Paula Deen revealed on The Today Show that she has Type 2 diabetes. I’m impressed that it’s not more severe, like Type 20/20.
Deen made her shocking — in the Claude Rains sense — disclosure to Al Roker, who had gastric bypass surgery years ago to deal with his own weight problems.
There is some controversy that Deen has pushed fat-laden dishes on her show while being diabetic. Anthony Bourdain believes this is in “bad taste,” though Deen contends she is “your cook, not your doctor.”
Only she’s not much of a cook. Her concoctions remind me of what would happen when my parents would leave me alone in the house when I was in middle school. I once made Ice Cream a la Robinson, which was butter pecan ice cream drenched in half and half. Yes, it was disgustingly delicious. I didn’t get away with it, though. Somehow my mother knew that the ice cream had been moved one inch to the right, and she could tell at a glance that there was less half and half in the carton. Probably because I’d used up all the half and half and put an empty carton back in the refrigerator. Rookie mistake.
My other childhood invention was the spaghetti sandwich — spaghetti with melted cheddar cheese on whole-wheat toast. I am still sore that Deen repurposed this as a lasagna sandwich without crediting me.
Here she is making a less-healthful version, if possible, of the Luther Burger.
And here she is frying a cheesecake:
Deen has been treating her condition with Novo Nordisk drug Victoza, according to USA Today. She’s been less successfully treating her exaggerated Southern accent with Novo Nordisk drug VivienLeighoza.
This is the American way: Tank your health with lasagna sandwiches and fried cheesecakes then make the drug companies rich. Many of her viewers probably don’t even have health insurance. Oh well, I’ll give them my Ice Cream a la Robinson recipe for free.
A video has been circulating the Internet depicting four Marines urinating on the dead bodies of Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan. This has led to an appropriate degree of outrage from our political representatives.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry on Sunday defended (the Marines), arguing “what’s really disturbing to me is just, kind of, the over-the-top rhetoric from this administration and their disdain for the military.”
“Obviously, 18, 19-year-old kids make stupid mistakes all too often, and that’s what’s occurred here,” the Republican presidential candidate told Candy Crowley on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “But, you know, when you’re in war, and history kind of backs up — there’s a picture of General Patton doing basically the same thing in the Rhine River. And although there’s not a picture, Churchill did the same thing on the Siegfried line.”
Perry is apparently justifying bad behavior by pointing to historical precedent of bad behavior — a literal trail of urine that leads back to when Moses parted the Red Sea with the force of his own stream.
The fact that this occurs in “war time” is hardly an excuse because it’s not like someone is criticizing Marines for not killing the insurgents according to Queensberry rules. A dead body is inanimate. It can no longer threaten you or defend itself. The proper, sane response to the death of an enemy is regret that violence was the only answer — not a crude celebration of your victory and bladder control.
“I mean, these kids made a mistake, there’s not any doubt about it,” (Perry) said. “They shouldn’t have done it. It’s bad. But to call it a criminal act, I think, is over the top.”
Except for the fact that it is a criminal act: U.S. law and the Geneva Convention “forbid the desecration of dead bodies.”
Perry believes the Obama administration is demonstrating “disdain” for the military by investigating this. Interestingly, Perry earlier stated that the administration was waging a “war on religion” by choosing not to “defend in court the Defense of Marriage Act, the 1996 legal prohibition of federal recognition of same-sex marriages.” So, Obama hates the military when he looks into a criminal offense and apparently hates religion when he doesn’t further the interests of a discriminatory law. Urinating on dead bodies = youthful indiscretion. Marrying the consenting adult of your choice: threat to religious freedom.
Perry is perhaps sympathetic to the four Marines because of his own history of urinating on soldiers — though in his case, it was the gay soldiers whose service in the military he considered “something wrong in this country.”
Comedian Bill Maher also sided with the Marines.
“A dead body is just, you know a f***ing body that’s dead and it just doesn’t bother me… If they were real Taliban, if they were people who burned down girls’ schools, and, you know, do honor rapes and throw acid in people’s faces, I’m not that upset about p***ing on them.”
The fact that these men might have deserved it is no reason for us to endorse such treatment. Their deaths were enough. It ended any evil they were committing and prevented any that they might commit. We are better than they are because of our ideals not simply because we won. Is our morality now inspired by an Image Comic from the 1990s?
CNN contributor Dana Loesch — who I’m pleased to say I hadn’t heard of before today — stated: “C’mon people, this is a war. Do I have a problem with that as a citizen of the United States? No, I don’t.”She added that she wants ‘a million cool points for these guys’ and would be willing to join them.“Can someone explain to me if there is supposed to be a scandal that someone pees on the corpse of a Taliban fighter — someone who as part of an organization murdered over 3,000 Americans.”
OK, it’s one thing to say that the Marines urinating on dead bodies is no big deal. It’s absolutely absurd to claim that it’s deserving of “a million cool points” (redeemable for a free port-a-potty). Is it somehow courageous to pee on corpses? Were the thousands of other soldiers who “held it in” less “cool”? Are we now going to start handing out “Yellow Hearts” for the lengthiest stream?
Loesch’s rationale that these fighters were “part of an organization” that brutally murdered innocent people on 9/11 is also suspect. There’s a good chance these insurgents were in grade school at the time. If Loesch really wants to justify these soldiers’ actions, she could bother to do some research and find some more recent offenses.
Maher and Loesch also seem to be under the impression that Taliban membership is voluntary — like the U.S. armed forces or the GOP view of homosexuality. These insurgents certainly could have willingly chose to serve the Taliban — it’s certainly more comforting for us to believe that — but there is ample evidence of conscription by gunpoint.
Al Gore, in a 2004 speech regarding the reported abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, said the following:
One of the clearest indications of the impending loss of intimacy with one’s soul is the failure to recognize the existence of a soul in those over whom power is exercised, especially if the helpless come to be treated as animals, and degraded. We also know – and not just from De Sade and Freud – the psychological proximity between sexual depravity and other people’s pain. It has been especially shocking and awful to see these paired evils perpetrated so crudely and cruelly in the name of America.
And Nietzsche sums it up fairly succinctly: “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.”
Yes, this was the post where I stated that you shouldn’t urinate on dead bodies. Tune in tomorrow when I explain why you shouldn’t take candy from a baby and then back over her with an ice cream truck.
Charles M. Blow of the New York Times has an interesting piece about the “politics of envy.”
In his New Hampshire victory speech on Tuesday, Romney lambasted his Republican opponents (who have raised real issues about his role at the private equity firm Bain Capital) for following the lead of President Obama, whom he described as a leader who divides us “with the bitter politics of envy.”
The next day on “Today” on NBC, Romney defended the statement, rejecting the notion that there were questions about Wall Street behavior, saying the whole discussion was about class warfare. He even went so far as to suggest that such talk shouldn’t even be openly entertained. When the interviewer asked, “Are there no fair questions about the distribution of wealth without it being seen as envy, though?” Romney responded, “I think it’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms and discussions about tax policy and the like.”
Quiet rooms? This isn’t a discussion of Keats in the sumptuously furnished salon of the Earl of Stuffypants. This is a serious issue. As Blow points out, the problem is that we’ve been “too quiet for too long” and I agree with him that if the Occupy movement deserves any praise, it should be for making these issues public and making certain people very uncomfortable.
And it is these people’s “discomfort” that this is all about. They rail about “class warfare” when very real concerns regarding income disparity are raised but are quick to warn voters about the insidious spread of socialism. Please note that the former concern is based on the history of the past 30 years. The latter is based on science fiction.
It’s not that they don’t want to fight a class war. They just don’t want the other classes to defend themselves. Shut up and take it while wondering what the hell happened in the “your quiet room” — before your friends at the bank foreclose on it.
I’ve stated before that Republicans these days sound more like Randians than anything else. However, I’m struck by the level of inconsistency in their beliefs. They have no interest in sacrificing for you but believe you should sacrifice for them. Basically, “one for all and all for us.”
The issue people have with Mitt Romney and Bain Capital (really, who names a company “Bain”?) is not based in “envy” so much as the simple fact that the system didn’t work for them. Should the 1,750 people who lost their jobs at Georgetown Steel applaud Romney’s business acumen in simultaneously doubling Bain’s investment even though Georgetown Steel eventually went bankrupt? The commonly trotted out excuse that Romney and his supporters give is that Bain’s actions “saved” other jobs, but this doesn’t mean much for the people whose jobs weren’t saved. Isn’t that “cold comfort” closer to the “socialism” Republicans revile? Putting the interests of others and of the “corporate state” over their own? How is that in their “rational self-interest”?
I’ve been in the position of having to fire employees whose jobs were being sent elsewhere. The HR talking points I was given had a section regarding how this “decision was not taken lightly” and would “benefit the company as a whole, by allowing it to remain competitive.” I refused to repeat this nonsense — pointing out that even if these statements were true, why should the terminated employee care? The only reason to try to reassure him that the company doesn’t “like” firing people is to avoid negative PR and only serves the company’s interests — from the employee’s perspective, the motivation doesn’t change the end result. And why should he care about the health of the “corporate state” once he’s been expelled from it? It’s not like he has stock in the company that will generate revenue for him even if he no longer earns a salary.
Hostess pulled the same shenanigans when it announced its latest bankruptcy.
In a court document explaining how the company got into this mess, Hostess largely pins the blame on its labor costs, as well as increased competition, poor financial performance and excessive levels of debt. Hostess also says the company didn’t do enough to fix itself during a lengthy prior stint in bankruptcy protection less than a decade ago.
Hostess said it does not “have a competitive cost structure and cannot achieve viability on a long-term sustainable basis,” according to its court filing. ”The company obtained only modest concessions relating to health and welfare, as well as inflexible requirements under their collective bargaining agreements relating to work rules,” Hostess says in its court filing, which says the company and its employees have 372 separate labor agreements.
“Modest concessions” relating to “health and welfare”? So, apparently it’s the unionized labor’s fault for not allowing management to create a more efficient plantation-style model in which they sacrifice for the company’s long-term profit and benefit. Their employees’ well-being seems to mean little to the company so why should the employees be all that concerned about the company?
Why is rational self-interest so selective in this country? Millionaires paying more in taxes is an unfair burden. It’s wealth redistribution. But unionized labor — even teachers — must “sacrifice” for the sake of the nation.
Is this an example of “some animals are more equal than others”? Whatever the bill of good that’s been sold, Americans are slowly realizing it’s a con. We are either all in this together or we’re not. If “sacrifice” leads to “socialism,” then it’s in working-class people’s best interests to advocate for better pay and better benefits (by “better,” I refer to the distant past prior to the Reagan administration). If you’re one of the countless Americans who don’t have health insurance, you are under no obligation to continue to sacrifice for the corporations that need to deprive you of those benefits to “remain competitive.”
Newt Gingrich argues that raising the minimum wage would lead to unemployment. Suppose he’s right (and I don’t) and companies would have to get by with 10% less employees if working-class wages are increased. Isn’t Comrade Gingrich advocating for a socialist system where you take a pay cut for the benefit of your coworkers and the “state” (your company)? If this is a “merit” society, as Romney likes to say before adding more millions to his children and grandchildren’s trust funds, then the best employees would survive the resulting cuts and have more to show for it. Would the company’s profits suffer if the workforce decreased? Perhaps. But if you’re making minimum wage, the minimum you should care is whether the company keeps the doors open.
It does make you wonder who the real “socialists” are in this country. And why the average Americans fear the “public state” more than the “corporate state,” which as far more power over their lives these days.
My last haircut was November 14, 2011. My hair grows very quickly so I currently resemble Freddie “Boom Boom” Washington from “Welcome Back, Kotter.”
"Hi there!"
My mother would not be pleased with this development. Growing up, she insisted on a strict grooming regimen — haircut once a month, a trim every other week. She was also rather strict when it came to hairstyles — nothing trendy because you always regretted it later when you looked at old photos of yourself. “Same haircut your whole life” was her theory. “Same wig you’ll deny wearing your whole life” was her practice.
I veered from her instructions on one notable occasion. My barber, who sounded and smelled as if he’d taken a hit from a bong five minutes before my appointment, suggested “trying out” a new idea of his on me. Yeah, that’s how ignorant I was. I let the guy, who was barely competent when not high, use me as his guinea pig. I left the barber’s with what he called an “eggshell” — no hair around the sides and a zig-zag “eggshell” pattern on top.
When I got in the car, my father turned on the engine in silence and pulled out of the parking lot. A few miles later, he finally spoke: “What did your mother tell you?”
I lowered my head. “Same haircut your whole life.”
I felt bad for my father. My mother was basically CEO of Robinson LLC, and she’d delegated to my father the task of taking me to the barber. Despite years of more than adequate service in that role, once she saw my “eggshell” haircut, it was obvious that he’d be restricted to simply mowing the lawn and jiggling the TV antenna outside to get better reception.
After I graduated from college and moved to New York, I abandoned my mother’s strict haircutting schedule for
I might need a haircut but I'm never going back to one of these places again.
the more relaxed “every once in a while.” If I started to get too bushy, I would apply a fistful of styling product to my hair and simply comb it away from my head. This would usually buy me a couple more weeks.
When I did break down and get a haircut, I would frequent the barber colleges, where for just $6, you could almost lose an ear. Once, a particularly nervous student was working on my hair for about half an hour when his teacher stopped to have a look. He recoiled in terror and when I asked what was wrong, he said – his face bone white, “Oh, nothing. It’s… uhm, coming along.”
Then I worked up to the $10 barber chains where you’d point to outdated photos of recent parolees on a laminated value menu and say, “I’d like the number 2.” These were the kind of places that gave you a free hat with every haircut.
Occasionally, I’d stumble into seedy dives that reminded me of the “hospitals” that hoods in gangster movies went to because a real doctor would have to report their bullet wounds to the police — flickering, bare light bulb swinging from the ceiling, cries of agony from the back room, the barber/surgeon swigging whiskey from a flask before offering you some.
More than once, I’d receive the sort of butchering for which the only remedy was “an emergency haircut.” This is when you wake up the next day looking like a blind blues musician with the DTs cut your hair. No amount of hair gel can salvage it, so you race to the closest barber and say through your tears, “Look, I don’t care what this costs or what you have to do, but I can’t go on looking like this.”
The one thing these places all had in common was that they didn’t take appointments and if they did, it didn’t matter because you still wound up waiting for about an hour at best. It was like a doctor’s office but the only magazines were “Ebony” and “Jet.”
It wasn’t until I was almost 30 that I discovered true, professional hair salons. I went to John Allan’s in midtown Manhattan for about three years. It was styled as a “gentleman’s club” where you could play billiards and drink a beer before your appointment or smoke a cigar while getting a manicure. I’d written a magazine article about John Allan’s, as well as the Paul Labrecque salon, so I was extended an “Editor’s Rate” that was just a few dollars more than the clown college barbershops but included a manicure, shoe shine, and competence. A trip to the barber was no longer a chore but a pleasant experience.
When John Allan’s technical director, Jesse Sweet (coolest name ever, by the way) left the salon, things began to go downhill. I saw a parade of female stylists, who while more attractive than Jesse were not as skilled. I was already on the fence about continuing there when I made an appointment at Paul Labrecque for a “deep scalp conditioning” treatment. This had worked wonders on my hair when I had it as part of the “research” for my story. It transformed me from Shaggy to Billy Dee. So, a return visit was my Christmas gift to myself. And that’s how I met Misti.
The only way to describe Misti to ask you to imagine your closest friend — how she’s always there for you, how she listens to your problems, comforts you in times of stress, opens her home and her heart to you and expects nothing in return. Now, the only difference is that your friend is just a friend and Misti is an amazing hairstylist. Believe me, the latter is far harder to find.
I knew halfway through our first session that I was never going back to John Allan’s. I lingered at the door for a moment before working up the nerve to ask her, “So, do you also cut men’s hair, Misti?”
“Men’s hair exclusively, actually,” she replied. “Sometimes women’s hair if it’s slow. Would you like me to cut your hair, Stephen?”
“Yes. Yes, I would.” A brief moment of doubt crept up: “You don’t use clippers, do you?”
“No way. I only use scissors.”
I knew we’d get along just fine.
Misti was punctual and cordial in the most Southern California way possible, but the best thing about Misti was her silence. I don’t enjoy conversation when I’m in the barber chair or really any other kind of chair. She even shampooed my hair for me rather than allow her chatty assistant to do it. During the Sighting of My First Gray Hair, Misti said nothing. She just leaned in close and whispered, “Looks like you have a stray hair here. Just a stray hair. I’ll just pluck it out. There, all gone.”
We went on this way — hairstylist and her incredibly vain client — until 6:37 p.m. on October 12, 2008 when Misti announced that she was moving, and… and… I’m sorry, I thought I could talk out it.
Misti’s chatty assistant was promoted to stylist. She was awful and strangely antisemitic. While trying to zone out during one of her never-ending monologues, I heard her comment about her upcoming wedding.
“So, it’s gonna be small, you know. Not too big. I’m not some rich Jew.”
I thought I misheard her — sort of like the “Jew, eat!” or “did you eat?” confusion from “Annie Hall.” Yet, the next time I was there, she started in again.
“I told my fiance – we gotta keep it simple. Not some big affair like the rich Jews would have.”
“Wait a minute,” I interrupted, suddenly remembering something else she’d rambled on about previously. “What’s your fiance’s name?”
“Isaac Goldstein. You know him?”
“No. Do you?”
It's probably time for a haircut.
I immediately switched stylists, preferring one without a shaved head or a white hood. For the past three years, my stylist was Pirrko, the salon’s artistic director. Originally from Finland, she divides her time now between Las Vegas and New York. She was actually the first person to give me the “deep scalp conditioning” treatment and I recall her saying, “Some men come in, they want to talk. Sometimes they don’t want to say a word and I understand completely.” That was just what I needed.
Pirrko cut my hair before the week before my wedding. She also introduced a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding the increasing number of “stray” hairs that Misti had battled. It wasn’t necessarily an “emergency haircut” but the approach was similar — “Do whatever it takes but we won’t discuss it.”
I said farewell to Pirrko in July of last year. During my travels in Europe, I had my hair cut in Vienna (“nicht schlecht”), Paris (“adéquates”), and Florence (“meraviglioso”). Did I hope to find Misti behind the barber chair at those salons? No, because I’m not a crazy person. However, now I’m back in the states and it’s time to move on. A friend has referred me to a salon in Portland. Unfortunately, the appointment is in two weeks, so my wife will have to put up with “Boom Boom” for a little while longer.
Brooke Jarvis at “Yes Magazine” defies you to “find a stupider op-ed than this one” written by Matthew Dowd, chief strategist for the George Bush re-election campaign in 2004. Journalist Jake Blumgart claims it’s the “stupidest thing” he’s read and possibly “will ever read.” Can it be that bad? Yes, yes it can.
Sunday night, watching Denver quarterback Tim Tebow’s post-game press appearance and President Obama’s interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes, I was struck by the fact that one man is offering his team (and the country actually) the leadership they need while the other is trapped in traditional discourse and scoring political points.
It’s amazing how the lineup on your TV can inspire you. I happened to be watching “Transformers: The Movie” (the only one, thank you very much) when President Obama was on “60 Minutes,” so I was struck by the fact that one sentient robot is offering his fellow Autobots (and the country actually) the leadership they need while the other is trapped in the real world with real problems that can’t be solved by scoring a touchdown. Also, Obama deals with less honorable and rational Decepticons.
Do I buy into some intervention by God because Tebow is a man of incredible religious faith? No. I do believe there is a divine presence in every one of us and in every thing, and the power of that presence remains a mystery of the ages. It can’t be proven or disproven by an intellectual conversation or scientific method, but it is hard not to accept if you are a person of faith and connection to something outside our mere humanity. Yet that is not what this Denver rise and winning streak is about.
Actually, I suspect that Tim Tebow plays so well because of a deal he made with the Devil in order to prevent the Yankees from winning the World Series (yes, I know he’s not playing baseball, but you can’t really trust the Devil). I stand by my half-assed theory because it also can’t be disproven by “intellectual conversation or scientific method.”
Take a look at Obama’s latest interview. It does not make you feel better about where we are heading. You don’t feel like we are going to win under his leadership. He points fingers and refuses to admit his own mistakes or weaknesses. I often wonder where is the Barack Obama of the 2007 and 2008 campaign. That Obama was much more like the leader we need at this time. He offered hope, he had soaring rhetoric, he offered a change from the bitter politics in Washington, and he made us feel we could win.
Yes, whatever happened to that nice, sweet, innocent Carrie White after those girls dumped pig’s blood on her? Why do so many on the right expect Obama to remain some clueless Candide regardless of what happens? But hey, it’s not about who’s right or wrong. A real leader should “admit his own mistakes or weaknesses.”
Yep, Obama, the arrogant socialist, is a stark contrast to Dowd’s former boss George W. Bush.
Tebow is the kind of leader for his football team that our country needs at this crucial moment in history. Yes, the Denver Broncos streak will probably end, and the odds are a team like the Green Bay Packers will win the Super Bowl. But no matter the outcome, Tebow has shown what faith, and confidence and humility can do for a team of limited skills that was losing consistently before. This is exactly what President Franklin Roosevelt and President Reagan understood about leadership.
Roosevelt and Reagan understood… failure? Should that be Obama’s speech at the Democratic Convention this summer? “No matter the outcome, I will demonstrate what faith, and confidence and humility can do for a country of limited skills that was losing consistently before. Or I could just release poison gas into the atmosphere and we could all die in our sleep. Give it some thought. I know where I’m leaning but I don’t want to pressure you. Well, actually, you probably wanna go with the gas. I mean, really, life’s terrible.”
This economy, and our country, do not need more programs out of Washington, D.C., or legislation from Congress, or tax cuts for the wealthy, or more spending on government stimulus. What citizens and businesses need is a leader who can raise us all up to a level we didn’t know we had in us, give us confidence in ourselves, give us a common goal to work toward, and make us believe in and have faith in ourselves again.
Yes, this country needs… the Music Man!
The President or Congress doesn’t need to actually do anything. Much like Superman, the President should not “interfere in human history” but rather his “leadership” will inspire us to fix everything. Clearly, all the country needs is the proper motivation to not go bankrupt. This doesn’t appear that time-consuming, so maybe Tebow could do this while maintaining his secret identity as a highly paid quarterback for a great not-so-metropolitan sports franchise.
The only potential kink is that Tebow is not Constitutionally eligible to run for president, as he’s not yet 35 years old. However, no one seemed to object to a head of lettuce from Minnesota running for the highest office in the land, so Tebow might be able to waive out of this requirement.
Ron Paul’s presidential campaign has put his libertarianism philosophy in the spotlight and led to some healthy debate regarding its actual effectiveness as policy. By definition, it claims to hold individual liberty as the “basic moral principle in society” but yet Paul has expressed his repudiation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on the basis of preserving rights of property owners, which is arguably a version of the same reasoning that led to the Civil War
OK, Paul is pro-life, so presumably he’d oppose slavery because of the act of aggression against a living being.
Or not:
Sure, Paul is opposed to slavery but is cavalier — in the libertarian style — regarding ending it. He bemoans the loss of 600,000 Americans during the war. According to the 1860 census, there were 3,950,528 slaves. Slavery is a living death — in the sense that you work for free until you die and with minimum coffee breaks.
The proposal of the U.S. “buying out” slaves from the South would violate Paul’s respect for property ownership by compelling slaveowners to sell their property. That would be a terrible precedent unless it’s based in the logic that slaves aren’t property. If that’s the case, then why are you paying slaveowners for them? The slaves would still receive nothing for their years of free labor, but their owners would essentially get ransom money. Lincoln could have dropped off the briefcase containing the unmarked bills in a deserted alley in Montgomery, Alabama.
Paul seems to forget that the entire Southern economy was based on slave labor. If I paid you $1 million for your entire labor force, which worked for free, you would still need to replace them and with people who’d expect wages. It wouldn’t take long for you to go bankrupt. The South would never agree to this. Though maybe they would be forward thinking and accept the terms, as the freed slaves would have nowhere to go and would conceivably wind up working for them for ridiculously low pay. The plantation owners might even be so kind as to rent them their old quarters back at ridiculously high rates. So, essentially, slaves in all but name. Everyone’s happy!
Come on, Paul, your philosophy can’t be this awful.
Let’s go back to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Segregation and racial discrimination in this country made life almost unbearable for blacks. Surely, Paul recognized this and believed the government needed to resolve it to protect individual rights?
Or not:
Chris Matthews and Ron Paul together are hard to understand but here’s what I gather: Paul believes it’s fine for private businesses to racially discriminate — even though such behavior is an expression of collectivism, which he claims to reject. He seems to live in an alternate reality where the racial discrimination Matthews describes (“whites only” at a laundromat and at a local bar) wasn’t effective. The “free market” would not have ended segregation and racial discrimination in the U.S.
For good or for ill, people are greatly influenced by social and legal convention. If racial discrimination is unlawful, then only a few fanatics would risk their own liberty by violating the law. The illegality of racial discrimination then makes it socially unacceptable, which results in significant alteration of behavior among the mainstream.
It’s one thing if we were talking about how to maintain individual rights in a country without racist, sexist, homophobic baggage. It’s quite another if we’re talking about the United States, which has so much of this baggage, even the largest plane would have trouble taking off with it all. It’s not enough to stop beating someone with a tire iron. You can’t just shake hands, suggest a game of touch football, and then expect a fair result.
I’ve only been to 1955 briefly after an incident in which I was escaping Libyans but Paul lived through it. He is either fooling himself or us if he does not acknowledge that not only was segregation the law of the land, it was a social norm. Businesses in the south that did not serve blacks would not have “gone out of business,” as he speculated. Quite the reverse: It would have been the businesses that dared serve blacks that would have faced financial repercussions.
Oh well, my father might have been sober and dirty in Paul’s libertarian utopia of the 1960s, but at least the rights of property owners are upheld. Those with power (“property”) can wield it however they choose over those without power (“property”). In essence, there are no individual rights because you only have the freedom that comes from the property you own.
When Dr. Paul prescribes the “free market” as a cure, he is promoting collectivism, which he claims to reject. If a restaurant won’t serve blacks, then they should have the right to do so and the individual has the right to go someplace else. Your “right” to eat in a restaurant or rent a hotel room regardless of your race is now based on the “free market” and whether the collective agrees. The individual is now Blanche Dubois dependent on the kindness of strangers who are willing to sacrifice their own meals or accomodations on her behalf.
Let’s see how Paul does with women’s rights. If he’s for individual rights, he certainly would oppose businesses treating women in a less than professsional manner based solely on their gender.
Or not:
Paul’s statements on sexual harassment are more of the same: Women are free to choose to leave an “environment” they don’t like. He doesn’t recognize that this is a burden that would fall on women more often than men, which would limit their careers greatly. No, he seems to think a woman not wanting to work in some “Mad Men” office where her male colleagues make offensive comments is about as frivolous a decision as her not wanting to work someplace that didn’t have Flavia coffee machines. He is at least against the workplace turning into the bar from “The Accused,” which is generous of him, I suppose.
Racial discrimination and sexual harassment are both crimes of collectivism — treating a person as an extension of a group rather than an individual. If Paul supports “individual rights,” then he would support laws that prevent this type of collectivist behavior. However, he always supports “property” rights — the rights of the powerful — first. If the government does not exist to protect individual rights, then it serves no viable function. The powerful don’t need help unless the actual goal is to make it easier for them to score a touchdown after beating you with a tire iron.
Our clips of today — not that I really do clips of the day — are appearances in the late ’70s by Ayn Rand on the Phil Donahue and Tom Snyder shows. Phil is still with us. Tom is not, unfortunately. Both were good conversationalists, as they actually listened to what their guests had to say and asked challenging but not contentious questions. I don’t agree with most of what Rand or even Donahue believe, but it’s fascinating to see people with such divergent perspectives have a cordial and engaging discussion. Those days are behind us, and we are the worst for it.
The Atlantic published a piece of libertarian wonkery regarding a proposed amendment to a Tennessee anti-bullying bill.
Not so many years ago, liberals and progressives would have supported a law ensuring the rights of high school students to express unpopular ideas that could make their classmates uncomfortable but would not threaten anyone’s person or property. Today, they’re apt to condemn this simple affirmation of basic student-speech rights as “horrifying.” Why? Because it appears in a proposed amendment to a Tennessee anti-bullying bill, advocated by an anti-gay Christian activist, and it would establish a religious and political “loophole” for anti-gay speech.
I graduated from high school almost 20 years ago but I don’t recall it being an episode of “Meet the Press.” Unpopular ideas could be expressed in a newspaper — I did it fairly often — but even that was under the guidance of the faculty adviser.
Under present law, “harassment, intimidation or bullying” means any act that substantially interferes with a student’s educational benefits, opportunities or performance, that takes place on school grounds, at any school-sponsored activity, on school-provided transportation or at any official school bus stop, and that has the effect of:
(1) Physically harming a student or damaging a student’s property;
(2) Knowingly placing a student in reasonable fear of physical harm to the student or damage to the student’s property; or
(3) Creating a hostile educational environment.
This bill specifies that “creating a hostile educational environment” would not include discomfort and unpleasantness that can accompany the expression of a viewpoint or belief that is unpopular, not shared by other students, or not shared by teachers or school officials.
The last paragraph has been interpreted as granting a “license to bully” among students who are anti-gay for stupid religious reasons rather than stupid secular reasons. It doesn’t make a lot of sense when you consider that it gives students less protection in school than their parents receive in the workplace. You’re not allowed to tell your female colleague you think her skirt is too short based on your interpretation of the scripture. It’s also not advisable to tell your coworker that he’s living a life of sin with his husband.
If it’s the job of a student’s parents to teach him basic manners, the job of a school is to reinforce them. That would mean you’re polite to your classmates, even if they look or behave differently than you do. I’m not sure how the merits of gay marriage would come up in Algebra, but even if it was a topic during Debate Club, the goal would be to discuss different viewpoints congenially and not make things personal.
Mitt Romney has had his fair share of gaffes during his presidential campaign. He’s claimed corporations are people, which employed the same twisted logic Southern politicians used to try to have slaves counted as people for representation purposes while still treating them like construction equipment. He’s also said he knows what it’s like to be unemployed: He is a millionaire many times over. He’s not “unemployed,” he’s comfortably retired — unlike many people in their early 60s who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own and have to struggle to survive or who had their pensions and retirement savings destroyed through Vegas-style investments.
Just in time for the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday comes Romney’s latest politically tone-death hit, in which he expresses his pleasure in firing people.
Romney’s previous gaffes received more of a pass because he was still running against the human-sized gaffes that are Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain. Now, fresh off his nail-biter, Karl Rove-approved victory in Iowa last week, Romney is receiving true front-runner treatment, which involves his opponents rushing toward any perceived blood in the water. So, he quickly sought to clarify his statement:
“I don’t want to live in a world where we have Obamacare telling us which insurance we have to have, which doctor we can have, which hospital we go to,” Romney said Monday at his news conference, according to The New York Times.
“I believe in the setting as I described this morning where people are able to choose their own doctor, choose their own insurance company. If they don’t like their insurance company or their provider, they can get rid of it,” Romney said.
Let’s look at Romney’s statement more closely, as there are two critical problems with it:
It also means that if you don’t like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. If someone doesn’t give me the good service I need, I want to say, you know, I’m going to go get someone else to provide that service to me.
"Hey, baby, you want some high-octane, blow-the-doors off health insurance?"
Unlike Romney, whose bank accounts have bank accounts, most people in the U.S. realize that health care in this country is expensive and only growing more so each year. When Romney extols the virtue of “choice” in health care, he might as well tell a minimum-wage worker at Wal-Mart who relies on a car to get to work that she has her choice of $100,000 BMWs. The only question now is whether to go for the one with the “luxurious interior” or the “smooth ride.” At this point, she might as well pick her preferred Enterprise model (1701 — original series, baby!, 1701-A, “Star Trek 4 – 6,” or 1701-D, Pimped-out Picard action) because it’s all just a fantasy.
I’d rather work toward getting her into a reasonably economical mid-size sedan, but even Archie Andrews’ jalopy is more practical than what Romney has to offer her, which are sore feet from walking. People with money tend to distract themselves with limitless options. A thousand brands of toothpaste is one of America’s original sins. If you don’t have money, though, the only toothpaste option that matters is the one you can afford.
The other problem with Romney’s statement is the cavalier manner in which he discusses firing people who don’t perform for him as he’d like. Here he definitely demonstrates his big-business background: “Humans” are interchangeable “resources.” If they miss a beat while tap dancing for your entertainment, then bring in someone else. I worked someplace that referred to and promoted this practice as “churn and burn.”
Any idiot can just fire people who screw up. Look at Donald Trump’s TV career. What takes vision, what takes leadership, is to help people succeed. Once upon a time, employee termination was viewed as a mutual failure. I once worked with an executive who combined the worst traits of all the GOP candidates — the insanity of Bachmann and Ron Paul, the cluelessness of Rick Perry, the Snidely Whiplash villainy of Newt Gingrich, the serpentine quality of Rick Santorum, and a conscience about as pronounced as Jon Huntsman’s visibility. I suspected she was assembled in Dr. Mindbender’s laboratory like the Cobra Emperor from “G.I. Joe.”
If staff performance wasn’t what she deemed it should be, she assumed it was due to incompetence, laziness, or meth addiction. Any recommendation for employee development that wasn’t punitive was rejected as “making excuses” or “being soft.” There was little interest in examining expectations and seriously considering if they were realistic. No, better to keep employees on a rotating hamster wheel of wage freezes and staff reductions while blaming them if performance suffered as a result. You can fire everyone who collapses on their way to a finish line that is constantly moved forward but eventually all you have left is management. Unfortunately, we’ve moved past the point where managers are paid to take a bullet. They are now paid to aim and fire.
In fairness, Romney was most likely referring to firing vendors or companies who provide a service, but as he himself said, these companies are comprised of people. What happens to the people who lose their jobs because of mismanagement they can’t control? I used to think the old lady who wrote an angry letter to a company informing them of why she would no longer buy their products was being churlish, but upon reflection, she is giving them the feedback that is necessary to allow them to improve. That’s more than you’d get from the Romneys of the world. For them, it’s all “churn and burn.”
Welcome to 2012 where publications still fire writers for using the word “nigger” (and in this case, its variant “nigga”).
Gawker released (a middle-class term for “fired”) writer Seth Abramovitch because of the following post regarding Kanye West, the rapper who has never used the “n-word” professionally unless you include his music.
(Yes, there’s a song called “Niggas in Paris.” I reviewed the lyrics online and curiously, there are no references to Josephine Baker or James Baldwin.)
In the space of two hours, Kanye West has tweeted 60 times and counting on, uh, his earnest pursuits in the realm of fashion and graphic design and nutrition and architecture and video games and publicity and medicine and law and science and app guys. You think Tom Ford is full of himself? Kanye West shits Tom Fords for breakfast. Then he irons out the shits into cutting-edge fabrics, and frantically cuts, sews, and laces that fabric through the night and into the morning, until he has produced the most unbelievable clothes — nay, FASHION + ART = FARTSHION! — in the universe. And he calls these clothes DONDA. But he calls all that other stuff DONDA, too! DONDA will be your everything. Just you wait and see. And what is DONDA? It’s an acronym for Dis Original N***a Dresses Aight.*
This resulted in an immediate uproar online. Abramovitch apologized, which was apparently deemed “half-assed,” so he was fired.
“Donda” is the name of West’s deceased mother, so the post was certainly in poor taste. Gawker is within its rights to fire writers who post things in poor taste, but Gawker’s also a gossip site, which is the definition of poor taste.
Clearly, Abramovitch was fired for using the word “nigga” in the same post in which he used the word “shit.” The post was meant to be humorous — we should consider the intent even if the execution was unsuccessful — but it still cost him his job in a lousy economy.
He was also arguably fired because he was white. It’s hard to imagine a similar outrage if the author had been black. And it’s not like a black person would have never considered saying the word “nigga.” Chris Rock uses the word all the time in his acts. He’s also used the word “faggot” and he’s not gay. He’s also used the word “bitch,” and he’s not female. So, perhaps there’s a double standard at work.
Reuters referred to the word as “an unpalatable racial slur,” but it’s a constant presence in rap music. A society in which the word is referred to euphemistically and in hushed tones in some quarters but is blast loudly from a stereo at a party in other quarters is an extremely divided society.
I don’t endorse running around calling black people “niggers.” This isn’t my childhood in the South. But the word should be considered within its context, just like any other word. A post mocking Kanye West, a rapper who uses the word frequently himself, is different from a National Review article about Barack Obama. “Nigga” in the latter case would be inappropriate. As far as context goes, I thought the “If I Were a Poor Black Kid” article in Forbes was far more racially insulting than the Gawker post. Abramovitch only used “nigga” once, while the Forbes piece used it metaphorically at least about three dozen times.
Almost 40 years after Richard Pryor released “That Nigger’s Crazy,” I don’t know why people still fear the word “nigger.” Marcia Clark couldn’t even say it in open court during the O.J. Simpson murder trial when confronting a racist witness. The word lost its power to wound when blacks gained the power to respond. They didn’t have to just grin, tap dance, and bear it. As the “Saturday Night Live” sketch with Chevy Chase and Richard Pryor demonstrated, calling a black man “nigger” is a good way to end up with a “dead honkey.”
serhasacomplaint 
The Yellow Heart…
A video has been circulating the Internet depicting four Marines urinating on the dead bodies of Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan. This has led to an appropriate degree of outrage from our political representatives.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry on Sunday defended (the Marines), arguing “what’s really disturbing to me is just, kind of, the over-the-top rhetoric from this administration and their disdain for the military.”
“Obviously, 18, 19-year-old kids make stupid mistakes all too often, and that’s what’s occurred here,” the Republican presidential candidate told Candy Crowley on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “But, you know, when you’re in war, and history kind of backs up — there’s a picture of General Patton doing basically the same thing in the Rhine River. And although there’s not a picture, Churchill did the same thing on the Siegfried line.”
Perry is apparently justifying bad behavior by pointing to historical precedent of bad behavior — a literal trail of urine that leads back to when Moses parted the Red Sea with the force of his own stream.
The fact that this occurs in “war time” is hardly an excuse because it’s not like someone is criticizing Marines for not killing the insurgents according to Queensberry rules. A dead body is inanimate. It can no longer threaten you or defend itself. The proper, sane response to the death of an enemy is regret that violence was the only answer — not a crude celebration of your victory and bladder control.
“I mean, these kids made a mistake, there’s not any doubt about it,” (Perry) said. “They shouldn’t have done it. It’s bad. But to call it a criminal act, I think, is over the top.”
Except for the fact that it is a criminal act: U.S. law and the Geneva Convention “forbid the desecration of dead bodies.”
Perry believes the Obama administration is demonstrating “disdain” for the military by investigating this. Interestingly, Perry earlier stated that the administration was waging a “war on religion” by choosing not to “defend in court the Defense of Marriage Act, the 1996 legal prohibition of federal recognition of same-sex marriages.” So, Obama hates the military when he looks into a criminal offense and apparently hates religion when he doesn’t further the interests of a discriminatory law. Urinating on dead bodies = youthful indiscretion. Marrying the consenting adult of your choice: threat to religious freedom.
Perry is perhaps sympathetic to the four Marines because of his own history of urinating on soldiers — though in his case, it was the gay soldiers whose service in the military he considered “something wrong in this country.”
Comedian Bill Maher also sided with the Marines.
“A dead body is just, you know a f***ing body that’s dead and it just doesn’t bother me… If they were real Taliban, if they were people who burned down girls’ schools, and, you know, do honor rapes and throw acid in people’s faces, I’m not that upset about p***ing on them.”
The fact that these men might have deserved it is no reason for us to endorse such treatment. Their deaths were enough. It ended any evil they were committing and prevented any that they might commit. We are better than they are because of our ideals not simply because we won. Is our morality now inspired by an Image Comic from the 1990s?
CNN contributor Dana Loesch — who I’m pleased to say I hadn’t heard of before today — stated: “C’mon people, this is a war. Do I have a problem with that as a citizen of the United States? No, I don’t.”She added that she wants ‘a million cool points for these guys’ and would be willing to join them.“Can someone explain to me if there is supposed to be a scandal that someone pees on the corpse of a Taliban fighter — someone who as part of an organization murdered over 3,000 Americans.”
OK, it’s one thing to say that the Marines urinating on dead bodies is no big deal. It’s absolutely absurd to claim that it’s deserving of “a million cool points” (redeemable for a free port-a-potty). Is it somehow courageous to pee on corpses? Were the thousands of other soldiers who “held it in” less “cool”? Are we now going to start handing out “Yellow Hearts” for the lengthiest stream?
Loesch’s rationale that these fighters were “part of an organization” that brutally murdered innocent people on 9/11 is also suspect. There’s a good chance these insurgents were in grade school at the time. If Loesch really wants to justify these soldiers’ actions, she could bother to do some research and find some more recent offenses.
Maher and Loesch also seem to be under the impression that Taliban membership is voluntary — like the U.S. armed forces or the GOP view of homosexuality. These insurgents certainly could have willingly chose to serve the Taliban — it’s certainly more comforting for us to believe that — but there is ample evidence of conscription by gunpoint.
Al Gore, in a 2004 speech regarding the reported abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, said the following:
One of the clearest indications of the impending loss of intimacy with one’s soul is the failure to recognize the existence of a soul in those over whom power is exercised, especially if the helpless come to be treated as animals, and degraded. We also know – and not just from De Sade and Freud – the psychological proximity between sexual depravity and other people’s pain. It has been especially shocking and awful to see these paired evils perpetrated so crudely and cruelly in the name of America.
And Nietzsche sums it up fairly succinctly: “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.”
Yes, this was the post where I stated that you shouldn’t urinate on dead bodies. Tune in tomorrow when I explain why you shouldn’t take candy from a baby and then back over her with an ice cream truck.