Saturday, October 10, 2009
You can't arrest me. I'm naked!
The criminal complaint alleges [Julia E. Laack, 36] stole a bag of beef jerky and a lighter at a convenience store Thursday afternoon. Police went to her home. The complaint said she refused to come to the door and began screaming and swearing at three children in her house, telling one that the incident was all his fault.
Police entered and tried to calm her down. With her children present, the complaint said, she stripped to her underwear and told the officers they couldn't arrest her because she would be naked.
Laack struggled with the officers as they tried to arrest her, the complaint alleged, kicking one in the groin and spitting in the mouth of another.
While in the squad car on the way to the police station, the complaint said, Laack exposed her buttocks against the rear window.
The brochure said you'd move beyond "self-imposed and conditioned borders" and "learn (and apply) the awesome power of 'integrity of action.'"
Shortly after 5 p.m. Thursday, a man and a woman, reportedly in their 50s, lapsed into unconsciousness during a simulated Native American sweat-lodge purification ceremony led by a self-help guru and inspirational speaker at a Sedona retreat. They were pronounced dead at Verde Valley Medical Center, and 19 others were hospitalized for as-yet-undetermined causes....
64 people were taking part in the sweat-lodge ceremony, which lasted about two hours and was being hosted by James Arthur Ray, an author and spiritual self-help entrepreneur....
The victims were attending the ceremony during the final day of a five-day program called "Spiritual Warrior," which Ray has conducted at the resort annually since 2003. Ray's Web site lists the cost for next year's program at $9,695 per person.This all happened in Sedona, which the linked newspaper article calls "an international mecca for New Age beliefs and purportedly the site of numerous 'vortexes,' or natural energy confluences thought to enhance spirituality and well-being."
It seems to be a money vortex. $9,000+ to be packed into a very hot stuffy room with 63 other people who saw fit to pay $9,000 for such abuse — rendered subjectively beautiful via soppy thoughts about "Native Americans."
Labels: Arizona, commerce, death, hotness, lightweight religion, New Age, vortex
At the Your Obsession Café...
![DSC04537](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20091010203415im_/http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2554/3997765585_9b52370071.jpg)
... it's where you can go to talk about what's been on your mind, which, one hopes is neither Andrew Sullivan nor the Nobel Peace Prize.
Labels: photography, plants
I respond to those 2 posts Andrew Sullivan wrote about me yesterday.
He also accuses me of having comments so that I can get "vile ad hominem, anonymous hate-speech" which he thinks, I "rel[y] on for traffic." What proof does he have that that is my reason for having comments or that it helps my traffic? I'd be very surprised if the ugliest comments brought more traffic. I think they hurt traffic, so I certainly am not relying on them for traffic. I do think a vivid, flourishing comments section keeps readers coming back to this blog, but not because of the ugliness. I think that drives people away.
This is more serious:
[T]hese were not just homophobic comments. They were vicious personal attacks on a specific human being, using both my sexual orientation and my illness as targets.But generic attacks on gay people as a group are much worse than attacks on a specific person who is a public figure, like Andrew Sullivan. They are still mean, but they are more like the anti-Bush material that goes on about how he was an alcoholic or used cocaine or whatever. I'm not saying it's good, just that it's different from general bigotry. And I would like Andrew Sullivan to acknowledge that I have a good number of active commenters here who are gay men. (Lesbians too.) So there is plenty of pushback against homophobia, and anybody who hates gay people is not going to be happy in my comments section.
Sullivan goes on to criticize me for not deleting the comments that attacked him:
I am glad she does not deny that she engaged in this thread herself, and she did so long after many of the references to my HIV were published. It seems to me that if you are actually contributing to a comment thread, you tend to have read the thread leading up to that point.Well, try it some time. There are hundreds of comments. I skim. I look for spam. I stop at the names of commenters I know and like. I have a free speech policy and ignore stuff that looks like low-quality junk. I have a lot of idiosyncratic strategies for getting through it all, and it's still a lot of work. I'm telling you: Your assumption is wrong.
So the idea she had no idea what was afoot is ludicrous.I may know what's "afoot," but only in a vague way, and not oriented toward finding things to delete. My working strategy is not to delete. From that I have exceptions. One is to look closely if someone emails me and points to something specific. Sullivan never did me that behind-the-scenes courtesy. He just made a post attacking me — and reprinting the ugly stuff. If he really wanted it excised, he wouldn't have reprinted it. He wanted to expose it and air it out. And there you see the value of my non-deletion policy. The ugly stuff is self-destructing! It argues against itself. Why drive it underground? Why empower the haters by letting them see they got to you? They are their own worst enemies.
She has already accused me of being a racist, a heterophobe and a misogynist...I appreciate those 2 links, because I wouldn't have remembered what I'd said. Go ahead and read those old posts of mine. I didn't generically call him a racist. I found racism in the way he talked about Bobby Jindal. As to heterophobia and misogyny.... well, frankly, I do think Sullivan has a problem with women. Does he ever write positively about women? For the most part, women barely exist in his world. And when one comes into prominence — notably Sarah Palin — he seems to feel a special antagonism.
[E]ven if everything Althouse says in her defense is true, it says a lot to me that she is unable even to offer a word of apology or regret, or to remove any of the vilest personal attacks in that thread. I offended her a while back with a post on her announcement that she was getting engaged to one of the commenters on her site... I subsequently apologized for any offense she subsequently felt.Did he really apologize? I emailed him about his outrageous insult and he posted something, but it wasn't really to the point. And anyway, "I subsequently apologized for any offense she subsequently felt"... that's what's called a nonapology. Okay, if it's really that easy then: Andrew, I am subsequently sorry if anything on my blog subsequently offended you.
I was too glib, and insensitive, but it's in a different universe from the hate speech she publishes.It's different all right. The difference is, what was said about me, you wrote. I didn't write any of the the offensive comments. I just have an open forum and a free speech policy. To say I "published" it makes it sound as though I pre-screened it. Ironically, you published those comments. You chose to copy and paste them on your blog.
If Althouse had not partially built her traffic on this kind of stuff for years, and if she weren't a big blog, and a contributor to bloggingheads and other MSM outlets and a professor at a university, I'd let this slide as I usually do....Since I didn't respond yesterday, he may have thought I was letting it slide, because he came up with this second post:
Just check out Ann Althouse's reaction to Garance Franke-Ruta's rather anodyne reference to Jessica Valenti breast controversy on bloggingheads....Oh, for the love of God.
I have no idea what the reference is....Don't worry. It has to do with breasts. It would only bore you.
... she threatens to hang up and tells Garance that she is involved in character assassination. But she is happy to post the vilest attacks on my being gay and having HIV and refuses to apologize.Again, jeez, I don't post the comments! I have an open comments section and a policy against deletion. In the Bloggingheads, I was in a one-on-one conversation with someone who was quietly sticking a dagger in and I called her on it. Where is the contradiction? I don't like crap said about me — and believe me, the breast controversy was a shitstorm — and I completely understand that you don't like crap written about you. Do you realize that my free speech policy includes leaving hundreds of insults against me in my comments section?
Finally, Sullivan restates my asserted free-speech position and then quotes something I wrote in 2005, when I was annoyed by the trend in the comments and said "I'm adopting a new, more activist form of supervision." He then says:
Maybe I missed a post after that where she expressed her willingness not just to accept but to participate in threads that accuse an HIV-survivor of AIDS dementia because they disagree with him.Let me use his word, "disingenuous." It's disingenuous to assume that a policy I stated 4 years ago is the policy I maintain and employ today. Obviously, it's not. Digging up the old defunct policy is a lame device that Sullivan is using to push the point he's been tying himself up in knots trying to make, that the insulting remarks came from me. They did not.
Why antagonize me over this? My inclination is to be sympathetic to anyone with an illness, and I like substantive argument (or funny snark) and not mean-spirited trash.
And, Andrew, if you ever want to go on Bloggingheads and talk about it one-on-one, let me know.
Labels: Andrew Sullivan, apologies, breasts, etiquette, free speech, the Althouse comments community
Am I really as interesting as Sarah Palin's womb?
Am I really as interesting as Sarah Palin's womb?
Labels: Andrew Sullivan, Sarah Palin
Amusingly mean headline in the Daily News email gets me to click... over to a warm fuzzy place.
![](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20091010203415im_/http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_BLtuyBP9bvM/StCONwnqQiI/AAAAAAAAAa4/-xUT8tYDpJ0/s320/cudgel.jpg)
"GOP split on whether to cudgel Obama with Nobel Prize." The song that immediately played in my head was "Vicious, you hit me with a flower." That's enough of a hook for me to think something's bloggable, so I click....
And what the hell?
![](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20091010203415im_/http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_BLtuyBP9bvM/StCPHQwqIgI/AAAAAAAAAbA/juyjYHXQpMM/s320/rainbo.jpg)
It's all rainbows and unicorns. Our sweet prezzident peeps at us through green and gold raindrops, under the sticky-sweet birthday-present headline: "Great Expectations: Nobel Peace Prize will be whatever President Barack Obama makes of it."
Labels: headlines, Nobel Prize, Obama the mood elevator, Obama wins
Friday, October 09, 2009
It's the Bloggingheads Nobel Prizapalooza.
Enjoy!!!!
Labels: Bloggingheads, crime, dadt, federalism, gay parents, Hanna Rosin, law, Nobel Prize, Obama wins
"George Bush liberates 50 million Muslims in Iraq, Reagan liberates hundreds of millions of Europeans and saves parts of Latin America. Any awards?"
More from Rush Limbaugh.
Leave Bill Clinton alone. The poor guy. It must really hurt to have Gore and now Obama getting the prize and not him. It was just a blowjob. Don't they understand that in Europe at least? Or are they waiting for the day when they can give the prize to him and Hillary at the same time. And what about Hillary? Why must she too suffer, seeing Obama collect the prize — and overshadow her in foreign affairs — overshadow her by doing nothing. The indignity of it all!
Let's let Bill speak:
Labels: Bush, Nobel Prize, Obama wins, Rush Limbaugh
"How can he now send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan?"
Labels: Afghanistan, Nobel Prize, Obama wins
"Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges."
Kind of a trick quote, isn't it? Or is that the lofty puffery we've learned to love? Or are you one of the ones who've come to find that sort of thing insipid? Or funny? Or damned scary?
His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population.That is, to lead, you must follow.
For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman.All right then. Hopefully, everyone will tag along after his tagging along and everything will be lovely.
Labels: boring Obama speech, Nobel Prize, Obama wins
"This just reinforces my ongoing impression that we've been living out a satire for the past year or two."
Labels: Balfegor, Nobel Prize, Obama wins
"They are handing him the Nobel Peace Prize because he isn’t George Bush."
More reactions:
Lech Walesa: "Who, Obama? So fast? Too fast — he hasn’t had the time to do anything yet."Lech, look at it the other way. If they wait, he might do something that makes him undeserving. And since he must win it, best to give it preemptively, before any pesky "achievements" cloud the picture... the picture of hope.
Nils Butenschon, director of the Norwegian Center for Human Rights at the University of Oslo: “It seems premature to me... I think the committee should be very careful with the integrity of the prize..”Integrity? Why start now?
Labels: Nobel Prize
I wonder if the Dalai Lama is thinking kind thoughts right now.
Labels: Dalai Lama, Gore, Nobel Prize
Riddle: Why didn't Barack Obama win the Nobel Prize for Literature?
Labels: Nobel Prize, Obama wins
You may ask who else was there who should have won the Nobel Peace Prize?
Labels: Nobel Prize, Obama wins
Barack Obama can now proceed undistracted by thoughts of what he would need to do to win the Nobel Prize.
Labels: Nobel Prize, Obama wins, war
The question is not why did they give Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize.
The story of Barack Obama is the story of winning things when he hasn't yet done enough to deserve them. He is, quite simply, Barack Obama. We understand that. Why didn't the IOC understand? You could see it in that smile on his face, when he concluded his little speech in Copenhagen, that he bore the sublime knowledge he would acquire the Olympics for Chicago. Because he is Barack Obama, the man to whom grand prizes are given.
Last Friday, it was so disconcerting. It just didn't make sense. Chicago is out?! Chicago is out?! And now, things feel right again. Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Labels: Nobel Prize, Obama wins
Thursday, October 08, 2009
The Obamas selected a work of art that's an outright copy of Matisse — done by an African-American woman.
A good place to begin thinking about Alma Thomas’s ravishing late work might be the moment in 1964 when, close to paralysis and bedridden, the 73-year-old artist found herself staring at the hollyhock shadows she had known her entire life and calculating how to use them in her paintings. A year earlier, she had seen the late Matisse cutouts at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Matisse’s work had prompted her to paint an acrylic-on-canvas version of his collage The Snail (1953), in which nearly all the original colors were reversed. Thomas named her painting Watusi (Hard Edge), after Chubby Checker’s dance hit “The Watusi.” As well as marrying high modernism with the popular culture of black America — then entering the American mainstream — the title she chose noted Matisse’s debt to African art.You know, the dance hit, which is actually titled "Wah-Watusi," was by The Orlons. It's not a Checker hit (though he may have covered the song). The Orlons are black too though, so it's as if it doesn't even matter to Art in America, as it makes up its inane explanation of what the old woman was doing.
Anyway, it's really sad to see this sentimental stretching to identify African-American artists. There are plenty of real ones, and mistakes like this make it seem as though there are not and that patronizing — which really ought to be called racism — is necessary.
Labels: art, fake, Michelle Malkin, music, Obama and pop culture, race and pop culture
I am defended over at Unzipped....
Labels: Andrew Sullivan, redirection
Maybe I should set up an Althouse on-line store...
Okay, so shirts: "Althouse Hillbilly," "Professor Althouse deleted me once," etc.It is funny that most of the conservative posters here seem to blithely wave off all of the vile quotes that Sullivan links to but if I write "Althouse Hillbillies" many of these same right wing Jethros get all lathered up about THAT!
Now I want an "Althouse Hillbilly" t-shirt.
Professor Althouse deleted me once. ...
My Dad always told us we was from the hills. Now I want an "Althouse Hillbilly" t-shirt.
Me too!
Labels: commerce
After I note Andrew Sullivan's obsession with Sarah Palin's womb, he responds... by quoting the nastiest stuff in the comments.
I ... stumbled across these comments in Ann Althouse's blog, regarding my skepticism of Sarah Palin's pregnancy stories. I deserve criticism on this and have aired it on this blog ... not because my doubts have been put to rest, but because I know I'm out on a limb and I know that means you take your fair share of whacks. But look at these comments, which Althouse engages with and certainly doesn't remove. I have a thick skin but really...Go to the link to see what he selected from the comments to quote.
This comes with the territory. Some of it is even a little funny. I'm not complaining. But it does bear noting that on a widely read conservative blog, this stuff is routine. I think that's part of the GOP's problem. I also think that Althouse's engagement in the comments section and failure to remove any of these remarks is eloquent."Althouse engages"... "Althouse's engagement"... hey! That reminds me of the time he gratuitously mocked me for writing a blog post letting people know I'd gotten engaged. A peek into Andrew's psyche? Tied to his obsession with Palin's womb? Think about it.
Anyway, as many of you readers have seen time and time again, I have a very high tolerance for vigorous/rough/nasty speech in the comments here. (Some of it is very pro-male homosexuality!)
I rarely delete, and there is no way that my failure to delete indicates approval. I do sometimes participate in the comments, and I have one comment (accidentally double posted) near the beginning of the thread in question. That comment of mine is a response to a commenter (Loafing Oaf) who asks:
How come we often see Althouse commenting on Andrew Sullivan posts but we almost never see him posting replies? I like Andrew Sullivan, but I wish he'd engage in more back-and-forth between him and bloggers who disagree with him.(Guess that one got answered.)
Althouse tends to post replies when bloggers post criticism of her. In recent years, a lot of the bigshot political bloggers have decided to just ignore debating people who disagree with them.So I did engage with a commenter in that thread. I answered a specific question that was addressed to me, and that I happened to find interesting. What I don't do — and what Sullivan is wrong to infer — is monitor the hundreds of comments that come in every day. I don't systematically keep track of anything. Sometimes I read haphazardly, and I am a very busy person... a very busy person who is committed to free speech and to creating a place where people with different opinions can talk with/at each other.
Now, Sullivan is upset/annoyed that some homophobic things show up in the threads here, as if it says something about my blog. He doesn't have comments, but I'll bet if he did, he'd collect plenty of homophobic crap at his place too. Probably even more than shows up here. Maybe that's one reason he doesn't have comments. But I've chosen to open my place to comments, and I have a strong free speech policy.
And let me add that my writing on this blog has never included anything homophobic, that I have a long record of supporting gay rights, and that many of the commenters who hang out here here are gay men. There is no way that I am cuing readers to be homophobic, and I think people who care about free speech and vigorous debate should be careful not to impute such things to me.
ADDED: And check out the lame piling-on by the local blogger for the Isthmus, Kenneth Burns:
... Andrew Sullivan... quotes vile anti-gay comments on the blog of Ann Althouse, the Robert W. & Irma M. Arthur-Bascom Professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Althouse is teaching on the Madison campus this fall.Indeed, Althouse has been teaching on the Madison campus since 1984.
These slurs appear quite literally under Althouse's name. If her policy is not to delete comments, that's her prerogative. But what purpose is served by leaving them up, other than to humilate gays like Sullivan and me and further curdle an already dismal political discourse? Is this prominent Madisonian proud to have these people as readers?The purpose is free speech and vigorous debate.
AND: No one emailed me to point out offensive comments and request that I consider deleting them. I wasn't aware of any of them until I read Sullivan's post this morning. I did get email the other day asking me to delete some nonsense about Glenn Beck. (I didn't delete.) I might delete some truly vile things about gay people. I've deleted comments that contain the n-word. Try emailing me!
ALSO: Boy, a link from Sullivan — who has huge traffic — brings very few readers over here. I would like them to see what the real context is. Of course, a link from the Isthmus blog brings absolutely nothing. As expected.
Labels: Andrew Sullivan, free speech, homosexuality, Loafing Oaf, Sarah Palin, the Althouse comments community
Irving Penn has died, age 92.
In other photography news, finally, we'll get to see Levi Johnston naked. And oh, the humiliation for Sarah Palin!
ADDED: Deafening Silence spotted a fascinating homage to Penn.
Labels: Irving Penn, Levi Johnston, photography, Sarah Palin
You might not want to be the one out in front, championing Polanski, if this is what you wrote in your memoir.
Labels: France, Frederic Mitterrand, pedophilia, prostitution, Roman Polanski
George Gershwin left some songs unfinished.
Todd Gershwin said a collection of several dozen song fragments, ranging from "a few bars to some almost finished songs and everything in between" had been sitting virtually untouched for more than seven decades. He and other trustees began reaching out in the last year or two to find contemporary artists who might be interested in completing those musical bits and pieces.
[Brian] Wilson, who says "Rhapsody in Blue" is his earliest musical memory, said the pieces he's working with are very likely to remain as instrumentals, and that they could easily wind up as three-minute pop songs. But he's also holding open the possibility of expanding them to more substantive pieces.
Wilson said many of them aren't easy to evaluate.
"I can't decipher the verse from the chorus from the bridge," he said, "so I'm going to try to insert some new music into them. I might even write some music for an introduction."
Labels: Brian Wilson, Gershwin, music
"Will Dylan or Oates get literature Nobel today?"
Before last year's prize announcement, outgoing permanent secretary Horace Engdahl said the United States was too insular and ignorant to challenge Europe as the center of the literary world, setting off an uproar.Go ahead, Europe. Boost your ego at our expense. It's what you need. It's what we're here for.
However, England struck a different tone, saying that in most language areas "there are authors that really deserve and could get the Nobel Prize and that goes for the United States and the Americas, as well."Engdahl, England... what difference does it make? Do we care what you think?
The contretemps has made people think there is a better-than-normal chance that an American will receive the prize.And Herta Mueller it is.
Oates has been called a favorite to win for 25 years.
However, British betting firm Ladbrokes is giving the lowest odds to Israel's Amos Oz and German writer Herta Mueller.
In ... two works, Muller depicts life in a small, German-speaking village and the corruption, intolerance and repression to be found there. The Romanian national press was very critical of these works while, outside of Romania, the German press received them very positively. Because Mueller had publicly criticized the dictatorship in Romania, she was prohibited from publishing in her own country....Well, let's see some sentences. Let's see some lines and passages. Let's see those "chiselled" details.
The novels Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jaeger (1992), Herztier (1994; The Land of Green Plums, 1996) and Heute war ich mir lieber nicht begegnet (1997; The Appointment, 2001) give, with chiselled details, a portrait of daily life in a stagnated dictatorship.
Meanwhile:
Socialism, hypnotism, patriotism, materialism.
Fools making laws for the breaking of jaws
And the sound of the keys as they clink
But there's no time to think.
Labels: Dylan, Herta Mueller, Joyce Carol Oates, Nobel Prize, Romania, writing
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
Jon Stewart tells Barack Obama something he apparently needs to be told.
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
The Gay After Tomorrow | ||||
|
Labels: "The Daily Show", Obama and gay rights, Obama and the military
A darling sleep aid, from Japan in the 1960s.
Labels: babies, breasts, sleeping, technology
What is your writing implement of choice?
"I think at some level Congress has a job to write with a scalpel and not a buzz saw in the First Amendment area."Well, it's true, a scalpel is a better writing implement than a buzz saw, but it's still pretty bad. I recommend — for free-speech-threatening purposes — the Uniball Vision Needle. Or, better yet, put down all your implements.
Labels: free speech, law, Supreme Court, things that won't work, writing
Bill Ayers "admits" he wrote "Dreams From My Father."
This, you realize, is especially clever and post-modern.
Get it? Let's say he did write it. Well, he's not really admitting that. He's making fun of the way some conservative bloggers think they've found evidence that he wrote it. He knows most sensible people believe their evidence is bullshit, and this has been amusing to him because he — in this scenario of mine — knows that, actually, they are right.
Now, confronted in the airport, he's handed an opportunity to stir them up into a frenzy — create a vortex around himself — ah, that feels so good! — by telling one of these conservative bloggers that he really did write it. Ah, ha ha ha.
And — he anticipates — that they will ultimately be beaten over the head with how stupid they were to have believed him when obviously he was just jerking their chain.
And this will be especially funny, because he'll know that these people, his enemies, who look like complete idiots, were actually right. And what better way is there to throw everyone off the track?
Brilliant!
Labels: Anne Leary, Ayers, Obama
Healthful foods are also the foods most likely to make you sick.
Obligatory film reference:
Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called "wheat germ, organic honey and tiger's milk."
Dr. Aragon: [chuckling] Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.
Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or... hot fudge?
Dr. Aragon: Those were thought to be unhealthy... precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.
Dr. Melik: Incredible.But don't laugh. Watch the clip at the first link to the end. This is all about priming us for a big increase in the power of the FDA.
Labels: food, health, law, Woody Allen
Instant Karma.
"Yeah, my name is Stacy and I am driving toward Ontario, when a car went off into the median at mile marker 22"...From a very credible-sounding 911 call. (2-minute audio at the link.)
Stacy is actually Melissa Farris, 35, of Caldwell, according to Caldwell Police Chief Chris Allgood. He says Farris made the call to 911, waited for paramedics to leave, then tried to slip under the closing bay door.The paramedics drove off looking for the nonexistent accident — as Farris — who, for whatever reason really wanted to get inside — lay dying under their door.
That attempt failed, and instead she got trapped and died.
Farris was a former worker at the paramedics station where she died Thursday. Her call appeared to be perfectly crafted to call paramedics away from the station.
The artwork Obama has chosen for the White House.
While Jacqueline Kennedy was known for her love of Cézanne and Hillary Rodham Clinton for living with paintings by Kandinsky and de Kooning as well as glass by Dale Chihuly, the Obamas have made a wider selection.Which object do you think most represents him? It's so easy to pick this:
While there are only a few women represented — Louise Nevelson, Susan Rothenberg and [Alma Thomas, the African-American Expressionist painter.] — there are several contemporary African-American painters like William H. Johnson and Glenn Ligon, whose “Black Like Me No. 2,” a paint-stick-on-canvas work from 1992, was among the works chosen.
But on subtle contemplation, I'm going with this:
Labels: art, Obama's psyche
"I don't know how much 4 different weddings would have cost me but I know doing it all at once saved money."
This guy is very organized:
"I prefer polygamy to having many girlfriends which is what some married men do," he says.
"If I love more than one woman, I would rather make it known to the other women in my life and make it official.
"If I feel like taking another wife this is something that will be in the open and my wives would know," he says....
There are seven days in a week and I have four wives. I will take turns visiting them and use the remaining three days to rest.He's pacing himself. If he's committed to giving each woman sex once a week, then he's got room to add 3 more wives, but then he's going to have to build up his vigor and cut down on that rest time.
Labels: polygamy, sex, South Africa
Should bloggers who review books have to make a point of saying that they got them free?
The FTC recently announced that bloggers who review books that they received for free from publishers should make readers aware that the books were provided for free....I've written book reviews for The New York Times and The New York Sun, and I didn't do it for the money. It's not enough money for all the work it takes. In fact, once the NYT had me review a book, paid me, and then never published it. That irked me no end, because I would never have done that much work for the amount it paid. (Maybe $700.) So I certainly wouldn't read a book and write about it just for a free book. Think about it. It's like when people give you a book for a gift. Don't you think, oh, great, now I have to read it. It's way easier to buy somebody a book than for them to read it. Imagine if when you got a book for a gift, you had to write about what you thought about it. You'd be saying to anyone who threatened to send you gifts, please, no gifts!
Newspapers and print magazines don’t provide disclaimers or tell readers that reviewers get the books for free. Newspapers and print magazines don’t announce that their reviewers often keep the free books or sell them on eBay. There is no presumption on the part of the FTC or readers that a newspaper book review is dishonest just because the reviewer was given the book for free....
[T]he government has no place weighing in on the battle between traditional and alternative media and conveying legitimacy on some and denying it to others....
Readers should base their opinion of the honesty of a review on the quality of the review and the track record of the reviewer — the body of work — and should not assume that a “professional” is somehow more honest or less likely to be bribed than an “amateur.” (And with what little money major publications usually pay book reviewers, really, we might as well all be amateurs anyway. I got free books when I reviewed books for the Philadelphia Inquirer. I didn’t suddenly become more honest because the Inquirer also sent me a small check for my work. ).
Now, some of these other gifts are more potentially corrupting. If companies were sending me steaks or cases of wine or .... hey, remember the time I tried to get Chevrolet to send me a Corvette?
Letterman's "stance is that of the proverbial court jester, a clownish figure with a mandate to prick the powerful -- not set himself up as a model of virtue."
But the question is sexual harassment, so: Ask not whether he has a mandate to prick the powerful, ask whether he has a prick to mandate the powerless.
Labels: Letterman, sexual harassment
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Andrew Sullivan is still obsessing over Sarah Palin's pregnant belly.
UPDATE: There is a controversy over the comments to this post, which I write about here.
Labels: Andrew Sullivan, pregnancy, Sarah Palin
"It’s very strange. We’ve had months of sturm and drang, and massive attention focused on the question, Whither health care reform?"
How will the story of America and race be written 100 years from now?
Labels: history, Obama, racial politics
"Cash for clunkers had two objectives: help the environment by increasing fuel efficiency, and boost car sales to help Detroit and the economy. It achieved neither."
According to Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer, at best "the reduction in gasoline consumption will cut our oil consumption by 0.2 percent per year, or less than a single day's gasoline use." Burton Abrams and George Parsons of the University of Delaware added up the total benefits from reduced gas consumption, environmental improvements and the benefit to car buyers and companies, minus the overall cost of cash for clunkers, and found a net cost of roughly $2,000 per vehicle. Rather than stimulating the economy, the program made the nation as a whole $1.4 billion poorer.You can't? It worked for Chaplin:
The basic fallacy of cash for clunkers is that you can somehow create wealth by destroying existing assets that are still productive, in this case cars that still work. Under the program, auto dealers were required to destroy the car engines of trade-ins with a sodium silicate solution, then smash them and send them to the junk yard. As the journalist Henry Hazlitt wrote in his classic, "Economics in One Lesson," you can't raise living standards by breaking windows so some people can get jobs repairing them.
Labels: cars, Chaplin, Obama economics
"Jesus had 12 disciples, so there'd be a hot dog for each of them."
"W00t, sir, we do agree with that."
"God bless you. And God bless America's wieners."
Labels: commerce, lightweight religion
Letterman's new, improved apology.
"There's a possibility that I'll be the first talk show host impeached," he continued. "It's fall here in New York City, and I spent the whole weekend raking my hate mail. It's cold, too—chilly outside, chilly inside my house."Video at the link.
Letterman then mock-started making cracks about Bill Clinton, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and Eliot Spitzer (apparently they all have something in common), stopping himself every time.
"This is only phase one of the scandal," he reminded the audience. "Phase two, next week I go on Oprah and sob."...
"Also," he added, "what can it hurt? Once again I'd like to apologize to the former governor of Alaska. Sarah Palin, I'm terribly, terribly sorry.
Labels: Letterman
Heidi Klum, married to Seal, for more than 4 years, finally decides to change her last name to Seal's last name.
The FTC going after bloggers and social media is like "sending a government goon into Denny’s to listen to the conversations in the corner booth and demand that you disclose that your Uncle Vinnie owns the pizzeria whose product you just endorsed."
The most absurd part of it is the way the FTC is trying to make it okay by assuring us that they will be selective in deciding which writers on the internet to pursue. That is, they've deliberately made a grotesquely overbroad rule, enough to sweep so many of us into technical violations, but we're supposed to feel soothed by the knowledge that government agents will decide who among us gets fined. No, no, no. Overbreath itself is a problem. And so is selective enforcement.
Labels: blogging, Facebook, free speech, Jeff Jarvis, law
Are you happy with your new seats?
Thomas chatted frequently with new seatmate Scalia, and he and Justice Stephen G. Breyer spent time looking from their new vantage points at something on the ceiling.Nice to know that Clarence loves Nino and Ruth loves Tony, but who are they not talking to — other than Thomas not talking to Breyer? Ginsburg's other seatmate is Samuel Alito, and I'm too lazy to figure out who Thomas was stuck sitting next to before the move.
Likewise, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg frequently talked to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, as she now sits to his immediate left.
Do I like to see them happy with their seating positions? Not really. I think there should be more turnover of the seats, so they shouldn't be too comfortable. Whether they are comfortable or not, I think the seating will reshuffle again soon enough.
Labels: law, Supreme Court
The Supreme Court opened its new Term yesterday, and the big question, of course, is...
... an inquisitive new justice... displayed no reticence.... she asked as many questions and made as many comments as... was far more active Monday than in her first hearing as a justice...was part of an animated bench... Sotomayor's active questioning...I guess it can't be helped. Everyone's hungry for something about the new Justice.
The case — Maryland v. Shatzer —was about when police may question of a person who has asked for a lawyer. The basic rule is that the police must stop asking questions until the lawyer is brought in. But the problem here is whether there's ever an end to the proscription against more questions. What if years have passed? What if there is new evidence and a new investigation?
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. posed this hypothetical: What if someone was arrested for joy riding in Maryland, invoked his Fifth Amendment protection, and was never convicted? Could police in Montana question him as a murder suspect in Montana 10 years later?So Alito asked a great question and Sotomayor repeated it.
When Davis said no, Alito replied: "And you don't think that's a ridiculous application of the rule?"
When Alito raised the hypothetical ante to a crime committed 40 years later, Sotomayor joined in.
"He is arrested for joy riding, he is let go, and you are saying that for 20, 40 years he is now immunized from being re-approached by the police?" Sotomayor asked.
Can we infer, then, that she didn't ask any interesting questions?
IN THE COMMENTS: Scott said:
Can we infer, then, that she is a parrot?MadisonMan said:
Can we infer, then, that she is a parrot?
Labels: law, MadisonMan, Scott (the commenter), Sonia Sotomayor, Supreme Court
Obama's photo-op with the doctors gets reported as... a photo-op with doctors.
But some of them — despite getting the memo to wear their lab coats — came dressed, well, appropriately. They wore business suits/dresses for their audience with a President. Oh, no!
White House staff had to scramble to get a bunch of lab coats, and the photo-op of the staffers passing out lab coats to the doctors was much more amusing than the a sea of health-care-reform-supporting doctors the White House wanted.
Come on, people! Obama's in trouble. You need to help.
Labels: Obama's health