| - Mood:distressed

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| This is what I want for Christmas this year. Even though her head is big. Like, Nancy Reagan big. (Seriously, that woman always scared me when she came on the news.) I was thinking I could auction off the doll accessories I'm currently making or hold a raffle of some sort to be able to afford her. (Or I could just keep my money and use it to fix the million or so things wrong with my life OR buy a vacuum chamber for my resin casting which would probably do me a lot better in the long run.) But Christmas is a time for dreaming of impractical presents and I can think of none less practical than this so ... *shrug.* I'm working extra hard because I want to get my regular projects done while making some doll stuff to sell on ebay. (This, while everyone still has their Christmas present spending money.) Sleep and I really haven't seen much of each other recently.... I received a notice from www.lulu.com saying Vol. 1 of my Prop and Armor compendium series had gone ker-flooey for some reason. (It was those dam data vampires from Dimension Q again, no doubt.) I reuploaded the book file and you should be able to order the softcover book again, if you wanted to do such a thing and weren't able to before. My webpages should all be working now, although I'll notice a broken image here and there that appears upon refreshing. (Don't know what that's about, but at least all of the links should work. I hope.) | |
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| http://reason.com/blog/2009/11/20/tea-party-movement-shattering
The Politico digs
up enough stories of internecine fighting amongst the loose
bunch of organizations supposedly responsible for, or furthering
in specific locations, the Tea Party movement to generate a
semi-convincing trend story that argues the movement may be
"losing momentum."
While the sort of petty conflict the story highlights between
your Tea Party Patriots and Tea Party Express and Tea Party
Nation, (your People's Judean Front and People's Front of
Judea...), are worth noting (and unavoidable in politics), I'd
say that an idea (which I think is a more accurate description of
the whole orbit of actions and groups lumped in as the "tea party
movement") that can still gather 4,000 people to a Texas rally,
as the story notes, isn't worth writing off yet.
More important than which particular organization involved in the
movement grows or triumphs is what this newly energized mass
movement pissed off at D.C. will end up standing for. Alas, that
a planned February National Tea Party
convention will have bailout-supporting warmonger Sarah Palin
as a star is an alarming sign that what had promise as a mass
anti-state movement will descend into personality cult
anti-Democratic party populism.
Matt Welch's
excellent first person account on the varied and interesting
promise of the Tea Party movement as shown at its huge September
rally in D.C.


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| http://reason.com/blog/2009/11/20/dea-still-erroneously-citing-t
On Tuesday I
noted that the Drug Enforcement Administration, apparently in
response to an emailing campaign organized by Law
Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), had removed from one of
its webpages the claim that "the American Medical
Association recommends that marijuana remain a Schedule I
controlled substance." That statement is no longer correct,
since the AMA last week approved a resolution
saying marijuana's Schedule I status, which makes it
unavailable for medical use under federal law, should be
re-examined. But LEAP points out that another DEA
webpage still says the AMA "has urged that marijuana remain a
prohibited, Schedule I drug." Go
here to bug the DEA about continuing to misinform the public
on this subject.


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| http://reason.com/archives/2009/11/20/vampire-family-values
It’s exhilarating to finally find a genre movie that knows how to
pander. The Twilight Saga: New Moon opens with Bella
Swan (Kristin Stewart) looking windblown in a barely-buttoned
shirt; it moves quickly to show us bare-chested Jacob Black
(Taylor Lautner), and ends with the dreamy declaration from
vampire-lover Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) that all the girls
have been waiting for. Add in a romantic triangle as Jacob and
Edward vie for Bella, a heavy dose of angst, some unrequited (and
fully requited) love, and it’s no wonder the preview audience I
viewed this with kept bursting into spontaneous applause and
sighs.
Vampire trappings and soap-worthy love triangles are all very
well and good, but the heart of the Twilight series
isn’t cheesecake or melodrama: It’s safety. Author Stephanie
Meyer, just like her characters, is consumed by fear. All her
creations are worrywarts: Edward is terrified that he’ll hurt
Bella, Jacob is terrified that he’ll hurt Bella, Bella is
terrified that everyone will get hurt defending her.
But this fear also manifests itself in an odd, and never fully
confronted, fear of aging. At the opening of New Moon,
both the book and the movie, Bella has a vision of herself as a
grandmother—a vision that she experiences as terrifying.
Bella is so adverse to aging that she tries to get her friends
and family to ignore her 18th birthday. More dramatically, she
begs Edward to turn her into a vampire at every opportunity. But
is this because Bella doesn’t wish to grow old while Edward
remains forever young, or is it because Edward’s immortality is
itself so appealing?
If Edward represents agelessness as a perfect fantasy, Jacob
Black represents aging as a horror-film disaster. As you almost
certainly know from advance publicity (and if you don’t, here
comes the spoiler,) Jacob discovers partway through the film that
he’s a werewolf. Lycanthropy, as it turns out, is adolescence on
steroids. Jacob loses control of his emotions, grows hair where
he shouldn’t, starts hanging out with the wrong crowd, and begins
thinking so loudly that all his friends can hear him.
In choosing between Jacob and Edward, Bella is choosing between
growing up, with all its dangers and messy unpredictability, and
staying a faery child, forever young and lifeless. In the end
(here’s another spoiler), without much of a fight, she opts for
immortality. Thus, the Twilight series isn’t so much a
coming-of-age story as a refusing-to-come-of-age story.
It’s easy to make fun of that. When the film showed a dream-image
of Bella as a future fantasy vampire, running besides Edward with
her magical fairy dust vampire skin all sparkly in the sun, the
mostly enthusiastic preview audience erupted in derisive
laughter. The desire for eternal youth is childish. And kind of
embarrassing.
But there’s also something natural, even conservative about it.
In the age of Obama, it’s generally assumed that young people are
progressive, but Twilight is here to tell you that isn’t
necessarily so. The desire for safety and sameness, the
reluctance to change, the wish for some father figure—like
Edward’s vampire dad Carlisle—to come and fix everything, that’s
appealing.
Indeed, one of the series’ oddest and most telling creations is
Edward’s family, a group of coupled-up vampires who refer to each
other as sisters and brothers and call Carlisle “dad.” In the
Cullen household, you can get married without growing up or
leaving home. The domestic idyll he offers is surely as much a
part of Edward’s faery charm as is his ability to remain forever
17. And that’s not even mentioning Twilight’s obsession
with abstinence. Edward won’t have sex with Bella because (of
course) he’s afraid of hurting her with his super-vampire bedroom
antics.
Meyer may be promoting family values of a sort with the books,
but she’s also promoting tolerance. In the movie, Jacob—the
muscled wolf-man running with the all-male pack—insists that his
new existence is not a “lifestyle choice” but that he was “born
this way.” Judging by the giggles in the theater, the gay subtext
couldn’t have been much clearer. Nor could the moral of the story
when Bella accepts Jacob for who he is despite the secrets hiding
in his closet. She does something similar with Edward, insisting
that her vampiric true love has a soul even though Edward
believes himself to be damned.
New Moon thus holds out the promise of life and love for
all God’s children, whether tween and swooning, closeted and
hairy, or angst-ridden and pale. It’s not a new vision, but it
remains a popular one.
Noah Berlatsky
is a Chicago-based writer whose work appears in Comics
Journal, The Chicago Reader, and other outlets. He
blogs at The Hooded
Utilitarian.


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|
| http://reason.com/blog/2009/11/20/sci-fi-sausage-beaker-bacon-va
Some musings on the
glorious future of lab-grown meat, from the glorious
future-oriented mag, H+:
In-Vitro Meat will be fashioned from any creature, not just
domestics that were affordable to farm. Yes, ANY ANIMAL, even
rare beasts like snow leopard, or Komodo Dragon. We will want
to taste them all. Some researchers believe we will also be
able to create IVM using the DNA of extinct beasts—obviously,
"DinoBurgers" will be served at every six-year-old boy's
birthday party.
Humans are animals, so every hipster will try Cannibalism.
Perhaps we'll just eat people we don't like, as author Iain M.
Banks predicted in his short story, "The State of the Art" with
diners feasting on "Stewed Idi Amin." But I imagine passionate
lovers literally eating each other, growing sausages from their
co-mingled tissues overnight in tabletop appliances similar to
bread-making machines.
The rest of the piece is great, liming the economic turmoil to
come in meat-based economies like Argentina and New Zealand, the
ultra-urbanization of a non-agricultural America, the insertion
of good fish fat in fat steaks, and the acceleration of the
expanding circle of humanity.
But here's one place where H+ gets it wrong:
My final prediction is this: In-Vitro Meat relishes success
first in Europe, partly because its "greener," but mostly they
already eat "yucky" delicacies like snails, smoked eel, blood
pudding, pig's head cheese, and haggis (sheep's stomach stuffed
with oatmeal). In the USA, IVM will initially invade the market
in Spam cans and Hot Dogs, shapes that salivating shoppers are
sold on as mysterious & artificial, but edible &
absolutely American.
My prediction: Beaker bacon will be seen in Europe as having far
more in common with genetically-modified corn than delicious
invertebrates. Powerful entrenched dairy and meat interests, plus
the other farmers who support their industry (remember those
milky protests
just a few weeks ago?) will play on the European aversion to food
biotech to achieve their own protectionist ends. And they are
quite likely to be successful, in the short and mid-term at
least.
Farmers are powerful here in America as well, of course, and
cultured chicken won't make it onto the menu without a fight.
Using Spam as the thin end of the wedge—forgive the mixed meat
metaphor—will allow an easier transition here, but will slow the
adoption of laboratory lamb on the other side of the Atlantic
even more.


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| http://reason.com/blog/2009/11/20/new-at-reason-shikha-dalmia-on
With unemployment reaching double digits
and public approval ratings sinking, ObamaCare has very little
going for it at the moment. So how come Barack Obama, Nancy
Pelosi, and Harry Reid have been able to march forward with their
grand designs undeterred? One reason, writes Shikha Dalmia, is
that Republicans have done precious little to seize the moral
high ground from them. By insisting on the removal of the public
option—instead of the individual mandate—as the price of doing
business, Republicans have missed a major opportunity to put
Democrats on the defensive and change the terms of the debate.


| |
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| http://reason.com/archives/2009/11/20/that-darn-mandate
ObamaCare has nothing going for it anymore. With unemployment
touching double digits, its economic timing is bad; with
polls showing tanking support in every group outside of the
narrow sliver of die-hard liberal reformers, its political timing
is bad; and with the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services
last week
saying that it'll add billions to the already out-of-control
deficit, its fiscal timing has gone from bad to awful.
So how are Comrades Pelosi, Reid, and Obama able to march ahead
with their grand designs undeterred? One reason is that
Republicans have done precious little to seize the moral high
ground from them. By insisting on the removal of the public
option—instead of the individual mandate—as the price of doing
business, Republicans have missed a major opportunity to put
Democrats on the defensive and change the terms of the debate.
Republicans threw down the gauntlet on the public option—a
government-funded, Medicare-style insurance plan that will
compete with private insurance—in a
June letter to Obama. "Washington-run programs undermine
market-based competition through their ability to impose price
controls and shift costs to other purchasers," they said. "The
end result would be a federal government takeover of our health
care system, taking decisions out of the hands of doctors and
patients and placing them in the hands of a Washington
bureaucracy."
True. But the problem is that Democrats don't need the public
option to engineer a "federal takeover of our health care
system." All they need is the power to force Americans to
purchase insurance.
A mandate will fundamentally alter the relationship between
Americans and their government. Instead of the government being
accountable to them, they will become accountable to their
government. No less than the Congressional Budget Office—a
non-partisan government agency—once admitted as much. "A mandate
requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be
an unprecedented form of federal action," it noted.
"The government has never required people to buy any good or
service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States."
If the government can force Americans to buy coverage on the
threat of fines or even imprisonment—an option that Nancy Pelosi
has pointedly
refused to rule out—every other government diktat becomes
small potatoes by contrast. In fact, it becomes necessary. If
uninsured Americans must buy coverage, why shouldn't other
Americans be taxed to subsidize them? Why shouldn't the insurance
industry be required to sell them coverage? Why shouldn't
government set insurance prices to ensure affordability? Why
shouldn't doctors and hospitals be asked to charge only
"reasonable" rates—or offer only government-sanctioned
treatments? Nothing about ObamaCare fundamentally changes so long
as the individual mandate remains intact.
Therefore, instead of wonkishly droning about the public option,
Republicans should counter Democrats' grand appeals for
"universal coverage for all" with equally grand appeals for
"medical freedom for all." They should stand together on the
Capitol steps and issue the health care equivalent of Reagan's
Berlin Wall ultimatum: "Mr. President: Tear up this mandate."
During the campaign, Obama himself successfully stopped poor
Hillary dead in her tracks by reminding voters at every turn of
her tyrannical plans to force them to purchase coverage. So why
aren't Republicans doing the same to Obama?
The main reason is that they themselves are deeply conflicted
about the mandate. On the one hand, every Republican on the
Senate Finance Committee voted against it—except, of course, for
Maine's Sen. Olympia Wavering-Heart Snowe. On the other hand,
many Republicans, led by their intellectual lights at the
conservative Heritage Foundation, among others, have long
accepted—no, championed—the notion that unless people are forced
to carry insurance, freeloaders who land in emergency rooms will
cripple the health care system. Legislate personal
responsibility, in other words. It was a Heritage plan for forced
coverage that formed the blueprint for the Massachusetts
universal care debacle that the then Republican Gov. Mitt Romney
enacted.
Thus Republicans have no leg to stand on now that Obama, pulling
one of his many switcheroos, has embraced the individual mandate.
Heritage folks are trying to pull their own
switcheroo by opposing Obama's mandate, saying what they had
originally proposed for Massachusetts was not really a mandate
but actually a self-insurance scheme under which an uninsured
person would have to post a personal bond before being treated in
an emergency room.
But countering mandates with bonds doesn't exactly make for a
rousing rallying cry. Indeed, both ideas are based on the
mistaken diagnosis that the central cause of our health care woes
is the cost of uncompensated care that the uninsured get. The
fact of the matter is that this care
accounts for no more than $40 billion of the country's $2.26
trillion health care bill—or less than 3 percent of total health
care spending. This is less than what department stores lose to
shoplifting every year. Several private hospitals that I visited
in India last month make a fraction of the profits that American
hospitals do but still reported treating up to 10 percent of
their patients for free.
The mandate barring American hospitals from denying treatment to
anyone who lands in emergency—the root of the supposed freeloader
problem—certainly imposes a heavy burden on some hospitals,
especially in inner cities. But it is far from clear that it
forces American hospitals as a whole to provide more charitable
care to the uninsured than what they would have without it. It
would certainly be worthwhile at some point to consider policy
options to replace this mandate with mechanisms to strengthen
voluntary charity by hospitals and others. In the meantime,
however, there is zero evidence to suggest that this mandate is
imposing a crippling enough burden on hospitals to warrant
mandates on everyone else as well.
The Republican strategy for defeating ObamaCare consists of
notifying: seniors that they will face rationing and loss of
private Medicare options; the uninsured that they will face fines
and possibly jail; the young and healthy that they will have to
subsidize the old and sick, etc. Alerting Americans to the
personal dangers they will confront under ObamaCare is certainly
a legitimate part of the political process.
However, the downside of a strategy based entirely on fear is
that even if it succeeds now, it won't help to define the proper
terms for a genuine solution in the future. For that, Republicans
have to offer a principled critique of ObamaCare that delineates
the sharp moral choices that Americans face. The current health
care battle is the domestic policy equivalent of the Cold War.
Democrats are on the side of command-and-control mandates that
deprive individuals of choice. Republicans should position
themselves on the side of market-based solutions that empower—not
enchain—patients.
Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation and a
bi-weekly Forbes columnist. This article
originally appeared at Forbes.


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| http://reason.com/archives/2009/11/20/how-to-get-ahead-in-law
Last June, District Attorney David Capeless of Berkshire County,
Massachusetts, announced that he was dropping all charges against
44-year-old Bernard Baran, a man who has spent half his life
behind bars on child molestation charges that the state no longer
has the confidence to retry.
Baran was convicted in January 1985 of molesting six children at
a pre-kindergarten day care facility in Pittsfield,
Massachusetts. He was released on bond in 2006 after an appeals
court determined that his trial attorney had been incompetent and
that the prosecution may have withheld key exculpatory evidence.
Baran says that during his jail term he was raped and beaten more
than 30 times, necessitating six different transfers to new
correctional institutions. Such is the cost the prison system
exacts on an openly gay man convicted of molesting children.
Baran was one of the first people in the country to be prosecuted
in the day care sex abuse panic of the 1980s, a bizarre
nationwide hysteria fed by homophobia, fears of Satanism, and a
wing of child psychology that used unproven interrogation
techniques that critics say caused children to recount sexual
incidents that never took place.
In this case, prosecutor Daniel Ford, now a judge on the
Massachusetts Superior Court, showed the grand jury that indicted
Baran an edited video interview with the children. According to
court documents, the video shows several kids alleging that Baran
had sexually abused them. Edited out was footage in which some of
the children denied any abuse by Baran, interviewees accused
other members of the day care faculty of abuse or of witnessing
abuse, and, most important, interrogators asked the same
questions over and over—even after repeated denials—until a child
gave them an affirmative answer. Some children were even given
rewards for their answers.
Withholding the unedited video from the grand jury was itself an
act of misconduct. An appeals court suggested that prosecutor
Ford may also have withheld it from Baran’s trial attorney. We
can only say “may” because there has never been a hearing on the
issue, and Baran’s trial attorney was far from competent. (Judge
Ford did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) In
granting Baran a new trial in 2006, Massachusetts Superior Court
Judge Francis Fecteau never moved beyond the inadequacy of
Baran’s lawyer. When the case reached the state appeals court,
the justices not only upheld Fecteau’s ruling; they looked more
closely at Ford’s possible misconduct. “While the record does not
settle the question whether the unedited videotapes were
deliberately withheld by the prosecution,” the ruling said,
“there are indications in the trial transcript consistent with
that contention.”
The court further noted that it took years for Baran’s appellate
lawyers to get prosecutors to turn over the unedited tapes. It
also cited other examples of Ford’s failure to turn over
exculpatory evidence, including evidence that two of the children
who accused Baran may have suffered prior sexual abuse.
To make matters worse, the case against Baran was awash in
homophobia. According to court documents, the first parents to
come forward with accusations against Baran in September 1984 had
just days earlier registered a complaint with the center that
Baran was “queer.” The boy’s mother, who thought gays “shouldn’t
be allowed out in public,” much less permitted to work at day
care centers, said she “didn’t want no homo” watching her son.
When that child later tested positive for gonorrhea of the
throat, Ford used the test against Baran at trial, even though a)
the child never accused Baran of forcing him to perform oral sex,
b) the child, in fact, specifically denied having sexual contact
with Baran on the witness stand, c) Baran tested
negative for gonorrhea, d) the boy had told his mother
two months prior that his stepfather had orally raped him, and e)
on the very day Baran was convicted, charges against the
stepfather were turned over to the district attorney’s office for
possible prosecution. Baran’s counsel was never informed of the
allegation against the stepfather. Addressing the gonorrhea issue
in his closing arguments, Ford implied that Baran’s “lifestyle”
made it probable that he contracted gonorrhea at other times and
knew how to quickly eradicate it to cover his tracks.
In his closing argument, Ford likened Baran at a day care center
to a “chocoholic in a candy store,” hypothesizing that in the
“five or 10 minutes” he was able to be alone with a child without
being seen by other staff or children, Baran “could have
sodomized and abused those children whenever he felt the
primitive urge to satisfy his sexual appetite.” The appeals court
that eventually overturned the conviction ruled that the
incompetence of Baran’s counsel “facilitated the speculative,
stereotypical, and deeply insidious links between homosexuality,
gonorrhea, and child molestation.”
According to an affidavit signed by Baran’s boyfriend at the
time, Ford spent an inordinate amount of time asking Baran’s
boyfriend about his own sex life, employing variations of the
word faggot and a mocking, drawn-out pronunciation of
homosexual. Baran’s boyfriend also claims he was pulled
over by police officers and further harassed on a daily basis,
and that Ford told him, illegally, that if he spoke with Baran or
Baran’s defense attorney he would be arrested.
In upholding the ruling that granted Baran a new trial, the
appeals court added in a footnote that if the state wanted to
retry him, Baran could file a motion for a hearing on Ford’s
alleged misconduct. By dropping the charges, the D.A. avoided
that hearing. “In my opinion,” says Boston civil liberties
attorney Harvey Silverglate, “ the possibility of an embarrassing
hearing into misconduct by a former prosecutor and now sitting
Superior Court judge was the main reason, if not the
reason, they decided to drop the charges. The appeals court
opinion cut a bit too close to the bone for them.”
So while Bernard Baran is free after 22 years of incarceration,
there are no plans to look into the actions of the prosecutor,
now a sitting judge, responsible for his conviction. Ford’s
career trajectory indicates the backward incentive structure that
prosecutors face: Convictions produce rewards, while abuse rarely
comes with a penalty.
Baran has said he isn’t sure he wants to endure a lawsuit, but
even if he did, he would be unlikely to get to Ford. Prosecutors
enjoy absolute immunity from civil rights lawsuits, even in cases
of misconduct that lead to false convictions. They are rarely
disciplined in other ways either. Courts and bar associations
tend to avoid professional sanctions. A study released earlier
this year by the Justice Project, a pro-defense advocacy group,
concluded, “Despite the prevalence of prosecutorial misconduct
all over the country, states have consistently failed to
investigate or sanction prosecutors who commit acts of misconduct
in order to secure convictions.”
The only way Ford’s actions in the Baran case might be examined
would be for one of the state’s legal ethics boards to open an
investigation, either on its own or in response to a complaint.
In a September article in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly,
a spokesperson for the state’s Office of Bar Counsel said that of
the 1,000 or so complaints the office investigates each year,
just “nine or 10” involve the state’s prosecutors.
One Ford defender told the publication that it’s unfair to hold
the judge accountable for something he did a quarter century ago.
But it isn’t as if this is some musty, inconsequential case
pulled from the depths of a Massachusetts courthouse. There’s
fresh damage here. Ford’s successors spent 25 years defending his
misconduct. And Bernard Baran spent that time paying for it.
Radley Balko (rbalko@reason.com) is a senior editor at
reason.


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| http://reason.com/blog/2009/11/20/isnt-it-awfully-nice-for-the-f
An audit of the Federal
Reserve Bank would "substantially castrate the Fed so it cannot
do what it was set up to do," Rep. Melvin Watt (D., N.C.) said
yesterday, in an effort to tamp down a congressional uprising
against the Bush/Obama economic team.
This
devastating exchange Thursday between Secretary of the
Treasury Tim Geithner and Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas); along with
weeks of
close attention to the mismanagement of federal stimulus
funds; Rep. Ron Paul's long-lived Fed Audit
bill; and last but not least,
continuing
horrible
news on
every
indicator Geithner cited to Brady (and a few
he didn't);
have together started a fire that is threatening President
Obama's economic brain trust.
The Wall Street Journal
gives some color:
At the Joint Economic Committee, a couple of House Republicans
called for the resignation of Mr. Geithner, who, as president
of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, played a major role in
last fall's moves to prevent the collapse of the financial
system. "The public has lost all confidence in your ability to
do the job," said Rep. Kevin Brady, Republican of Texas.
Mr. Geithner, in an unusual public display of pique, fired
back. "What I can't take responsibility is for the legacy of
crises you've bequeathed this country," he told Mr. Brady.
Although several Democrats defended Mr. Geithner at the
hearing, some liberal Democrats have been complaining that the
Obama administration isn't doing enough to combat
unemployment....
"Quite frankly, all the gambling on Wall Street is doing
nothing to put people back to work in America and rebuild our
economy," said [Rep. Peter DeFazio (D., Ore.), who earlier this
week urged Geithner to resign].
One issue that has dogged Mr. Geithner is the rescue of
American International Group Inc. last fall.... Mr. Geithner
said Thursday that the government lacked powers it needed to
handle the collapse of a financial company that wasn't legally
organized as a bank. "Coming into AIG we had, basically, duct
tape and string," he said...
Mr. Geithner's job status doesn't appear to be in jeopardy and
several Democrats leapt to his defense.
I'm not so sure about that last bit. In his congressional hissy
fit, Geithner gave the game away: He can't lay this on President
Bush because, as Brady pointed out, when Bush presided over the
$14 trillion inflation of assets that got us where we are today,
Geithner was working the pumps with more eagerness than most
.
As I
noted the other day, Geithner's actions as President of the
Federal Reserve Bank of New York will probably not be deemed
sufficient to fire him from his current job. But it is false and
stunningly uncouth for Geithner to blame the previous
administration for his manifest failure as head of the Treasury.
Geithner v. Brady, on television:
As for Melvin Watt's husbandry metaphor, you may want to unpack
the image a little bit. (If you need to be alone, I'm totally
cool with that.) When you castrate an animal, you do so to keep
it from breeding (or to groom it for soprano roles in Grande
Opera). So exactly what action is the Fed performing for the U.S.
economy that requires intact male genitals?


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| http://reason.com/blog/2009/11/20/in-hollywood-show-me-some-skin
You might think that movies
featuring bare-breasted starlets are more likely to blow up at
the box office. But as Tom Jacobs notes in Miller-McCune, that
perception suggests you might not be "keeping abreast* of the
latest research."
Analyses of 914 films released between 2001 and 2005 indicated
that sex and nudity do not, on the average, boost box office
performance, earn critical acclaim or win major awards,"
reports a new study titled
"Sex Doesn't Sell — Nor Impress." According to the researchers,
sex and nudity were negatively correlated with a film's net
profits from domestic distribution and had no positive impact
on a picture's popularity or prestige according to a wide
variety of measures.
"I have yet to see a way of crunching the numbers where
sex/nudity has a positive relationship with box office, even
controlling for MPAA rating or budget," reports co-author
Anemone
Cerridwen, an independent scholar based in Vancouver,
British Columbia. "'Sex sells' is a myth, at least for this
database."
Hollywood's Foreign Press Association, however, does seem
more taken with the carnal:
"In the case of movie awards," they add, "sex/nudity does have
a small positive correlation with the Golden Globes, an
appreciation not shared with the Oscars."
Obviously, a tally like this
doesn't include pornography; I also wonder if the lack of
box-office boost from nudity is a recent phenomenon. As a movie
geek, my impression has always been that bare breasts were a
bigger selling point in the 1980s (especially in the genre
market). And these days, with the advent of comprehensive
celebrity nudity sites like Mr. Skin (obviously not safe for work!),
which indexes starlet flesh, I suspect big-screen nudity is less
of a draw.
On the other hand, if it's high-profile enough, celebrity
nudity still draws traffic on the web: When Lindsay Lohan
bared all (tastefully, of course) for New
York magazine last year, web traffic instantly shot up 2,000 percent.
*Ha-ha! Abreast!


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| http://reason.com/blog/2009/11/20/thanks-for-your-massive-genero
On behalf of everyone at Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that
publishes this website, Reason.tv, and Reason magazine,
I want to thank you for generous support of our work. The
webathon officially ends at midnight tonight, but as you can from
our torch graphic in the upper-right-hand corner, you've polished
off the arm and all but the tip of the fire up there too!
So far, over 600 of you in countries as far away as Australia and
Japan kicked in more than $56,000 to keep our journalism, public
policy research, and video productions running at top speed.
So again, thanks very much. We can't do it without you and we
won't let you down as your voice in the public debate for "Free
Minds and Free Markets." 2010 promises to be a hugely important
year for politics and it's good to know that supporters like you
have got our backs.
Once again, the Al Sharpton donation video:


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| http://reason.com/blog/2009/11/20/hadley-centre-for-climate-pred
The
blogosphere is hopping with reports that the British Climate
Research Unit's computers have been
hacked and possibly embarrassing internal emails and other
documents are now circulating on the web. Earlier this year, the
CRU, which teams up with the Hadley Centre to produce one of the
most cited global temperature datasets*,
rejected accusations that it had destroyed original
temperature data making it difficult for outside scientists to
evaluate their adjustments to the datasets.
Before jumping to conclusions, remember that many of us write
private emails that we might not want to see publicly
distributed. Will follow up as details become available.
Mucho kudos to threadjacker PicassoIII.
*corrected. The CRU computers have been hacked, not
those of the Hadley Centre as originally misreported. The scandal
here is me confusing the HADCrut


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