"So there you go: an internet troll. That's what they look like."I thought
this was a joke, but it's not.
The BBC tracks down some piddling internet troll and confronts him.
At the Neon Café...
... you can order anything you want.
Evidence that 34% of likely voters are irrational.Here are 2 questions from
the same Rasmussen poll, conducted in the last 2 days, of 1,000 likely voters:
1* Should health insurance companies be required by law to cover all government-approved contraceptives for women, without co-payments or other charges to the patient?
43% Yes
46% No
11% Not sure...
4* Should individuals have the right to choose between different types of health insurance plans, including some that cost more and cover just about all medical procedures and some that cost less while covering only major medical procedures?
77% Yes
9% No
14% Not sure
If you answered "yes" to question 1, you can't rationally turn around and say "yes" to question 4! How are these individuals supposed to buy something that the insurance companies are not allowed to offer? Apparently, people feel sympathetic to individuals but not to insurance companies, and they reflexively decide to push the companies around and respect individual freedom.
Anyway... speaking of things people get emotional about... there's also sex and religion, which naturally go together, since
"At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."
"Back in business — Blaska!"Announces Meade, telling Isthmus readers to bookmark
the new blog, but it's Isthmus, so Meade's immediately smacked down by one commenter who assures everyone that Meade "will be dropping [Blaska's] opinions on [the Isthmus forum] like they are science at every opportunity, so I don't feel the need to bookmark his page." And then everyone switches to talking about some other blogger on the same site, and she's apparently a complete idiot.
Blaska was the conservative blogger at Isthmus not too long ago. But Isthmus lost a couple of its liberal bloggers left — Jack Craver (remember when
he trashed me?) and Emily Mills (remember when
she trashed me?) — and if they'd kept Blaska, there'd only have been one liberal (
Citizen Dave) to offset the one conservative, and that wouldn't make sense in a Madison, Wisconsin
"alternative" newspaper now, would it?
"Obama Has Handed The Election Over To The Super Rich."Says Robert Reich.
It has been said there is no high ground in American politics since any politician who claims it is likely to be gunned down by those firing from the trenches. That's how the Obama team justifies its decision to endorse a super PAC that can raise and spend unlimited sums for his campaign.
Seems like a pretty damned good justification to me. But not to Reich.
[W]ould refusing to be corrupted this way really amount to unilateral disarmament? To the contrary, I think it would have given the President a rallying cry that nearly all Americans would get behind....
"Russian scientists have breached an ice sheet that has sealed subglacial Lake Vostok in Antarctica for more than 20 million years...""... at a depth of nearly 4,000 meters, reaching a critical stage in a decades-long drilling project... Lake Vostok is the largest of a network of hidden subglacial Antarctic lakes... It is also one of the largest lakes in the world."
Reports The Moscow Times, which adds this spicy tidbit:
Rumors that these lakes were also home to secret German submarine bases during World War II are also being revisited in the wake of renewed excitement, driven by Nazi claims that they had created an "unassailable" Antarctic fortress and by archival evidence describing the construction of ice caves.
No Nazis in
the NYT report, which pays attention to the threat of pollution from the kerosene and Freon used in the drilling and the prediction — which was supposedly correct — that the borehole would freeze up, sealing in the chemicals, as soon as the drill reached the lake.
The most recent Rasmussen poll has Santorum up 1 point over Obama.A big gap closed up suddenly:
Rasmussen Reports, 2/2-2/3: Obama 44, Santorum 45
Rasmussen Reports, 1/31-2/1: Obama 46, Santorum 44
Rasmussen Reports, 1/23-1/24: Obama 48, Santorum 40
Rasmussen Reports, 1/17-1/18: Obama 48, Santorum 38
ADDED: By the way, there's a lot of talk about how Rush Limbaugh hasn't endorsed anyone, but — based on my own listening to nearly every recent show in the last month — I think he's been subtly influencing listeners to choose Santorum. Limbaugh frequently talks about how he doesn't do endorsements, that his "candidate" of choice is
conservatism, and that he wants to be in a position to support whoever goes up against Obama in the fall. But he has repeatedly pointed to Santorum as the most conservative candidate and, perhaps more important, the candidate who will be most able to articulate conservatism when confronted with Obama.
Why did Mitch Daniels in Indiana get away with doing something more drastic than what Scott Walker did that set off the huge protests in Wisconsin?Leon Fink (in Salon) wonders:
In Wisconsin, the union presence seemed wedded to a deep sense of civic identity, including connection to a long-standing state tradition of "progressive" innovation and peaceful reconciliation of differences among competing social and economic interests.
In Indiana, despite the fact that Indianapolis had once hosted more union headquarters than any other city in America, legislated reduction of the union presence triggered no visible sign of larger public hurt. That the union leaders themselves viewed the issue as "mere politics" betrays their own skepticism that worker rights can truly appeal to the public conscience...
That is, love/support/respect for unions needs to be firmly embedded in the culture of the place or you don't get the Wisconsin Effect. Noted. That means you can't suddenly whip up a political frenzy in response to one political move on the other side, no matter how drastic the move is.
Fink drifts off into a reverie. Here's his last paragraph before the one-liner "I'm dreaming, of course. This is Indiana.":
I could only think of how different was the determination of the 1968 Olympic athletes who raised a black-power salute at their official Olympic awards ceremony. If a similar sense of solidarity had been on display in Indianapolis, players from each team might have unfurled a "union" banner — Norma Rae-like — at halftime and carried it aloft to their respective locker rooms. Better yet, they would have handed off the emblems to Madonna, a long-established member of both the Screen Actors Guild and Directors Guild of America.
It's actually pretty pathetic when your
dreams of deep embeddedness in the culture consist of showy gestures by sports/music/movie celebrities.
Madonna, the union member? Why would organizations that boost Madonna resonate with Hoosiers and seem
wedded to a deep sense of civic identity?
Face it, Fink: There's a price to be paid for locating liberalism in pop culture. It's not going to be deep. It's inherently shallow.
Deeply shallow.
Mike Kelley "never lost his interest in the cut-rate products of American culture, work that for one reason or another ended up discounted and ignored.""His art tried to make failure into the highest form of achievement,"
writes Richard B. Woodward in the Wall Street Journal about the artist "who died last week at the age of 57, reportedly a suicide."
His most identifiable body of work (late 1980s to early '90s) are the thrift-store stuffed animals that he placed on blankets in the middle of gallery floors. Their air of soiled hopes and cheerful failure became central to the critical movement of "pathetic" or "abject" art. But how should the icky pungency of these pieces be balanced against his later wish to distance himself from their popularity? "I was viewed as an infantilist, possibly a pedophile, or victim of abuse myself," he complained in a 1996 essay.
"Abject" is a great word. If you Google it, the first substantial hit — i.e., the first thing that's not just a definition of the word — is
"Introduction to Julia Kristeva, Module on the Abject":
According to to Julia Kristeva... the abject refers to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other. The primary example for what causes such a reaction is the corpse (which traumatically reminds us of our own materiality); however, other items can elicit the same reaction: the open wound, shit, sewage, even the skin that forms on the surface of warm milk....
On the level of our individual psychosexual development, the abject marks the moment when we separated ourselves from the mother, when we began to recognize a boundary between "me" and other, between "me" and "(m)other."...The abject has to do with "what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules"... and, so, can also include crimes like Auschwitz. Such crimes are abject precisely because they draw attention to the "fragility of the law"...
A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being....
The abject for Kristeva is... closely tied both to religion and to art, which she sees as two ways of purifying the abject: "The various means of purifying the abject—the various catharses—make up the history of religions, and end up with that catharsis par excellence called art, both on the far and near side of religion"....
At the White Dome Night Club...
... you can talk all night.
"I think Eastwood got scammed. I think he got scammed.""I think he got roped into doing something he thought was patriotic, and ended up being played. I do."
Rush Limbaugh on the Clint Eastwood "Halftime in America" Super Bowl ad.
(There's also a parody of the ad but you have to be a RushLimbaugh.com member to get to it. I wish he'd put it up for the general audience. It's quite good, basically making the pro-Obama political message overt.)
ADDED:
Reason Magazine has a parody of the commercial.
Santorumentum."Rick Santorum had a breakthrough night on Tuesday by winning the Missouri primary and making strong showings in the Minnesota and Colorado caucuses, breathing life into his struggling campaign and slowing Mitt Romney's march to the Republican presidential nomination."
ADDED: I'm listening to Santorum speaking. He's saying tonight's results show what happens when we don't have one candidate vastly outspending the others, and this is therefore more like what will happen in the fall. That is, Romney's been depending on his money, but in the end, he won't be able to do that.
At the Blue Glow Café...
... you're still staring at the screen.
"Of course, debates are a completely new form of 'dialogue' for me: a brouhaha. In short, we shouted to our heart's content."Presidential candidates debate in Russia:
The candidates repeated familiar promises and accusations, with [Communist Gennady] Zyuganov pledging to bring "justice and socialism"... Zyuganov twice invoked Hitler to criticize [businessman Mikhail] Prokhorov
"What moral right do you have to rule after what the Communists did?" Prokhorov said, prompting Zyuganov to later accuse him of disrespecting the accomplishments of the Soviet Union.
The post title is a Twitter post by Prokhorov. For his part Zyuganov tweeted: "Unfortunately, Prokhorov and I were not able to have a normal conversation. He didn't discuss anything; he simply repeated worn-out phrases."
Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin, who is way ahead in the polls, avoided the debate. Not sure if he tweeted.
Prop 8 ruling from the 9th Circuit is expected momentarily.At 10 a.m. Pacific Time, noon Central.
UPDATE:
The court holds that the ban on same-sex marriage violates equal protection.
AND: Here's the opinion [
PDF].
ALSO: What Prop 8 did, the court writes, was take away the designation "marriage," and that word matters:
We are excited to see someone ask, "Will you marry me?", whether on bended knee or in text splashed across a stadium Jumbotron. Certainly it would not have the same effect to see "Will you enter into a registered domestic partnership with me?". Groucho Marx's one-liner, "Marriage is a wonderful institution... but who wants to live in an institution?" would lack its punch if the word "marriage" were replaced with the alternative phrase. So too with Shakespeare's "A young man married is a man that's marr'd," Lincoln's "Marriage is neither heaven no hell, it is simply purgatory," and Sinatra's "A man doesn't know what happiness is until he's married. By then it's too late." We see tropes like "marrying for love" versus "marrying for money" played out again and again in our films and literature because of the recognized importance of the marriage relationship. Had Marilyn Monroe's film been called How to Register a Domestic Partnership with a Millionaire, it would not have conveyed the same meaning as did her famous movie....
You get the idea. The judges are old. I mean... marriage — even just the word — matters.
Warm caramel/warm cheese.
Karen Handel — VP for public policy at Susan G. Komen for the Cure — has resigned... why?She'd been on the side of cutting off funding to Planned Parenthood:
A person with direct knowledge of decision-making at Komen's headquarters in Dallas said the grant-making criteria were adopted with the deliberate intention of targeting Planned Parenthood....
According to the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions, a driving force behind the move was Handel, who was hired by Komen last year as vice president for public policy after losing a campaign for governor in Georgia in which she stressed her anti-abortion views and frequently denounced Planned Parenthood....
Handel, a Republican, ran for Georgia governor in 2010, winning an endorsement from former vice presidential candidate and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Handel then lost a primary runoff to former Georgia Congressman Nathan Deal, who won the general election.
Throughout the campaign, Deal accused Handel of being soft on abortion.
Deal repeatedly attacked Handel over a 2005 vote she took while serving on a metro Atlanta county commission to give more than $400,000 to Planned Parenthood....
Abortion politics. It's hard to position yourself in the middle, as it seems Handel has done, and she's managed to get slammed from one side and then the other and to lose 2 big jobs.
"School Linked to Abuse Claims Will Replace Entire Faculty.""The drastic move is the school district's latest attempt to deal with a crisis of confidence among parents who had begun to protest what they said was the failure of school officials to act against the abuse and explain its extent."
They really don't want that protest!
"Is it fair that some of Mr. Obama's largest campaign contributors received federal loan guarantees?"Stephen Moore, at the Wall Street Journal, noting that Obama likes to talk about economic fairness, has
"A Fairness Quiz for the President."
"Profs Criticized for Insufficient Love of Reagan."Hmm.
Some students pay tuition that is as high as it is to fund financial aid that is offered to other students.Is there something wrong with that?
In his proposed budget, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell is seeking to cap the use of tuition dollars from in-state students to provide financial aid, a practice employed by almost all colleges and universities, public and private. McDonnell has said he is pushing the cap to spur conversation about aid policies and to keep down the cost of college education, saying the current structure is placing a higher burden on middle-income students....
Who ultimately bears responsibility for ensuring access to higher education? If states aren't willing to pay, do institutions have the right to charge more to students who can pay in order to subsidize those who can't?
"The witches' brew of predator-prey arms races: eye of newt, fenny snakes and resistance to a deadly poison."The title of a lecture, one of many
events here at the University of Wisconsin campus this week — in observance of the birthday of Charles Darwin. (We do a whole week for "Darwin Day," apparently. The
great man's actual birthday was February 12, 1809.)
My mind is dragged back to the fascinating story in
the previous post. Trent Arsenault has the ideal Darwinian strategy, doesn't he? He's perfecting and maximizing his genetic material and its distribution, including the likelihood that his offspring will be healthy and well-protected and well-reared to adulthood.
If you do come to Madison this weekend, perhaps to take in some Darwin-related things, make sure to drop by the Chazen Museum and see the
Art Department's faculty show. Meade and I loved it. I couldn't do photographs of that exhibit, but there's a slide show at the link. My favorite thing was "
Stoney's Tiny Tattoo" ("a painted-wood structure by Assistant Professor Fred Stonehouse... Inside, graduate student Ben Grant tattoos himself"). No one was doing tattoo performance when we were there. I just loved all the faux-primitive drawings inside the booth.
But wait! Why am I talking about Darwin's birthday today? It's not the 12th, it's the 7th. And it's not a big centenary birthday for Darwin. That was 3 years ago. Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of another great Charles D: Charles Dickens. And the reason I noticed this is the usual reason people these days notice things like that: I saw
a mysterious Google Doodle and clicked on it. I've read a lot of Dickens, but there's only
one Dickens book I've read twice:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way....
Oh, yes... that reminds me, it's just about exactly the 1-year anniversary of the start of the Wisconsin protests, our own special Wisconsin
season of darkness/spring of hope/winter of despair.
If you're coming to Madison for Darwin
Day Weekend — and maybe the faculty art show — you can also sojourn in and around the protest commemorations. I don't know what's in store, but check out the Capitol Square for some hope and despair and epochal belief and incredulity.
Trent Arsenault — devoted sperm donor, virgin father — hounded by the FDA.Here is a man who has — as I read this truly fascinating article — devoted himself to sperm donation for altruistic, religious reasons. He gives the sperm, only to couples, and he maintains a rigorous health regime designed to produce the best quality product.
And I use the word "product" to highlight the fact that the FDA has filed a "cease manufacture" order against him.
Although sperm is neither a food nor a drug, the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research regulates those who traffic in it, enforcing frequent and comprehensive tests designed to curb the spread of communicable diseases and genetic disorders. Historically the agency has focused only on traditional sperm banks, not private donors, but Trent was unprecedentedly public about what he was doing. When the FDA first contacted him, he had naïvely signed a piece of paper confirming that he was "an establishment." In August 2010, using that as a pretext, the FDA sent three agents to his house, where for several days they interviewed him and copied his records. Trent had by then made 340 donations to some 46 different recipients. The scrutiny was time-consuming and stressful; he didn't have a lawyer and worried than he might land in prison.
By November, the FDA determined that Trent wasn't screening for diseases nearly often enough, and it issued its cease-manufacture order. Trent replied that he wished to contest it. He wasn't charging money, as he explained, and he was helping people. He knew that he was celibate, that he was disease-free, and that he took extraordinary measures to safeguard his DNA. He considered his relationship with his recipients to be "intimate." Why should the government regulate what he was doing, when anyone, with who knew what health issues, could walk into a bar and have a one-night stand? A government-accountability public-interest group, Cause of Action, agreed, seeing the FDA action as a ringing example of regulatory overreach, and filed a brief on Trent's behalf. "We questioned him as to the parameters of his relationship with recipients," Amber Taylor, the chief counsel for Cause of Action, says. "We took away that he's a very generous, helpful person who sees people in need who could not have children without some form of assistance, who are often lower income or underserved by the fertility-medicine industry." Trent is currently awaiting a decision by the FDA on whether to grant him a hearing, and in the meantime, the cease-manufacture order has been suspended.
I'm sure that, after this high-profile article, the FDA will back off. But let's talk about the legal issues here. Does Arsenault have a right of privacy in his relationship with the couples he assists? "He describes himself as a 'donorsexual,' with all of his libidinal energy channeled in service of others." Consider that he has 15 — and counting — children through this activity, which had deep religious and emotional meaning to him:
Many of the recipients who have successfully become pregnant have maintained contact with Trent; the lack of anonymity has always been part of his appeal. They send him ultrasounds and arrange to have Trent meet the child. He has a bag ready to go containing his own old toys, which he gives away, and items he uses to observe childhood development....
Trent sits at his desk and pulls up Facebook, where he clicks through photographs of many of his biological children....
Even if he were to stop donating—which he would do immediately if, for instance, he learned that one of his children was autistic or had another genetic problem—Trent says he would stick with his extreme health regimen. "I want to be alive for the children. They will want to know about me. It may not be until they turn 18, or later in life, that they decide they want to meet me, so I want to be in a good capacity to meet them."
Quite aside from whether he has a constitutional right of privacy with respect to these intimate relationships, why does the
federal government have power over his activity? Because it regulates the sperm bank business and this is like the way it can regulate growing one marijuana plant even one that isn't intended for the commercial market? But marijuana is a
commodity, and — as the Supreme Court said in
Gonzales v. Raich — "the regulation is squarely within Congress' commerce power because production of the commodity meant for home consumption, be it wheat or marijuana, has a substantial effect on supply and demand in the national market for that commodity."
Be it wheat or marijuana... or sperm?
At the Wine Bottle Café...
... you get the message.
Should the government crack down on unpaid internships?Or leave people alone to enter into whatever sorts of arrangements they find mutually beneficial?
