Subtle distinctions in criminal behavior

Akaky doesn't get it:

The headline of today's dead tree edition of the Middletown (N.Y.) Times Herald Record reads, "Should Illegal Immigration Be A Crime," a statement that causes no end of cognitive dissonance among those of us with access to a dictionary, since it makes us all wonder if the word illegal has some shade of meaning that we've missed somehow. I was under the impression that illegal immigration was immigration in violation of the law, and that violating the law and illegality were more or less the same thing, and that both states were synonomous with committing a crime.

I just returned from Leftylooneyville...

also known as my family. They are smart people, truly. And nice. So how can they parrot "Bush lied"? Typical exchange:

Beloved relative I: Capitalism is inherently corrupt.

BR II: (Pained look) But what is there that's better?

BR I: Communism!

BR II: But--I mean, look at Russia...it didn't work for them, surely?

BR I: It's never been tried.

BR II: ? (Silence, look of disbelief)

This sort of thing is what I had to contend with, when the discussion turned to politics. In the hopes that other topics would be explored, I walked as through a minefield.

Some tenets of the creed:
Drug companies are greedy and bad.
The un-health-insured are many, all of them sick with potentially fatal diseases, and are being turned away daily from the life-saving treatment they need by hard-hearted capitalists, mainly George Bush.
More money is needed for public transportation, whether anyone wants it or not.
The environment is in imminent danger. We might wake up tomorrow to find we have been globally warmed to death. Or frozen by nuclear winter. Bad either way.
If the environment doesn't get us, the pollutants currently being poured into the rivers out of sheer spite by evil manufacturers will poison us all by September.
Hillary is pandering to the Christian right. Bad Hillary!
Bush should be impeached, censured, or at least sent to his room until he learns to behave.
The Iraqis were happier under good old Saddam Hussein.

Evil kitty placed under house arrest

From linda sog.

We're very picky about who we allow to be a citizen

Just because a guy is a marine serving in Iraq doesn't satisfy our fastidious bureaucrats:


George [the Marine] told the [call-in] show's host that the INS dolt who told him over the phone that his application forms were not filled out properly and she was 'following the letter of the law.'

Thank God for the integrity of public servants.

Christiane Amanpour does it again

According to the Ace,

I thought I’d make a brief analogy to explain why CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour’s defense of Hamas’s recent election victory in the Palestinian Authority was intellectually dishonest, and completely repulsive. Amanpour makes the ridiculous argument that the Palestinians didn’t vote for Hamas because they were a terrorist group that was dedicated to wiping Israel off of the map, but because they were frustrated with how corrupt the ruling Fatah Party was, and because Hamas has built schools, and health clinics etc.

Plus ca change, plus le meme chose. The excuse for Mussolini was, he made the trains run on time. This totally excuses his being a fascist, imprisoning his political enemies, getting in bed with Hitler, etc.

As for Amanpour, the mere sound of her voice makes me break out in hives, but I guess people think she sounds dashingly European. My theory is that her real name is Christie Rafferty and hails from Bayonne, New Jersey, but I can't prove it.

Are you sitting down?

Of course you are, you wouldn't be reading this standing up at the computer, would you?

Okay, listen up. I am going away for a few days, lured by the bright lights of Broadway. Back Friday. See you soon.

I am posting this announcement because every time I stop blogging for three days, you all desert me. So this is a warning. Come back in April. Remember: we know who you are.

There she goes again...

about libraries:
But why are libraries necessary in this age of the internet and Google? Isn’t every scrap of information we could ever want soon going to be available online?

Well, all the things that the internet can’t provide are part of the essential experience of going to a library. First, there’s the place itself: a special place, dedicated to assembling knowledge and making it available....

A book is infinitely more comfortable and pleasant and informative than a screen. The very impress of the print on the paper is a valuable part of your experience of the book.
Libraries give us this physical engagement in a way that no Google ever will.

Thirdly, there’s the infinite value of browsing. You simply don’t know what you’ll find till you’re in front of a range of shelves full of books. Of course they say you can browse on the internet, but it isn’t really browsing; some system or algorithm has done the selecting for you. Much, much better to stand in front of a shelf of books and simply pick them up and look for yourself. You never know what you’ll find — and that’s exactly the point.

Fourthly, there’s the library staff. What helpfulness, what experience, what knowledge! Compared with a face-to-face conversation with a real live intelligent informed human being who knows the sort of thing you’re looking for and can suggest more ways than one of getting to it, the internet is like an automated answering service: ignorant, mechanical, inhuman, stupid, graceless and hugely frustrating. Long live librarians.

So libraries of every sort are treasure houses. I love them, I cherish them, I use them all the time, I could not bear to live in a society without them....

I’m on the side of everyone who uses libraries, from the little child looking through the picture books, to the scholar searching for hard-to-find knowledge, to the busy man or woman looking for something entertaining to read on the train, to the poor old vagrant who’s just come in to sit near the radiator on a winter’s day. The library is for all of us. Let’s look after it!

Ht to normblog.

Breast worship

In Japan.

NSFW.

I heart Yiddish

Yiddish is known as mamaloshen, meaning mother's talk--"the language we speak at home."In this case it was the home of my grandmother, whose first language it was. Either Yiddish is a language which lends itself to sarcasm or my grandmother was sarcastic. I suspect the latter. She had a tongue like a razor blade. Double edged.

Some samples:
"Gay mit der kopp in dererd und de fiss in klaishter" means approximately: go with your head in hell and your feet in church.

"A chalerya," an all-purpose curse that means you should catch cholera.

"Bahayma"=big clumsy oaf (literally behemoth).

"Vas daff min honeck ven dreck is ziss?" Why do you need honey when shit is sweet to you? (Said when a granddaughter was dating a loser.)

"Tsvay klugen und ein vugen." Klug is a plague and vugen is a wagon. It's not real good in English. It means two jerks who belong together. Think Bill and Hillary Clinton. Ward Churchill and Noam Chomsky. You get the idea.

" (Insert name here) is a mayven vie a chazer on hayven." A mayven is a judge, a chazer is a pig, and hayven are oats. Pigs are not good judges of oats. So (Insert name here) doesn't know what he/she is talking about.

Forgive my transliteration.

I've always felt it was my acquaintance with Yiddish which made me interested in learning languages.

Jacques Chirac threatens to take his toys and go home

if the other kids don't play nice:
…perhaps the most memorable moment in Brussels was when French President Chirac stormed out to protest a decision by fellow Frenchman Ernest-Antoine Seilliere, head of the European UNICE employers group, to speak English.

Original in Today online.

Was everything all right?

According to l is for law school, When a manager comes to your table to ask how everything is, it actually does make you feel better about the restaurant.

Oh, I don't know. My friend Betty and I once had breakfast in a Friendly's restaurant. When we paid the bill, the cashier asked, "Was everything all right?" Betty replied: "They cut the toast in half. It should be cut into triangles." An uncomfortable silence ensued, during which one patron pushed his face two inches from hers.

On the same trip (I don't know what's in the water around there), we went to a steak place. This time the manager came around and asked if everything was all right. I asked him for a butter knife. The knives we had were steak knives, and naturally enough, I had cut my steak with it. I wanted a butter knife to butter my bread. A clean knife, not covered with steak juice. He apologized and said they did not have butter knives, they were a chain and management didn't provide them.

So: yes, it makes you feel better when they ask if everything is all right, but only when everything is all right.

Confusion to our enemies

The New York Times loses readership.

The Palestinians know who their friends are

Terrorists spare BBC office.

A few days ago I wrote that during a rampage in Gaza, Palestinian terrorists took an Associated Press photographer into “protective custody” so that nothing would happen to them. Now Tom gross notes that the BBC office in Gaza was spared any destruction. It all goes to show that the Palestians understand that the AP and BBC (and others as well)are anti-Israeli news organizations doing their bidding. It’s not really in dispute anymore, since the Palestinians have proven it to be true.
Apparently, nothing can penetrate the academic mind, except a bullet:

One clueless idiot says he feels sorry for the scum who snatched him.

The American professor, Douglas Johnson, said he was unharmed and understood his abductors' actions.

"They are angry over what is going on in Jericho. I feel sympathy with them," he told an AP reporter at an abandoned cemetery, where he was briefly held before being freed.

A message from the lovers of peace, Christian division

to the warmongers (that's us):

The 3 CPT members were held by patriotic Iraqis whom we sympathize with. These poor souls were so distressed by the occupation of their country and they had no other way to voice their opinion except by kidnapping hostages and chopping their heads off. They have done so in the most humane way.

“They killed Tom Fox because they wanted to tell the world that they wanted hospitals, schools, and Starbucks in the Sunni areas. We fully understand what motivated them to do so” said CPT head Dough Pritchard. “Nobody asked the occupation forces to free our members”.

Courtesy of sandmonkey.

Romance in the ancient world, Arab style

From protein wisdom.

What Bush should have said

according to Buckley. Read the whole thing, it's hilarious. A sample:

"Jesse Jackson is to helping black people what Ted Kennedy is to helping drowning victims."

"And although I have a great deal of personal affinity for Charlie Rangel, the fact that I have personally seen him arguing with a Snicker's bar on several occasion needs to be made public."

Babes and Boobs

From tinkertytonk, this news flash:

Joan Acocella reviews The Playmate Book: Six Decades of Centerfolds by Gretchen Edgren. Two things (heh) stand out when looking through the pictures of pinups past: The girl-next-door face and the enormous breasts.

What is the fascination with gigantic breasts about? Were all the men in America weaned too soon? Or what?

Aside from the dubious advantage of having men stare at your chest when you are talking to them, rather than look you in the eye, why do women want to have bigger breasts? Take it from one who knows, ownership of these, ah, items is strictly a mixed blessing. For one thing, you can't just go to Victoria's Secret and buy some of those sweet little nothings adorned with lace. The bras they have for women with serious boobs are the heavy industrial kind, with more rigging than a suspension bridge. The idea is to push them up until they reach your shoulderblades, and then flatten them out.

In order to get a bra that fits and looks okay, not nice but okay is to go to a place where they measure you and fit you properly. Unfortunately the only bras they sell in those places cost $65 and up.

Student loans are a great investment

especially when you have a Congressman in your pocket:

Duke Cunningham, the former American fighter ace and national hero, landed on CHANCE and drew the dreaded GO TO JAIL card this past Friday for admitting that he broke the rules related to acceptance of gifts from companies looking for congressional favoritism. In this case, what he did was correctly labeled as bribery.

Meanwhile, Kevin Madden, Tom DeLay's former communication director, who moved over to John Boehner's office after DeLay was indicted, was quoted by the Cincinnati Post last Friday as saying that the heavy criticism Boehner has received since he became House Majority Leader is correctly labeled as "frivolous."

See if you agree.

One of the areas where Boehner has taken the most criticism are his "fact finding" trips aboard private jets of companies that had business before his House Education and Workforce Committee.

And among his favorite "fact-finding" trips were the Boca Raton golf junkets sponsored by Al Lord, the Chairman of Sallie Mae, which is far and away the nation's largest holder of student loans.

Boehner has adamantly defended these types of trips, saying, "Lawmakers must be able to see what's going on around the country first hand," but everyone knows that the only fact about Boca Raton that's unknown at the beginning of these trips is who's going to shoot the lowest golf round after the plane lands.

But, that's how Boehner keeps up his tan, and getting him there is how Sallie Mae keeps up its profits.

Not sure what to make of all this yet? Then keep reading.

Al Lord is building his own private golf course and trying to buy a professional baseball team with his share of the profits, a good part of which can be traced back to the high margins resulting from the restriction-of-trade laws that have dogged the student loan industry for decades.

In fact, Sallie Mae's margins are so high, Fortune Magazine recently dubbed them as America's second most profitable company.

And the situation, according to the Free Market News, is going to get worse because when the newly passed laws affecting student loans go into effect this July, there will be far less competition than ever before.

Even before the latest legislative changes, student loans were already subject to one of the most anti-competitive laws on the nation's books. It's known as the "Single Holder Rule", which says that students and parents whose loans are owned by one lender cannot shop around for the best terms when they consolidate their loans.

For those not familiar with higher education matters, students and parents consolidate college loans for the same reasons homeowners refinance their mortgages -- to take advantage of low fixed rates and to lower monthly payments to a more affordable level.

But under the new laws, the vast majority of students and parents who have already consolidated, or do so in the future, will be legally barred from ever refinancing again, no matter what other lender later offers a lower rate.

Many would think it impossible that Sallie Mae could have pulled this off, especially under a Republican Congress that claims to support free trade. But think again -- it's the new law of the land.

Make no mistake about it; this is completely different from the Cunningham situation. In this case, no one's going to jail because everyone involved has followed the rules Congress set down.

But that doesn't make the rules right.

National columnists like Terry Savage, Dick Morris and Froma Harrop are calling the anti-refinancing scheme a rip off, shameful or abusive. The San Diego Union Tribune reported that Duncan Hunter (R-Ca), Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, plans to propose a rule requiring the House Ethics Committee to verify that each privately funded trip that congressional lawmakers take is a genuine fact-finding mission, not a junket designed to win favor.

If Congress actually passes that rule, there may be less favoritism going forward, but that is not going to reverse the special interest legislation already on the books. Reduced competition will mean higher interest rates, and higher interest rates will result in students and parents having to pay billions of dollars more than an open market would dictate.

The cost of college is simply too high to allow Sallie Mae to keep collecting excess profits every time around the board.

Cunningham draws Monopoly's GO TO JAIL CARD - but Sallie Mae is still landing on FREE PARKING.

You former students out there--did you know that Sallie Mae was a private company established by Congress to get rich off those student loans you are struggling to pay off?

To learn more, visit studentloanjustice.org.

The triumph of common sense

From the Telegraph:

At last, the Law Lords have injected some sanity into the case of Shabina Begum, the Bedfordshire schoolgirl who had insisted when she was 15 that it was her "human right" to defy her school's dress code by covering herself from head to toe in the full Islamic jilbab.

Yesterday, they overturned a ruling by the Appeal Court that Denbigh High School in Luton had broken the law by insisting that she should wear the tunic and trousers of the shalwar kameez instead....
Every word of the Law Lords' ruling yesterday rang with religious tolerance and common sense. The school, said Lord Bingham, had taken "immense pains" to devise a dress code that respected Muslim beliefs "in an inclusive, unthreatening and uncompetitive way".

Lord Hoffman made an excellent point, too, when he said that there had been nothing to stop Shabina from going to a single-sex school, or to one that permitted the jilbab. To change schools might not have been entirely convenient for her, he said, "but people sometimes have to suffer some inconvenience for their beliefs".

Increasing productivity in academia

Can it be done? Sample quote:

In real life, when I'm looking through job applications, I'm struck at how many people have degrees in some soft science, and drifted down and out, through internships and other tangental employment in their field, into the retail world. So many newly minted sociology majors are folding sweaters at The Gap eight years later. (Helpful hint: "If an academic discipline has the word "science" in its title, it isn't a science.")