Straight Out of Newport

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2007-09-19T11:08:00.001-04:00

This is a test.

Quote of the Day

2006-09-15T15:43:00.000-04:00

Where in the hell did this Terri Schiavo thing come from? There’s not a conservative, Constitution-loving, separation-of-powers guy alive in the world that could have wanted that bill on the floor. That was pure, blatant pandering to [Focus on the Family President] James Dobson. That's all that was. It was silly, stupid, and irresponsible. Nobody serious about the Constitution would do that. But the question was will this energize our Christian conservative base for the next election...

...Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies. I pray devoutly every day, but being a Christian is no excuse for being stupid. There's a high demagoguery coefficient to issues like prayer in schools. Demagoguery doesn’t work unless it's dumb, shallow as water on a plate. These issues are easy for the intellectually lazy and can appeal to a large demographic. These issues become bigger than life, largely because they're easy. There ain't no thinking.

-- Conservative Former Congressman Dick Armey

Athlete of the Day

2006-09-14T09:24:00.000-04:00

You won't believe this, but it's Stephon Marbury.

The New Newport...And Yes, That WAS The Projects

2006-09-01T11:54:00.000-04:00

Please Crawl Back Under The Rock You Came From

2006-09-01T11:53:00.000-04:00

Paul Hackett - Iraq war vet, former Ohio Democratic House candidate, and all-around fool - was at it again recently. Check out this exchange with former Iraq-based Pentagon spokesman Dan Senor. He refers to Senor as "Herr Senor" and "the Unterfuhrer".

That's an especially nice choice of words considering Senor is Jewish and his mother is a Holacaust survivor. What a dumbass.

The Hezbollah "Victory"

2006-09-01T11:44:00.000-04:00

From Charles Krauthammer:

Most important, Hezbollah's political gains within Lebanon during the war have proved illusory. As the dust settles, the Lebanese are furious at Hezbollah for provoking a war that brought them nothing but devastation — and then crowing about victory amid the ruins.

The Western media were once again taken in by the mystique of the "Arab street." The mob came out to cheer Hezbollah for raining rockets on Israel — surprise! — and the Arab governments that had initially criticized Hezbollah went conveniently silent. Now that the mob has gone home, Hezbollah is under renewed attack — in newspapers in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Egypt, as well as by many Lebanese, including influential Shiite academics and clan leaders. The Arabs know where their interests lie. And they do not lie with a Shiite militia that fights for Iran.

The Next Bill Cosby

2006-09-01T11:43:00.000-04:00

Juan Williams of NPR and Fox News and syndicated column fame:

For anyone who wants to get out of poverty, the prescription is clear.

Finish high school, at least. Wait until your 20’s before marrying, and wait until you’re married before having children. Once you’re in the work force, stay in: take any job, because building on the experience will prepare you for a better job. Any American who follows that prescription will be at almost no risk of falling into extreme poverty. Statistics show it.

Plame-Gate Ends With A Wimper

2006-09-01T10:05:00.000-04:00

From the WaPo's editorial this morning:

It follows that one of the most sensational charges leveled against the Bush White House -- that it orchestrated the leak of Ms. Plame's identity to ruin her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson -- is untrue.

Quote of the Day

2006-08-31T15:34:00.000-04:00

"I got some good news earlier today before the show. Thanks to Alex Rodriguez, I am no longer the most overpaid disappointment in New York City." -- David Letterman

If I Move To Warren County, Will I Get Richer?

2006-08-30T14:08:00.000-04:00

I'll Take 12-4

2006-08-30T14:06:00.000-04:00

Quote of the Day

2006-08-29T15:47:00.000-04:00

Trey Parker, co-creator of South Park, on a time when he, as a Republican, saw the religious right as an ally for libertarian causes:

"The Republicans didn't want to run your life, because Jesus should. That was really part of their thing: less government, more Jesus," Parker says. "Not it's like, how about more government and Jesus."

I've Been Saying This For Years

2006-08-23T14:49:00.000-04:00

From, of all places, Forbes magazine. I had to copy this in its entirety because it's so right on.

Don't Marry Career Women
Michael Noer
08.22.06, 6:00 AM ET

Guys: A word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don't marry a woman with a career.

Why? Because if many social scientists are to be believed, you run a higher risk of having a rocky marriage. While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children, and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it. A recent study in Social Forces, a research journal, found that women--even those with a "feminist" outlook--are happier when their husband is the primary breadwinner.

Not a happy conclusion, especially given that many men, particularly successful men, are attracted to women with similar goals and aspirations. And why not? After all, your typical career girl is well-educated, ambitious, informed and engaged. All seemingly good things, right? Sure…at least until you get married. Then, to put it bluntly, the more successful she is the more likely she is to grow dissatisfied with you. Sound familiar?

Many factors contribute to a stable marriage, including the marital status of your spouse's parents (folks with divorced parents are significantly more likely to get divorced themselves), age at first marriage, race, religious beliefs and socio-economic status. And, of course, many working women are indeed happily and fruitfully married--it's just that they are less likely to be so than non-working women. And that, statistically speaking, is the rub.

To be clear, we're not talking about a high-school dropout minding a cash register. For our purposes, a "career girl" has a university-level (or higher) education, works more than 35 hours a week outside the home and makes more than $30,000 a year.

If a host of studies are to be believed, marrying these women is asking for trouble. If they quit their jobs and stay home with the kids, they will be unhappy (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2003). They will be unhappy if they make more money than you do (Social Forces, 2006). You will be unhappy if they make more money than you do (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2001). You will be more likely to fall ill (American Journal of Sociology). Even your house will be dirtier (Institute for Social Research).

Why? Well, despite the fact that the link between work, women and divorce rates is complex and controversial, much of the reasoning is based on a lot of economic theory and a bit of common sense. In classic economics, a marriage is, at least in part, an exercise in labor specialization. Traditionally men have tended to do "market" or paid work outside the home and women have tended to do "non-market" or household work, including raising children. All of the work must get done by somebody, and this pairing, regardless of who is in the home and who is outside the home, accomplishes that goal. Nobel laureate Gary S. Becker argued that when the labor specialization in a marriage decreases--if, for example, both spouses have careers--the overall value of the marriage is lower for both partners because less of the total needed work is getting done, making life harder for both partners and divorce more likely. And, indeed, empirical studies have concluded just that.

In 2004, John H. Johnson examined data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and concluded that gender has a significant influence on the relationship between work hours and increases in the probability of divorce. Women's work hours consistently increase divorce, whereas increases in men's work hours often have no statistical effect. "I also find that the incidence in divorce is far higher in couples where both spouses are working than in couples where only one spouse is employed," Johnson says. A few other studies, which have focused on employment (as opposed to working hours) have concluded that working outside the home actually increases marital stability, at least when the marriage is a happy one. But even in these studies, wives' employment does correlate positively to divorce rates, when the marriage is of "low marital quality."

The other reason a career can hurt a marriage will be obvious to anyone who has seen their mate run off with a co-worker: When your spouse works outside the home, chances increase they'll meet someone they like more than you. "The work environment provides a host of potential partners," researcher Adrian J. Blow reported in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, "and individuals frequently find themselves spending a great deal of time with these individuals."

There's more: According to a wide-ranging review of the published literature, highly educated people are more likely to have had extra-marital sex (those with graduate degrees are 1.75 more likely to have cheated than those with high school diplomas.) Additionally, individuals who earn more than $30,000 a year are more likely to cheat.

And if the cheating leads to divorce, you're really in trouble. Divorce has been positively correlated with higher rates of alcoholism, clinical depression and suicide. Other studies have associated divorce with increased rates of cancer, stroke, and sexually-transmitted disease. Plus divorce is financially devastating. According to one recent study on "Marriage and Divorce's Impact on Wealth," published in The Journal of Sociology, divorced people see their overall net worth drop an average of 77%.

So why not just stay single? Because, academically speaking, a solid marriage has a host of benefits beyond just individual "happiness." There are broader social and health implications as well. According to a 2004 paper entitled "What Do Social Scientists Know About the Benefits of Marriage?" marriage is positively associated with "better outcomes for children under most circumstances," higher earnings for adult men, and "being married and being in a satisfying marriage are positively associated with health and negatively associated with mortality." In other words, a good marriage is associated with a higher income, a longer, healthier life and better-adjusted kids.

A word of caution, though: As with any social scientific study, it's important not to confuse correlation with causation. In other words, just because married folks are healthier than single people, it doesn't mean that marriage is causing the health gains. It could just be that healthier people are more likely to be married.

The 25 Most Important...

2006-08-15T16:33:00.000-04:00

...Questions in the history of the universe.

Finally!!

2006-08-15T07:55:00.000-04:00

It's taken nearly 5 full years, but somebody (the Brits) has finally gained some common (or un-common) sense.

THE Government is discussing with airport operators plans to introduce a screening system that allows security staff to focus on those passengers who pose the greatest risk.

The passenger-profiling technique involves selecting people who are behaving suspiciously, have an unusual travel pattern or, most controversially, have a certain ethnic or religious background.

The system would be much more sophisticated than simply picking out young men of Asian appearance. But it would cause outrage in the Muslim community because its members would be far more likely to be selected for extra checks.

Now That Was Easy

2006-08-11T12:33:00.000-04:00

Graham Alison, the former Dean of The Kennedy School for Recovering Politicians at Harvard, offers a simple prescription for victory in the Global War on Terror:

“We must delegitimize terrorism -- making it as internationally unacceptable as slavery or piracy.”

Huh?

What's the Excuse Now?

2006-08-11T07:33:00.000-04:00

Poverty and disillusioned youth, right?

Wrong: Twenty-four terrorist suspects being held last night over an alleged plot to blow up as many as 10 transatlantic jets include middle-class, well-educated young men born in Britain. At least one of them converted to Islam only recently.

Has to be anger over Iraq, right?

Wrong: In the decade after we left Saddam Hussein in power rather than deposing him, representatives of the umma responded by bombing the World Trade Center (1993), Khobar (1996), the embassies (1998), the U.S.S. Cole (2000); unsuccessfully plotting to blow up much of Manhattan (1993), a bunch of airliners (1994-95), L.A. Int'l Airport (2000) and the U.S.S. The Sullivans (2000); and finally killing almost 3000 of us in suicide hijackings that destroyed the WTC and damaged the Pentagon. But it was the Iraq war of 2003 that radicalized them?

Hmmm, then what? It couldn't possibly be, say, the Koran's Sura 9:5: "Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolators wherever ye find them, and take them captive, and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush."

Shocking!!

2006-08-10T15:00:00.000-04:00

Three of the alleged ringleaders of the foiled airplane bomb plot have been identified by Western intelligence agencies involved in unraveling the plot:
--Rashid Rauf
--Mohammed al-Ghandra
--Ahmed al Khan

Rashid, Mohammed and Ahmed? Hmmm. To stay safe, we better crack down and start screening old ladies and high school teenagers a little bit harder.

The New Normal

2006-08-10T12:56:00.000-04:00

From Dean Barnett:

As you all know by now, a terrorist plot in England was foiled in the last 24 hours. The plan was to blow up something like a half dozen passenger planes, perhaps over American cities. The British authorities characterized the plot as an effort to commit “mass murder on an unimaginable scale.”

What a poignant choice of words that is. One of the most important conclusions of the 9/11 forensics was that 9/11 was partly caused by our lack of imagination. We used to go to the airport and the airline personnel verified that we had packed our own luggage and that we had never let it out of our possession. The notion that terrorists would execute a suicide mission had never penetrated our collective consciousness.

We apparently didn’t care to imagine what incredible damage such an attack would cause.
HERE’S WHAT I’VE LEARNED from personal experience. As Soxblog readers know, I’m a 39 year old man with Cystic Fibrosis. For those of you not familiar with CF, 39 is pretty old for someone with the disease. I’m doing quite well now, but I’ve had some extremely rough patches and some very dark days in the not too distant past.

When you go through such times, the first instinct is to resist imagining the unimaginable. Our human instinct is to recoil from the worst; if there’s something that makes recoiling easy, it becomes all the more likely that you’ll choose to not face your unpleasant reality.

If you have a serious disease, you eventually wind up going one of two routes: One is that you confront your problems, deal with them in a hard-headed way and make peace with the hand you’ve been dealt. I call this dealing with your New Normal; the old normal was better, but the New Normal becomes your reality. It may be less than optimal, it may be downright dreadful, but it’s your new reality and you find a way to deal with it.

The other choice is to deny the situation. There are tons of ways to rationalize such a decision without using the pejorative term “denial.” You can defiantly say that you won’t let your condition rule your life. If you do, people will applaud your toughness. These are often the same people who always tell you how healthy you look, even when you look and feel like death warmed over.

So you live your life without accepting or dealing with your New Normal. And you reap terrible consequences.

AS FREE SOCIETIES, the Western democracies have a choice of whether or not face up to the existential challenge they face from Radical Islam. The lure of seeking an easy way out is almost irresistible. The siren song of sitting down and reasoning with the Hezbollahs and Ahmadenijads of the world is powerful. If we could just do something to convince ourselves that all is well and that there’s nothing to fear, life sure would be easier.

Just as is the case with an illness, there are a lot of people willing to tell us that are fears are overblown. If you want to believe that George W. Bush and the Patriot Act are the greatest threats to our way of life, you won’t have much trouble finding a professor on a nearby college campus to buttress your theory. If you want to think that there was nothing really going on in London to warrant any concern and all the news this morning is just Karl Rove’s response to Joe Lieberman’s defeat, you’ll easily locate a prominent blogger to offer his concurrence.

But it’s past time we face the facts and realize that this our New Normal. It’s worse than the old normal, the one that we had before 9/11 when we felt completely safe even though we weren’t.

It’s time we stop having a sphere of things that are “unimaginable.” Let’s imagine airliners exploding over our cities. Let’s imagine a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv. Let’s imagine a mushroom cloud over New York.

Let’s imagine how such things might happen. And then let’s resolve to stop them.

This Seems About Right

2006-08-01T11:12:00.000-04:00

Following are excerpts from an interview with Arab-American psychiatrist Wafa Sultan. The interview was aired on Al-Jazeera TV on February 21, 2006:

Wafa Sultan: The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings. What we see today is not a clash of civilizations. Civilizations do not clash, but compete.I am not a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew. I am a secular human being. I do not believe in the supernatural, but I respect others' right to believe in it.[...]

Wafa Sultan: The Jews have come from the tragedy (of the Holocaust), and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror, with their work, not their crying and yelling. Humanity owes most of the discoveries and science of the 19th and 20th centuries to Jewish scientists. 15 million people, scattered throughout the world, united and won their rights through work and knowledge. We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people. The Muslims have turned three Buddha statues into rubble. We have not seen a single Buddhist burn down a Mosque, kill a Muslim, or burn down an embassy. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people, and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them.

Quote of the Day

2006-07-31T15:32:00.000-04:00

"I have seen much war in my life and I detest it profoundly. But there are worse things than war, and they all come with defeat." -- Ernest Hemingway

This Is Priceless

2006-07-26T07:59:00.000-04:00

The soccer player action figure.

That Music You Hear is The Twilight Zone Theme Song

2006-07-26T07:47:00.000-04:00

DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) -- Irish archaeologists Tuesday heralded the discovery of an ancient book of psalms by a construction worker while driving the shovel of his backhoe into a bog.

The approximately 20-page book has been dated to the years 800-1000. Trinity College manuscripts expert Bernard Meehan said it was the first discovery of an Irish early medieval document in two centuries.

"This is really a miracle find," said Pat Wallace, director of the National Museum of Ireland, which has the book stored in refrigeration. Researchers will conduct years of painstaking analysis before putting the book on public display.

"There's two sets of odds that make this discovery really way out," Wallace said. "First of all, it's unlikely that something this fragile could survive buried in a bog at all, and then for it to be unearthed and spotted before it was destroyed is incalculably more amazing."

He said an engineer was digging up bogland last week to create commercial potting soil somewhere in Ireland's midlands when "just beyond the bucket of his bulldozer, he spotted something." Wallace would not specify where the book was found because a team of archaeologists is still exploring the site.

"The owner of the bog has had dealings with us in past and is very much in favor of archaeological discovery and reporting it," Wallace said.

Crucially, he said, the bog owner covered up the book with damp soil. Had it been left exposed overnight, he said, "it could have dried out and just vanished, blown away."

The book was found open to a page describing, in Latin script, Psalm 83, in which God hears complaints of other nations' attempts to wipe out the name of Israel.

I Still Love CNN

2006-07-20T11:34:00.000-04:00

A great CNN headline:

A Hezbollah rocket attack on Nazareth, revered as birthplace of Jesus, kills two people, Israeli army says

Uh, last I checked, Jesus was not born in Nazareth. But just a minor detail.

I Did Not Know This

2006-07-15T20:06:00.000-04:00

WASHINGTON (AP) - Roads and bridges built by U.S. taxpayers are starting to be sold off, and so far foreign-owned companies are doing the buying.

On a single day in June, an Australian-Spanish partnership paid $3.8 billion to lease the Indiana Toll Road. An Australian company bought a 99-year lease on Virginia's Pocahontas Parkway, and Texas officials decided to let a Spanish-American partnership build and run a toll road from Austin to Seguin for 50 years.Few people know that the tolls from the U.S. side of the tunnel between Detroit and Windsor, Canada, go to a subsidiary of an Australian company - which also owns a bridge in Alabama.

Some experts welcome the trend. Robert Poole, transportation director for the conservative think tank Reason Foundation, said private investors can raise more money than politicians to build new roads because these kind of owners are willing to raise tolls. "They depoliticize the tolling decision,'' Poole said. Besides, he said, foreign companies have purchased infrastructure in Europe for years; only now are U.S. companies beginning to get into the business of buying roads and bridges.