The Biscuit Report

American culture is profoundly unfriendly to children

2008-02-10T11:55:00.000-05:00

So there's an article in the Times this morning about how some bars in park slope are banning strollers. And it's interesting, because rather than sticking to the narrow point that strollers have gotten very large and take up too much damn space in small city stores and restaurants, the whole thing gets blown up to some kind of "how dare parents take their kids out to bars?" and "Parents these days don't want to give up their hipster lives just because they have kids," and the child-free people get involved and bitch about how they don't want to hear crying babies when they're out having beers. And oh, a generation ago it would never have been a problem, because people would never have thought it was appropriate to take your kids out to a bar. Oh, those self-absorbed refuse-to-grow-up modern parents.

The whole debate really strikes me as so incredibly parochial and also a bit twisted. When we took Ari to Spain with us two years ago, we dragged him all over creation, till all hours. (Well, all hours that we could manage, which was pretty much till 11 pm) (Yes, he inhaled secondhand smoke. We are evil, evil people.) We weren't bizarre weirdos, either. Just people with a kid. And other people with kids also took them out with them. And there weren't specially segregated kiddie places, and kid restaurants, and kid menus. Kids out in the world weren't treated as a nuisance or an imposition, but as people, sometimes charming, sometimes annoying, sometimes difficult or tired or adorable or silly or quiet or loud. We found the same thing in New Zealand. And in St. Martin. (Those are the three foreign places we've traveled with Ari; we are going to France with the kids in May, so we'll provide an update after that).

Anyway, so if you don't travel with your kids outside of the country, you might not realize just how much American culture just doesn't like kids. American culture is great at selling stuff to kids, and using kids to sell stuff to parents. But actually respecting kids as actual members of the community? Not so much. We do our best to make sure that the only grownups our kids come into contact with are family, teachers, childcare providers, coaches, and members of the child-related product industry. Adults without kids, especially men, have barely ANY opportunities to interact with children in the course of their daily lives. Then, of course, when and if they do have kids themselves, they are utterly unprepared to understand how to interact with these small people. Everyone loses.

Children learn to exist in community from older children, and from adults in the community. Likewise, adults learn about caring for and interacting with children by, strangely, having opportunities to watch others care for and interact with children, and to do so themselves. We segregate children not only from all adults save those who have some authority and responsibility for them, but also, for large parts of their days, from children of different ages from whom they might learn and to whom they might teach.

the whole thing is bizarre and unhealthy.

Nevertheless, I do think it's reasonable to carry your kid in a sling if you're going barhopping. Or at least use an umbrella stroller, and you know, ACTUALLY FOLD IT UP WHEN YOU PARK IT.

No, it was always illegal!!!!!

2008-02-08T07:30:00.000-05:00

This headline in the Times this morning absolutely kills me:
C.I.A. Chief Doubts Tactic to Interrogate Is Still Legal

What it should read is: "CIA chief falsely suggests waterboarding was legal five years ago."

I don't give a crap what the sadists at the OLC said about it, that shit was never legal, not least because it violated a fucking treaty that our nation is a fucking party to.

I hope Bush and Cheney live in fear of traveling outside the US for the rest of their lives and getting arrested for crimes against humanity. Actually, I'd prefer to skip to the end, and see them stand trial for crimes against humanity sooner rather than later.

Getting our videotaping priorities right

2008-02-01T16:40:00.000-05:00

I was starting to write a post about how fortunate it is that Arlen Specter has worked up his righteous indignation about the destruction of videotapes, but Dr. Jonas at Buzzflash has already said it better.

Naturally, the videotapes in question are not the destroyed tapes of CIA agents torturing prisoners, but instead of the New England Patriots videotaping another team's coach during a game.

Right on, Arlen.

Privacy slowly dissolves

2007-12-11T22:34:00.001-05:00

This evening I went to buy some generic Sudafed (pseudoephedrine) for the first time in a while. I already knew that they now stock it in the pharmacy, and I thought that was to keep people from stealing them easily to use in their methamphetamine labs.

While that's the motivation for the policy, the new policy is dramatically more sinister than that (which isn't particularly sinister; I don't have a problem with stores keeping high-shoplift items under tighter control.)

No. What do you need to do now to purchase pseudoephedrine?

Provide a picture ID. Your name and address are recorded.
Sign an electronic form.
You are limited to 3.6 g/day and 9 g/month. Presumably this is enforced by the above items.

It's breathtaking what people are willing to give up in the name of "fighting" terrorism, crime, whatever. Individual, personal records kept. I suppose that this is one of the things that the pro-gun fanatics lose their heads about, but it's an awful lot harder to do harm to somebody with some decongestant pills than with a gun.

We sit by as we are increasingly monitored and controlled.

And I can't excuse myself either: I didn't complain.

Two things from the Times

2007-10-08T09:55:00.000-04:00

This op-ed made me cry. The diseases of the mind are terrible, terrible things.

Nothing, for example, can bring back the life of Carol Ann Gotbaum, 45, whose terrible end in a holding cell at the Phoenix airport was chronicled in a Times report by Eric Konigsberg. Depressive and fighting alcoholism, Carol missed a connection by minutes. She became hysterical and was subdued, handcuffed, shackled, abandoned and found dead with the shackle across her neck.

All this happened fast. We can hear her cry: “I’m not a terrorist. I’m a sick mother.”

Note to everyone: don't let your mentally ill loved ones fly anywhere alone when they are in a crisis. Flying is too stressful, and people are no longer tolerant of strange behavior in airplanes and airports. Anyone remember that poor guy who was shot to death in the Miami airport a couple years back? You would think that reasonable people would remember that someone acting strangely is far, far more likely to be mentally ill than a terrorist, and that while some mentally ill people ARE dangerous, most are not. And even the dangerous ones could use some compassion. But compassion and reason are out of favor these days. So: if you have to, pay an aide to fly with your sick loved one. Don't send them off alone to face airport security.

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Second thing from the Times. Krugman. I love that, besides being right-on as usual, he riffs off a Talking Heads song here:

Now, as they survey the wreckage of their cause, conservatives may ask themselves: “Well, how did we get here?” They may tell themselves: “This is not my beautiful Right.” They may ask themselves: “My God, what have we done?”

But their movement is the same as it ever was. And Mr. Bush is movement conservatism’s true, loyal heir.

In 50 years, that will have to be footnoted in his collected works. Or it won't be, and the reference will be lost in the mists of time.

outrage, both minor and major

2007-10-04T12:17:00.000-04:00

Oh, fer christ's sake! I swear to god the new york times runs these articles just so people like me will be outraged and link to them, increasing their page views and ad revenues. (And look, it works! Last week it was that article about twenty-something women who make more than their boyfriends and are annoyed that their boyfriends don't want to fly first class on vacations. go find it yourself if you want to read it).

On the other hand, they didn't make up the whole idea of the 'mommy job', a package deal in plastic surgery to put your body 'back the right way' after you've had kids.

“The severe physical trauma of pregnancy, childbirth and breast-feeding can have profound negative effects that cause women to lose their hourglass figures,” he said. His practice, Marina Plastic Surgery Associates, maintains a Web site, amommymakeover.com, which describes the surgeries required to overhaul a postpregnancy body.

Lots of our friends and family think me and Max are totally anal and freakish when it comes to allowing our kids access to pop culture and television. (yes, I know many of you are too polite to say it to our faces, and we do appreciate that.) Well, people, shit like this is why. Hypercapitalist surface-is-everything anti-woman super-consumption revoltingness like that.

Even as I'm revolted by this, however, another article in the New York Times this morning forces me to return, once again, to the original purpose of this blog, from which I often stray, and from which I hope (dimly) one day to leave behind forever. So:

Reprise: I'm a torturer. Are you?

If you're an American citizen, you are. We let our government do this. We find out about it, we wring our hands, and we do nothing. We're torturers. Here's me, nearly three years ago:

Alberto Gonzales thinks torture is A-OK. If we allow him to become Attorney General, we are also saying we think torture is A-OK.

So let's all stand in front of a mirror, right now, and practice saying to our kids, "Torture is A-OK." Practice explaining to them what constitutes torture. "Torture is when you stub out cigarettes in someone's ear, threaten to rape their sister, or their son, beat them in the kidneys, don't let them sleep, and use the advice of psychiatric experts to permanently damage their minds, all in the expectation that good will come of it."

Feeling a little nervous about how to have "The Talk about Torture" with your kids, current or future? A little shaky on the best way to explain why torture is A-OK? Vomiting into your toilet about now, thinking about what it means to teach your kids that torture is A-OK?

Then please, please, let us stand up against the perverse and depraved lifestyle of torture. Let us purge the government of people who think torture is a legitimate lifestyle choice. Let us tell our perhaps-elected representatives exactly what we think about torture-loving perverts serving in high office.

It's unlikely they'll pay us any mind, of course, but what else can we do?

And yet here I am today, still a torturer.
Glenn Greenwald writes in Salon:

All of these subversive and grotesque policies -- the Yoo/Addington theories of the imperial presidency, torture, rendition, illegal surveillance, black sites -- began as secret, illegal Bush administration policies. But the more they are revealed, and the more we do nothing about them, the more they become our own.

It is vital to emphasize here that these revelations are not obsolete matters of the distant past -- something we can all agree to leave behind in the spirit of harmoniously moving forward. The torture, detention and surveillance policies in question are still the formal and official position of our government -- and thus can be applied with far greater vigor not merely in the event of a new terrorist attack, but at any time.

The current policies of the U.S. Government still include, in undiluted form, the Bush administration's theories of unlimited presidential power; the lawless powers of indefinite, due-process-free imprisonment even of U.S. citizens (as applied to Jose Padilla); the use of black sites; the asserted right to spy on Americans with no warrants or legal constraints. None of that has gone away. We just decided to accept it.

After all, look at Britney's revolting mommy-belly on MTV! She needs her a nice mommy job, doesn't she!

Yeah, this whole thing is depressing. What are we supposed to do about this, Amy? I don't want to shove cigarettes in people's ears, but how do I stop? I don't know, exactly, people. I mean, all the usual stuff, like calling your congresspeople and giving money to Amnesty International and the Center For Constitutional Rights and things like that. But to actually stop it, for real? When there doesn't seem to be any political will to do so? I dunno.

So maybe we can't stop it. Maybe what we have to do is learn to live with it. In June 2005 I wrote a post about that:

Tell me it can be fixed before I look at it, you say to me, and I say to you that no such promise can be made. But if we cannot fix it, if we cannot make our government stop, then we must learn to live with it, and how can we do that unless we see it for what it is? Do you not have the sense, some part of each day, that there's something enormous that you're avoiding? Like that pile of bills on your desk, some of which are no doubt overdue. But you don't pay the bills, and you don't even open them, and you don't even look at them, and instead you think about easier things. And yet the bills are there, a hole of discomfort, a gravitational force that pulls at your mind. As long as those bills sit unopened, parts of you are sloughing off and drifting toward them.

Such is the power of unpaid bills, so imagine the great black hole that is torture. My friends who will not look, do not imagine that you thereby protect yourselves from the terrible force of this fact. Your fear grows and grows. You are afraid, and you feel guilty and ashamed that you are afraid, and all of these feelings are awful, and you hope, by not looking, that you will not have to feel them so much.

Feel your fear, friends -- it's a fearsome thing. Feel guilt and shame too. I certainly do. But do not let those feelings keep you from turning toward torture. Only by turning toward it can we hope to stop it. And if we cannot stop it, then, if we see it together, we can comfort one another. We can share the burden of seeing together. Surely that is better than staying locked, each in our own private horror. If we cannot stop the torture, then let us cry for it together. Let us beat our breasts and tear our hair together, in our guilt and shame and helplessness and fear and our despair. Let us witness, and witness honestly, and not convince ourselves that if we do not look that it does not affect our humanity.

In this moment, while torture again is in the news, we have the opportunity to pay attention, and to ask one another to pay attention to it.

I beg you to see, in this moment, and the next, and the next, and the next after that.. If we cannot help one another to do this, then there will be no end to our shame.

Not even a real blog post, suckers!

2007-10-03T11:22:00.001-04:00

Just a couple random thoughts.

Digby on why partisanship is not a bad thing these days:

The political system in this country is roiling right now and it is not going to be nice and friendly for a while. We disagree on some fundamental issues and we're going to have to hash them out. I'm sorry that makes it hard for Village hostesses to put together a congenial dinner party, but they're just going to have to adjust.

An article in Salon about the Breakfast Liberation Front:

So if cereal isn't the elixir it's cracked up to be, why can't you riffle the lady mags at the supermarket without being admonished to start the day with a bowl? News flash: We -- the American people in the year 2007 -- are not highly respected by nutritionists. In their view, they are talking us down from a bag brimming with Egg McMuffins and hash browns or a jumbo Snickers bar and a 16-ounce Coke. Their advice is tempered by a venti dose of "lesser of two evils."

My experience of nutritionists (during pregnancy) forces me to concur with this assessment of nutritionists' opinions of us. Also: all that measuring! And exhortations about drinking 8 glasses of water a day (a myth! a myth!, I tell you! Drink when you're thirsty. But 8 glasses sure is an easy way to feel virtuous and healthy!)

"Limbaugh latest victim in war of condemnation", says NYT headline. Oh, cry me a damn river! If I were prone to engaging in eliminationist rhetoric, which I'm not, I'd engage in some about Rush Limbaugh. But that man's audience should be limited to the roaches in his basement.

Oh, and here's tristero:

Let's go over that again. One excuse doesn't work, so they come up with another. And if that one doesn't fly, you can bet your bippy they'll find a third. The important thing is: sell the war.

Got it? That means there is no real reason to go to war with Iran. If there was, they wouldn't be switching reasons when they don't poll well. Bush and Cheney just want to do it. That's all. They just want to.

I can't believe this is happening. And I have no idea how this can be stopped. This is sheer madness, not only on Bush's part. A press that isn't howling loudly about this, a political class that isn't speaking up as one to prevent this, and finally, a public that can't be troubled to protest warmaking on a whim - the country is as insane as it was in the fall of '02.

And that is really fucking scary.

Please, please let us not go to war with Iran AND elect Rudy Giuliani. Then I will have to move to New Zealand, and while it's lovely there, it's awfully far away.

yes, yes, we're all against slavery, satanists, pedophiles, and ocular penetration.

2007-09-23T14:24:00.000-04:00

Ah, it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood. We took the kids out to an open house this morning, to get my house fix. Beautiful mansard victorian in a great location, not outrageously expensive for what it was (mostly, one gathers, because it doesn't have a master bathroom with a jacuzzi bathtub). The kind of house even Max can imagine living in. On the walk home I talked about the pros and cons of the house, whether we could convince my brother to go in on it with us, what we'd do with three extra bedrooms, and other completely irrelevant questions, since we can't actually buy the house. Max was very kind as he pointed out the irrelevancy of the issues I raised. "But there was a beautiful little deck right off the kitchen!" I said, my mind full of coffee on the deck with the morning newsfeeds. And a birdbath. Also, the house was painted the loveliest shade of blue.

Anyway, moving right along, let's talk about human trafficking and torture. This morning I read an article in the Washington Post about the immense charitable effort that's developed in the United States around human trafficking, and the absence of evidence that human trafficking is a particularly large problem in this country. Apparently, decrying human trafficking is a win/win situation for everyone in government, because both the feminists and the Christian fundamentalists can agree: selling women into sexual slavery is bad. Except that it's mostly a problem, apparently, in other countries. Here, it's like Satanic ritual abuse and internet predators: it exists (not so sure about Satanic ritual abuse, but I'm sure it probably happened at least once, people being what they are), but not in the numbers claimed. (Yes, I realize that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but they've apparently been looking really hard for people who can be classified as part of the global trade in humans, and haven't turned up a lot. They don't count regular old American women who are forced into prostitution locally -- they have to have been sold across international boundaries. )

Anyway, the White House has thrown some money at the problem, and when asked about how few people the problem affects in the U.S., vs. the amount of money and number of organizations that have arisen to take advantage of the money, here's the white house:

But Tony Fratto, deputy White House press secretary, said that the issue is "not about the numbers. It's really about the crime and how horrific it is." Fratto also said the domestic response to trafficking "cannot be ripped out of the context" of the U.S. government's effort to fight it abroad. "We have an obligation to set an example for the rest of the world, so if we have this global initiative to stop human trafficking and slavery, how can we tolerate even a minimal number within our own borders?"

He said that the president's passion about fighting trafficking is motivated in part by his Christian faith and his outrage at the crime. "It's a practice that he obviously finds disgusting, as most rational people would, and he wants America to be the leader in ending it," Fratto said. "He sees it as a moral obligation."

Now, not that every word spoken on behalf of this administration doesn't drive me straight up the fucking wall, but this frosts me.

First, it's so much more convenient to be up in arms about the tiny number of women in America who are officially part of the global slave trade, than it is, say, to give a shit about all the women who are plain old prostitutes because they can't otherwise support their kids, or whose boyfriends beat them up, or who don't have health insurance. It's just like sexual predators: let's all worry about how our kids are going to be kidnapped by evil men, and not spend too much energy thinking about all the ways that huge, huge numbers of kids in this country are neglected by our health care system. Small numbers of evil men (traffickers, predators, terrorists, and evildoers) are so much more manageable a problem than systemic evil, which is such a downer. We can't spend all our time laughing at Britney, we want to feel like good, caring people too, so here's an obvious evil that we can all agree on, and that is conveniently not perpetrated by anyone we know. (Except that, invariably, it is.) The Onion lampooned this better than I could, with its fantastic coverage of the Ocular Penetration Restriction Act of 2007. (NSFW, but duh, you knew that.)

Also, "we have an obligation to set an example for the rest of the world" makes me choke, given the kind of example we've been setting for the last several years.

Coincidentally, I was reading the New York Review this morning, and there was a review article on some new books about human trafficking, mostly talking about the problem internationally. It ended with a quote from one Michael Korzinski, a clinical director of a UK foundation that works with people who have been tortured, "For us, trafficking is another form of torture. It is as sophisticated as state-sponsored torture, except that it is happening not in a brutal repressive country, but in a block of flats in Turin or a leafy suburb of Vermont." (Really? Vermont? But let's leave that aside.)

I know biscuit has not complained about this in a while, but our nation is, in fact, continuing its own program of state-sponsored torture. Plenty of people all up in arms about the brutality of human trafficking clearly have no problem whatsoever with the brutality of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and god-knows-which CIA black sites in god-knows-where. Our military's everyday treatment of the Iraqi people is brutal and dehumanizing, and it is brutalizing and dehumanizing our soldiers at the same time that it is making the situation there worse. But the right-wingers shouting loudly about human trafficking and how brutal it is to women are silent about the ways in which, every day, our country is brutalizing huge numbers of men and boys who will then grow old hating us. One suspects that they think of violence by men against other men as natural and in some cases desirable. One suspects that they think that whether or not someone should be treated as a human being depends on whether they are guilty or innocent (Iraqi or other dark-skinned men, of course, being guilty by definition, just as embryos are innocent and sexually active women guilty by definition ).

Now, in my understanding of morality, people are human beings whether they are innocent or guilty. Torturing guilty people is wrong, not simply because they might actually be innocent, but because even if they're guilty torture is inhumane. Such an understanding seems to be increasingly out of fashion, particularly among the crowd of Republican presidential contenders, all of whom I think are pretty loathsome.

Because so many of the right wing Christians who care so very much about the plight of these poor trafficked women care so very little about the plight of poor tortured dark-skinned men, it upsets me to read, again in the New York Review, that "In the US, feminists and Christian evangelicals have joined forces, both claiming inspiration from the fight against the slave trade and both seeing the world full of evil inflicted by men on women, with sex as a primary means of abuse." I don't think it's a particularly good idea to join forces with Christian evangelicals even when you seem to agree. Max and I have watched with frustration as major Jewish organizations have 'joined forces' with evangelical Christians because they support Israel. Evangelicals support Israel because it plays a major role in their eschatology, not because they feel the pain of the Jews. They give a crap about human sexual trafficking because a) it's titillating, just like thinking about all the places you can stick cigars, b) ladies have to be protected because of their delicate natures, c) no one but them should control women's sexuality, d) no one they know is selling albanian girls into slavery, and e) the albanian girls are white(ish).

Yeah, I'm being a tad unfair. I know some well-meaning, though heavily deluded, evangelical Christians myself. But I don't trust their leaders. Their vision of what our country should be is nothing like mine, and not simply because their values are different, but because their values are incoherently authoritarian. I don't believe that anything good will come of allying with them, and that they need to be prevented from coming to power wherever possible. They are infiltrating the government at every level, and yes, I realize I sound like Joe McCarthy.

****

WaPo had another article on changes to the Iraqi detention system being made by that guy Stone, who thinks it's really awesome when inmates start forcibly shaving off others' beards.

In the first week of a special program during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the U.S. military released 260 Iraqi detainees from U.S. prisons, the military said Wednesday, compelling each to take a pledge before an Iraqi judge not to engage in misconduct and requiring a family member or a friend to act as a guarantor who would face sanctions if the pledge is broken.

And

In describing the impact of the release program, Stone told the bloggers that during Monday's ceremony, "we had a mother so overjoyed she fainted." Detainees offered release, he added, became "just over-ecstatic that they get to make a choice" of which gate to use to depart.

And

Stone told the bloggers that since he took over, he has released very few detainees up to now, and he believes that has been a factor in restraining Sunni violence. "I'm not out here, you know, for social work. . . . We're out here because war is an act of force, and we're going to compel this enemy to do our will."

So: In honor of Ramadan we're releasing a token few hundred of 25,000 men we're holding, after they've been re-educated and family members made ransom (in unspecified ways) to their good behavior. Clearly the surge is and will continue to be a great success with men like Stone fighting to win hearts and minds.

crap that's pissing me off

2007-09-21T08:11:00.000-04:00

Dear Internets,
Yeah, yeah, long time no see, where ya been? Sort-of starting a business, though it turns out that this business about the business of america being business is one of the reasons we often fantasize about living in some other country. Right now, we'd just like some paid vacation please.

Don't get me started on job hunting. Let's just say that Guantanamo could replace all its barking dogs and menstruating interrogators with a complicated system of resume-sending, phone screens, interview quizzes, and salary negotiations followed by complete silence, and sidestep Geneva Convention issues entirely while reducing inmates to a perfect state of learned helplessness.

A baby is snoring in the bed next to me.

It's fall, so yes folks, it's time to yank out the blue LED happy light and give myself cataracts again. Busy september, with the boy starting preschool ("It'll be a nice break for you!" everyone kept insisting. Hah. The pediatrician said "Expect at least two colds a month for the entire first year." This makes me happy I did not, as urged, put him in preschool last fall, when I was miserable enough!) and us doing consulting and me being a teaching assistant for a programming class and max with the orchestra and the chamber group and looking for something nice, stable work he doesn't feel is contributing to the evil in the world. Doesn't this sound just like one of those letters people send in their holiday cards? Oh wait, I forgot to mention Ari's french classes. No organized sports activities, thank god.

Wait, I had a reason for wanting to post this morning. Fucking politics. Fucking Democrats. A sense of the fucking senate that MoveOn is out-of-bounds? Got anything better to do with your time, people? Like grow fucking spines???!

things raising my blood pressure:
- sense of senate about moveon
- failure to restore habeas
- tasers
- Bush to veto child health insurance bill because it "federalizes healthcare". Can't he even pretend to give a shit anymore?
- How can you not manage to get a bill passed for soldiers to get some fucking leave time so their families don't entirely fall apart more than they already are? How hard can that be? [interesting: that last link is for Digby, and I just realized that even though I know Digby is a chick, I still hear Digby in my head as a guy.] Right, and shouldn't republicans even have to stay up late and sleep in their clothes and read from the phonebook to filibuster, not just threaten a filibuster to get their way? If it was good enough for Strom Thurmond, it should be good enough for them!

Oh, and in the realm of unbelievably creepy, apparently Iraqi prisons are being turned into re-education camps.

The U.S. military has introduced "religious enlightenment" and other education programs for Iraqi detainees, some of whom are as young as 11, Marine Maj. Gen. Douglas M. Stone, the commander of U.S. detention facilities in Iraq, said yesterday.

Stone said such efforts, aimed mainly at Iraqis who have been held for more than a year, are intended to "bend them back to our will" and are part of waging war in what he called "the battlefield of the mind." Most of the younger detainees are held in a facility that the military calls the "House of Wisdom."

And

Stone said he wants to identify "irreconcilables" -- those detainees whose views cannot be moderated -- and "put them away" in permanent detention facilities. Psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors and interrogators help distinguish the extremists from others, he said.

And

The 25,000 detainees now being held in U.S. facilities in Iraq include more than 820 juveniles, Stone said, most of whom are held in the House of Wisdom, which opened last month and is located at the Camp Victory military base near Baghdad's airport. He said that six additional young people had been sent to him just yesterday, and that "the trend is towards the youth," including 11-, 12- and 13-year-olds. He described older juveniles -- the 15-, 16- and 17-year-olds -- as "harder nuts" and said that 50 to 60 of them have been removed from U.S. detention facilities and turned over to Iraqi authorities for trial.

And finally

Stone described a sort of religious insurgency that occurred at one detention facility on Sept. 2. "We had a compound of moderates for the first time overtake . . . extremists. It's never happened before. Found them, identified them, threw them up against the fence and shaved their frickin' beards off of them. . . . I mean, that is historic."

My goodness, now people. We're just gonna go right in there and have a great and glorious cultural revolution now, aren't we. Thugs for moderate Islam! We'll transform the whole world!

Well, that's all from me now, folks. I've gotten myself depressed about the larger issues in life, and successfully distracted myself from the fact that our sink overflowed and leaked into our neighbors' apartment, I'm going through a house-envy period, the stovetop is filthy, and Max is stuck in limbo about a job he was very interested in. Oh wait, distraction not working anymore.... Quick, think about the failure of restore habeas!

The War

2007-08-19T08:16:00.000-04:00

From The New York Times > Opinion:

When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages. As an Iraqi man told us a few days ago with deep resignation, “We need security, not free food.”

"misunderstandings"

2007-08-10T09:06:00.000-04:00

From the New York Times, this morning:

Lyrics sung by Pearl Jam criticizing President Bush during a concert last weekend in Chicago should not have been censored during a Webcast by AT&T, a company spokesman said Thursday.

AT&T, through its Blue Room entertainment site, offered a Webcast of the band’s headlining performance Sunday at the Lollapalooza concert. The event was shown with a brief delay so the company could bleep out excessive profanity or nudity.

But monitors hired by AT&T through a vendor also cut two lines from a song to the tune of “Another Brick in the Wall” by Pink Floyd. One was “George Bush leave this world alone,” and the other was “George Bush find yourself another home,” according to the band’s Web site.

The AT&T spokesman, Michael Coe, said that the silencing was a mistake and that the company was working with the vendor that produces the Webcasts to avoid future misunderstandings.

Think about that for a minute. There are people in this country who believe, when hired to screen out naughty language and naked people, that non-profane criticism of George Bush somehow qualifies. We live in a country where it's possible to have such a "misunderstanding".

Bravo, Republicans! Bravo! Why make it an actual crime to criticize the Dear Leader when you can just convince people to censor the criticism as a matter of course?

I continue to fucking despise those loathsome SUVs

2007-08-09T10:14:00.000-04:00

This story is a perfect encapsulation of one of the reasons why I fucking loathe those cretinous SUVs. The victim is a sort-of relative (an uncle-in-law, if you will), killed by some idiot driver jumping the curb in her absurd fucking shiny assault truck. I bet my eyeteeth that she was yakking on the phone at the time.

While we were sunbathing...

2007-08-06T11:54:00.000-04:00

The congress, inexplicably, again gutted the constitution. Why, people, why? Can we stop giving in to the thugs, please? Jack Balkin says:

Do not be mistaken: We are not hurtling toward the Gulag or anything that we have seen before. It will be nothing so dramatic as that. Rather, we are slowly inching, through each act of fear mongering and fecklessness, pandering and political compromise, toward a world in which Americans have increasingly little say over how they are actually governed, and increasingly little control over how the government collects information on them to regulate and control them. Slowly, secretly and imperceptibly, the mechanisms of government surveillance are being freed from methods of political control and accountability; and the liberties of ordinary citizens are being surgically removed under a potent anesthesia concocted from propaganda, fear, ignorance and apathy.

I hope the Democrats are justly proud of themselves for their cowardly contributions to this slow-motion destruction of our constitutional system.

. Glenn Greenwald writes:

It is staggering, and truly disgusting, that even in August, 2007 -- almost six years removed from the 9/11 attacks and with the Bush presidency cemented as one of the weakest and most despised in American history -- that George W. Bush can "demand" that the Congress jump and re-write legislation at his will, vesting in him still greater surveillance power, by warning them, based solely on his say-so, that if they fail to comply with his demands, the next Terrorist attack will be their fault. And they jump and scamper and comply (Meteor Blades has the list of the 16 Senate Democrats voting in favor; the House will soon follow).

Nancy and Harry: Why should I do a damn thing for you guys if you cannot control your party? Let's see some of that Stalinist party discipline I've heard we all have these days. Oh wait, it's too late for that. The milk was already split all over the supreme court.

Man, I'm depressed.

Brought to you by Avian Influenza, ltd

2007-05-28T17:55:00.001-04:00

from the Boston Globe:

Even as avian flu has faded from the headlines, the lethal viral illness continues to strike in certain corners of the world and, in an especially ominous development, health authorities said they believe it has reemerged in Vietnam, where control measures had stopped its spread for more than a year.

Bird Flu: It's the New Black Death.

Business

2007-05-02T20:02:00.000-04:00

Dear Readers:

For a couple of years now, Max and I have had a dream of working together on our own software consultancy. Regular readers know we are not keen on the whole notion of careers, and would rather loaf around with our kids than sit in cubicles or go to meetings with powerpoint presentations. But we do genuinely like the practice of software development. We like writing code, and we like helping people use technology to get their work done.

Max had a big contract end a few weeks ago, and we though it was time for him to look for a full-time job, 401K plan and all. Except so far nothing has come up that's seemed right, and I don't much fancy Max finding some 60-hours-a-week job in the 'burbs, even if it does come with a 401K. So I've been getting back into coding, which I'd quit doing for a couple of years while all this other stuff was going on in my life, and I've been urging him to give a joint consultancy a shot.

I love my husband, and I love to work with him. I want us both to have interesting work and interesting things going on outside of work. I also want us both to have time to relax. Two people working together, slightly more than one 'full-time' job's worth of work. We're in the same industry, and have complementary skills (I'll spare you the resume keywords). If we have to work for a living, and we do, I would like it very much if we could do it this way.

So the deal is, here's our consultancy. Right now, the site is mostly a blog, written mostly by me. We have some projects we're working on, and we're looking for more. If the right company came along, we wouldn't be averse to Max signing on as an employee, but we're going to give thirdbIT a try. So I am earnestly pimping our business to you, readers, and in any case, hoping you'll check out our other blog, which is where much of my creative energy is going these days. (Non-technical readers may be bored by some of the posts, but there are some acid amy nuggets buried in there if you're inclined to go after them.)

Love, Amy

Every Word Counts

2007-04-26T22:22:00.001-04:00

So I get these emails from babycenter describing what-all my ybab is supposed to be doing each week of her so-called life. Mostly I keep getting them because it reminds me how old she is, so I'm not utterly clueless when people ask. Anyway, I came across an ad for this, um, product, in the email. It is so shockingly bizarre, unnecessary, and freakish that I had to share it with you, my dear readers. It is a software system that records all the words spoken in the vicinity of your baby (using a special recording device that the baby wears in special clothing that you buy along with the system) plus statistical software to analyze the words to make sure that your baby is hearing enough of them. It costs 750 bux. Honestly, people, you have to see it to believe. And, Lena purveyors, I am sorry if you stumble across this blog post being absolutely horrified that you would even offer such a product to parents, but, um, I'm absolutely horrified. How fucking ridiculous!

Oh and parents, tip: If you can afford to pay that much money for the lena system, and if it seems like something that might conceivably be a good idea, then trust me, you don't need it. Your baby hears you talk just plenty.

Anyway, you must check out the testimonials. Here's an example:

"It is important to be able to view the number of our conversational turns and to compare our statistics with national and local parents. Getting to see the results of how much I interact with my child shows me how many times during the day I am just not cutting it. I thought the weekend would prove more beneficial with both parents, but I noticed Zachary received less direct conversation than when it’s just one-on-one. Awareness of these problems will help us improve greatly. Using LENA helps us become more attentive to what we read and what is said throughout the day.  I am also able to analyze how much I interact with my son compared to his other caregiver.

 

OMFG!

turkeys

2007-04-19T15:52:00.001-04:00

Today there was a turkey in front of our apartment building, gobbling around on the street like it owned the place. Flew down out of nowhere.

This is strange, though not entirely unexpected. The turkeys have been making their way steadily into the city from the surrounding burbs, and had been sighted a neighborhood or two away.

still and all, not your usual city sight, and a welcome one, though I hear the turkeys are vicious. The survivalist in me fantasizes about what a great food resources the wild turkeys will make after peak oil. But of course, people will bag the turkeys pretty early. Now, squirrel meat...

sign of apocalypse

2007-04-19T13:29:00.001-04:00

today my schedule said: "Manage medical bills." (It does not say 'pay medical bills', because mostly what I do is manage them rather than pay them. I send certified letters to the billing agencies explaining why I don't owe them what they think I owe them, and try to reconcile insurance explanation of benefits with hospital bills. Sometimes, with enormous gratitude, I get to actually write a small check for an amount that I think is correct and seems not unreasonable to me, staple a bunch of duplicate bills and EOBs together, and file them away. But mostly I just shake my head at the idiocy of it all, and wait for the next month's round of bills to see if the billing agency has actually bothered to read the certified letter it signed for to see why I'm not paying their bill. Sometimes I send certified letters to collections agencies to tell them why the debt they bought is not legit. I use fancy-sounding legal language like "Pursuant to Federal Law 95-109, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, I am notifying your office in writing that I dispute the validity of the debts you reference in your letter of ....". I follow up the scary legalese with a suggestion that they "revisit" the issue of the debt with the hospital or medical office in question.

I have hopes that one day soon, after last year's round of pregnancy bills go through, I will not require a whole item on my schedule devoted to "manage medical bills," but just be able to pay a bill during my normal bill-paying time.

Anyway, about the sign of the apocalypse. Two years ago, I had a pap smear. Yes, I have them every year. The one I had in May 2005 was billed to an insurer I was no longer with at the time of the smear. For two years now, my GP's billing service has been dutifully billing me for this pap smear, every single month. Some months I have ignored the bill. Some months I send it back with a form letter I've devised that provides all my insurance information (current and previous ) on it and politely requests that they bill it. In November, I broke down and went the certified letter route. In December, January, and February, I continued to receive bills for the ancient pap smear.

Today I opened up the March bill and found that on February 28th, they billed the insurance company for the pap smear. They even, I gather, billed the correct insurance company for it, because the company paid.* Hence, my feeling that the apocalypse must be coming soon.

Now if I can get the very same billing agency to deal with the certified letter I sent on Max's behalf, complaining about the $60 check they cashed but didn't credit, and their insistence that in January 2006 we were not covered by insurance, when we most certainly were, then I will really start stocking up on the canned goods.

*Though I still have the vague sensation that the amount the insurance company paid was not all that it should have been, because I still feel that the "patient responsibility" was rather high for a pap smear, which is neither an expensive nor elective procedure, and certainly far cheaper than metastatic cervical cancer....

Aya

2007-04-18T11:25:00.001-04:00

is so proud of herself. She just rolled over back to front, which she's been diligently working on for a while now.

No, I do not recall if this makes her gross motor skills "advanced" or just short of qualifying for early intervention. Nor do I care.

This has been another edition of stuff you probably don't care about in my life.

A380

2007-04-18T08:47:00.001-04:00

Ari informs us this morning that his barosaurus friend just flew in from New Zealand on an A380. It pulled right up to the building so that his friend didn't have to get wet when he arrived. Mysteriously, however, his friend then immediately went out to Trader Joe's, in the rain, to buy us some more English Muffins.

"If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

2007-04-15T09:20:00.001-04:00

Yesterday was Mr. A's 4th birthday party. I made a cake with strawberry-colored frosting on it, studded with strawberries. Everyone asked for my cake recipe. "Bittman," I said. There were cupcakes to go along with it. The cake was gorgeous and full of butter, hence tasty. There were balloons, colors chosen by Ari, each blown up to a specific size chosen by Ari, each with the name of a guest written on it, and sometimes also an inscrutable balloon-related statement that Ari dictated to Max. I can't make that last sentence come out right, sorry. Take it as an illustration of the kind of convoluted statement that actually ended up on the balloons.

Anyway, we also had a huge roll of bubble wrap that we threw on the floor for the kids to jump on, which they did, gleefully. I hope the downstairs neighbors' chandelier did not break. There was wine and cheese for the grownups. ( The Dubliner cheddar was popular, and the guests were pleased to hear that it could be purchased inexpensively at Trader Joe's. ) There were 8 children, and they got along splendidly. My brother was there, and Max's family, and all the parents of the kids were people that Max and I know and like well on their own account. Ari blew out all his candles on his first try. Nobody got hurt. Aya got passed around from one adoring grownup to another, cheerful as could be. I wore a shirt with no spit-up, new jeans that fit me, and sandals with heels. And lipstick. I ate two pieces of cake. Ari did not receive any presents that will have to be quietly boxed up and given away when he is not looking. He did receive, among other things, a home-made superhero kit, a pair of alligator oven mitts he's been coveting at Max's parents' house for a while, an air gun with foam bullets (which goes well with the superhero outfit), some "Do-A-Dot" paints, and, from me, a tape gun of the sort that the UPS store uses to box up your Zappos returns. There were no planned activities, no theme, no party hats, and no party favors (save the inscrutable balloons). I think the party cost maybe 50 bucks (most of it cheese).

It was a beautiful party.

Today, as is my wont, I have a migraine, but it was worth it.

****

The title of this post is from a Kurt Vonnegut book I've been meaning to read since even before he died. A blog I like, The Happiness Project, posted a quote from this book yesterday:

But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

Wow, even the students at Brigham Young don't like Dick Cheney...

2007-04-11T08:53:00.001-04:00

Says NYT:

he invitation extended to Vice President Dick Cheney to be the commencement speaker at Brigham Young University has set off a rare, continuing protest at the Mormon university, one of the nation’s most conservative.

Some of the faculty and the 28,000 undergraduate and graduate students, who are overwhelmingly Republican, have expressed concern about the Bush administration’s support for the war in Iraq and other policies, but most of the current protest has focused on Mr. Cheney’s integrity, character and behavior. Several students said, for example, that they were appalled at Mr. Cheney’s use of an expletive on the Senate floor in a June 2004 exchange with Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont.

“The problem is this is a morally dubious man,” said Andrew Christensen, a 22-year-old Republican from Salt Lake City. “It’s challenging the morality and integrity of this institution.”

What I find most amusing is that the big issue appears to be that he said "Fuck".

Morning cup of Cary

2007-04-09T09:25:00.001-04:00

Cary Tennis, replying to a man who's worried his son might be gay:

People come into being, and who they are is a mystery to us. We are bystanders at the magic show. The world is becoming what it's becoming with little regard to our opinions. It's not going to ask us whether it should produce gay people or straight people. People are just coming into the world at an alarming rate and becoming who they are and anyone who thinks hard about it can only conclude that our most dignified and respectful stance is one of reverence and amazement and service -- to our kids, to our fellow people, to the planet. Reverence. Service. And less crazy talk -- from all quarters.

I love my morning cup of Cary.

Self-Subjugation

2007-04-08T15:36:00.001-04:00

NYT says:

A new, long-term hunger strike has broken out at the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, with more than a dozen detainees subjecting themselves to daily force-feeding to protest their treatment, military officials and lawyers for the detainees said.

Note to Times: those people at Kink.com are subjecting themselves to painful and humiliating treatment. Prisoners at Guantanamo are not.

workin'

2007-04-03T20:25:00.000-04:00

egads, yet another book on how well-off, well-educated women (i.e., like me) are failing the world and themselves if they stay at home full-time to raise their kids. As always, Salon has the details.

Life and work are hard; some women don't want to be corporate cogs, and that's admirable; some can't find careers that let them balance work and family, and that's lamentable; and some just don't want to do the hard work of finding a career they love and getting good at it, and they use kids as an excuse, which is deplorable. For such women it's easier (in the short run; back to those actuarial tables) to pretend you never wanted to succeed in the first place, and to let your husband do the hard work of building a rewarding career. Bennetts' last chapter borrows Simone de Beauvoir's great phrase "the anxiety of liberty" as its title, and exhorts women to live through that anxiety to embrace a full and complex life of work and family.[my emphasis]

"Deplorable"? Really? As in "deserving strong condemnation"? As both author and reviewer point out, there is a perfectly practical reason to not let one's so-called 'career' fall entirely by the wayside: security. Do we need to have the Protestant work ethic, macho existentialism, and the threat of being labeled lazy shoved down our throats as well? If we were to start deploring one another for everything we avoid because of our vague existential fears -- well, there'd be a lot of strong condemnation to go around, wouldn't there?

Oh wait. There is a lot of strong condemnation going around.

Let's see what Salon's own Cary Tennis has to say about a lazy feeling of just not wanting to put in the effort for a career: "Give yourself a break, my man. If you are depressed and have a drug problem or have a metabolic imbalance, then that's some serious stuff and you need medical care. But if you simply lack ambition, I take my hat off to you. The world is way too full already of overly ambitious fucks elbowing us out of the way on the streetcar."

That's so beautiful, I'd like just to repeat it, and thank you Cary for writing it:

"The world is way too full already of overly ambitious fucks elbowing us out of the way on the streetcar."