Josh
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Balding comic book nerds, does Vitamin B6 work?
I'm trying it, and I'm honestly not sure.
What dosages per day are people supposed to take in order to fight baldness?
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Those whimpery, anguished faces actresses make in many mainstream video entertainment media offerings. I never see actual women act like that, unless something highly unusual and truly awful has just happened, and rarely even then. Our wonderful entertainment media establishment just love to portray women as soft, sensitive, frail little wimps, who in their nearly-sniveling frailness are incomplete without a big strong man to prop them up -- at least some of the time. (Other times, though, many/most of these same characters are strong and some even kick ass.)
I don't see this kind of thing to an equal degree in all movies or TV shows, though. Not so much in the really well put together, well-written, award-winning ones. I think some ages and ethnicities of women are portrayed that way more often than others, and more so in certain genres than others. But I'm not sure I've ever seen this in shows aimed at a lesbian or gay male core audience.
Maybe I'm strange, but I don't like to see people in the usual target groups, including women, be made to look pathetic because they are members of their group. Making an individual character look pathetic? No problem, if that goes to the heart of that particular character and isn't a stereotypical attribution.
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There's a lot of that thinking in Nicekl And Dimed and its sequel as well, I'm told.
She seems like kind of a shallow writer, actually. Kind of a breezy yet aggressive New York professional writer-y kind of style, the style of someone who makes a living writing freelance articles aimed at sort of a popular audience that is easily satisfied.
I get the feeling her attitude isn't necessarily lightyears better than that of the positive thinking creeps, sort of a tough-minded All-American kind of thinking. She talks about people with depression at one point, and frankly sounds an awful lot like she believes that they are being self-indulgent -- just like self-deluding unrealistically optimistic people -- and that the prescription is the same for each, to stop being so self-involved and get out in the world and deal with it.
However there is much of worth in the book, for instance her narrative on how positive thinking got to be the required stance for all Americans, especially in certain circumstances where they are more vulnerable to ostracism or even retaliation for not toeing the line. In some cases, I'm not sure how fair she's being to some people or positions that she criticizes, but mixed with sloppy and shallow thinking and some glib erroneousness as a lot of good information, particularly at the end of the book where she deals with how required positive thinking walled financial industry top decision makers off from the reality of the looming real estate collapse, which is all too similar to the way the Bush administration operated during those same years. I haven't finished Bright-Sided so there's probably more of worth that I haven't yet mentioned....
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The more you learn about him, the worse he is:
Why Do Mainstream Media Suck Up to Pastor Rick Warren?Posted by Adele Stan, AlterNet at 1:27 PM on December 1, 2009.
On Meet the Press, David Gregory never asked about Warren's tacit support for Uganda's gay-execution law, or challenged Warren's description of abortion as a "holocaust."
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/sex/144285/why_do_mainstream_media_suck_up_to_pastor_rick_warren
Warren says he doesn't interfere, as in the affairs of other countries, but in other articles, Warren was very directly involved in getting an aid program changed so that Uganda could no longer get hold of cheap/free condoms, helping to reverse success in that country cutting new HIV infections.
Warren really isn't ideologically as bad as a lot of Religious Right leaders, but in a way I think that allows him to do more damage. Since he is more moderate or even progressive on a few issues, he has greater influence out in "the world" than do some more overtly reactionary born again political types do, and is more effective as pushing some of their most reactionary politics (opposition to condom use to stop HIV, non-opposition to at least one "death penalty for homosexuals" law in a situation where that's the indicated move for anyone with a modern conscience.
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Is it true that in certain places, you can't even smoke in the street?
Nope. Some buildings (hospitals, for instance) require you to smoke a certain distance away from the entrance, but that's not the same.
Chicago has a (widely ignored) law banning smoking a certain number of feet from the entrance to any public building. The problem is that realistically that would put all the smokers in the middle of the road.
In my state the law is something like 25 feet from the entrance. I've decided that if ever someone tells me that I'm smoking too close to an entrance I'll say 'You go get some measuring tape while I finish my cigarette.'
In San Francisco I think it's 20 feet. I think it's good in the case of this city because here, there is always significant air motion, and in many to most buildings, especially older ones, there is a prevailing air motion through the building, in one end and out the other. When the prevailing direction on a typical narrow San Francisco storefront business is in the front door and out the back, cigarette smoke from anyone smoking just outside the front door gets sucked right in and goes all the way through the place, so everyone within "gets the benefit". In fact the previous location of my favorite comic book store had this precise problem. Yech....
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Some thoughts from the woman behind Feministe on the attitudes of some users of food stamps, a longstanding program of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture which gives people a book of special dollar-valued coupons that they can redeem at grocery stories for food-type items. This references a New York Times article and touches on a number of areas in a short time:
Conservative Hypocrisy: Food Stamps Are Hand-Outs to the Lazy ... Until I Need ThemPosted by Jill Filipovic, Feministe at 6:30 AM on November 30, 2009.
(Then it's still a hand-out to the lazy, just not for me.)
[ . . . ]
The article is also interesting because of its unspoken undercurrent of "this is now notable because white people do it." Food stamps are now for "regular folks," instead of those other people who usually rely on public assistance. And it contains some staggering statistics -- like the fact that half of all Americans, and 90 percent of all African Americans, will rely on food stamps before they're 20. It’s certainly a good thing that the government is able to help that many people, but what else is going on where so many Americans can't afford food to begin with? And given those numbers, why are food stamps still treated with such disdain?
The article is mis-titled, a very common occurrence on Alternet, to hook into left of center anti-right anger. The story isn't so much about what evil conservatives are doing, but ordinary American working people who have some conservative attitudes that permeate the entire body politic. Many Americans DO think that it's very important, at least to themselves, that THEY aren't cynical, lazy freeloaders when they need to have recourse to programs that help people who are having problems making it, especially programs that are identified in the public mind with people who rely on government programs rather than work for a living -- like "welfare" (general assistance) and food stamps.
The most stunning thing in the article, though, is its repetition of the stats from the New York Times about the really large proportion of the U.S. population that's using programs like food stamps now.
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Shocking: High School Grads Twice As Likely To Be Jobless Than College Grads – and Right-Wingers are Profiting From Their Pain
By Adele M. Stan, AlterNet. Posted November 28, 2009.
The economic meltdown has hit non-college grads much harder than the educated. And conservatives are very good at exploiting their anger and unease.
We all know that unemployment is high -- 10 percent nationwide, and higher than that in certain geographic pockets. (Michigan tops the states with more than 15 percent.) Economists tell us that when you factor in all the underemployed people, and those who have given up looking for work, the national employment picture is more like 17 percent who are either out of work or barely working. But chances are, if you're at all like me, those numbers tell you that something's terribly wrong, but your day-to-day life is more or less holding together. Those who do not possess a college diploma are having a far more visceral experience of this recession.
Among college graduates, the unemployment rate for October was 4.7 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (PDF). For people with some college or an Associate's degree, the rate is almost doubled, at 9 percent. Among high school graduates who never went to college, 11 percent are unemployed, while high-school drop-outs show a whopping 15.5 percent unemployed.
The two things I wanted to point out in the article were 1) the assumption that "us progressives" are all people with at least four year college degrees, 2) the assumption that "teabaggers" don't have as much education and due to that they are more easily exploited by the conservative movement, and 3) there is a real economic divide between those with at least four year college degrees in regard to unemployment and those without in the U.S.
The education divide in and of itself is very important for myriad reasons, among others because at least one influential rightwing policy wonk, good old Charles Murray, has been advocating that fewer people go to college. Interestingly, strapped state governments have been enacting policies that will cause that to happen by cutting down on so many college classes that fewer students will be able to go to state-funded colleges.
The "progressive divide" is another matter. There are plenty of people among the 70% of American who don't have four year degrees who think of themselves as "progressive", and many more worldwide. I see a split between progressive elitists like Barbara Ehrenreich who can't help but look down on genuinely working class people, especially the poorest of them, and those of us who a+re down in the groups people like her are so condescending toward, along with a third group who have at least four year college degrees but who don't see any crucial difference between themselves and those who are less educated and/or more working class, perhaps because they know a lot of working class people, unlike article author Adele Stan, because they are from a working class background, or they are unusually open emotionally.
I see the progressive divide doing nothing but ultimately strengthening the hand of those who champion economic inequality. It's one source of serious disunity among folks who would be much stronger together, but since it's due in large measure to socio-economic (class) differences, it's going to be at least a little tough to overcome. A large part of the resistance is denial on the part of the "educated" progressives like Stan and Ehrenreich that there's anything wrong with the way they think, or that they actually discriminate in any way.
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/UPDATE*/U.S.:
State Department Backpedals on Landmine Treaty
Jim Lobe*
WASHINGTON, 26 Nov (IPS) - One day after the State Department announced that the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama will not sign the 10-year-old treaty banning anti-personnel landmines, it insisted that Washington's policy on the issue was still being reviewed.
Human rights and disarmament activists had reacted with outrage Wednesday to Tuesday's announcement by State Department spokesman Ian Kelly that the review had concluded and that Washington "would not be able to meet our national defence needs, nor our security commitments to our friends and allies if we sign the [landmine] convention".
[ . . . ]
"While we were told to expect a landmine policy review..., we were taken by surprise that it had already been concluded behind closed doors without the consultation of non-governmental aid workers, legislators, and important U.S. NATO allies who are all States Parties to the treaty," Zach Hudson, the group's coordinator, said Wednesday morning before the State Department changed its position.
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Seriously, some Republicans are trying to push a resolution through the Republican National Committee to not fund any candidate who doesn't agree with eight or more items on a ten-item list that's supposed to represent the thinking of Ronald Reagan - except that Reagan himself would have only agreed with seven items on it at most:
November 23, 2009, 1:32 pmG.O.P. Considers ‘Purity’ Resolution for Candidates
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
[ . . . ]
The resolution invokes Ronald Reagan, and noted that Mr. Reagan had said the Republican Party should be devoted to conservative principles but also be open to diverse views. President Reagan believed, the resolution notes, “that someone who agreed with him 8 out of 10 times was his friend, not his opponent.”
Hence the provision calling for cutting off Republicans who agree with the party on fewer than eight of 10 items. The resolution demands that Republicans support “smaller government, smaller national deficits and lower taxes,” denial of government funding for abortion, and “victory in Iraq and Afghanistan.” It calls on candidates to oppose amnesty for illegal immigrants and repealing of the Defense of Marriage Act.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/gop-considers-purity-resolution-for-candidates/
The article has the list of ten resolution items. Check 'em out.
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And speaking of mainstream racists, here is Eric Alterman's excellent series The Bell Curveball on Charles Murray and his racist book The Bell Curve, explaining very fully how the book was very intentionally and calculatedly mainstreamed and the degree to which "respectable" news outlets discussed and promoted it:
You've got to be taught to hate and fear ...April 04, 2007 2:11 pm ET by Eric Alterman
The Bell Curveball, Part I
The story of Charles Murray's rise in just one decade from being a public nobody to being America's best known and perhaps most influential public intellectual is an odd but instructive tale with regard to just how easily conservatives can manipulate the SCLM, and legitimate views once considered unspeakable in polite society. As a writer, Murray displayed an uncanny ability to offer what appeared to be a reasonable and scholarly-sounding voice to opinions and arguments that had hitherto been considered beyond the pale of respectability. Indeed, he has been quite self-conscious regarding this purpose as evidenced by the fact that in his book proposal for Losing Ground, he explained to potential publishers that his work would be welcomed by people who secretly believed themselves to be racists. "Why can a publisher sell it?" he asked. "Because a huge number of well-meaning whites fear that they are closet racists, and this book tells them they are not. It's going to make them feel better about things they already think but do not know how to say."
The institute which was responsible for fronting this book has its monetary reach into some very interesting places.
Some very influential African-Americans are being funded by the institute now (or perhaps they always were) to be the public face for the new "seperate but equal" campaign of Washington's "Race to the Top" school program.
Segregation is no longer something to be despised because this time, unlike before, it will be seperate but equal because of things like charter schools and more black-run private academies.
I don't know how different that is from the period of the Harlem Renaissance, myself.
We can go all the way back to apologists like Booker T. Washington's "the talented tenth".
From what I've picked over the last number of years, there is a sufficient feeling of desperation among some people in the U.S. black community about the situation of African-American young people that some now have an attitude that could be summed up as, "We're so desperate that we're willing to try anything at this point." Some are saying that perhaps black young people should be educated separately, under the theory that they may need to actually be taught differently than everyone else. Not unrelated to this is the sentiment that perhaps black boys should be educated differently and possibly separately from black girls.
The fact that these spokesmen are being funded by the same institute which was pouring money into the book The Bell Curve is very worrisome, I would think.I'm going to hazard a guess that those willing to take money from the backers of The Bell Curve are a subset of African-Americans who think that segregated education should perhaps be tried {again}, and that the rest want nothing to do with "respectable racist" money.
That article also makes a good point about the writing of the book being written in a style for a laymen audience that is rare for a book which, on the surface, seems to have been geared towards debate at the college level. This book is not written in a style for peer review/critique amongst professors.Odd that, eh?
Yeah, it is. It was apparently already intended while it was being written for the kind of promotion and popularization that its backers gave it. And... in whatever style it might have been written, it wouldn't have had a hope of surviving peer review in any but the most reactionary and unprestigous academic journals.
Alterman quotes one of the authors of The Bell Curve as saying that some of the stuff they read while researching the book they didn't want to be seen reading in public. That should be a clue as to the likelihood of positive reception of the book by experts in the areas it covered.
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November 25, 2009
Ahead of Key Global Conference, U.S. Announces Continued Rejection of Land Mine Ban
REPORTER: I think we’re one of only two nations, and Somalia is about to sign it, right? So we are going to be the only nation in the whole world who doesn’t believe in banning landmines. Why is that?
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/25/ahead_of_key_global_conference_us
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Remember the fit "everybody" had when Jimmy Carter said that a great deal of the opposition to Obama is due to racism? How "everybody" took him to task for that?
It's a pity Carter didn't think to point out that the lad isn't a socialist as well, while he was stating the completely obvious, really.
The point about racism deserved to stand alone. By itself it was more than enough for Americans to chew on.
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I'm really not sure, but is the upper one Humphrey Bogart?
The lower one is Bob Dylan, though, isn't it? Of the two I like it best.
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Bwahahahaha. This from the work on the bell-curve book. "And the education professor Nathan Glazer pointed out that during the second world war, a U.S. Army study found that Northern black recruits not only scored higher than southern black recruits on intelligence exams, they also scored higher than southern white recruits".
Ouch. I bet that wasn't posted on the wall in any army base in the south.
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Unchristian: what a new generation really thinks about Christianity ... and why it matters by David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons of the Barna Group, an Protestant evangelical outfit that does surveys and studies for the benefit of fundamentalist/evangelical/born again Christians. In this very recent book, published this year, Kinnaman and Lyons tend to focus on people who were 18-29 when they were doing their research, more specifically on the subgroup of them which they have labeled "outsiders", basically people who aren't Christians, a surprisingly high 40% of that age cohort. Through in depth interviews and the analysis of answers to survey questions given to their sample groups, the authors came up with the most common negative perceptions these young "outsiders" had of Christians, that they are "antihomosexual" [the authors' phrase], judgmental, hypocritical, and "too involved in politics", in order by the number of people who hold each perception, in addition to a number of perceptions adding up to "Christians" (aggressive born agains, evangelical) being out of touch with the current social reality and too aggressive in seeking converts. Very much despite its authors' evangelical faith, this is a really insightful book that actually even goes into the degree that these negative perceptions are actually true of "Christians" (born again Christians and evangelicals). Very well-written with a great deal to say about every group discussed, to the point of being very readable and quite entertaining. :)
Grace after Midnight: a memoir by Felicia "Snoop" Pearson with David Ritz. Also very readable. Just getting into this one.
Bright-sided: how the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined American by Barbara Ehrenreich. Well it's about fucking time somebody wrote about attacking the whole dominant American positive thinking mentality! About the all-American positive thinking bullcrap in general and how it expresses itself and does damage in regard to certain areas of life -- her first chapter is Smile or Die: The Bright Side of Cancer, mostly breast cancer, with which Ehrenreich had a personal encounter. Her final chapter in that sentence is, "What it gave me, if you want to call this a 'gift,' was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before -- one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate."
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Remember the fit "everybody" had when Jimmy Carter said that a great deal of the opposition to Obama is due to racism? How "everybody" took him to task for that?
It's hard to believe that Pruden was the guy who fired that bigoted piece of shit Samuel Francis from the Washington Times in 1995 for being a racist. I mean, if you can be busted by Dinesh 'Dartmouth "Lynching Photo" Review' D'Souza for being a racist, you'd have to be a pretty bad one. (And Francis was: I saw his appearance at the American Renaissance conference on CSPAN.):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_T._Francis
Maybe if he hadn't died in 2005 they'd've invited him back by now.
And speaking of mainstream racists, here is Eric Alterman's excellent series The Bell Curveball on Charles Murray and his racist book The Bell Curve, explaining very fully how the book was very intentionally and calculatedly mainstreamed and the degree to which "respectable" news outlets discussed and promoted it:
You've got to be taught to hate and fear ...April 04, 2007 2:11 pm ET by Eric Alterman
The Bell Curveball, Part I
The story of Charles Murray's rise in just one decade from being a public nobody to being America's best known and perhaps most influential public intellectual is an odd but instructive tale with regard to just how easily conservatives can manipulate the SCLM, and legitimate views once considered unspeakable in polite society. As a writer, Murray displayed an uncanny ability to offer what appeared to be a reasonable and scholarly-sounding voice to opinions and arguments that had hitherto been considered beyond the pale of respectability. Indeed, he has been quite self-conscious regarding this purpose as evidenced by the fact that in his book proposal for Losing Ground, he explained to potential publishers that his work would be welcomed by people who secretly believed themselves to be racists. "Why can a publisher sell it?" he asked. "Because a huge number of well-meaning whites fear that they are closet racists, and this book tells them they are not. It's going to make them feel better about things they already think but do not know how to say."
http://mediamatters.org/blog/200704040003
But none of this is to take away from what started all this. Good catch, Mark.
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The media are making a big deal of the fact that Palin seems to be using the book to "settle scores". That's how they can be expected to put things, of course, when the "score seeker" feels that the news media establishment is one group that that the individual feels has fucked her over. And really, how CAN a person be expected to get her story out past the news media that she believes she's been victimized by? A well-read book is a great way to do that. But it may be that there is something to this score settling theme some of the media have latched onto. Palin may genuinely be one of those vindictive, anger-motivated pols. If so, it's better to know it now.
And speaking of Sarah Palin: some folks are putting out an anti-Palin book on the same day her Going Rogue will be released. The anti-Palin book is named Going Rouge .
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Sarah Palin is doing such an admirable thing by going to Fort Hood to help heal the psyches of the brutally traumatized people there and those of the nation at large after the recent mass-shooting. [/sarcasm]
November 13, 2009 2:17 PMSarah Palin to Visit Fort Hood
Posted by Brian Montopoli
According to the Journal, an official at Fort Hood contacted Palin's publisher at some point after the attack to indicate that she should go ahead with the planned appearance, scheduled for December 4th.
Palin's book tour begins November 18th. She is largely avoiding liberal-leaning cities such as Seattle, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. Instead, she is stopping in Sioux City, Iowa; Noblesville, Indiana; Washington, Pennsylvania; and Rochester, New York.
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/11/13/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry5635712.shtml
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Greatness. :)
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It's kind of odd when something in this thread is related to one pretty directly, but in perusing a partial list of college professors maligned in David Horowitz's The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, I realized that the first one on the list, perhaps alphabetically the first in his book, is someone I'm 99% sure I had when I was pursuing a degree! I haven't been able to find a picture of him online but the dates and his particular discipline fit perfectly.
The funny thing is that when I had Anatole Anton, a philosophy professor, for Introduction to Critical Thinking back in the early `80s, I had no idea of his politics, other than perhaps that he might be somewhere left of dead center. If he ever brought politics into the classroom, I don't remember it or it was just as a one-sentence aside. So Horowitz's attack on him in this book as someone who misuses his academic position to indoctrinate his students with evil leftism is a complete crock of shit, unless Anton had a gross change of personality between then and now. Horowitz is unhappy Anton has a long history of public activism, including at San Francisco State at 1968, taking risks with his then just beginning academic career at the school that his teaching history strongly suggest is where he's wanted to teach all along. The funny thing is that Horowitz apparently couldn't fault him on his own behavior, so he makes a big deal of the evil of one organization that Anton's been involved with.
The book is a methodologically sleazy, error-ridden hack job, at least according to Free Exchange on Campus:
http://www.freeexchangeoncampus.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=7&Itemid=34
Elsewhere on their site the have the complete 50 page report which goes fully into their case against Horowitz's book, including the profiles of the mistakes made on the 13 academics that are on the page URLed above. Before going through it, I thought that Horowitz at least tried to get his facts right and that he had SOME integrity. I don't believe that now! Which makes me wonder about his earlier books co-written with Peter Collier before they both left the Left and became Reaganites, which I had gotten the impression actually were worth reading. Hmmmm.
God, are all the public GOP conservative public figures completely lacking in integrity? Blech.....
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A heartening story for Americans and an educational one for those who've chosen to believe that the news media accurately reflect the degree of popular ferment here:
The Endless Censoring of LaborTuesday 10 November 2009
by: Dick Meister, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
Did you know about the Bush administration's rotten treatment of the air traffic controllers whose work is essential to air safety? That controllers were forced to work long, fatiguing shifts with little time to rest? That many quit because of that? Were you aware of the great potential for serious accidents that posed?
Did you know that President Obama's appointees to the Federal Aviation Agency - FAA - stepped in to rescind the onerous conditions imposed by Bush's FAA appointees and end the controllers' long struggle for decent treatment?
Well, you wouldn't know about those vital developments if you relied solely on mainstream media. To most mainstream outlets, it was just another labor story to be ignored - another labor story to be, in effect, censored.
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Cantor Says Tea Party's Dachau Photos 'Inappropriate,' Takes Issue With Limbaugh
Rachel Slajda | November 6, 2009, 4:58PM
"Do I condone the mention of Hitler in any discussion about politics?" said Cantor, who is the only Jewish Republican in Congress. "No, I don't, because obviously that is something that conjures up images that frankly are not, I think, very helpful."
Will being Jewish while objecting to misuse of Nazi ideas and imagery be enough cover to allow a national Republican politician to criticize Rush Limbaugh without being forced to apologize to him shortly thereafter? Stay tuned.
And, Cantor's the only Jewish Republican in Congress? Somehow that doesn't bode well for the GOP, at very least in that it suggests that the GOP is very weak in those areas that aren't redneck, uneducated or sparsely populated.
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Mind you, Fox was insisting that Obama's trying to force through the reforms as part of a sinister eugenic agenda to kill as many white people as possible, isn't it?
Would that be part of his environmental initiative?
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From what I've heard, low-grade fevers are your bodies way to attempt to fight.
I guess the big worry here is that a low-grade fever could turn into a high-grade without warning, and then you'd wish you started battling it earlier.
No medical expertise on my part though.
Oh! Also, it probably depends on what is meant by a "fever" here.
Our body temperatures do fluctuate.
So, if it's very low-grade, I probably wouldn't classify it as even a "fever".
Do you have a fever?
Yes, as the result of what probably is a change-in-the-weather seasonal bug.
The slightly tepid questions that don't really need answering
in Bring the Noise
Posted
It does, and here's how it works:
If the women are Gen Xers or Gen Yers, they will. If they're not, they won't.
So unless you're looking for women who are over 40, you're in luck.