I'm sure you've seen this story that's been passed around about the supposed "health" editor at xoJane who uses Plan B as her primary form of contraception. (Seriously, how rarely are you getting laid that this even seems like a remotely feasible plan of action?) There was much fail in that piece, including her casual assumption that condoms are only there if you sleep with a subjectively-defined "many people", as if STDs are the result of cumulative stranger-seed instead of exposure to contagious germs. This sort of thing might make you wonder---I know it made me wonder---if younger people these days have been so poisoned by creeping prudery plus abstinence-only education that behavior like Cat's, which indicates a deep ambivalence about the morality of sexual pleasure, is common. I know it made me long for the days when Salt 'n' Pepa were talking about sex and TLC was flinging condoms around, and the pursuit of female sexual pleasure was taken as a right, instead of treated like some foul thing that requires self-punishment through repeated abortions. Or worse.
As part of its National Survey of Family Growth, the CDC discovered that eight in 10 teen boys ages 15 to 19 reported they had used condoms during their first sexual experience. That's 9 percent more teenagers than the last time the CDC checked in, back in 2002. High school kids are still boning at the same rate they were 11 years ago—a little more than 40 percent for both genders—but they're getting smarter about it. Besides the rise of rubbers and the decline of teen pregnancy, the study also found that 16 percent of teen males "double up"—that is, use a condom in combination with a female partner's hormonal method—up from 10 percent in 2002.
As Nona notes, this shows that fears that better access to contraception will lead to more sex are ungrounded. Of course, the idea that "more sex" is some sort of bad thing to be opposed at all costs is what we in the biz like to call a problematic assumption. More bad sex is a bad thing, sure. But just more sex? If it's good sex, opposing it is like being opposed to sunny days and laughing with puppies. But even if you have a fucked-up way of looking at things and think that people feeling good has to bad, take heart. People don't have more sex because they use more condoms. Generally with young people who are already ready for sex, having it is a matter of people-based opportunity more than any other factor. The main obstacle to the fucking in the streets that conservatives worry so much about is getting people to do it with you. Since there's not a massive surge in people's attraction to each other, there really shouldn't be a surge in the havings of the sex.
For those of us who actually like people and want them to be happy, this is just straight good news: Teenagers can be teenagers---that is, experiment and muddle their way towards adulthood---with a lower chance of getting sick from it.
I was going to ignore this Dr. Pepper "bitches ain't shit" campaign on the grounds that it's just catering to the Tea Party-fication of America. It's clear the whole point of it is to convince sexist assholes that using this product will piss off the feminists, since they have empty, meaningless lives that can only be filled up with the hopes that they're somehow pissing off the liberals. Being angry about it just contributes to their disease, because it gives them a temporary fix and discourages them from developing lives with meaning that will keep them from wanting so desperately to piss off the liberals. But Scott highlighted this aspect of the website advertising Bitches Ain't Shit Cola, or whatever it's called:
This week, the company unleashed a new campaign on Facebook, including a “man quiz” and a shooting gallery that aims at girly things like lipstick.
Yeah, because the right way to react when your sense of masculinity is threatened is to whip out a gun.
Obviously, Dr. Pepper rolled out this campaign before there was a mass shooting that left 8 dead, in which the murderer was apparently motivated to get revenge on his ex-wife over not getting his way in a custody battle. But if they'd done a little market research, they would have been able to predict the reaction from the very same misogynists they hope will buy up their soda. David Futrelle gathered some at Man Boobz. The theme of the comments he collected was, "Children are the property of men who create them all by themselves by ejacualating into incubators we call "women", and when you're done with your incubator, she shouldn't be able to get custody over your child-property, no matter what a judge says. And anyone who disagrees only has themselves to blame if they get shot in the face." A sample:
E]nough of this type of offensive action might just start making women and their supporters* think twice, especially if they also become targets. (* Divorce attorneys, child services workers and counselors, family court judges, and other enabling cogs in the feminist legal system)......
Essentially men need to tell feminism to shut the fuck up, give it a vigorous slap across the face thus reminding it who is the biological superior, then order it back into the kitchen/bedroom.......
What options other than overt acts of physical violence are there for a man to deal with a shrew ex and corrupt family court system?....
Most men will just lay down and be resigned to the state-enforced kidnapping and extortion plot, but some are made of tougher stuff and for you to whine about this dead ex-wife or that is inconsequential and no loss to humanity.
I submit that women … are much more likely to pay attention when they’re being threatened.
So yeah, no matter how "cute" or "harmless" you may think misogyny is---or invoking violent misogyny---unfortunately, in the real world, it's not cute or harmless at all.
Shouldn't have too many problems updating the blog, but there will probably be some blips this next week. That's because, after today, I'll be traveling in West Texas to visit my folks, spending time in the one area that I don't think has much in the way of songs written about it---the Midland/Odessa area. (Though the fictional Dillion, TX from "Friday Night Lights" is based on it.) Then on to Lubbock, which has one of my most favorite recent country-western songs written about it.
I think it's interesting/telling that in the past decade plus's celebration of "bluegrass" and "alt country", the Dixie Chicks have been larger ignored, though they have such marvelous instrumentalists.
I will try to pay attention to the local media there to get a general idea of how they're seeing things in West Texas and the Panhandle. Meanwhile, we're gonna Panda Party, amirite? Y'all will have to fill me in on how the last Panda Party went, since I wasn't able to make it. But I should be in there most of today, and am frankly looking forward to it, since I haven't had a lot of opportunity to listen to music this week.
So, a brief thought I had about Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan today: it sucks. Pretty much everyone with a brain thinks that it sucks. But I think I came up with a way that it sucks even more than it was previously thought to suck. Walk with me, will you?
The 9-9-9 plan consists of three taxes: a nine percent income tax, a nine percent sales tax, and a nine percent "business tax". The business tax is a receipts tax rather than a profits tax (as the current corporate income tax is). What this means is that you don't get to deduct anything except "investments, all purchases from other businesses and all dividends paid to shareholders." In other words, you're now taxed nine percent on all wages and salaries paid to employees.
Under the current system, an employee whose pre-tax salary is $50,000 actually costs an employer $53,825 once FICA taxes are added. (For the purposes of this post, all we're concerned about is the employee's pre-tax salary and the employer FICA contribution.) This is because the employee pays 7.65% of their income in FICA taxes, and the employer matches with another 7.65% contribution. The 9-9-9 plan would do away with FICA taxes, and one of Cain's promises is that your employer will pay you that 7.65%. He claims to have worked in private industry before, but that statement makes me doubt this claim.
Anyway, there's no FICA tax under the 9-9-9 plan...but there is a business tax. And the money used to pay your $50,000 salary is subject to a 9% tax. That means the cost of paying you is actually $54,500. Using powers of math, the cost of employing you is $675 higher under 9-9-9.
Amazingly, the problem gets worse the more you're paid. FICA tax is not assessed on wages over $106,800. For someone paid $250,000 a year, the total employer-side FICA charged is $8,170.20, for an effective employer rate of 3.26% and a total cost of $258,170.20. Under 9-9-9? Your employer would pay $22,500 in taxes on your salary for a total cost of $272,500.**
Not only do poor people get a drastic tax increase, but every single person in America would instantaneously become more expensive to employ!
...Pizza joke!
**Figures changed (I accidentally used the lowered 2011 FICA withholding rate).
I'm sure you've seen Erick Erickson's response to We Are the 99%, which is a moving Tumblr created to support Occupy Wall St., where people explain exactly what it's like to not be rich in an America where inequality is expanding rapidly. Erickson responded by starting We are the 53%---the reference is to federal income tax, which wingnuts conveniently pretend is the only tax, even as they attack Medicare and Social Security, which have different revenue streams---a Tumblr dedicated to assholes mocking the pain of others, but in that self-pitying wingnut way. To sum up the tone of the Tumblr: imagine a wingnut walking down the street and seeing someone break their ankle so badly that bone is sticking out. In response to the person with a broken leg crying out for help, wingnut says, "Man, I stubbed my toe a couple hours ago and you don't hear me crying," before moving on and laughing about what a wuss that person is as they bleed all over the pavement. It's somewhat startling to see how much the contributors don't realize what monsters they come across as. I suspect it's because they get excited when they hear a complete asshole being a blowhard (see, Rush Limbaugh), and they forget ordinary people don't actually find it attractive when someone struts about how their puppy-kicking abilities make them a badass. This was Erickson's inaugural entry:
And it is not clear to me what Erick's three jobs are: his internet biographies mention (i) right-wing internet community organizer, (ii) CNN commentator, and (iii) radio host. Are these his "three jobs"? Most of us would say that those are three aspects of one occupation--not three jobs. People who work three jobs are people who teach elementary school in the morning and early afternoon, take a shift at the car wash around dinnertime, and work a pre-dawn shift at a 24-hour 7-11. That does not sound like Erick, Son of Erick to me.
Shit, all this time I described myself as a freelance writer/journalist, not thinking I could take each separate job responsibility and count it as a separate job: author, humorist, blogger, podcaster, columnist, op-ed writer, contributing blogger to XX Factor, freelance journalist, reproductive health care expert, social media maven, and media commentator on all things feminist. That's at least eleven jobs, using the Erick Erickson Patented Job-Counting Method®. And I don't have a wife to handle the housework and social calendar organizing for me, unlike this parasite. I can probably add "chef", "housekeeper", and "cat mom" to the list, using his method.
Oh wait, you totally do. What was I thinking? He's still ranting about how those broken-leg people don't know what it's like to carry around the fading memory of a stubbed toe. Why doesn't anyone care about Erick Erickson's suffering?!
It's a good thing Erickson is a pampered, spoiled white guy. If he wasn't, he would have starved to death for lack of other people catering to him and keeping him in a bubble so thick he actually thinks this routine of his makes him look like anything but the spoiled child he is. With these levels of stupid, I'm genuinely surprised he was able to figure out the steps to writing out a sign and taking a webcam picture. Just kidding! I know someone else operated the webcam for him, because if he did it himself, he'd add "webcam operator" to his list of jobs, bringing the total to four.
More importantly, Is This It remains (takes deep breath, steels self for commenter rage) the single best album released in the past 10 years.
Being contrary and citing the existence of haters doesn't actually make your opinions more interesting. With this defense of The Strokes, it basically makes you sound like someone who reads a lot of mainstream music magazines but never actually listens to music. But hell, even if you require a record to be a mainstream breakout hit in order to consider it the best album of the past decade, there's an easy contender that makes the whole Strokes apologia sound exactly as sad and troll-y as it is: White Blood Cells by the White Stripes, which also came out in 2001. Oh yeah, remember them? I think you should put "Fell In Love With A Girl" on and then read this line, while cackling evilly:
Beneath the shaggy haircuts and puppy-dog eyes there lurked an idea for a crisper, more melodic rock album that would radically update the sound of its forebears—one that, crucially, went against the overproduced schlock then infesting the charts.
Yeah. Because really, the White Stripes were like Lady Gaga or something. Sure.
I thought it would be fun to just start listing rock albums from the past decade that are exponentially better than This Is It, just because what else can you do in the face of epic trollery like this?
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fever to Tell
Sleater-Kinney, The Woods
Le Tigre, This Island
The New Pornographers, Electric Version
The Gossip, Standing in the Way of Control
TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain
The Dandy Warhols, Welcome to the Monkey House
LCD Soundsystem: Honestly, all three records---LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver, This Is Happening---are classics
The Dum Dum Girls, I Will Be
Cansei de Ser Sexy, Cansei de Ser Sexy
The Dirtbombs, Ultraglide in Black
Wild Flag, Wild Flag: it just came out, but it's clearly better than the fucking Strokes, both in terms of rocking and in terms of not-sucking
The Vivian Girls, Everything Goes Wrong
Neko Case, both Fox Confessor Brings the Flood and Middle Cyclone
I could keep going, but you get the picture. And I'm trying to stick to stuff I think is just straight-up classic; not even talking about stuff I just really like for my own purposes but falls short of being one of the Big Records Everyone Should Own.
One thing that I think is worth noting that The Strokes have that none of these other bands I've listed have: a line-up composed strictly of straight, white men. Perhaps that's why it's easier to imagine they're the Greatest Band of the Past Decade, since they fit the image many people have in their heads about what a great band should look like. But what's been cool about rock music in the past decade is that strict rules about who gets to really be an awesome rock musician have been dismantled, put through the shredder and pissed all over. And I, for one, am thrilled.
In a bit of news that will no doubt cause rejoicing amongst "men's rights activists", Topeka, KS has decriminalized wife-beating. In case that is hard to register, let me repeat: it is now basically legal to beat your wife in Topeka. If this fuckwittery isn't halted quickly, I expect that the Topeka airport will have to start booking a whole lot more flights to Russia and Thailand, as they experience a surge in new residents who have a strong interest in acquiring mail order brides. Just make sure not to have any more "Ladies Nights" at the bars, Topeka, because your new residents really hate to see bitches get half-priced drinks while they're in the club, trying to get with women half their age using tried! and! true! "pick-up artist" techniques.
All jokes aside, this new decision by Topeka is intensely dangerous. The rationale for it is they don't have the money to prosecute domestic violence cases any longer, and because of this, they're basically letting abusers go home to their victims, no doubt filled with rage that said bitches dared called the cops on them in the first place.
In the month since new prosecutions of domestic violence stopped in Topeka, there have been at least 35 reported cases of domestic battery or assault, and 18 people jailed have been released without facing charges.
What happened is that Topeka stopped enforcing misdemeanors, and as long as you make sure to beat your wife without a weapon, domestic violence is a misdemeanor in Topeka. Not that I'm weighing in on what kind of crime is should be classified as, of course, but when it comes to domestic violence, it's really a piss-poor idea to just ignore it when it happens in the early "no weapon" stages. As any expert on this could tell you, abusers tend to escalate the abuse over time. They see how far they can go without consequences, and if there aren't any, they up the ante, often with an end goal of basically beating any remaining will or autonomy out of their victims. The earlier in the process they face consequences, often the easier it is for a victim to escape. If there's one place where "broken windows" theory absolutely can be shown to work, it's with domestic violence.
I realize that prosecuting domestic violence is a really frustrating thing to do. Often, victims refuse to testify and plead with the police to drop charges. But that's all the more reason to do it; often inducing a separation between abuser and victim gives the victim time to, for lack of a better term, snap out of it. Certainly, it keeps the abuser away from her while he's steaming with rage that she dared to call the cops (they often also feel it was her fault for "starting" it, an explanation that comes up frequently on "men's rights" forums). Being consistent with consequences works to stop domestic violence; according to Bill Scher's reading of the federal government's crime statistics, the Violence Against Women Act---which emphasizes outreach to victims and swift consequences for abusers---has led to a 50% drop in non-fatal domestic assaults, and a 20% drop in domestic murders. (This sudden shift towards real consequences for abuse is, I believe, just as much an instigator for the expansion of the "men's rights" movement as is the internet.) Interestingly, the drop in female-on-male murders was more dramatic, mostly because enforcing domestic violence laws gives victims the option to leave, and they don't get so desperate that they shoot their abusers. You rarely see such a stellar example of how enforcing the law can cause a dramatic drop in crime, and yet, here Topeka is giving up on doing what we know works. I can't help but think indifference to women's safety is feeding this, as is the heavy influence of fundamentalist Christian teachings that domestic violence is the victim's fault for being inadequately submissive, as well as so-called libertarian influences that would have the government butt out, allowing men to treat women like property.
From an intellectual, political perspective, I really loathe anti-vaccination nuttiness. Just like with anti-choicers, I will never completely understand what compels people to support choices and policies that will objectively create health problems where none need exist. I hate the shunning of evidence for woo, and I especially hate the way parents are encouraged to substitute their own dislike for getting their children vaccinated (kids hate shots!) for intellectual assessment of the necessity of vaccination.
But now I have one more reason to loathe anti-vaccination nuts. They made me feel kind of hot---and not in a fun, sexy way---all damn afternoon. Though I imagine it will fade in a couple of hours, I am running a slight fever, and Jenny McCarthy and the sea of yuppie no-vaccination parents are to blame.
You see, I agreed this morning to get a Tdap, which is a combination tetanus, diptheria, and pertussis vaccine. It used to be that adults getting a booster for tetanus (every ten years, people---keep up with your shots!) or tetanus/diptheria alone, but now they toss the pertussis in with it. Pertussis is better known by the name "whooping cough". Just last year, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended that adults, especially those with regular exposure to small children, start getting pertussis boosters along with their tetanus shots, in response to a surge in whooping cough cases, which have resulted in at least 10 infant deaths in California alone. The reason for the surge in whooping cough cases? Anti-vaccination activists. Yep, because of paranoia about vaccinations, vaccination levels for whooping cough have fallen below herd immunity levels, causing the disease to come back. And it's an ugly one even if you don't die, I'll tell you. From this handy-dandy cheat sheet debunking the nine most prominent anti-vaccination arguments comes this description of the hell that is whooping cough:
Whooping cough is much more than “just a bad cough”. Kids often turn blue from lack of oxygen during coughing fits, they may vomit after severe attacks, and even fracture ribs. There is no cure for whooping cough – antibiotics are given to help stop the transmission to others – you just have to hope your immune system can fight it. Severe complications such as pneumonia and brain damage occur almost exclusively in unvaccinated people and in babies under 6 months of age the symptoms can be severe or life threatening. Whooping cough is also known as the 100-day cough making it a chronic and potentially fatal disease.
Frontline showed a video of a baby with whooping cough who was coughing so hard he was unable to take a breath and nearly died. It took me days to shake that horrible image from my head. Terrible stuff. So when my doctor suggested I get a Tdap, I was like, "Where do I sign up?" I'm not someone who spends a lot of time directly around children, but it still seemed to my doctor and myself like I really should get vaccinated. I live right smack dab in one of the major areas where there are both a lot of young children and a lot of yuppie parents who buy into anti-vaccination nonsense, meaning that I'm simply in an area that probably has fallen below herd immunity levels. I'm somewhat surprised that Brooklyn hasn't had an outbreak to rival the ones in yuppie-thick areas of California, in fact. So getting a shot that helps raise that herd immunity, even by a little bit, seemed like the right thing to do. But I am kind of paying for it a little right now. So I'm blaming Jenny McCarthy and putting the word out there to the adults reading this blog to get your booster shots. If you're feeling like whooping cough isn't that big a deal, please watch that episode of Frontline. And then go get vaccinated.
Of course, I may have just run a slight fever from a tetanus shot alone, to be completely fair. And that particular vaccine? That one is just for me, because dying of lockjaw seems scarier to me than being burned alive.
Via Roy, I see the folks at National Review are openly longing to live in a society where the streets are clogged with beggars and families are forced to sell their children to traffickers to get enough money to eat. Julie Gunlock, writing for NRO, is ready to give hungry children something to cry about:
Sesame Street would be wiser to educate America’s children about the real poor and hungry — the 98 percent of the world population who live outside the United States.
I want to see that Sesame Street! "Hey kids, I know you mom put you to bed without dinner because she couldn't afford any food, but at least you aren't like this beggar, whose nose fell off from leprosy! Now pray to Ronald Reagan for forgiveness for thinking that you, a 4-year-old child, deserves to eat food. Get a job, you lazy welfare suck."
The truth is, 94.3 percent of American households are able to put enough food on the table every day to feed their families.
Meaning that one in 20 Americans goes entire days without eating. Julie is unsatisfied with this number! If you took a random sampling of kindergarteners and put them in an average sized classroom, only 1 would be too hungry to behave or learn, and that number should be much higher. At least 5-6 children should be crying with hunger. Maybe they can grow up to be fashion models, so they shouldn't be so whiny.
As I wrote on NRO back in January, the idiom “food insecure” — a term created by the U.S. Department of Agriculture — means one has either “reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet” or “disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake.”
So, far from hungry or starving, Lily suffers from a much less dramatic condition — unpleasant to be sure, but at its core, just a somewhat boring, irregular, and occasionally reduced diet.
I mean, she's not saying that they should go weeks without eating! Just days. Toughens them up, I'm sure. I mean, sure, living on a diet of irregularly accessed Ramen noodles sounds unpleasant for Julie, but we're talking about poor people here. They're not real people in Julie's eyes, and so needs like "nutrition" just don't register. We just need to get enough calories in 'em so they can clean Julie's house and office and harvest and prepare her food. Those things a diverse diet provides---such as vitamins or minerals---who gives a shit? Small children of poor people don't need the brain development of a properly fed child. What are they going to do with all that literacy? Probably vote or something, and we can't have that. And sure, not being fed a decent diet can cause major damage to your bones and internal organs, but how strong do you really need to be to push a mop to clean up after Julie? Strawberries aren't that heavy; you don't need a well-formed body to pick them.
God, I can't even continue. What a monster. The lack of empathy on display is so outrageous that I have to wonder if Julie had a nutritional deficiency as a child that kept the empathy centers in her brain from forming. Of course, the fact that conservatives think this is acceptable and invigorating discourse tells me that this is more a cultural issue---they were born with empathy centers and fed properly, but they lost their sense of empathy from underuse.
I'm just surprised she didn't suggest that if women don't want to see their children suffering from malnutrition, they should have kept their legs shut. But hey, there's still time and apparently, she writes about this topic a lot.
I'm a religious reader and super fan of GOOD, but once in awhile they fall into some of the more annoying yuppie-left habits, forcing me to write complaining blog posts like this one. I only gripe because I love! The sin this time came, sadly for me, amidst a challenge you all know I'm going to support whole-heartedly, a "get healthy" challenge. But to my mind, a large part of being healthy is being evidence-based in your health choices, which can do two things for your health. One, it makes your choices more effective. Two, it saves you the stress of having to attend to a lot of things that are meaningless, like whether or not something is "natural" or "homeopathic", freeing up time in your day to do things that are genuinely good for your health, such as exercising, eating right, and sleeping 8 hours a night.
Day 8 of the challenge, therefore, is getting it from me. Cord Jefferson surprised me by writing an anti-soap screed, since he recently wrote an evidence-based explanation of why you should wash your hands every time you use the bathroom. That post made me even more cognizant of times I really should be more careful about washing my hands, and reminded me that I need to get a whooping cough vaccine update in order to be a good citizen who doesn't put physically weaker people in danger of catching germs off me. So I was surprised to see him dismiss soaps and shampoos as "chemicals" that are dangerous for their, well, chemicaliness.
In January of this year, prompted by the GOOD challenge to swear off soap for a month, I stopped using soap, body wash, and shampoo on my hair, face, and most of my body. My armpits and crotch still got lathered, but the rest of me was free of all the lab-made junk that goes into our hygiene products nowadays. Eight months later, I’m still not using soap, and my skin and hair have never felt or looked better. The moral of the story: You don’t need a bunch of nonsense dreamed up by chemists to stay healthy and be happy.
This might be a good time to point out that there's a great deal of variation in how much filth people have on their bodies. Some people are greasier and hairier than others, and some people have hormone levels that cause their sweat to be extra-smelly. Some people are up to stuff that gets them dirty. If a quick rinse does it for you, good for you, but individual results may vary. I'm not fond of heavy duty anti-perspirants, but I've come to realize how much of a godsend they are for people whose body chemistry isn't quite like mine. Plus, I just really like the feeling of being squeaky clean. Don't try to guilt me out of one of these little joys in life that harms no one. And that's my next point: the argument for why soap is "bad" isn't there.
Though most people eat, drink, and use dozens of foodstuffs and products per day, the vast majority of us never actually look at the labels and ingredients lists on most of our products. We’ll read countless blog posts, but not the little square on the back of our face wash that tells us we’re rubbing acid on our cheeks every morning.....
Should you actually be putting salicylic acid near your eyes? If the answer to these questions is no, try going a day without that product and see how you feel. If the answer is still yes, that’s fine, too. At least you’ll be far more aware of what it is your putting in and on your body day in and day out.
I get that he's trying to agree that individual choices may vary, but it's clear that the "correct" answer is that one shouldn't use salicylic acid because it's a Chemical. There's no actual argument here for why it's not safe, and certainly no producing of evidence for why one should hesitate to use this chemical; it's just unnatural-sounding and an acid to boot. This is just poor reasoning, plus a really unnecessary swipe at chemists, who are no more evil a group of people than anyone else. Honestly, they're probably better on average than we journalist types.
I blame Michael Pollan in part. He crafted some food rules that were intended to reorient people to eating healthy in a way that was less work than going through elaborate processes of educating yourself about everything that goes into food, by simply trying to push people towards simpler food that wasn't crafted in a lab in order to maximize your calorie and fat consumption. But in doing so, he reaffirmed the Cult of the Natural, i.e. the belief that because something has a chemically-sounding name, it's automatically suspicious. And we're seeing that logic taken to an extreme here.
The funny part is that salicylic acid is "natural". If you simply called it "willow bark extraction", the naturalism cult people would be eating that shit up. It's also pretty safe if used correctly, and I can attest is very good at holding off adult acne problems. But even if it wasn't "natural", the problem here is simply assuming that something is dangerous because it sounds complicated. There's no reason to assume that. I'm sorry to see such poor reasoning being passed off as health advice at GOOD. I realize filling 30 days is hard to do, but a better use of their time would be to encourage people to do things like get up and walk around more, or add more fruits and vegetables to their diets.
Spoiler babies: If you're not all caught up on all shows on NBC, just skip this one.
The excitement over Breaking Bad last night was sadly undermined by the fear that we'll soon be having to put Parks and Recreation to bed. I was thrilled when the show was renewed--- from what I understand, it was touch and go there for a bit---but now I'm beginning to think that they had to sell out big time to get that renewal, and it may become unwatchable. Thursday night's episode, which we watched on DVR last night, felt like a big time shark jump, the moment when the writers gave in and stopped making a show for smart people who are quick to get a joke, and started to make the show for people who don't get a joke unless you explain it to them.
Example #1: the joke at the top of the show, which you see in the first part of the full episode here. I was excited that they were going to send up NPR and just general quiet, pretentious public radio, and they did do that with the joke about "Nefirtiti's Fjord". Old P&R would have simply had her read the bit about the lesbian funk-Afro etc. band and played the music and gone out, trusting that the audience gets why that's funny. New P&R has the characters explain the joke to you with Leslie complaining that the music sucks and the DJ explaining that "lesbian" trumps "quality". Which in turn makes the joke kind of offensive, instead just a funny poke at public radio for the overall pretentiousness of their music, instead of zeroing in on the "lesbian" thing.
Example #2: After Ann finally gets Ron and April's attention with a gross medical story, Ron calls her by another name to put her in her place. Not that funny a joke, but at least a joke. But then they cut to him explaining what he did, in case you didn't get it. Here's an idea: instead of riding every joke into the ground for fear that one will get by the slower people in the audience, why don't you just keep making jokes, figuring some have to hit? That's what you used to do!
Example #3: I think we get why the birth certificate nonsense was stupid, and the people of Pawnee are stupid to care. There was a recent event in our history that would be a helpful reminder, in case we didn't get that. So why do you keep explaining it, over and over again?
There are more examples---I counted at least 7, and that was after I started counting, so there were probably more---but it's too depressing to watch it again and count them up. Plus, I have other complaints!
Complaint #1: Bad characterization. For no real reason, they've made Chris stupid and Ann even more so. The whole subplot with Ann trying to get Ron and April to talk to her is the dumbest thing they've ever done with Ann, and Ann is by far the weakest character on the show, story-wise, of any of them. Ann used to be there as a bit of a no-nonsense character who was baffled by the red tape and politics of city government. Now Ann....gives a shit if two people she doesn't even like that much make small talk with her? We have had zero indications to date that Ann is a person with a perverse love of small talk, nor do we have any reason to think she's an attention whore. I think this is an attempt to get Rashida Jones onscreen more, which I can appreciate because she's cute and funny, but if you don't have anything good for her to do, don't just make up out-of-character weirdness that has no relationship to human behavior.
Also, old Leslie would have asked her mom about her birth first.
Complaint #2: Sentimentality. Old P&R had a healthy sense of humor about Leslie's attachment to the shithole they call Pawnee. One of the best running jokes on the show is how the ungrateful citizens of Pawnee ruin every public meeting by being irrelevant and cranky. Leslie's sense of scale is supposed to be out of wack, even if other parts of her personality are admirable. But now she's giving impassioned speeches about why she loves Pawnee, and instead of it being a joke, we're supposed to get sentimental with her about her fictional town that has been routinely portrayed as Backwardsville, USA? No, thank you. This is especially fucked up in light of the birth certificate storyline---since it was a reference to the President's situation, there's an unpleasant whiff of suggesting that the racist screeching about the birth certificate should be written off as relatively harmless eccentricity instead of a toxin that's eroding our political discourse. That's unforgivable in a show that usually has a swift grasp of the realities of politics.
These are my complaints, and I'm only issuing them because the only thing that's made me laugh all season was the torturing-Ann-with-penises joke. That said, I don't blame the writers fully for this downward dive that P&R has taken. I blame NBC. Towards the end of the show, I turned to Marc and said, "I'll bet this dumbing down wasn't the writers' idea. I just can't imagine you get so stupid so fast. I'll bet NBC had a come-to-Jesus meeting where they were told that either they make the show much stupider and less harsh towards the assholes in our society to reel in a larger audience, or they will be canceled." I'm a firm believer in the mediocrity principle, and I think that Hollywood executives have turned making mediocre but popular shit into an art. And they're not wrong! Shows that are sharp in their critiques of American society will be turned off by people who cherish the unjust status quo, as well as people who get uneasy about "mean" humor, which probably kills off more of an audience than a network show can afford to lose. Shows that assume an audience that's paying attention and is smart enough to get rapid-fire humor also lose a huge audience chunk, which is why 30 Rock can't pull it out in the ratings no matter how many Emmys they get. (And the only time they surged in ratings was their worst, stupidest season, season 3.) I get why networks see sharp, pointed humor and want to reel it in. So that was my theory of what's happening to P&R.
And then, right after I floated this theory, I got a confirmation from the universe, in the form of the writers of Community. See, we had only caught up to the end of season two last week, so we watched the season premiere of season three right after the latest episode of P&R. I had heard in the rumor mills of the internet that Community is also hanging by a thread, under threat to tone down the weirdness by NBC, with cancellation looming. I worried that they, too, would rob the show of everything odd about it I love in order to appeal to people who don't like sharp humor and prefer predictability in their sitcoms. But instead I got this:
If that's not a "fuck you" to NBC executives telling them to tone it down, I don't know what is. This confirmed all my suspicions that the showrunners and writers are getting immense pressure to produce more generic, sentimental, unfunny crap that has a mass appeal. It's a shame to see P&R give in to that pressure, but I suppose predictable, since The Office went there years ago. Let's just hope 30 Rock keeps riding their Emmys off into fuck-you land, because for some reason they've managed to come back to the humor that made them so great in the first place without getting cancelled.
2) I had a three-way debate with some folks about where all this was headed, and was the most wrong. I believed Gus poisoned Brock, straight up. Lindsay believed that it wasn't ricin. She was more right than I, but we both underestimated Walt. He's now, I believe, the most evil protagonist of a major TV show ever. "Profit" tried to do something similar, but their problem was they started with him being evil. This way---having a character devolve into evil---gets audience buy-in much better.
3) This episode was good at putting you on the "is he or isn't he?" roller coaster. The trick with the old lady, and his willingness to put her in danger, was supposed to initially make you think he's gone all in. But his palpable relief that she was safe makes you think he's still Mr. White, the reasonably decent human being. Twice more in the episode he seems to put innocent people in danger, but then you find out that he didn't really. First was the bomb in the nursing home, where you wonder how on earth he can be so evil as to put innocent nursing home patients in danger, and then you find out he made the bomb just big enough to kill people in the immediate vicinty, but not so big it hurts anyone else. Then they set fire to the lab, and if you're me, at least, you're worried about the laundry employees and their escape. But they made a big to-do about pulling the alarm and making sure no one got hurt. Sure, Walt shot those two thugs in cold blood, but hey, they kidnapped Jesse! So when the big reveal comes, it was genuinely a shock.
4) One thing I struggle with is the notion that Jesse would still have doubts about killing Gus. Gus threatened Walt's family. The "no kids" thing, I would think, is still in play when it comes to, you know, Walt's kids. But it is true that Brock's near-death would make the problem more real for Jesse.
5) I was wondering when Gus would just force them to cook at gunpoint. Glad that was cleared up, because duh.
I'm driving upstate for a wedding today, so I can't host the Panda Party. But that doesn't mean there can't be a ! I'm just going to leave room info blank of themes and leave it to majority rule to figure out what the themes will be. Have fun, everyone! I'll be back next week.
Meanwhile, here's a song:
Songs with obvious sexual metaphors are always encouraged at Panda Party.
In response to my post below, a reader sent me an email exchange she had with Skechers, who not only has a "Shape Up" line of get-your-back-out-alignment-for-mythical-toning-benefits shoes, but also has a line for girls, so they can get an early start on fucking up their backs and knees in the name of achieving a literally impossible physical ideal. The reader specifically pointed out that there's no "Shape Ups" for boys, and this is the reply she got:
The whole message behind Shape-ups is to get people moving, exercising, and getting fit. Skechers' advertising for Shape-ups for Girls contains the same message as the First Lady's Let's Move initiative, which is aimed specifically at children. American children are more sedentary now than at any time in our history. Shape-ups are intended to get people moving and being fit. We think that is a good thing for adults and kids -- and hope others understand the intent.
The reason we do not have a Shape-Ups line at this time for boys is simply a matter of how our company's research and development works for Shape-ups. The Shape-ups line was first created for women and, once it became clear they were popular and there was a demand, the line for men was developed and marketed. The same is true for the kids' lines. Shape-Ups for Girls were rolled out first. The success of this line and the need in the market will guide us in deciding if we will create a line for boys. Other lines may start with Men's.
Regardless of what you may think of Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign, I think it's safe to say that the First Lady is not endorsing snake oil products that promise physical effects they can't deliver. On the contrary, a quick perusal of the website will show that it sticks to scientifically sound ideas about nutrition and exercise, with an emphasis on safety. In fact, the reason that children became the focus of the campaign is that there's overwhelming scientific evidence that people who are already-fat don't get thin, so the idea behind the campaign was to prevent the weight gain in the first place. Again, I'm not saying that you have to agree with that goal---though I do think it's going to be a side effect of improved nutrition and exercise in children---but it's just a fact that this is the goal. This has nothing to do with snake oil sneakers promising to give you a supermodel's butt just by running your errands.
It's worth noting that Obama has received a lot of attention---and a lot of it has been nasty as hell---for not fitting the fashion model version of beauty, but instead being a strong, fit woman who has visible muscles.
I will add that presenting little girls with unachievable ideals of beauty is contrary to real-world fitness goals. It encourages eating disorders in some, but also causes others to despair. A person who is in despair because they'll never be perfect isn't someone who is motivated to go to the gym to be well.
I'm sure you've seen this story that's been passed around about the supposed "health" editor at xoJane who uses Plan B as her primary form of contraception. (Seriously, how rarely are you getting laid that this even seems like a remotely feasible plan of action?) There was much fail in that piece, including her casual assumption that condoms are only there if you sleep with a subjectively-defined "many people", as if STDs are the result of cumulative stranger-seed instead of exposure to contagious germs. This sort of thing might make you wonder---I know it made me wonder---if younger people these days have been so poisoned by creeping prudery plus abstinence-only education that behavior like Cat's, which indicates a deep ambivalence about the morality of sexual pleasure, is common. I know it made me long for the days when Salt 'n' Pepa were talking about sex and TLC was flinging condoms around, and the pursuit of female sexual pleasure was taken as a right, instead of treated like some foul thing that requires self-punishment through repeated abortions. Or worse.
From an intellectual, political perspective, I really loathe anti-vaccination nuttiness. Just like with anti-choicers, I will never completely understand what compels people to support choices and policies that will objectively create health problems where none need exist. I hate the shunning of evidence for woo, and I especially hate the way parents are encouraged to substitute their own dislike for getting their children vaccinated (kids hate shots!) for intellectual assessment of the necessity of vaccination.
I'm a religious reader and super fan of GOOD, but once in awhile they fall into some of the more annoying yuppie-left habits, forcing me to write complaining blog posts like this one. I only gripe because I love! The sin this time came, sadly for me, amidst a challenge you all know I'm going to support whole-heartedly, a "get healthy" challenge. But to my mind, a large part of being healthy is being evidence-based in your health choices, which can do two things for your health. One, it makes your choices more effective. Two, it saves you the stress of having to attend to a lot of things that are meaningless, like whether or not something is "natural" or "homeopathic", freeing up time in your day to do things that are genuinely good for your health, such as exercising, eating right, and sleeping 8 hours a night.
Spoiler babies: If you're not all caught up on all shows on NBC, just skip this one. 
Spoilers.