It doesn't seem to matter: persecution of black Republicans continues. I had heard that my friend Ted Hayes was getting kicked off the land he's been using as a village for the homeless downtown, but I hadn't realized that it was because of his association with the Party of Lincoln until I went to Goldstein's site today.

Bigotry against Republicans is a tragedy in the world today. And I'm dead serious: I had to take the Bush bumper sticker off my car. Not because of the honking and getting flipped off in traffic; I can certainly handle that. The problem was, it was costing me jobs in "tolerant" Los Angeles.

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. . . that the Arab/Muslim King isn't wearing any racism. Or something like that.

Via Beautiful Atrocities.

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And the Democrats are starting to sweat.

(h/t: Crystal)

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Black people continue to leave the "liberal plantation." One NAACP leader in Orange County, Florida, is remarkably honest about his motives: economic development of the black community, starting with his own business.

That sounds crass until you contemplate the fact that people like Jesse Jackson, and (worse) Al Sharpton never admit that they're out to make a buck.

Remarks one of my good friends, who defected to the GOP quite some time ago: "I ain't pickin' nobody's cotton." But which he means that he has no intention of letting the black victocrats tell him what to think.

[hat tip to Crystal at AFR.]

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. . . what you remember from the sensuous seventies.

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We love you.

Rest in peace.

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I'd love to get my hands on some of the earlier versions of the Nancy Drew stories. And it would be lovely to have multiple versions of my favories (e.g., Mystery at Lilac Inn) just to see what details were changed over the decades.

In a way, Nancy is my first girl-detective role model. However, if I had to choose, I'd root for Trixie. Because I'm a dirty turncoat.

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. . . about setting Nancy Drew in the present day. When I was growing up the editions I read tended to have details from the 50s: there were lots of sweater sets. I'd never seen one, and wondered what they looked like.

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This shit is offensive.

And I'm speaking as a chick who isn't positive that white people wearing blackface is necessarily meant in a bad way. (It often is, but it really depends upon the spirit in which it's done. When my friends who were a heterosexual couple cross-dressed to attend a costume party as Ozzie and Sharon Osborne, were they putting down each other's gender? Of course not. Masquerade is about getting out of our own skins, if only in a superficial, symbolic way. There's nothing more natural than using such occasions to escape the limitations of race, class, and gender.)

There's simply a line that's crossed when an "artist" gives animal features to one race, and one race only. This is not subtle, or difficult to understand. Use your eyes.

The Mexican authorities ought to be ashamed of themselves.

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There's a great summary over at Photon Courier of a study that shows people can make analogies from the flimsiest resemblences. In the test scanario, subjects were inspired to find analogies between a hypothetical threat from one nation to another: and it was shockingly easy to get them to see either the Vietnam war or WWII as parallels.

Quite an insight into our teeny tiny minds.

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After Jane was called a Mason by those who wish to discredit her, one of her readers pointed out that 1) there are lodges of people who call themselves Masons and yet are co-ed or all-female; these are not generally recognized by the majority as true Masons, and 2) there has been a mixed reaction to the Order of the Eastern Star, with British Masons a good deal more skeptical or negative than U.S. Lodges.

I have no first-hand knowledge of this issue, but my family's history is intertwined with Things Mason, so it might be appropriate to comment.

My grandfather was a Shriner and either a 32nd or 33rd degree Mason, depending upon whom one speaks to. Some cousins tell me they are skeptical about the 33rd degree version of the story; it's apparently very rare for this to be granted at all. Let's just say the exact ordinal is a little hazy, but he was way into it.

My grandmother, his wife, was a member of the Order of the Eastern Star, and I believe a female cousin on his side is as well: she appears to be even more gung ho about the Masonic culture than her husband is, though she holds the belief that females cannot be Masons.

My mother was a member of Job's Daughters, and her younger sister was in the Rainbow Girls.

When my mother took her first long trip away from home she was 16; she was traveling by bus. This would have been in 1952, ten years before I arrived on this planet. As my grandfather drove her to the bus station he told her that if she ever got in trouble or needed help in any way, she should look for someone with a Mason ring, and get help from him.

That is interesting to me: my grandfather was essentially telling my mother that there are some strange men you can trust. If I have a daughter would I ever tell her that she could always trust someone she met through, say, Twelve Step programs? No: there are a lot of crazy people in Twelve Step programs.

But I feel good that there is an organization out there that engenders that level of trust. I like the notion that once in a while there's a way to guess which people might be decent human beings.

At present my aunt wears my grandmother's Order of the Eastern Star ring. I like that. Someday I'll probably wear it myself. It's pretty, and it reminds me that underneath all my family's problems and neuroses, there is a thread of decency, a concern for Doing the Right Thing, at least most of the time. It's nice to think about that every now and again.

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1 LMA, Well put! As a 32nd Degree Scottish Rite Mason and York Rite Knight Templar, I can attest to the fact that we Masons are far from perfect as individuals (especially this one!), but at least TRY to hold up the ideals of service, fairness and generally ethical dealings with the world in our lives, regardless of whatever political, religious, ethnic, national, or class background we may have.

Posted by: Mikal at May 08, 2005 04:51 PM (N1Lj5)

2 BTW: When I looked at the original context of the "Mason" slur, I understood it better. Militant Islam, like all ideologies based on intolerance and envy, HATES Freemasonry because it brings together men of different religious, political, ethnic, national and class identities as individuals committed to common ethical goals. This subverts the divide-and-conquer strategy of resentment-based politics, so naturally they can't stand us, and use the "secret society" slur to whip up suspicion against us. (Actually, our "secret" rituals have been publically "exposed" for centuries; the true mysteries of Freemasonry lie in the ineffable experiences that brothers go through in the initiatory and lodge processes, as well as in our commitment to protecting each other's individual confidences, murder and treason excepted.) For haters, paranoiacs, and politcal extremists, Freemasons have a very high International Bad Guy status. It's right behind that of -- you guessed it -- THE JOOOOOOS.

Posted by: Mikal at May 08, 2005 05:02 PM (N1Lj5)

3 Well, there's the Trilateral Commission

Posted by: Attila Girl at May 08, 2005 07:10 PM (FAdyB)

4 Funny how you find people occasionally with very similar backgrounds. My grandfather is a 33rd degree Mason with all the hooha that goes along with it. My father is a 32nd degree. Me, I'm a Catholic living in a generation that absolutely could care less about fraternal organizations after college and believes that by the time our children are in their 30's, there will be no more Elks, Moose, KofC, or Masons.

Posted by: Short time reader first time poster at May 09, 2005 07:35 AM (YeUTv)

5 No mooses? That would be sad.

Posted by: Attila Girl at May 09, 2005 09:23 AM (FAdyB)

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. . . has the transcript of the first lady's speech from the other night.

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. . . discusses the fact that we've very nearly cured the disease of "being a little boy."

Thank goodness.

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So long, Johnnie.

And, fuck you, too: you set race relations back by at least a couple of decades, setting white and black women, in particular, at each other's throats and getting a brutal killer off the hook for a vicious crime.

Wait. Did I say fuck you?

Via Protein Wisdom.

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1 I do believe you did. No doubt where you stand.

Posted by: Desert Cat at March 29, 2005 07:55 PM (xdX36)

2 What a sleazebucket. Will we hear encomiums from the Black Community?

Posted by: jeff at March 29, 2005 09:13 PM (FT/fv)

3 I'm bracing myself, just in case.

Posted by: Attila Girl at March 30, 2005 01:31 AM (R4CXG)

4 How do you really feel?

Posted by: Michael at March 30, 2005 06:28 AM (ExF20)

5 ...and unfuck Ito. California has had some real stupid judges [Rose Bird] but Ito comes close to the dumbest.

Posted by: Walter E. Wallis at March 30, 2005 04:27 PM (MBCZx)

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My cousin* Attila, the "Pillage Idiot," wrote an interesting meditation on the unique relationship between Jews and America. I love it, and I think it has a lot to say, by extension, about other ethnic groups in their own relationships with this nation. We comprise the first nation to make equality an ideal and to push hard toward that ideal.

And that is what makes us the Shining City on the Hill.

* We're related by marriage. He's a Marylander Jew, and I'm Californian Anglo-Saxon/Native American trailor trash. But we both like to plunder and pillage, so we get along fine.

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Via Pirate's Cove comes this chart, which purports to show how the inhabitants of various states rank when it comes time to give to charity. I didn't get a chance to study the methodology behind it, but I found the idea fascinating, since instead of simply adding up all the money spent and adjusting for population (which would presumably make New York and California look good) it adjusts for the actual incomes of the populations involved, creating a "generosity index" (and placing New York and California squarely in the lackluster middle of the pack).

The site provides ammo for those who maintain that "all stereotypes are true, up to a point." The list begins with two Southern states, Mississippi and Arkansas, and stays Southern and rural for a good 15 entries. The first Western state is Utah, at #8, then Idaho (# 10), Wyoming (11) and Texas (12). The first state from the upper midwest is Indiana, at #25, and the first state from New England is Maine, at #32. The bottom of the barrel (um, chart) is Rhode Island (47), New Jersey (4 , and then two more New England states: blue-blooded Massachusetts (49) and New Hampshire (50).

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(writing as Jane Galt, of course) recommends a book on welfare reform, and then tells us:

My own thoughts on welfare reform: it's clear to me from the research I've done to write about poverty, and from reading books like DeParle's, that the poor suffer from three main problems: their own poor impulse control or decision making; a culture that encourages poor decision making; and limited means, which give them no buffer against the results of their poor decision making.

Liberals want to change the third variable, but this is somewhat recursive. As long as our society offers housing to everyone who needs it, the poor will be stuck living with people whose bad behaviour makes them impossible neighbours . . . so that even if the housing stock is physically perfect, crime and various other sorts of antisocial behavior that flourish in a world without evictions make the housing for the poor actually unbearable. Also, if people have very bad problems, such as mental illness or drug addiction, no reasonable amount of cash will improve their lot without adding things like forced institutionalisation. The people with those problems, unsurprisingly, are the overwhelming majority of the truly immiserated poor, who have rotting housing, insufficient caloric intake, and so forth.

Conservatives, by and large, want to change the first two variables, and there's a lot to this. There's simply no question that welfare enables women to make short term choices that are all right in the short term (dropping out of school, having a baby out of wedlock), but disastrous in the long term. Enabling women to make awful short term choices means enabling some proportion of them to ruin their lives.

But it's not enough to say to these women "Get married" or "Ignore your friends and pay attention to school". Some extraordinary people do, of course, but we all tend to overestimate how easy it is to be that extraordinary. Most of us reading this blog, after all, went to college and/or got nice steady jobs because we had enormous social and familial pressure on us to do so. How many of us were strong enough to overcome our environment, drop out of high school, and sell drugs?

I jest, of course, but not totally. The fact that every inner-city kid isn't a Horatio Alger story doesn't mean that inner city kids couldn't be, if their environment were more like the one I grew up in. After all, the girls in my high school didn't fail to have babies at 16 because they were more virtuous than the ones down the road at JFK High; they failed to have babies because they had a very clear idea that something better awaited them. How do we give those kids a more hopeful vision of their futures?

Part of the answer, I hope, is that by ceasing to enable those bad short-term decisions, the culture changes to focus more on the long term. Girls stop having babies at fifteen, and start demanding committment at 25--and they demand, too, that the boys stop selling drugs, because a husband in prison is one who can't provide for his family, and the government won't replace him any more. I doubt that's the whole answer, but I hope it's a big part of it.

There's a lot I agree with in there—and a little I do not.

But she's certainly a smart cookie.

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Michele points out that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is re-thinking the whole Food Pyramid idea, and possibly contemplating some new geometric shape. Read the article, because it's hilarious: it says the Food Pyramid—first published in 1992—can't be working, because Americans are overweight. There are two fallacies at work there: 1) that people are eating the wrong foods in order to get overweight (perhaps they are eating too much in exactly the right proportions), and 2) that if people only understood what they ought to be eating, they wouldn't choose an unhealthy diet at all. The bureaucratic mindset is on parade here: no one, fully knowing the choices out there, would ever deliberately do anything wrong. This can, of course, apply to genocide as much as to gluttony—and to everything in between.

Michele has her own wickedly hilarious suggestion for a fresh approach to government guidelines, which you must go look at now.

Done? Did you read the comment by Crank? "How about a Food Sphinx, which dispenses only impenetrable riddles and offers no useful guidance?" Nice. He gets a link for that; I laughed out loud. And that certainly seems to be the government's policy; it holds across shapes.

After visiting Michele's place I started wondering whether I could remember the guidelines from when I was a kid, the ones that hung on at least one cafeteria hall in the 60s and 70s: The Basic Four Food Groups.

Meat and Dairy, Grains and Legumes, Fruits and Vegetables . . . what else? Hm. I started Googling to see if I could remember those guidelines, which I believe were developed in the 50s. Interestingly, there is no consensus now on what they were. Now, I might be able to find them somewhere, such as in my pre-1992 edition of The Joy of Cooking, but that would be cheating.

A popular pediatrician gives us this version of the Basic Four: meat, dairy, vegetables, fruits. That sounded wrong to me: I could have sworn that all produce was lumped into one category, which might be why the green beans in the ground beef casserole were all the fruits and veggies we supposedly needed in a given day (thank goodness my mother was a fruit fanatic—and relatively enlightened—or I would have gotten scurvy by the time I was six).

Still Googling on the first page (because I'm far too lazy to go any deeper than that, thank you very much) I find this site, by one Aunt Lynnie—who's clearly just a citizen nutritionist, without the good Doctor's resources. She seems to have it right: meat, dairy, fruit and vegetables, cereals and grain. Her graphic shows what I vaguely recalled, that the meat group encompassed one other protein source. But it was eggs—meat and eggs. Dairy is its own category in the old scheme. That also made sense in those days, as there was tremendous concern about getting enough calcium into children. And I'm old-fashioned enough to think my child (when he/she arrives) should get a little cow's milk every day, despite Dr. Gordon the Food Prude's warnings about its dangers, and his assurance that tofu and broccoli contain ample calcium.

And I'm suddenly seized by nostalgia: I want to eat something "healthy" from the old days. Like macaroni and cheese. Or, you know—beef.

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I have some real mixed feelings about this.

On one hand, I don't like anything that smacks of censorship, and I despise the idea that Jeb Bush might somehow retaliate against Disney if Miramax distributes Michael Moore's latest piece of shit. If true, that's unacceptable behavior for a governor. Furthermore, I believe it's idiotic of Disney to acquire a film company known for "edgey" material and then forbid it to get involved in edgey projects.

On the other hand, I'd like nothing better than for the community of responsible film producers to wash their hands of this man and disassociate themselves from his lies.

The compromise might be for the film industry to produce and distribute his work, but not to nominate anything for an academy award in the "documentary" category that's really fiction.

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1 Moore was lying again--he knew over a year ago that there was no distribution deal, and made up that stuff about Jeb Bush. Big Fat Liar indeed!

Posted by: Susie at May 09, 2004 09:04 AM (rokYU)

2 Maybe his next film will be about the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction. Fiction is as fiction does.

Posted by: litlemrmahatma at May 10, 2004 08:03 AM (R6HyB)

3 Oh, right. Those WMDs. The ones that every nation in the world--including France--believed Saddam possessed. The ones that Clinton relied on when he first articulated a U.S. policy of regime change for Iraq. The ones that might have surfaced in Syria. The ones that ultimately don't matter, because it was Saddam's failure to cooperate with the U.N. that provided the legal basis for us to go in and make sure.

Posted by: Attila Girl at May 10, 2004 01:15 PM (q85Vj)

4 Yep, those WMDs, the ones that weren't there but Bush et al decided to not let truth stand in the way of his agenda. But - hey! - you're armed as you repeatedly say so you must be right. A true Bushie. Let those with the biggest weapons make the rules, even if honesty, fiarness, and justice get left by the wayside. Two sides to every coin Sweets.

Posted by: littlemrmahatma at May 11, 2004 07:56 AM (R6HyB)

5 Well, you're right. And Michael Moore's camera is the biggest weapon of all. He uses it to lie about corporations, gun owners, the NRA, Chuck Heston, the President (apparently), and the very nature of America itself. Our friend who's a professor in Maryland (you remember the one) was reading one of Moore's books recently, and told me he was dismayed by it. "I keep wanting to tell him, 'I'm sympathetic to your point of view. You don't have to distort things and misuse statistics to try to convince me.'" But that's the thing I can't stand about Moore. He makes up his own facts to suit his agenda. Not in any uncertain, ambiguous way (as in the President's 16 words in a SOTU address that British intel has stood by even when the authorities in this country decided the information was wrong after all). Hundreds of pages, and three films that are just lies built on lies. Charleton Heston speeches created out of whole cloth by splicing together things he's really said and editing them creatively to put words in his mouth. It's really disgusting stuff, and there aren't two sides to this issue. If you care about your point of view, you shouldn't want it sullied by the likes of Michael Moore. You should be fighting harder than anyone to discredit him. The factual distortions in the book (banks give guns away as premiums if you open accounts with them--and just let you take the firearms home from the branch) should sicken you before they sicken me. This is your fight more than mine, because if your side can't get things like this straight, people will not listen or take you seriously.

Posted by: Attila Girl at May 11, 2004 11:20 AM (i+lmP)

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About two-thirds of my friends are Jews. I have a handful of friends who aren't Jews. Once I even went out with about seven other people, and figured out about halfway into the meal that we were all of Anglo-Saxon stock. Not one Jew in the bunch.

Naturally, it was a dull meal. Anglo-Saxons can be real grinds, all on their own like that. Not the same without the Jews.

(WTF am I doing? Google-baiting. In honor of Passover, we're trying to change the Number One entry in Google under Jew to something less offensive than the current anti-Semitic claptrap. Join the fun. [I'm not going to link the offensive site; it's offensive.]

Via Pixy Misa. I mean [UPDATE] via Simon, who has one fine-lookin' blog there. [Talk about your MuNuby mistakes: I just tend to assume Pixy is the source for all that is good and light.]) more...

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