The Climate and Health Council, a collaboration of worldwide health
organisations including the Royal College of Nursing, the Royal College of
Physicians and the Royal Society of Medicine, believes there is a direct
link between climate change and better health. Their controversial plan would see GPs and nurses give out advice to their
patients on how to lower their carbon footprint.
So what might a visit to a physician look like in 2012 England?
— Doctor, I have swollen lymph nodes.
We'll get to that. Am I correct that you drove here?
— Sorry? Did I drive here? I — um — yes I did. What ...
You are aware that you could have taken the number 39 bus?
— Yes, I suppose. It only comes once an hour though. I prefer my car.
Well, there's your problem. Your carbon footprint is out of control.
— I, um — I'm actually here to see you about my swollen lymph nodes. How I got here is not that important, is it?
That's where you're wrong, unfortunately. If you don't contribute to keeping our environment healthy, why should our considerable national-health apparatus contribute to keeping you healthy? We all have our responsibilities, my good man. It doesn't appear that you take yours very seriously, now do you?
— Look, could we drop it please, and talk about my lymph nodes for a second?
Certainly. Take two aspirins and call me in the morning. Make sure you take them with a small sip of water, so as not to waste our precious resources. But definitely don't use a soft drink to wash them down — the sugar will kill you. May I suggest you walk home, by the way? A little exercise never hurt anyone. You may pick up a map for pedestrians, with suggested walks, in the waiting room on your way out, for 75 pence.
— This is getting bizarre. No thank you, I'm driving.
Stubborn fellow, aren't you? But please take a map anyway. The proceeds enable the National Health Service to promote environmental awareness among the lightly educated, such as yourself. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a ten-year-old boy with a broken leg to tend to. It seems he violated the sanctity of a tree and fell off a branch.
— Poor lad.
Oh, I assure you, it's nothing that can't be helped with a stern talking-to.
In the none-too-encouraging present, here's the latest scandal involving yet another National-Health-Service-administered shithole hospital.
"The good thing about a 32% beer is that you can get drunk, have your
kebab, throw up in a taxi, start a fight with a post box, and still
be in bed by 9:30."
P.S. As it turns out, BrewDog, the microbrewery behind the world's strongest beer, had caught flak for a previous high-alcohol-content beverage; so in response, the company also released a 1.1%-alcohol beer and called it ... Nanny State. Awesome.
"Anyone who knows BrewDog, knows beer, or anyone has more common
sense than a common (or garden) gnome will know that the scathing and
unrelenting criticism we faced was pretty unjustified. If logic serves, the same people who witch-hunted and publicly
slated us should now offer us heartfelt support and public
congratulations."
"The intention of anybody possessing a firearm is irrelevant."
The mere act of possessing it, however briefly, is illegal. So here's a guy, Paul Clarke (a former soldier and upstanding citizen, from the looks of it) who found a gun and brought it to the police station to "get it off the streets" ... and he has just been convicted. Clarke faces five years in prison. The jury had no choice:
Prosecuting, Brian Stalk, explained to the jury that possession of a
firearm was a "strict liability" charge — therefore Mr. Clarke's
allegedly honest intent was irrelevant. Just by having the gun in his possession he was guilty of the charge, and has no defence in law against it.
Today, on Thanksgiving, I'm thankful for the American heroes who wrested our country from the tyranny of exactly these kinds of laws.
With the purchase of two new Macs, I've given Apple $4,500 this year alone. I've been buying nothing but Macintosh desktop machines and Powerbooks (about 15 total) since 1991, not to mention extended warranties, iPods, Airport routers, and other pricey peripherals.
But there are times when I'd like to kick Apple in the nuts — not because I'm unhappy with the products, but because it's galling to me that I've given all that money to a company that has a troubling penchant for both censorship and the kind of self-serving righteousness that will always receive a smackdown on this blog.
Apple is about as free-speech-unfriendlyastheycome. That's a plenty stupid corporate trait for any company, but especially for one that disproportionally markets to people who think of themselves as individuals, creators, and (in Apple's words) "rebels, misfits, troublemakers, and round pegs in square holes."
Earlier this year, Apple banned the Eucalyptus e-reader from its online app store because the program draws content from Project Gutenberg, the much-loved online library of rights-free classic books. Actually, that wasn't the problem. The problem was, Apple's bluenoses explained, that one of the books in the Gutenberg collection is the Kama Sutra.
And consider the latest episode of Apple cracking down on iPhone content that few outside of the Cupertino bubble would find objectionable. The fashion photos in question are from a mainstream German magazine. They show just enough skin that the developer, perhaps mindful of Apple's legendary prudishness, asked buyers to state whether they are 17 or older before the app can be used. Not good enough, Apple decided. The company yanked the program.
Why does Apple concern itself with what adults voluntarily download to their Macs and iPods in the first place? It's all very much akin to a customer buying, say, a Sony TV, and Sony having programmed the set to shut itself off as soon as it detects a whiff of on-screen raunch. Crazy church-lady stuff, in other words. It's a miracle that Apple's Safari browser allows access to "objectionable" content (I wouldn't know, actually; I use Firefox).
My feelings about the company are not softened one whit by the recent news that Apple refuses to service machines that have been "contaminated" with cigarette smoke. It's one thing if the company wants to argue that tar build-up inside a Mac, or other excessive tobacco-related gremlins, constitute abuse and thus void the warranty. But Apple's eye-popping claim is that smokers' machines are bio-hazards, and that it would be unethical and illegal to expose its personnel to nicotine-related health risks.
That's thinking different, to say the least. Does Apple honestly assume we don't know how many toxic materials go into the making of a computer as a matter of course? The list includes mercury, radioactive isotopes, cadmium, and dioxins. But some tobacco residue, that'll kill Apple's people like flies? Please. They think nicotine is icky? Here's my free advice: Don a pair of latex gloves, wear a 25-cent mask from the hardware store if you're still worried, and get to fucking work on those broken Macs already.
For the record, I find Apple's actions in all these cases much more distasteful than any content (or tobacco cooties) that the company has so far managed to suppress.
Some two dozen Lincoln University seniors may not receive their degrees
this spring, thanks to a graduation requirement stipulating that
students who enter college with a BMI over 30 must either prove to the
school that they've lost weight, or take a one-semester class called
"Fitness for Life." ... James DeBoy, chairman of the health, physical education, and
recreation department, doesn't see a problem with the requirement. "We
test for written, oral communication skills, and I don't see this as
any different," he says. "We want our students to have a sound mind, but also a sound body."
The notion that thin is healthy, and fat leads to disease and death, is bizarrely limited. It ignores landmark research that shows that people who are moderately overweight enjoy better health than people who have the "right" weight as dictated by the BMI. In a major study by the Mayo Clinic, published in the Lancet a few years ago, overweight patients had better survival rates and fewer hart problems than those with a 'desirable' BMI. By the same token, subjects with a lower-than-ideal BMI had anelevatedrisk of heart disease.
We all know or have met people who are lean, and yet don't exactly look like the picture of health. They might include chronic drug (ab)users, bulimia and anorexia sufferers, AIDS and cancer patients, smokers, and so on.
The BMI is a flawed standard, and the procrustean zeal with which it is applied by medical professionals and busybody laypeople alike is disturbing. The BMI is a 175-year-old scheme dreamed up by an obscure Belgian physician in an era when phrenology was considered a solid science. If it has any usefulness at all, it should be used as a very rough, very broad guideline — not as a club to gleefully and smugly hit pear-shaped people over the head with.
Got a call from a pollster at the Centers for Disease Control just now, regarding tobacco. Our exchange, pretty much verbatim:
She: Have you smoked a cigarette in the past seven days?
Me: No.
She: In the past thirty days?
Me: No.
She: How about in the past year?
Me: I don't believe I've smoked a cigarette in more than twenty years.
She: I know this is repetitive, I have to ask you this, OK? In the past five years?
Me: [laughing] No.
She: How about in the last ten years?
Me: That would be another no.
She: Fifteen years?
Me: No. Nope. Noperooney.
She: So has it been more than fifteen years since you last smoked a cigarette?
Me: Nothing wrong with your powers of deduction! Hey, this isn't personal, I swear, but would you be surprised if I told you that you're confirming some long-held suspicions about the federal government? You do see that it's a little bit nuts to keep asking these questions once I've given you the answer you're after, right?
She: I understand sir. As I said, they might be a little repetitive.
Me: Oh hell, it's fine — at least you're giving me something to blog about. Please, continue.
She: Thank you. Have you ever smoked tobacco in a water pipe, also known as a hookah, even once in your life?
Me: Sure. Late seventies, early eighties.
She: Have you smoked a water pipe in the past week?
Me: Nein. Nyet.
She: In the past thirty days?
Me: This is going to take a while, isn't it?
Nice lady. I'm sure I'll remember her for a fleeting moment come April 15.
When raising my kids (below), I do fine without corporeal punishment, and without threatening corporeal punishment. But exceptions have occurred. I've spanked my seven-year-old twice in her life (and my youngest, 4, never...so far). The last time happened about three years ago, after the oldest threw a cup of milk at me during a nasty tantrum.
I note that, since firmly swatting her bottom on that occasion, I've not been doused in dairy again.
In England, the punishment I meted out might have meant jail time for me, or maybe a decade of probation. This British mother only threatened to spank her out-of-control kids, and the consequences were unpleasant, to say the least:
[A] 34-year-old mother, the trainee manager of a Christian
bookshop, ... was quizzed by police after threatening to smack her children,
a boy of 11 and a four-year-old girl, when they started rampaging round her
local supermarket in Southampton.
Later, she received an official letter from the council's children's services
department, warning her that her "chastisement" of them had been "put
on record" for at least the next 14 years.
Anyway, thought I'd share my own (ahem) history of violence, only because I'd hate to see spanking become a subject that can no longer be discussed in polite company except when voicing mandatory disapproval. Sure, habitually hitting and beating children is likely to create monsters. But there are also kids — legions of them, I bet — who will turn into monsters if they never receive a few slaps on the behind, or threats thereof.
From where I sit, spanking is a useful tool in a parent's repertoire. It's kinda like owning a sump pump for the basement: it may only come in handy once or twice, and you hope to never have to use it, but it's nice to have it at your disposal.
Part of the joy of watching Top Gear, the BBC's outrageous car program whose new season starts this weekend, is that it's a droll, politically incorrect antidote to the stifling sanctimoniousness of rules-mad Labour apparatchiks. The Guardian, though reliably left-wing, recognizes that. Or, in this profile, at least the paper doesn't try to gloss over it. Says James May, one of the three hosts:
"We don't like being told by other people how we
should live and how we should think."
As for the underdeveloped environmental sensitivity of his colleague Jeremy Clarkson,
During filming for Top Gear, it was claimed he damaged a peat bog in
Scotland. On another occasion, the BBC was forced to apologise after he
rammed a pick-up into a chestnut tree to test the vehicle's strength.
He rails against political correctness and health and safety
regulations, and earlier this summer was accused of calling Gordon
Brown "a cunt" in unbroadcast comments to his Top Gear audience, whom
he has also referred to as "oafs". He has been condemned by chief
constables for glamorising speeding, has joked about truck drivers
murdering prostitutes, and said a woman presenter would be "a disaster"
on Top Gear.
He sounds like a sexist monster and a bully, but
then Clarkson's reactionary opinions are probably the calculated
wind-ups of a professional stirrer.
Precisely.
Undaunted by the criticism of reflexive nannies and professional sourpusses, the show's stars tear up the world's asphalt in clunkers and supercars alike, with so much good cheer and studied carelessness and schoolboy charm as to constitute a Jackass for doughy white men and the women who love them.
Another joy of the program is that it results in enraged comments by Guardian readers, such as this one by "jonnyhaw":
"I don't like cars and their effect on our lives and our cities, so obviously can't stand Top Gear. When is the BBC going to produce an hour-long, primetime programme for public transport users?"
When indeed. Really, that's almost as funny as the show itself.
Not yet familiar with the program? Right this way.
Or enjoy the Top Gear team doing the American South in sub-$1,000 jalopes, pranking each other almost to the point of death-by-angry-mob:
My two young Chinese-born girls were abandoned
as infants. My oldest was left in a box in the stairwell of a Chinese cigarette factory (let the two minutes' hate against Big Tobacco commence!). My youngest was placed in a box of her own in the middle of a traffic circle, where she cried her smog-filled little lungs out for hours, maybe days. Most likely, they were discarded in favor of boys — China's odious population-control policy at work.
So, really, I want to like the Girl Effect website. Of course girls deserve the same
chances as boys. I'm, let's say, rather adamant about that.
I'm put off, though, by the facile implication of the
site's makers that girls are the virtuous gender whose innate
decency and quiet wisdom will somehow make the world all right.
Equality means
treating everyone the same. That means not favoring one sex over the other.
There's something undeniably discriminatory about the assumption
that if you give a girl an education, she will rise through the ranks
and bless the community with her intelligence and superior judgment;
whereas boys are the hopeless gender, not to be entrusted with such
delicate things as leadership and vision.
On the other hand, I have donated to Greg Mortensen's Central Asia Institute,
where girls' education is paramount, so what do I know?
P.S.: For some reason, I get the feeling I won't have much to worry about with my daughters, learning- and empowerment-wise. Half an hour ago, just kinda goofing off on my Mac, I was teaching Jolie (4) the rudiments of Photoshop. Using the eyedropper tool, I showed her how to choose any color. "For instance, honey, here, let's pick brown." Her reply: "Daddy, that's more of a terracotta-rust shade." !! WTF is up with this kid?
Inevitably, the execution of John Allen Muhammad, the D.C. sniper who murdered ten people in 2002, drew heated protests in recent days. I understand the opposition to the death penalty in general, and am relatively agnostic on the topic. It's a damn sight more than unfortunate that in the U.S.A., capital punishment is
applied so easily and broadly, and in a pretty overtly
racist and often arbitrary way to boot. Then again, there are capital crimes that are so grotesque and heinous, and the guilt of the perp so completely beyond question, that I can't lose sleep over the killer being given a lethal injection. Yes, putting a man to death is horrible (it is supposed to be), just as I am repelled by the people who celebrate the snuffing out of another human being's life, even if that human being is a mad killer.
That said, I'm glad Muhammad's lawyers got nowhere when they tried to present last-minute evidence that their client had been beaten and generally treated badly as a boy. A shitty childhood neither excuses nor truly explains a single thing — be it failure to obey a stop sign, taking a dump in the cereal
aisle, and least of all, capital murder times ten. If it did, we'd be
living in a nation of dozens of millions of poor maltreated serial
killers (and, I suppose, serial/cereal dumpers).
Similarly, surely tons of sociopaths have enjoyed rather charmed, gilded upbringings. What's their excuse?
A Facebook friend of a friend, D.B., claimed yesterday that my notion is factually wrong:
No serial killer, rapist, dictator, or sociopath ever studied had anything but the most brutal of childhoods.
I don't believe that's true (examples welcome, I'm too overworked to hit Google much right now) — but even if it is, so what? What are we to take away from that? Lots of folks endure
loveless childhoods, even beatings, and still make something of
themselves. I'm rather attached to the idea that people are responsible for their own actions. If we don't believe that, where does our personal culpability for bad / criminal behavior end? And if "others" are overwhelmingly to blame for how we turn out, couldn't every bully, thug, and killer just insist they wuz robbed — robbed of a childhood with a mom's kisses and a dad's hugs, not to mention teachers' persistent attaboys and apple pie on Sundays and bi-annual family trips to Disneyland?
Yes, they could, and many of them do — or else their supporters and defense attorneys will do it for them.
The nadir of this belated mollycoddling and soft-hearted ueber-tolerance has to be an article entitled The Price We Pay For Shaming Little Boys by Dr. Mary Armstrong, a Canadian pyschotherapist. (D.B. referred to the short essay approvingly to bolster his argument, so I checked it out.) The good doctor's screed qualifies as one of the oddest pieces of failed academic prose ever
secreted in the field of psychology, which is quite a distinction in a profession rife with claptrap.
What does Ms. Armstrong set out to do? It's pretty ambitious: She is begging of us to understand that high-ranking World-War-II-era nazis and all their henchmen, right down to the lowliest concentration camp guards, are honest-to-god victims.
That's right. Armstrong contends that because
early-twentieth-century German men grew up in a "harsh" child-rearing
culture, and were then further cheated out of building "self-esteem" due to the
"humiliating and bloody defeat of 1918 and the subsequent shame of
Versailles," they couldn't help but take revenge on Jews.
Germans who had been traumatized in childhood took out
their rage on Jews and others who reminded them of themselves when they
were helpless children. They projected onto others all their own 'bad'
qualities which they had never been able to accept in themselves.
Oh,
those poor Nazis! Their lack of "self-esteem," fueled by their cold Prussian daddies, caused them to go bonkers and kill six million Jews.
This
is, to a T, my problem with the kind of moral relativism preached by D.B. and others; in the end, Armstrong's so-soft-it's-rotting view of human depravity lets even
Hitler's mass murderers off the hook. To hear her tell it, any Nazi can claim full-blown "injured-party" status right
alongside the gays and gypsies and Jews he and the rest of his Herrenvolk tried so very hard to
exterminate.
For his part, D.B. says he is not out to excuse bad behavior, and I believe him. But he's playing a game of dialectics. There's is really only a hairbreadth's difference between explaining why someone is
legally but perhaps not morally culpable for premeditated murder or
genocide (after all, "they grew up with abusive parents," etc.), and excusing it.
John Allen Muhammad has been dead less than 24 hours, but my thoughts are not with him; he leaves me neither hot under the collar nor cold in my heart. My thoughts are with the families and the friends of the ten people he killed.
I'm sorry if that offends people like D.B., and delighted if that offends crackpot victimology champions like Dr. Mary Armstrong.
I've been traveling a lot this past week, in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Vermont. I'd hoped that my Maine plates would turn into a mark of pride on November 3. Instead, it feels like I've been driving around with this on my car. "Regrettable" doesn't begin to cover the bitter outcome of Tuesday's election.
I have a
question for Maine's Yes-on-1 voters: Will you have the guts to tell your
children and grandchildren (not just today but in a generation from
now) what you did, how you pulled the lever in favor of discrimination?
Just curious.
One reason I was relieved to leave the Netherlands behind had to to with the stifling requirements of government-mandated sameness. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of petty Dutch rules that governed everything from what you were allowed to call your newborn to what exact color you were allowed to paint your front door (in Amsterdam's city center, you may choose any color at all, as long as it is a particular shade of dark green).
To my chagrin, I've since learned that forced conformity is the rule in a good number of municipalities in the U.S. too (to say nothing of condo boards and homeowners' associations, which appear to be the favorite refuge of wannabe tyrants everywhere). The mentality is on perfect display here:
A property manager's decision to paint a rundown rental house pink is angering some neighbors, who say the owner is trying to get back at the city. BK Management repainted the house in the New Chauncey neighborhood district after city inspectors said the dwelling needed aesthetic improvements. Chad Budreau of BK Management said the owners originally wanted to install neutral siding but chose paint because of the cost. "We were able to get the paint for a very good price, and the students living there seem to like it a lot. A lot of people have actually called and complimented us on the color," he said.
Katy Bunder, who has lived in the neighborhood for 22 years, isn't one of them. "It's the worst I've ever seen on a home," she said. Bunder says the owners "intentionally devalued" the house.
Which makes zero sense.
I wonder if Ms. Bunder would accuse the owners of these and these homes of having "devalued" them. Me, I think it's kinda nice that not every house has to be painted beige or eggshell-white; though if people like Katy Bunder had anything to do with it, no doubt that'd be the law.
Most great children's literature, despite its greatness, is still an open book. As adults, we know why these books work. We see and recognize the masterful, rhyming whimsy in Dr. Seuss' greatest hits; the bursting-at-the-seams anarchy and just a hint of loneliness and lost-ness in the Eloise series (minus the dreadful Eloise at Christmastime, that is); the simple-minded, almost soulless innocence of Curious George.
All these books, while unique in their tone and content, and while groundbreaking in their day, are transparent enough. They're not quite formulaic, but they were written in an idiom that is fairly easy to copy, both for the original author and for the epigones following in his or her footsteps.
I know only three exceptions to this general rule: Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree, a book that has occasionally forced me to pretend I had something in my eye; Alice in Wonderland, awash in odd imagery and day-glo allegories; and Maurice Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are. (Admittedly, Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon deserves at least an honorable mention here.)
Of these, to me, Wild Things is the most impenetrable mystery. It's Heart of Darkness for toddlers. It stirs something deep in me, and presumably in generations of other readers, that I cannot put into words. I'm tempted to compliment the book by saying that it is pure poetry, but that's a meaningless descriptor — especially for someone who, like me, has never cared for poetry that much.
Wild Things is, I believe, irreproducible. It appears fueled not by a calculated "what if" (what if a little girl lived in the Plaza Hotel, what if an explorer brought an African chimp to America), but by one author taking a kernel of an idea and recklessly letting it take him where it
wants, giving in to the pull of his intuition and subconsciousness.
There's no internal logic to Where the Wild Things Are, no overt meaning (though lots of hidden ones), let alone (shudder) a message: rather, the book is a danger-skirting fever dream that Sendak rides without holding back, capturing a wisp of inspiration that can't be willed to return.
Sendak is an admirer of Herman Melville, and once said of Melville's books
"There's a mystery there, a clue, a nut, a bolt, and if I put it together, I find me."
I doubt there's higher praise for any author. It applies equally to Sendak himself.
Whether Spike Jonze's movie will do justice to Sendak's masterpiece, I don't know — I'm prepared for the film to be somewhere between a glorious flop and this generation's Kazaam.
So why am I even writing about Sendak on Nobody's Business? Because the irascible author tells scared little children to go fuck themselves. Well, almost.
That's a whole new level of caution-to-the-wind curmudgeonry. I have to say, I admire it a helluva lot more than the bromides of professional audience-panderers like Disney Corp (the a-holes who turned A.A. Milne's beautiful Winnie the Pooh into a godforsaken saccharine cuddleball).
I also like imagining how Sendak's remarks will rile the mollycoddlers and the nannies who insist that children's entertainment must be exclusively wholesome and educational (the kind of people who are not above trying to ban his books, such as In the Night Kitchen, from public libraries).
We need Wild Things, like Sendak. Yeah: Wild Things, too.
It's come to this: A prominent New York Times scribe supports government-coerced speech.
Randy Cohen, the paper's self-styled resident ethicist, is in favor of mandatory warning labels on advertising images that have been Photoshopped. He hints he might even support a ban on such images, analogous to a law that Britain's Liberal Democrats have been pushing. (French parliamentarians have also been clamoring for mandatory warnings, with fines of more than $50,000 per violation.) Cohen got religious about the issue in the wake of the Ralph Lauren skeletal-model controversy.
Let me start here: I desperately wish that some kindly art director at the Times would digitally correct Randy Cohen's too-magenta, overly-shiny, yellow-toothed headshot (at right). Long live Photoshop!
And
I advise anyone — Times pontificators, social activists, legislators — to keep their damn noses out of my business. How I make the people
in front of my cameras look (and yes, I frequently use Photoshop to
soften laugh lines, brighten smiles, discreetly slim belly bulges, and
so on) is none of anyone's beeswax; it's between me, my clients, and
those models.
The wannabe busybodies can make their images look
they way they want and I'll make my images look the way I want. Then
we'll let the marketplace sort out which photos consumers prefer. Fair enough?
To be sure, yeah, those
'shopped Ralph Lauren models look horrifyingly freakish to me; and in trying to belatedly suppress the images with stupid legal threats, the company sure didn't do itself any favors. The dreadful, what-were-they-thinking Photoshop work
in question rightly reaped a firestorm of criticism, causing RL
to apologize and (a)mend its ways. That's the way we take care of things in a
grown-up democratic society — not by slapping mandatory warning labels
and wholesale prohibitions on some of the things we don't happen to
like.
Imagine, in a few short years: If I want to publish a photo that I took — hang it in a local gallery, put it in an ad, share it on Flickr — and I've used Photoshop's
cloning tool or healing brush, I'll be forced to destroy the
visual integrity of my image with a mandatory warning label, roughly
as attractive as a bar code and possibly a whole lot bigger. If I disobey, my business may be fined out of existence.
That's nuts. And wrong.
I won't stand for anyone doing that to me, my images, my vision, my style, my business, or my clients.
And for what? To protect women from "developing an unrealistic self-image"? (Does anyone else see how sexist that notion is on its face — as if women are too weak-willed and lame-brained to be trusted with glamour photos that may shatter their delicate Victorian sense of selves?) Or is the goal to promote
truth in advertising? In either case, then we should also ban or regulate, just for starters, push-up bras, breast implants, artificial
eyelashes, botox, and lip gloss.
It follows that, if "reality" is the goal, or the only reasonable benchmark, we should require people to walk around with text stenciled on their foreheads saying they've had lipo, they still suck in their stomach at parties, and they've shaved their armpits. After all, those things are not what nature intended. They promote unrealistic body images, and, being augmented reality, are carried out to deceive.
Cosmetics are merely "hope in a jar"; Photoshop, on the other hand, offers guaranteed
results. How is that a bad thing? I wonder how many people wouldn't like to look a little younger, a little trimmer, when they have their photo taken. In fact, I'd
wager that rather a lot of the very same men and women who profess to abhor "photochopping" would, if given the option, prefer to look at a photo of themselves in
which they're five pounds lighter, and in which they have mild
laugh lines instead of deep crow's feet — "reality" be damned. They demand that other people's pictures be unretouched; I suspect they'd like their own portrait to be the sole exception.
I recently attempted to test this theory in a discussion on an online forum. To the local feminist who publicly excoriated fashion photography and Photoshop artifice, I extended this (I thought) rather generous offer:
I invite you to have your photo taken by me. After I'm done brightening eyes, smoothing
skin, and so on [in Photoshop], you get to pick either the high-resolution before or after version to display to the world (Facebook/Flickr/YouTube et cetera). When would you like to schedule your free session?
I never heard from her again.
The effectiveness of any of the augmented-reality methods I mentioned above (Photoshopping included), and the degree to which they convince people that there's no choice but to copy that look in real life, depends entirely on
the gullibility of the beholder. The answer to the problem, then, is not "Make more laws." The answer is not "Let's have a Photoshop / fashion police." The answer is "Stop being such an impressionable dimwit."
I'm genuinely happy about this YouTube video (below), which I recently watched twice with my seven-year-old daughter (who is anything but a dimwit but still plenty impressionable). It's a great discussion piece and we had a nice talk about it, one we'll repeat as necessary:
It seems to me that, as usual, education is a thousand times better than legislation.
This whole debate is ultimately about personal freedom — the freedom to pursue the image you can see in your head,
whether you're a photographer or someone dolling herself up for a date.
UPDATE, Wednesday evening: Cohen published a followup today that's even more gobsmacking.
By his own explicit if belated admission, a warning label
would have no effect; after all, to his opponents' idea that surely we may expect a bit of critical, independent thought from the would-be
victims, he replies
[This] erroneously assumes that simply knowing that an image is falsified immunizes you from its effect.
Interesting,
no? So he's saying, labels won't help; and women can't be counted on to arm themselves
with a modicum of skepticism. It seems that banning 'shopped images is
the only solution Cohen is left with.
I remember an era when the Times was on the first line of defense against First-Amendment attacks.
Bernard Kerik — former NYPD police commissioner, one-time Homeland Security Secretary nominee,
national Sept. 11 hero — has a new label. Inmate No. 210-717.
Kerik got his assigned number at the Westchester County jail after becoming the first NYPD commissioner to wind up
behind bars when a judge revoked his bail Tuesday for trying to taint
the jury pool in his upcoming corruption trial. ...
"Mr. Kerik has a toxic combination of self-minded focus and arrogance
that leads him to believe that the ends justify the means, that rules
that apply to all don't apply to him in the same way, that rulings of
the court are an inconvenience," [judge Stephen] Robinson said.
Remarkable post from Scott Greenfield, a prominent blawger, reflecting on the mindset of prosecutors — and on what happens when their pedestal implodes and they lose their job and find themselves literally living with their parents again, as happened to the once high-flying and perhaps overly self-righteous David Greenspan:
Oh, how wonderful to be so powerful, to be able to make life and death
decisions for others with the might of the State behind you. How
glorious to laugh about it with your friends at the bar afterward, how
you showed this miscreant who's boss. And to make defense lawyers,
many years your senior, talk sweet to you, beg you, cajole you, try to
curry your favor, all to weasel some small concession out of you. How
wonderful it is to wield such power.
And then one day it's
gone. All gone. The judges who once loved you no longer know your
name. The lawyers who quaked when you looked at them askance ignore
you. You're nothing. You're nobody. All the bridges burned, the
friends you thought you had, and nobody will take your calls. ...
Some may feel the Schadenfreude, but that's petty. They are only
children, fed a false belief of importance and given powers far beyond
their abilities and understanding.
Here's a small anecdotal measure of the efficiency of the U.S. postal system.
So a product I ordered from Hong Kong was shipped on October 3rd and arrived at a New York sorting facility, after an 8,000-mile trip, on the 5th. Then our "neither sleet nor rain nor snow" paragons took over, unfortunately producing eleven days of zilch (and counting). As of right now, the status on the postal service's website still shows that my package is "in transit."
To call that "tracking" is to call Stephen Hawking "a silver-tongued orator."
By the way, the distance between New York and Downeast Maine is about 400 miles. An arthritic donkey could have covered that stretch by now.
More fun: The manager at my local post office says I'll have to wait at least another week before he's willing to begin making inquiries.
James Lindgren, a law professor at Northwestern, asks an intriguing question when a New Yorker scribe quizzes him about David Letterman having allegedly been blackmailed by Robert Joel Halderman, a TV producer with knowledge of Letterman's intra-office trysts.
It's perfectly legal for Halderman to write, or threaten to write, a
screenplay (or an e-mail to TMZ) exposing the fact that David Letterman
had flings with "Late Show" employees. It's also legal for Halderman to
ask Letterman for money as part of a business transaction. So why are
the two things illegal when you put them together? In other words,
Lindgren said, “Why is it illegal to threaten to do what you can do
legally anyway?"
I'd never really thought about it, but I find that a convincing argument. Halderman is a douche — but why would he be a lawbreaker?
Saul Smilansky, the author of "Ten Moral Paradoxes," said that, in his opinion, what Halderman did
wasn't heinous. "It's not terribly attractive, but it's still fairly
standard capitalist practice," he said. "The Marxists used to say that
capitalism is like blackmail — everyone tries to buy people off. Many
social transactions look like blackmail when you examine them." He
listed a few: "couples in divorce proceedings basically blackmailing
each other to get a better deal," consumers telling a company "if they
don't get a settlement they’ll go to the press" — in other words, any
negotiations based on threats. What makes blackmail different? "There's
no good reason to allow it," Smilansky said. "But our attitude towards
blackmail, that it's so unusual, so terrible — it's just sanctimonious."
I frequently blog about unnecessary new laws — but unnecessary old ones can be plenty odious too.
The legislation I want most is a bill stipulating that for every new law that gets put on the books, lawmakers must abolish an existing one. The law against blackmail ought to be be a prime candidate for legislative overhaul, or, better yet, for scrapping altogether.
"Whilst it is obviously a load of nonsense it will appeal to people who are in distress or are vulnerable. It really is manipulation of people's fears and a complete fraud."
That's a Catholic clergyman from Cambridge, England, speaking out against a local center for the occult. Self-awareness has never been the Church's strong suit, I suppose.
Interesting piece about how parking enforcement has become a cash cow for towns and cities across the United States. Local government workers privately call it a curb tax. Cute.
How
aggressive is enforcement? Bolofsky said he's seen New York drivers get
tickets for double-parking merely because they are waiting for someone
to pull out of a spot on the street — a time-honored practice in the
competitive world of city parking. "They
sneak up behind people. They are waiting in the wings, in the shadows,"
he said. "Then they knock on the window and hand the driver a summons."
In its manifesto the Democratic Party, which won a general election in
August, pledged to introduce full videotaping of interrogations.
Japan's courts have a conviction rate of more than 99% — although it
cannot be compared directly to other countries because there is no plea
bargaining. Prosecutors usually proceed with a case only if they are sure they will win, and a confession has been called the king of evidence.
Extracting one from an innocent man or woman isn't as hard as it may seem.
"The
detainee has absolutely no access to his defence lawyers, has no idea
how long the interrogation session would go," said Rajiv Narayan of
Amnesty International.
That's not quite accurate: Any suspect in Japan may be detained for 23 days before charges must finally be brought. So the suspect need only hold out for three-plus weeks against treatment like this:
"[Interrogation] involves many, many hours
of repeated questions [as many as 16 hours a day, RvB] and sometimes sleep deprivation, and where the
detainee is given the impression he would only be released once he
confesses." ...
[One suspect, a British national,] says he was handcuffed, tied with a rope to his chair and not allowed to use the toilet. Every day he was presented with papers in Japanese, which he did not understand, and told to sign them.
But, you know, the Japanese do make the trains run on time. Whole article here.
In Philadelphia, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania
find, possessing a gun is strongly associated with getting shot.
Since "guns did not protect those who possessed them," they
conclude,
"people should rethink their possession of guns." This is
like noting that possessing a parachute is strongly
associated with being injured while jumping from a plane, then
concluding that skydivers would be better off unencumbered
by safety equipment designed to slow their descent.
Mary Kenny, in the Guardian, writes why she, as a Catholic, feels persecuted, and why this so-called persecution elates her:
To be persecuted — or at least, disapproved of — is the highest honour,
because it means that the Christian is not fitting in with "the
system": he or she is not part of any "establishment".
Quite. Christian culture is far outside the mainstream, and so antithetical to the establishment, isn't it? Christians have zero political power; no overriding cultural influence whatsoever; and apart from the tattered Bibles that they stealthily pass back and forth while hoping not to get caught, they really have nothing to call their own.
This is the norm everywhere in the West.
Except for every fucking place I've ever visited in the U.S.A., the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain, and so on.
It's bizarro world for any of Christ's followers to claim otherwise. Our entire Western culture is so absolutely steeped in Christian notions, Christian values, Christian traditions, Christian power, and Judeo-Christian laws, that it throws Ms. Kenny's observational faculties into some doubt. To be kind, perhaps she genuinely doesn't know any better; perhaps she can no more experience reality than a fish truly experiences water. In other words, when the stuff that constitutes your environment is so pervasive, it may just become invisible.
On a good day, I find Kenny and Christians like her amusing. On a bad day, they irk me no end. What do they know of persecution beyond what their pious ancestors did to heretics and freethinkers and "witches"?
Western Christians claiming the mantle of martyrdom, openly cherishing the delusional belief that they're spat upon and vilified at every turn — now that's some goddamn chutzpah.
In her broadside, Kenny also bemoans the fact that our culture has turned materialistic, that opulence has become a virtue:
The world rewards greed, pride, aggression, pushiness, clamour, and frocks and rocks that cost a million.
Christianity, she suggests, is the antidote to this cultural disease.
That's enough cognitive dissonance to make one's head asplode. I have some images I'd like to show her. My pleasure.
P.S. Here, former Pope John Paul complained of a drop in living standards after he'd moved from the Vatican to the kingdom of Heaven. Another spot-on Onion spoof.
More than 500 complaints per 1,000 officers in one year's time. Even when you take into account that not every complaint is justified, that's a pretty astonishing number. Three British police forces easily reach such a level of [cough] professionalism, and plenty more fall only just shy of the mark.
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