.

Canary in a Coal Mine

This is yet another post singing the praises of Hooter’s, which is not for everybody. You’ve been warned.

Like Chris Rock says, nobody goes to Hooter’s for the wings. Hooter’s wings are somewhere between Kentucky Fried Chicken items, and something you’d find in the frozen section of Albertson’s. But the international franchise consistently gets high praise from this blog for two reasons:

• Brittle, unhappy women, who would control how normal healthy men live (along with the normal healthy women who actually like those normal, healthy men), are pointed out to the rest of us by the shrill, screeching sound of their own voices. Were the subject of nice-looking young girls in short-shorts not ever to come up, their presence would go undetected — which would be a bad thing, since these angry, controlling harpies are everywhere, and they are exceptionally dangerous.
• Wherever there is a Hooter’s, these angry, freakish women aren’t going to be there. They’ve got no business being there. If they’re there, they aren’t going to be there very long. Hooter’s is a haven for healthy people who don’t want to be around these angry, screeching trolls. And it should be noted, that it’s getting increasingly hard to get away from the trolls. They’re more like tribbles than trolls. Cold-blooded, prickly, venomous, rapidly-reproducing tribbles.

So Hooter’s is both an oasis, and an alarm clock. It is like a canary in a coal mine.

An in the early-warning-system function, it has just fulfilled this useful purpose by means of the latest plans to open up shop in New Zealand.

Kiwi women don’t like Hooters
08 September 2005
By SUE ALLEN and NZPA

American restaurant Hooters, whose “Hooters Girls” wear tight shorts and tank tops, plans to open branches across all major New Zealand centres.

The first is expected to open in Auckland early next year.

Green Party women’s affairs spokeswoman Sue Kedgley described Hooters opening in New Zealand as “retrograde”.

“It just sounds like the blatant sexism of the 1960s that provoked the feminist movement. It’s hard to believe this could be a serious move in the 21st century.”

Rape Crisis spokeswoman Andrea Black said putting women in skimpy clothes and getting them to wait on tables perpetuated the myth that women were purely there for men’s sexual pleasure.

“There’s a risk in that for society as a whole and for women.”

This is amazing. Simply amazing.

Sue Kedgley and Andrea Black are unhappy. Obviously, it’s not enough for them to be reassured that if they don’t like to go to Hooter’s, they don’t have to go. No, they want to stop everybody else from going.

Though it describes itself as a “neighbourhood place”, 68 per cent of customers are male, most aged between 25 and 54.

Oh my goodness, how incriminating! Two-thirds of the clientele have penises, compared to just 49% of the population at large. Statistics lopsided to the tune of nineteen points, how un-neighborhood-ly.

This is good news for me to get ahold of. I’m at a time in my life where if I wanted to go to New Zealand, I could go. I’ve got time, I’ve got money. Two military men I’ve met, something like fifteen years apart, one from the US and one from the UK, have sworn up and down that NZ is a friendly, hospitable place to go. Well, now I know I should stay away. They have at least two angry, outspoken, venomous snakes who think something is terribly wrong with a commercial franchise gives men a fun place to go — plus, as if that weren’t enough, a major newspaper along for the ride.

It is an extraordinarily sad commentary that, given a choice between taking Sue Kedgley out for a night of drinking, dancing and fun, and The Wicked Witch of the West, I’d want to go with the Witch — who at least knew how to smile.

Healthy straight men, single or otherwise, beware. Wherever there is no Hooter’s, this is probably a place you don’t want to visit, and almost certainly don’t want to live.

Hamish Kynaston, an employment law specialist with law firm Buddle Findlay, said though the law did not prohibit people being hired on the basis of their looks, companies doing so would have to be careful not to fall foul of the Human Rights Act.

That meant people could not be discriminated against on the basis of things like age, sex, race or disability.

What is up with this strange place called New Zealand? We have weird laws like that over here in The States, but as far as I understand, generally you’re on safe ground if the job description has something to do with the so-called “discrimination”. Opening a Hooter’s restaurant, or for that matter any retail location with nice-looking girls, and hiring only the nice-looking girls — it’s a no-brainer. This article seems to imply the excuse of job-description has been pitched out the window.

So in addition to a 400-pound tub-of-lard who didn’t land the job as a Hooter’s girl, who else has standing to sue?

The guy with delirium tremens who didn’t get hired as a brain surgeon?

The guy who can’t get a driver’s license because he’s legally blind, who was passed over as an airline pilot?

The disc jockey born without a tongue, who wants to do the morning traffic and weather?

I’d really like to hear from someone who’s spent time in this bizarre country. The nature of the article appears to imply that Hooter’s is on brand-new, hostile territory in the hiring process. If that’s true, for the reasons stated by Mr. Kynaston, we should keep an eye on the place. Either something doesn’t really exist as it’s been presented here, or else this is a country that should have an exceptionally difficult time existing in day-to-day life.

Well I’ve said my piece. I’m off to my local Hooter’s for a late lunch, and anybody who doesn’t like it…bite me!

WWJND?

I’ve had very little to say about the Louisiana/Mississippi disaster. That’s because this blog has an informal policy of corking-it when there is little or nothing further to be added to what others have already said. At this point all I’ve got to talk about is 1) I’ve donated $$$ and if you haven’t donated at least that much, you’re scum; 2) There are heap-big problems with priorities — government, or coverage of government.

Well I’m not going to say 1) because I think it’s juvenile and retarded. You’re a Republican, I’m a Democrat, you donated ten dollars and I donated twenty, that makes me right? Stupid. And yet there are people saying that very thing. As far as priorities, I’m sure our government will do what the press tells them to do, like it always does, and I’m sure the press always does what we tell it to do. Right now the instructions from the media to the Bush administration are as follows: “You stink!” — because the people who don’t like the Bush administration, have figured out if they can’t strike a public-relations blow here, they can’t do it ever.

Texas-Air-National-Guard-gate has melted into the ground. Downing-Street-Memo-gate went nowhere. Talk-To-Grieving-Mom-gate has turned out to be a huge embarrassment for all concerned. The whole Iraq thing was doing okay for awhile, but if there’s a national consensus, it turns out to — surprisingly — agree with me. We’re glad Saddam is gone, who gives a rip what the reason was. Some people changed their minds when flag-draped coffins came stateside. People like me, are wondering what kind of rock people like those, live under. War has casualties. We had that argument before March 17, 2003. That there would be casualties, was not concealed from us, as the case was being made.

So the only dry powder they’ve got is the high price of gas, and the FEMA response to the debacle in New Orleans. Okay, fine, use it; that’s politics. But time it adequately. While rescue efforts are underway, and people are basically camping out in the ocean, surrounded by non-potable water, no food, crapping wherever they can, dead bodies floating past ’em — let’s just concentrate on what’s needed to get the help where it is needed.

The Feds could have done this? The local rescue efforts could have done that? Anyone with a lick of common sense is in favor of a post-mortem…some of the things that went on were inexcusable. Save it for when the frost is on the pumpkin. If we look into this the first part of October, that gives, like, six or seven weeks before the holidays start in earnest. That’s plenty enough to slime whoever you want to slime.

Doing it now is essentially What Jesus Would Not Do.

It’s cheap and sleezy. It’s simply allowing political parasites to make use of Phase II of the K�bler-Ross model: the anger. Grieving people are quick to anger. Bush-bashers are making use of this. That is all this is, and we shouldn’t indulge it.

Why point that out? Because let’s get realistic, blame is distracting. Can you guarantee me we can play the blame game, and at the same time, rescue everyone who needs rescuing? You can’t? Okay, then the conversation’s over. Rescue away.

Shoot, the way things have been going with other disasters, we’ll be watching the finger-pointing well into next year if not the year after. There’s time enough for it.

Must-Tards II

Here’s a classic truism of the word “must”: Speaking of it in the general sense, it is a signature of the purest form of evil. There is very little reason to use it, and when you hear someone else using it, you should run like hell.

Think about it: Someone must do something. Well, the person pointing this out either has full and complete ownership over the decision, or he doesn’t. If he does, there is no reason to run around using the word “must”; he can simply do what he thinks must be done. If he does not own the decision, then he can state the case why the person who does own the decision, “must” do it the way he wants it done.

But the trouble with that, is, the word “must” does not state a case. The word “must” mandates complete unconditional acceptance on the part of the person who owns the decision, and anyone else who is within earshot. Now you could logically state the case in a number of ways, and then follow it up by saying “and in conclusion, you must do it my way.” Even then, the person using the word “must” is presuming to speak for all others concerned, in deciding what the desired outcome is. And who is that person, to try and do that? You say “you must take a right at this road to get to Grandma’s house” and you know, since I’m driving, maybe we’re not going to Grandma’s. Maybe we’ll see her after I get something to drink because I’m thirsty. Maybe I’m mad at Grandma and we’re not going there. If you feel so strongly about seeing Grandma, how come you’re not driving?

So when you hear the word “must,” or “cannot,” head for the hills.

That’s not an absolute rule, of course. It’s perfectly reasonable to say “You must slow way down and take a sharp left, or else we’ll end up in the ditch.” As the driver of the car, I have an interest in not ending up in the ditch. So the litmus test is, when you tell me I must do something, is it clear what happens if I don’t do it? And who the hell are you ordering me around, anyway? Even if you have the authority to tell me what to do, it’s polite to stick your neck out and make a statement as to why you want this thing done, what happens if it’s not. To just sit back and dictate like that, “green paint here red paint there” paint-by-numbers style, is just freakin’ insulting.

Most of the time, the word “must” is used used in a hollow way, in a dictatorial, “just do it the way I want or I’ll cry like a red-headed little bitch” way. Especially outside of the United States. Europeans, I notice, lately have been complete Must-Tards. I’m not sure when that started, but Europeans have diarrhea of the mouth with the word “must.” Unions, too. The United Nations, especially. And the European Union. And over on this side of the pond, left-wing zealots are particularly keen on that word “must.”

Kim Gandy has discovered the word “must,” and you can bet your bottom dollar she is up to no damn good. The President of the National Organization of Women, who somehow thinks her organization has not thoroughly worn out its welcome, popped the cap on her crustiest yellow bottle and let that sucker fly with a windy commentary about the nomination of John Roberts for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Nomination of John Roberts as Chief Justice is an Outrage to Women
Statement of NOW President Kim Gandy
September 5, 2005

The National Organization for Women has been outspoken in our opposition to the nomination of an anti-women’s rights, anti-civil rights judge, John G. Roberts, to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Now that Roberts’ attitudes toward women have been revealed, it is an outrage and an insult to the women of this country that George W. Bush has nominated such a jurist to be Chief Justice of the United States.

First, there cannot be a “stealth nominee” for Chief Justice. Bush must release every document from Roberts’ tenure as Principal Deputy Solicitor General under the first President Bush, and any remaining writings from his time as an advisor to the Reagan administration. How dare Bush nominate this candidate for the top position on the Supreme Court when his administration has deliberately concealed hundreds of thousands of pages of his writings, during a time that he was one of the top lawyers representing the people of the United States? If the Bush administration refuses to release these papers, we must ask ourselves what they are hiding. And the Senate must ask the same question.

The Senate Judiciary Committee and the full Senate must find its collective spine and not roll over for Bush’s favored candidate. They must refuse to move forward until all requested documents are released, and they must ask even tougher questions of Roberts because of the critical nature of the Chief Justice appointment.

Second, NOW is even more concerned that John Roberts, as Chief Justice, will have a greater opportunity to move the Court and our country backward. The Chief Justice plays a key role in leading the Court, including deciding who writes certain opinions, making numerous appointments within the judicial system, and presiding, alone, over presidential impeachment hearings. If Roberts is confirmed as Chief Justice, Bush will have established right-wing leadership of the Court for another 30 years-a lifetime legacy of the Bush presidency that women and girls will have a lifetime to regret.

Third, I am taken aback (but not surprised) by Bush’s cynicism and lack of compassion in nominating Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s successor even as his body is being prepared to lie in repose at the Court. Bush’s lack of sensitivity has been on prominent display this past month as he avoided Gold Star mom Cindy Sheehan and was stubbornly slow responding to the humanitarian crisis in New Orleans and Mississippi. With the South still in turmoil from Hurricane Katrina, Bush is pressuring the Senate to rush through this very important process and confirm John Roberts to a lifetime as Chief Justice while the country is looking the other way.

Finally, Bush now has a second opportunity to honor Sandra Day O’Connor’s legacy by naming a moderate woman to replace her as associate justice. He can get it right this time, and if Bush needs any help finding a woman who will uphold women’s rights, NOW will be happy to help.

Now just go through this line-by-line and count out the word “must.” It’s absolutely incredible. This woman clearly has no interest, none whatsoever, in respecting any role on the part of others to help decide things against her particular desires, certainly no intention of sharing power in a democratic fashion within a constitutional republic. She just plain wants things her way, period.

Look at that word “must” just leap off the pages. Here, I put something together to help out with this.

I don’t understand why people think this gets them any traction. We’re designed to get fatigued, first of all, by one-syllable words, especially when those words are repeated over and over again. And the word “must”? That’s what your Mom tells you when she’s pissed off at you. Maybe Kim Gandy wants to inspire a feeling of guilt and obligation, by acting like everybody’s Mom on one of those days, like when Mom caught Dad giving the babysitter too big of a tip. That doesn’t seem like a smart tactic to use multiple times within a couple paragraphs, does it? Your Mom in a foul mood? You must pick up your clothes and then you must clean your room and then you must do the dishes like I told you to do this morning three times! Who the hell wants to listen to this? And why does Kim Gandy think anybody does?

It’s particularly offensive here, because by now most people understand the Supreme Court could overturn Roe v. Wade tomorrow and abortion would still be legal. So no, Kim ol’ gal, women and girls will not have a “lifetime to regret” this unless Roberts does something as Chief Justice that is completely outside the realm of what you’re talking about.

And anyway, anybody who’s paying attention to what is going on with our courts, knows what this is really all about is clarity. While the Rehnquist-Thomas-Scalia triumvirate was kept down to just three votes, confusion reigned. You could go into the Supreme Court with a law that says “Morgan’s guilty, he owes fifty bucks” — it could say it THAT WAY, in black and white — and the outcome would be anybody’s guess, with judicial activism & all. If the outcome is anybody’s guess, you’ve got to hire really good lawyers, and so do I. So lawyers make “Dictators of Society” type money, instead of simply “do stuff without screwing it up” type money made by schoolteachers, doctors, maybe some airplane pilots. Well, three guesses which way Kim Gandy wants it to work. Guess who she’s in bed with.

No, this doesn’t have much at all to do with women and girls. This has to do with payback.

And that is ANOTHER reason it pays to be suspicious around Must-Tards like Kim Gandy. You want someone to do something, you should at least provide a statement as to why. That way, if you’re lying, it’s easier to nail your ass to the wall. Anybody who wants to avoid that, I don’t trust.

Sowing Salt

I’m going against form on this one. Normally when when someone screeches about the “societal dangers” being created by “vigilante justice,” by the time the fearmongering reaches my ears it somehow gets translated to “I’m a limp-wristed liberal pansy and I want to release as many bad guys from jail as I possibly can.” No, I’m not a vigilante. No, I don’t want to be a vigilante. Yeah, I see vigilantes as a threat…I just see them as a low-ranking threat.

Put it this way. How do you go about being a sniper victim? Just go about your business. How do you go about being a victim of a cop-killer? Go through training, take an oath, and then do your job. How do you go about being a rape victim? Be a woman, and do some stuff at night which you rightfully ought to be able to do. How do you go about being a vigilante victim? You have to be a bad guy. Real bad. So, no, unless you want to talk about cases of mistaken-identity, we’re not talking about something that endangers “the societal contract,” we’re talking about something endangering people who have already refused to honor that contract. We don’t all have the same rights as a provision of that contract…not if there are some who refuse to sign it.

Now having said that — this guy is bad, and I’ll tell you why. Early in the morning of Saturday, August 27, James Russell returned to his home at 2825 Northwest Ave. in Bellingham, Washington, and found the bodies of Hank Eisses and Victor Vasquez. Russell and Vasquez had been renting this unit from Eisses. All three men were registered Level III sex offenders.

According to the various news sources which in turn appear to rely on eyewitness accounts from the mens’ neighbors, Eisses and Vasquez were visited for perhaps over two hours by a man claiming to be from the FBI. It would appear the man came in person to warn the sex offenders of some vigilantes who had downloaded their home address from a web site, and were going to do something about them. Presumably, sometime during the interview it was revealed that the “man from the FBI” was the vigilante. Eisses and Vasquez ate bullets. The suspect is still at large.

Link, link, link, link, link, link, link, link.

There is a huge cadre of activists and politicians who, for reasons that entirely escape me, treat this kind of stuff as a “something absolutely has gotta be done to guarantee this never happens again in a bazillion-and-one years” whereas, on the other hand, the crimes committed by the sex offenders fall into the category of something resembling an “oopsie.” Nobody can really explain why this is, even the “ordinary” people who echo the sentiment. Bad things happening to bad people, why, that’s bad. We should turn all the furniture upside down to stop it from happening. Bad things happening to good people…well, that’s just life, isn’t it?

So the mission has already been undertaken to educate us about how this looks from the point-of-view of other sex offenders who are afraid the bad guy is after them. And yeah there is something wrong with that; things shouldn’t be that way. Just like the victims of these sex offenders should never have become victims. You know what’s going to happen now? They’re going to start locking down those offender lists. Maybe you’ll have to register yourself, in order to find out where they live. Maybe pay a fee. Or maybe you won’t be able to find out where the tree-jumpers live, no matter what you do. Maybe you’ll be fined and prosecuted for disclosing the addresses, just like you would be for disclosing private medical information. Who knows, before it’s over maybe you’ll be subject to prosection for even learning the addresses. Maybe they’ll stop compiling the information altogether.

All these things are possible, and even become likely if this guy gets to off many more perverts on his list — especially if he can work his way through it without giving the police any leads.

All of this puts kids in danger. We get to learn the addresses of these registered sex offenders, so that if one of them is living right where our children walk home from school everyday, we can learn about it and do something about it. Why do I care? Because I walked to school. In Bellingham. I grew up there. And I walked past some rented housing units that were, well — let’s just say if I was somehow still doing it, I’d want a peak at that list.

The sex offender registry process has been a powerful weapon in the war of keeping the innocent among us, protected from harm. Now it has a real chance of being taken away from us…and what’s worse, is if this comes to happen, the powerful advocacy groups would stand guard to make sure the information on registered sex offenders never becomes available ever again — never, never, not ever. There is a real potential here that salt can be sown into the ground.

Somehow, when the “normal” public, which is assumed to be law-abiding, gets a new freedom, that freedom is regarded as a privilege which is subject to nullification if one headstrong weirdo sees fit to abuse it. Practically never does the general “public have a right” that is actually treat as a right. Truly inalienable rights, are reserved for the scummy layer. The sex offenders don’t have privileges. They get real live “rights” which are left intact, whether they are convenient to others, or not. The disparity is obvious, contrary to common sense, just plain ridiculous, and it’s easy to argue persuasively against it. Or, at least, it would be easy to argue against it, if some trigger-happy asshole wasn’t running around snuffing people out.

Chief

This morning President Bush nominated John Roberts to replace the deceased Chief Justice, instead of taking Associate Justice O’Connor’s seat.

The swift move would promote to the Supreme Court’s top job a man who currently is being considered as one of eight associate justices.

“I am honored and humbled by the confidence the president has shown in me,” Roberts said, standing alongside Bush in the Oval Office. “I am very much aware that if I am confirmed I would succeed a man I deeply respect and admire, a man who has been very kind to me for 25 years.”

A month ago, I had poo-poo’d Ann Coulter’s objections to John Roberts and his tendency to be…well, his tendency to not be an Ann Coulter clone. I despise people who bitch and piss and moan about people in power not being carbon-copies of the people doing the bitching and pissing and moaning, and the fact is I can grow very old waiting for a carbon-copy of Ann Coulter to survive senate scrutiny and screechy demagoguery by Kennedy, Reid, Feinstein and Boxer. Assuming I wanted to see that.

But I must say…this does have me a little concerned. This is how Earl Warren got started. It is a nearly-precise repeat (except Warren was a recess appointment). Nobody, anywhere, is debating with any effect how constitutionalist principles are going to be respected by a Justice Roberts — all I see them doing is trying to reassure the Abortion-On-Demand crowd that a Supreme Court with Roberts’ butt in one of the seats, will oversee just as much baby-killing per annum as it has overseen up until now. In this day & age, an Earl Warren wouldn’t even need a recess appointment. He’d squeak right on through.

Coulter’s concerns are very serious. We don’t need any more dead children. And I’m not talking about children who are still in their momma’s tummies. I’m talking about children children, the ones who could be kidnapped as they walk home from school, by predators released from jail by brand-new exclusionary rules, penumbral rights and other such technicalities. We don’t need district attorneys to become “distract attorneys” as they are bullied and intimidated by a judiciary hostile to justice. We don’t need another age of serial killers.

That Includes Me?

Speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-LA, took aim at some of the less flattering things federal officials have had to say about local rescue efforts in New Orleans.

“If one person criticizes them or says one more thing, including the president of the United States, he will hear from me…One more word about it after this show airs and I might likely have to punch him. Literally.”

This is to be expected. One of the jobs a senator has is to get her mug on television and let her constituents know what she is doing for them — getting them food and meds, finding federal money to rebuild after the damage, defending their reps. And as far as violence and threats of same by sitting members of the United States Congress, this is nothing new. Two years ago, the Carpetbagger Report did a great job rounding up examples of canings, wrestlings, beatings, etc. since 1798. So I’ll leave it to someone else to get all squeamish and pissy about threats of violence from scrappin’ senators.

No, what concerns me is what has happened, relatively recently, to the Daniel Patrick Moynihan quote. “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” The political party Moynihan claimed as his own, appears to have forgotten the first half of this; I haven’t seen any evidence that anyone in charge there, is ready to protect, or even respect, opinions they don’t like. I walk into a room full of Republicans and announce “Al Gore really won the election in 2000” and I get basic respect. Sure, I get sneers, heckling, derisive giggles, raised eyebrows, cluck-clucking, oh-dearing, tsk-tsking, but that’s about all. In other words, I’m perfectly entitled to my boneheaded, stupid, silly-ass opinion. I walk into a room full of Democrats and say “George Bush won the election of 2000” and I get — something else. Something that is not at all pretty. Passionate speeches about how much harm I’m doing by proliferating my opinion. The terrible people I’m protecting and what they’re doing to the Little People. Aid and comfort I’m giving to people who commit hate crimes.

This is not good. Over the short term, we can expect more Republican senators to be elected if Democrats continue to provide instructions to people about what everyone should be thinking; other than that, there’s no upside to this. Leaders don’t hand out stencils that define who can be criticised and who cannot be. If George W. Bush is unfairly slandering the local rescue efforts, respond point-by-point. If the facts are on your side, this is something you should be able to do.

I find it awfully tough to believe any constituency needs to send someone to the senate to make sure the federal government never criticizes their local emergency management agencies. Point out the things that make those local agencies look good? Sure. That’s representation. But bully and intimidate, with physical force, so that nothing bad can ever be uttered against those agencies? That smacks of union-style thuggery. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe Sen. Landreau’s party, with its history of coziness with union thugs, has atrophied from the process of collecting facts and forming opinions from those facts. Maybe they’re just a little too comfortable with threatening people into having the right opinion.

Senator Landrieu, can I make up my own mind? It’s pretty clear the rescue has been bungled badly, and who the hell knows now, maybe after we do the post-mortem all the facts will put squarely to George W. Bush and FEMA. But a post-mortem we will definitely have to do, and speaking for myself, I don’t think any cows should be made sacred. Facts are still coming in about who messed up what, and where. Let’s fix all of it, local and otherwise. That’s my opinion. I know you’re busy right now, but I’ll be living here for probably quite some time, about seventeen miles from Sacramento International Airport (code SMF) and I’ve been smacked in the face by better women than you.

Summit

The American political theater is just a big sine wave, with peaks and valleys. A zenith for Republicans is a nadir for Democrats and vice-versa. This means if one party keeps right on winning, the winning streak comes to an end sooner or later, and you can see it coming when the wins get less and less frequent, and less and less meaningful. If the other party keeps right on losing, the time’s going to come when there is noplace left to go but up, and when that happens, the losing party will start kicking ass.

With this whole New Orleans debacle, I’ve got a feeling we’re just about there. One of the things that made Bill Clinton such an effective representative of the Democratic party was that his presidency saw to it that international problems, if there were any, were kept off the front pages. (The incident with “Monica Missiles” was an exception to this, his motives for making it such being obvious.) One thing that stays consistent across time, is that international news is not helpful to Democrats. It’s hard to get worked up about free medicine for rich old people being increased in next year’s budget by eight percent instead of ten percent, when shaggy old men who smell like goat pee are trying to kill you.

Democratic party activists say they “hate George Bush because he started a war,” but it’s probably closer to the truth to say they hate him because he got people to start talking about the war. President Bush, like everyone on this side of the ocean, actually started nothing. The organizations we’re fighting now, started a war on us, and throughout the years they’ve probably been getting pretty darned ticked off over their inability to get our attention.

I hope Al Qaeda enjoyed having our attention while they had it.

Hurricane Katrina has turned things around, and I’m afraid it’s for the long haul. Bush looks bad. The road doesn’t go uphill anymore, it’s leveling off, and it’s leveled off because we’re at the summit. Worrying about Iraq, all of a sudden, is tough to do. A woman a hundred years old is sitting out in the scalding sun, with no way to get the medication she needs, while thugs and rapists rule the streets around her, and babies with bloated bellies go without formula.

The Boston Herald has started to dig up some dirt on the current FEMA director. It looks like a hatchet job. It looks petty. It also looks pretty persuasive.

This is why, while it’s easy to get a laundry list going of social problems toward which liberals have contributed helpful programs, it’s awfully hard to think of any social problems they’ve actually solved. Social problems are dry powder for them; excruciating social problems that make people wince when they hear about them, are more like dry C-4. Democrats are in a position to monopolize just about every pressing domestic issue, but what they can politically afford to actually solve amounts to precisely nothing.

What’s interesting to me, is that when you start digging around for some facts on what went wrong with this whole New Orleans business and how it could have gone down a little better, everybody looks bad but the questions left unanswered reflect more on the municipal side of things. As more facts come out, that may change. But by now it seems firmly established that there either was no plan, or if there was one, it lacked substance or was rendered inoperable by emerging circumstances.

Let’s take the things that make the feds look the worst. Mike Brown himself, director of FEMA, was unaware until sometime in the middle of the week about the evacuees being warehoused at the convention center. This is pretty huge. If this whole exercise culminates in a resignation from Mr. Brown, the seeds that will blossom into that resignation event will have been sown here. So is this purely a federal problem? Do we call for Brown’s head and call it good?

If that’s our strategy for fixing the problem, I do not want to go into any convention centers during the next crisis.

How does FEMA become aware of people waiting for help at convention centers? Is the director of FEMA supposed to be watching Nightline? As I wallow in human filth at the convention center, starving and dehydrating, how exactly am I supposed to be hoping someone finds me? Am I supposed to be hoping one of Mike Brown’s subordinates finds out about me on Google? No, that’s ridiculous. A breakdown in communication of this magnitude, had to happen in a number of places…and some of those places were municipal. Is the convention center a place you’re supposed to go to in an emergency, yes or no? Why are we confused about the answer now, on Saturday, six days after the hurricane hit? If we’re this confused now, what was it like as the lights were going out?

This situation cries out for overhaul across the board. But the way the American political system works, I’m afraid there will only be an outcry for overhaul at the federal level. You can only find some powerful interest groups to agitate dissatisfaction at that level…nowhere else.

And how long will this dissatisfaction stay agitated? Probably quite awhile. Look at Abu Ghraib. Long after the last prisoner was ever made to wear a hood and stand on a box holding wires in his hands…long, long after the Army had opened its own investigation into this…major newspapers were cooking up ways to put Abu Ghraib stories on Page One, without any new news to report on it. Long after Janice Karpinski had been relieved of command and busted from one-star to bird-colonel, our newspapers were still printing the story above-the-fold, trying to find a way to damage the Bush administration.

Well New Orleans is going to be rebuilt (or swept away) for years. Years. It will be like lifetimes and lifetimes worth of effort.

Our media will jackhammer this thing into the ground. It will make “Passion of the Christ” look like a quick earlobe-nibbling session with your date. So long as there remains one single traffic light, parking meter or newsstand that needs to be carted from one end of the freshly-rebuilt New Orleans, to the other end, our media will regurgitate the obligatory lines about that disaster in late-August of 2005, brought on by hurricane Katrina and that horrible, ineffectual FEMA that was part of the incompetent George W. Bush administration.

It’s a shame, really. It’s been said that even the staunchest small-government libertarian-anarchist-guy is in favor of having a fire hall, and just about all of us can get behind the idea of government being prepared to respond for a natural emergency like this. Clearly, that government — or those governments, when & where they are expected to communicate with each other — failed us. That failure is a clarion call for a good, purifying light of journalistic watchdoggery, which could serve us best by creating a long, comprehensive list of places where those failures originated, and how they metastasized.

And what we get to look forward to, are indictments of the George W. Bush administration.

Which on January 20, 2009, won’t be around anymore anyway.

We need our media. They have a great opportunity to demonstrate to us how much we need them. They’re about to blow it.

The last time Democrats won at anything, they stopped their guy from being removed from the White House during an impeachment scandal. Every Republican victory since then, has lifted us up another thousand feet, and another, and another. Now we’re at the summit. We’re about to drop from that summit, with a 21st-century Lyndon Johnson or Jimmy Carter administration. Get ready for twenty years of tax increases, tea parties with terrorists, exotic legal arguments for releasing perverts and rapists from jail, gun control up the ass, and a maximum wage that’s about five bucks an hour higher than the minimum wage.

And VERY little sincere post-mortem about what happened in New Orleans.

Hate to say it, but that’s my prediction.

So Compassionate

There are certain things I know, regardless of whether I’ve figured out why those things are so, and one of the things I know is:

17. A man may not kill a fly for a cause he believes is right; but he might do terrible things for a cause he believes is righteous.

And it would appear from skimming over this link over on Democratic Underground (DU) that one of the terrible things someone can do for a righteous cause, is to go entirely out of one’s way to avoid helping someone in terrible need based on the injured party’s political beliefs, and then actively go about projecting that behavior on someone else. And in an Internet forum visible to the entire civilized world, no less.

Quothe DU denizen demgurl:

I was on my home and was on the ramp getting off the highway. I saw a mini-van on the side of the road. There was a lady standing next to the van and in her arms she held her child. I can only assume her mini-van had broken down. I don’t know, perhaps with so many gad stations being out of gas, she had also run out. I slowed down and started to pull over to offer her a ride. At the very last second I noticed a “W” sticker on the back of her vehicle and I sped up and drove off.

If you’re familiar with DU this is nothing new. DU people are a whacky bunch, and when these nuggets are mined out of the DU message stream the immediate knee-jerk defense is that “all Democrats are not like that.” And that’s true, by the way. I’d say out of the Democrats I know, maybe 20% or 30% have the same hateful nature as the DU community, the balance of them being truly nice people with golden hearts who’ve simply been fooled into thinking we can eliminate poverty by giving poor people money.

But this particular thread is remarkable. Read every post:

• First poster says next time, give them a chance to convert, and only refuse to help them if they don’t
• Second poster submits an empty message with a title endorsing the first poster
• Third poster is the original person who actually did the abandoning, apparently expressing surprise and disgust at her own actions. “I don’t know how freepers can act this way and not even think twice about it. ” Freepers are members of the Free Republic, which is DU slang for people who don’t think like them. This is projection.
• Fourth poster says the fact that demgurl is so troubled by her own behavior suggests she has a conscience, which proves she’s better than Bush.
• Fifth poster says he or she wouldn’t have stopped either.
• The sixth and seventh posters, finally, point out that this was not okay. Interestingly, the seventh poster says the reason it’s not okay is because it’s an example of becoming what you hate. This person has seen too many movies and is engaging, again, in projection.
• Eighth person thinks the original poster did the right thing. Ninth and tenth persons react (I think to this) with some measure of righteous indignation. Eleventh person says she understands completely and totally, injects some tripe about how the whole hurricane thing is all Bush’s fault, and the temper tantrum continues.

This is kind of scary. Our ability to think about things is nationalized now. It happened when communication sped way up throughout the twentieth century; presented with an opportunity to think for ourselves in the midst of a constant onslaught of other peoples’ opinions, which generations previous we never would have found out about, we declined. We started echoing opinions instead of simply listening to them.

Now, when we decide hemlines should go up, we nationally decide hemlines should go up, and not a single one of us can explain why. When we decide we’re tired of hearing about Christina Aguillera, and we’re in the mood for a retro comeback from Cher, we decide this nationally, and no one among us can explain why. We’ve become like ants. People don’t think for themselves too much anymore.

For that reason, this is a national security threat, I think. Not the political belief system. Demgurl can decide to vote for John Kerry or Al Gore so that we won’t have any more hurricanes — that’s simply stupid, and we’ve had stupid people around for a long, long time. We can survive stupid. What I don’t think we can survive is someone refusing to help truly needy people because she doesn’t like the needy person’s political beliefs; convincing herself that it never happened and it was the other side that did this; and a roomful of sympathetic people telling her “there, there” and reinforcing her belief this is what actually happened.

No, I don’t think DU should be shut down.

No, I don’t think any rules should be changed, anywhere. That’s why I’m not a liberal. I’m noticing something is busted and it will eventually kill us — it does not automatically mean I’m for changing any rules.

But we should all make an effort to be aware of what is happening here. That awareness, whether it changes the way you vote or not, is the only thing that will eventually save us.

Happy 30th, Bruce

Today is the thirtieth birthday of Jaws.

Birthdays of movies are entirely unimportant, but birthdays of entire genres are worth remembering. Why? Because a genre mirrors important events in the evolution of our society. There are reasons for them. Also, we haven’t really had too many genres in American cinematic history. Everything we’ve had since World War 2 falls into something resembling this:

1. A hard-drinking detective who sleeps in his office agrees to take a case that turns out to be more complicated than he thought
2. Swords-and-Sandals
3. Elvis
4. Spaghetti Westerns
5. Spies with cameras that look like belt buckles and guns that look like…cameras or something
6. Earthquakes, fires, floods and hijacked planes
7. Burned-out, hard-drinking, grizzled cop, or bereaved husband & father, or both, takes the law into his own hands
8. Forces of nature eating people
9. Outer space stuff with lasers that go zap
10. Hatchet-men like Jason, Freddy, Michael
11. A headstrong woman has a difficult relationship with her headstrong mother and they spend two hours showcasing their headstrong personalities
12. An ugly duckling in a new school is picked on by the cool-girls and an hour into the movie she gets a makeover that consists of lipstick and swirling her hair around, gets the guy of her dreams, humiliates the meanest girl in school at the prom
13. In an adaptation of a Tom Clancy novel, it’s up to Jack Ryan to stop some sinister group of bad people from executing some devious plot to destroy something really big that would kill a lot of people and in the process he learns something about our government that is really interesting, incredibly disturbing, or both
14. Hollywood instructs us on what we’re supposed to think about Bill Clinton, his Monica problems, the military, hippies, global warming and radio talk show hosts — and charges us money for the privilege of being told what we should think
15. A tormented hip hop artist copes with a tough life in the hood before finally making it big
16. Martial arts specialists use wire-work to change the laws of physics to something resembling a Bugs Bunny cartoon
17. James Bond is brought back from the Dead
18. So is Star Wars

And that’s it. It’s a pretty short list for a sixty-year span, and with the exception of a few brave explorations here and there that didn’t pan out, there aren’t many movies that fall outside of this.

It should be noted that although “Forces of nature eating people” mostly failed to establish any noteworthy franchises, the flagship movie had to do everything right just to get this whole thing started. The preceeding “takes the law into his own hands” genre was a grassroots movement inspired by a public grown weary and agitated by a justice system that was bound & determined to flood every neighborhood with perverts and psychos walking around as free as anyone else. The Hollywood I remember back then, wasn’t cozy with the liberal establishment like they are today — they simply shared an anti-war agenda, and that was about it. Good money was to be made making “Death Wish” and “Dirty Harry” movies, which were relatively inexpensive to make, so the movies got made. The point is, if it were not for Jaws, this would have sputtered on forever. Or at least another 2 years before Star Wars came out.

Jaws may very well have saved lives. We realized that walking out of a movie theater with a phobia you didn’t have when you walked in two hours before, was actually pretty fun. We were reminded that the movie theater was a place for make-believe. Had we continued to wallow in our disaffections with the porous justice system over buckets of popcorn, maybe we never would have rallied to show that dissatisfaction at the ballot box. We may never have had a President Reagan, and who knows, even today we may have had a Supreme Court endlessly coming up with new reasons to let perverts and murderers out of jail.

Can You Feel It Yet?

Two short weeks ago I was pitching a hissy-fit that our “news” services were kind enough to tell us that boy oh boy, that gas crisis, it’s a really bad one because in some places it’s going for three dollars, regular unleaded. Where would that be? Silly you. Somewhere, that’s where! And it’s really bad, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. Just wanted to know you how bad it was, tune in at eleven.

And I was raising the question, what kind of news is this?

Now, sometimes I run off on bunny trails and sometimes I don’t. I’m looking at that one and thinking, well that’s sort of right on the line isn’t it. Because it was not my intent to challenge that gas cost three dollars a gallon, or that it was on the way up — I was questioning whether what we call “news” is a product being offered to serve “our” own interests, in this case, the interests of gas consumers. I do still have substantial questions about that…and it IS what I wrote about.

But it’s probably fair to level a charge at myself of coloring-outside-the-lines because offer Sacramento as a model for high gas prices, I did. And dispatch myself to go look at local gas prices, I did. And revise my prediction at the time, by a dime a gallon, I did. And have something to do with my original point…well, it kind of didn’t.

I bring it up now because it’s kind of interesting. They apparently like to name the towns now, and what the prices have done in the last seventeen days…hoo boy.

Take a look at this. It still doesn’t affect me worth a damn because of what I drive. But all the rest of you have a serious problem. And…you know, when this is all over, we need to revisit that original point. What does news do for us? Is it supposed to tell us what’s going on, or is it supposed to get us all huffy and puffy when it wants to, like a tail wagging the dog?

Gas Prices May Rise As Much As 40 Cents Wednesday
State Consumer Protection Urges People To Report Suspected Gauging

The cheapest unleaded was settling at $2.99 for most of the area Tuesday night. That’s a jump of 20 to 30 cents a gallon, but that may be just the first shockwave.

WISN 12 News has learned that the price gas stations pay for their gas is jumping about 40 cents Wednesday, which would make $2.99 seem like a bargain.
:
“Sometimes, I wonder if people are living under a rock because they’ll come in and yell. They’re yelling at me, and I’m like, ‘You know, we don’t set the world oil prices at Brass Ball Mobil. We don’t have a little red switch in back that says this is what it’s gonna be today,'” [gas station owner Tom] Koenecke said.

More…

I feel sorry for all of you — except the retards who yell at people like Tom Koenecke. You’re just jerks. Here’s an idea, jerks. Get an SUV that — just to shake things up a little — doesn’t have a stepladder for you to get in. Sell your kids on the idea of basic cable instead of premium so you can pony up the extra hundred bucks a month. Stop yelling at Tom.

People are spending the night in a stadium with no electricity and foul-smelling water everywhere. They’d love to bitch and yell about gas prices, if only they could care.

Memo For File

A lot of the posts that go into my blog are for my own benefit, not that of the many people who never read it. I’ve decided to call these “Memo For File” so they can be called what they really are. Although nobody ever reads this blog, for some reason I still place a premium importance on the time invested by those nobodies whenever they don’t show up. I was referred to this Mark Steyn article by means of Newsblog Central, noticed the link doesn’t work, and found thoughout the vast universe that is Google there is only one (1) copy and that’s the link that is somehow not there anymore. That’s the nature of the Internet, it seems. Some things are lying there, waiting to be read by nobody who never happens along to not read it; some things are there to send your attention off to some distant corner, where nothing awaits you, only a shadow of what once was.

Interested readers, as if there are any, will note immediately from the content what makes this a precious find, and why I thought it was important to fetch it out of Google Cache and put it where I can get to it later.

Those who have some attention span and memory-retention, and are just a little on the media-savvy side, will understand what the font is all about. Without further ado…

Islam does incubate terrorism
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 12/07/2005)
“There are no Muslim terrorists. There are terrorists,” Father Paul Hawkins of St Pancras parish church told his congregation on Sunday. “The people who carried out these attacks are victims of a false religion, be it false Christianity or false Islam.”

Oh, dear. “Britain can take it” (as they said in the Blitz): that’s never been in doubt. The question is whether Britain can still dish it out. When events such as last Thursday’s occur, two things happen, usually within hours if not minutes: first, spokespersons for Islamic lobby groups issue warnings about an imminent backlash against Muslims.

In fairness to British organisations, I believe they were beaten to the punch by the head of the Canadian Islamic Congress whose instant response to the London bombings was to issue a statement calling for prayers that “Canadian Muslims will not pay a price for being found guilty by association”.

In most circumstances it would be regarded as appallingly bad taste to deflect attention from an actual “hate crime” by scaremongering about a non-existent one. But it seems the real tragedy of every act of “intolerance” by Islamist bigots is that it might hypothetically provoke even more intolerance from us irredeemable white imperialist racists. My colleague Peter Simple must surely marvel at how the identity-group grievance industry has effortlessly diversified into pre-emptively complaining about acts of prejudice that have not yet occurred.

Among those of us who aren’t Muslim, meanwhile, there’s a stampede to be first to the microphone to say that “of course” we all know that “the vast majority of Muslims” are not terrorists but law-abiding peace-loving people who share our revulsion at these appalling events, etc.

Mr Blair won that contest on Thursday, followed closely by Brian Paddick and full supporting cast. If “of course” Mr Blair and Mr Paddick and the rest do indeed know that “the vast majority of Muslims” do not favour terrorism, is that because they’ve run the numbers and have a ballpark figure on the very very very slim minority of Muslims who do? And, if so, what is it? 0.02 per cent? Or two per cent? Or 20 per cent?

And, if they haven’t run the numbers, why do they claim to speak with authority on this matter? If it were just a question of rhetorical sensitivity, I’d be happy to go along with Mr Paddick’s multiculti pap and insist that “Islam and terrorism don’t go together” – events in Beslan, Bali, Israel, Nigeria, Kashmir, etc, notwithstanding. But the danger in separating “Islam” from “terrorism” is that it leads the control-freaks of the nanny state into thinking that “terrorism” is something that can be dealt with by border security, ID cards, retinal scans, metal detectors. It can’t.

Terrorism ends when the broader culture refuses to tolerate it. There would be few if any suicide bombers in the Middle East if “martyrdom” were not glorified by imams and politicians, if pictures of local “martyrs” were not proudly displayed in West Bank grocery stores, if Muslim banks did not offer special “martyrdom” accounts to the relicts thereof, if schools did not run essay competitions on “Why I want to grow up to be a martyr”.

At this point, many readers will be indignantly protesting that this is all the fault of Israeli “occupation”, but how does that explain suicide bombings in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where there’s not a Zionist oppressor for hundreds of miles? Islam has become the world’s pre-eminent incubator of terrorism at its most depraved. Indeed, so far London has experienced only the lighter items on the bill of fare – random bombing of public transport rather than decapitation, child sacrifice and schoolhouse massacres.

Most of us instinctively understand that when a senior Metropolitan Police figure says bullishly that “Islam and terrorism don’t go together”, he’s talking drivel.

Many of us excuse it on the grounds that, well, golly, it must be a bit embarrassing to be a Muslim on days like last Thursday and it doesn’t do any harm to cheer ’em up a bit with some harmless feel-good blather. But is this so?

Why are we surprised that “Muslim moderates” rarely speak out against the evil committed by their co-religionists when the likes of Mr Paddick keep assuring us there’s no problem? It requires great courage to be a dissenting Muslim in communities dominated by heavy-handed imams and lobby groups that function effectively as thought-police.

Yet all you hear from Mr Paddick is: “Move along, folks, there’s nothing to see here.” This is the same approach, incidentally, that the authorities took in their long refusal to investigate seriously the 120 or so “honour killings” among British Muslims.

Just as the police did poor Muslim girls no favours by their excessive cultural sensitivity, so they’re now doing the broader Muslim community no favours. The Blair-Paddick strategy only provides a slathering of mindless multiculti fudge topping over the many layers of constraint that prevent Islam beginning an honest conversation with itself.

Unlike Malaya or the Mau-Mau or the IRA, this is a global counter-terrorism operation across widely differing terrain, geographical and psychological. We need to be able to kill, constrain, coerce or coax as appropriate.

Kill terrorists when the opportunity presents itself, as 1,200 “insurgents” were said to have been killed in one recent engagement on the Syria/Iraq border the other day. Constrain the ideology behind Thursday’s bombing by outlawing Saudi funding of British mosques and other institutions. Coerce our more laggardly allies like General Musharraf into shutting down his section of the Saudi-Pakistani-Londonistan Wahhabist pipeline.

But the coaxing is what counts – wooing moderate Muslims into reclaiming their religion. We can take steps to prevent Islamic terrorists killing us, most of the time. But Islamic terrorists will only stop trying to kill us when their culture reviles them rather than celebrates them.

There are signs in the last week’s Muslim newspapers, in London and abroad, that some eminent voices are beginning to speak out. At such a moment, Britain should be on the side of free speech and open debate. Instead, the state is attempting to steamroller through a grotesque law at the behest of already unduly influential Islamic lobby groups. One of its principal effects will be to inhibit Muslim reformers. Shame on us for championing Islamic thought-police over Western liberty.

Nerd Bigot

There are people who think your ability to contribute productively to a civilized society is directly proportional to your “Gift of Gab,” so to speak, and if you happen to be one of the creative-introvert types, you’re a freak.

I’ve met these people. It’s generally been my experience that they hold professional positions where expertise is expected, but not quite absolutely required; and their personalities are such that if expertise is present, it’s not manifested quite as quickly as the previously-mentioned “Gift of Gab.” They strike me as insecure people. They seem to want to live in a world where Gift of Gab counts for a lot more and everything else counts for a whole lot less.

Now I can’t prove this is what motivates these people, and I can’t prove that Carol Costello is one of these people, or that this is what sparked the brief altercation caught on live TV during the graveyard shift on CNN. But I’ve seen the clip, and I don’t understand — even in the slightest — what came out of Chad Myers’ mouth that has to be “translated” for Costello. Honestly, the appearance to me is that they’ve been playing hide-the-weenie. That, or Costello is a Nerd Bigot. Maybe both.

Katrina: CNN’s Carol Costello & Chad Myers Yell At Each Other On Live TV

Transcript:

Chad Myers: It has filled in a little bit, filled in with some air, but this lower portion, but…

Carol Costello: Chad, Chad, Chad…

Myers: Let me talk Carol!

Costello: Translate that for us, I don’t know what that means, what does that mean–

Myers: Well if you would let me talk!

Costello: [Laughs] Go ahead.

Clip.

Is it “air”? “Portion”? “Filled in”? What needs to be translated?

Keep Writing It

Jenny McCarthy had a book ready for publication about marriage, and then a funny thing happened. Take a look.

�Jenny was deliriously in love with her husband and her book, which is hilarious, was going to be a [part of a] series about marriage,� says a source. �Jenny was going to be the spokeswoman for a generation of young, sassy, married women. But just as the contract was being signed, Jenny filed for divorce.�

Irreconciliable Differences is the cited reason for the divorce. I’ve got a gut feel, which I can’t actually prove, that the “sassy” thing has something to do with the Differences. I don’t know as much about happy marriages as some other people might, but to me they don’t appear to have a lot of room for sass.

But hey. Happily married people, to the extent I can see, can only dish out a little bit of information about what makes their marriage happy. The happier their marriages are, the more reluctant they appear to be about describing “one size fits all” methods of reproducing the same enviornment somewhere else. To get some passionate, energetic opinions, it seems you have to go to people who haven’t been happily married. Or people who haven’t been married at all. Hoo boy, nobody has more opinions about marriage, than people who’ve never been married. And few people have more entertaining opinions about marriage, than the people who have been married unhappily.

So I think she should keep writing it, especially if it’s supposed to be “hillarious.” Marriages that truly are going to last awhile, have little entertainment value. They aren’t necessarily supposed to be entertaining. Maybe that’s why they last.

The Polite Word For This Is “Nonsense”

Yesterday toward the end of Rush’s second hour, he made mention of this story. Those listening at the time will recall it to be about the f-word quota, where if you’re a student at this secondary school, you get to swear up to five times per lesson. You can even use the f-word, but the teacher will keep score and if you go over that five-time limit, you’ll get — oh, the horror! — a lecture that you shouldn’t be doing that.

The school in question is Weavers Secondary School in Wellingborough, UK. The most informative link I could find, is here.

The rule allows kids to use the f-word against their teachers five times a lesson. Which means, the poor kids can abuse their teachers just about 30 times a day. No more.

Parents of children who attend the Weavers School in Wellingborough were told about the policy through a letter, the Daily Mail reported. The letter says: �Within each lesson the teacher will initially tolerate (although not condone) the use of the f-word (or derivatives) five times and these will be tallied on the board.�

So not only does the teacher have to take the abuse, he or she will also have to keep the score � and �speak to the class� if the tally is high. This is effective next week.

The school says that it is part of a policy of containment, aimed at a particularly profane bunch of 15-16 year-olds. Headmaster Alan Large defended his stand (and his students) saying: �The reality is that the f-word is part of these young adults� everyday language�.

I’m entirely unclear on whether the five-utterance quota applies to the class, or to each student. This is somewhat important. If it applies to the class, and you and I are in class together, and you use it four times, then I can only use it once before we all have to get that painful lecture, you peckerhead. If it applies to each student, then a substantially greater part of that blackboard will be taken up with the tallying, and what’s even better is we can wait until the teacher turns around to write something on the board and squeek out the f-word with a little voice-throwing effect, and oh think of the disrupting power that would have over today’s lesson.

Knowing how young boys work, I’d be worried about one who didn’t try this, or wasn’t at least tempted to.

This would be much less damaging to the learning atmosphere if they just made a policy that said the f-word was allowed unconditionally. You can break a rule five times and it doesn’t matter until the sixth time? What kind of world are they preparing these kids to get into?

I’ve never been in the UK. Maybe I’m learning something. Hey Bobbies, can I come over there with my stupid yankee driving, and make five laps in the round-about in the wrong direction before you pull me over?

Ooh, do I get to own up to five handguns?

Hating the French

Here’s a challenge. I want you to find a fictitious, entirely made-up, demonstrably false reason for hating the French. Something that would make you extra mad if they did it, but at the same time, something they have, according to verifiable facts, not done. Okay?

Use your imagination. Take your time.

Dum dee doo…doh doh dee doh.

Remember: You can’t say “They endangered the world by refusing to pass a resolution against Iraq’s old regime after it was shown to be in material breach of Resolution 1441 in exchange for billions of dollars in Oil For Food money.” Only a concocted reason will do. Need more time?

La la dee la…la la la.

Okay, time’s up! What have you got?

Let me guess. It was using cute little puppies and kittens to fish for sharks, wasn’t it?

Aw gee, today just isn’t your lucky day.

A six-month-old puppy was found last month with hooks implanted in its snout and one of its legs.

The French Society for the Protection of Animals (SPA) told the daily the dog was the victim of cruel fishermen who attract sharks by throwing puppies or kittens into the water, tied to fishing lines, and wait for the predators to swallow the thrashing animals.

“We don’t see that every day, but it’s not the first time, either,” Marie-Annick Chantrel, the vice-president of the R�union branch of the SPA, told Clicanoo. “We’ve already seen cats six or seven months old with hooks in them.”

Back to the drawing board for you.