yanoblog

Animal rights activists often claim that animal research is unnecessary or not reasonable (e.g., PETA’s FAQ or their website devoted to the issue).

Today’s Times has an article about (it’s in the business section, reflecting the various contradictions about a for-profit economy and medical need) that opens:

Chopped pig pancreas may not sound appetizing. But most cystic fibrosis patients eat a refined version of it each breakfast, lunch and dinner — five large capsules a meal — to supply enzymes their bodies do not produce. The pills are life-sustaining for most of the nearly 30,000 people in the United States with cystic fibrosis, a hereditary disease that attacks the lungs and digestive tract.

The article then discusses efforts to develop animal-free alternatives (failures so far) as well as various business aspects of the issue.

But for me, the most important point is that if PETA et al had their way, these 30,000 people would just be told to crawl off and die. Animals Rights uber alles.

I normally wouldn’t bother posting this, I’d just send it to friends, but Bijan made it clear I have to blog about this sort of thing.

Ferraro quit Clinton’s campaign after saying:

If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.

Regardless of who you are or aren’t supporting in this election, that was a racist comment. But it’s not her first time spouting this crap. Back in 1988, she said:

If Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn’t be in the race.

(Washington Post, April 14, 1988, pA4)

Front page of the Times today has an article headlined Race Matters Less in Politics of South. It’s an interesting article about a black man getting elected to the State House from a district that’s 96% white. That’s certainly an interesting story. All the more so, given the specific history of that county. (Incidentally, this would be an interesting story anywhere in the country – racism isn’t exactly confined to the Deep South).

Obviously, the hook for the story (and the reason it’s on the front page) is Obama’s campaign.

However, the best part of the article is the way some residents seem to have dissed the reporter without him realizing it. Or even if that wasn’t their intent, it’s funny he (Adam Nossiter) wrote the story that way. I’m not sure what size the beats are at the Times (they appear to grow in size as you move away from the city, from covering 10 square blocks to covering whole continents), but it seems like he has the whole Bible Belt.

Anyway, he writes… Oh wait, I was about to cut and paste from the online article, but its content is a bit different than the paper edition I have. That’s an interesting story in itself, which I don’t have times (Get it?) to pursue. Anyway, in the New England edition, he writes:

And a few weeks ago, voters in a county that is more than 96 percent white chose a genial black man, James Fields, to represent them in the State House of Representatives. It is a historic first, but the remarks of many white voters reveal an unconscious condescension.

(The online version is the same, up to “It was a historic first, but” and then reads: “the moment is full of awkwardness.” I assume an editor realized Nossiter was overstating the case.)

Nonetheless, where he sees “unconscious condescension,” I see some white folks messing with a reporter they sense is trying to make them look backward:

“Really, I never realize he’s black,” said a white woman in a restaurant, smiling.

“He’s black?” asked Lou Bradford, a white Cullman police officer, jokingly.

“You know, I don’t even see him as black,” said another of Mr. Fields’s new white constituents, Perry Ray, the mayor of one of the county’s villages, Dodge City.

(By the way, Nossiter did some amazing reporting during Katrina and its aftermath.)

We were at the mall this past weekend and I spotted a flier in the food court.

It’s for an upcoming beauty pageant sponsored by Sunburst USA Their full name is Sunburst USA International Beauty Pageant. “USA International”?!? (Also, they’ve misspelled “pageant” in the title of their home page).

This flier is both evil in its approach and annoying in its content.

There are many exclamation points and they always come in pairs!! Because this contest is that exciting!! And there are a lot of “quotation marks” throughout:

“divisional winner”
“Event Scoring System”
“TOP 5”
“optional Event”

...and so on (I got tired of typing these). Consistent use of upper and lower case eludes this flier: “That would be your State Final. Who goes to the state final?” Which is it: “State Final” or “state final”?

Here’s the -deal- scam. For a mere $40, you can enter your child into a contest. But there are up to 4 other “optional” contents (Best Attire, Most photogenic (just bring a head shot), Best Hair, and Best Eyes). Why the optionals?

HOW CAN OPTIONALS HELP ?
THEY CAN PROVE TO BE VERY IMPORTANT!! EXAMPLE; IF YOUR CHILD DOES NOT DO WELL WITH THEIR “EVENT SCORES” AND ARE NOT ONE OF THE TOP FIVE IN THEIR AGE DIVISION AWARDED TEHIR STATE ENTRY FEE THEY CAN EARN THEIR STATE ENTRY FEE BY WINNING AN OPTIONAL IN THEIR AGE DIVISION , AND GO ON TO THE FINALS. REMEMBER; AT THE STATE FINALS, EVERYONE STARTS OVER. HOW THEY PLACED AT THE PRELIM IS TOTALLY FORGOTTEN !! ANYONE CAN WIN !!

(All caps, underlines, incorrect punctuation, bad grammar, and awful marketing in the original).

In other words, you can enter this contest, for $40-$80, for the chance of winning the entry fee for the state finals (where “ANYONE CAN WIN !!”). The state final fee is $300, which implies that anyone can just skip this regional hassle and go straight to the State Finals!!

Don’t worry though, “NO CONTESTANT GOES HOME WITHOUT A PRIZE.” As for the state Finals:

Over $15000 in bonds and prizes. Huge 6 ft. trophies, TWO $1,000.00 OVERALL SCHOLARSHIP BONDS, and a talent agency will be represented to audit ALL contestants. More detailed information will be provided in your state booklet if you qualify to move on. And FAMILY FUN FOR EVERYONE !!

I can forgive the sentence ending in a preposition (“move on”) and the sentence fragment at the beginning. But that second sentence is too obscure.

Okay, enough snarkiness about the flier itself.

I hate these contests. I think they are scams designed to rip off families and more importantly, they are bad for children. Do we really need another tool to teach girls to hate their bodies (“BOYS DO NOT COMPETE AFTER 4 YRS. OF AGE”)? That this is a “NATURAL LOOK ONLY !!” pageant (i.e., no Jon Benet makeup) doesn’t help.

And according to various posts on the net, if you make it to the State finals, the “NATURAL LOOK” is ignored. Here’s a sample

SUNBURST BEAUTY PAGEANTS Post By EJ (Guest Post) (05/29/2006) HORRIBLE EXPERIENCE AT THE STATE FINALS IN ORLANDO FL. THEY DO NOT WANT NATURAL BEAUTY. THEY WANTED TOTALLY GLITZY. CHILDREN BETWEEN THE AGES OF 3 AND 6 WEARING FAKE LASHES, WIGS, HAIR PIECES AND PLENTY OF MAKE-UP. THANK GOD MY DAUGHTER WAS A GREAT SPORT.

Sigh. I hate these scam artists.

Rant over.

Yesterday, I blogged about David Brooks’ latest error and wondered when the correction would come.

Well, it looks like they won’t be openly correcting it – it’s been silently changed in the Times archive.

Whatta schmuck.

There is precedent for having columnists openly correct their mistakes.

For example, a few years ago, Frank Rich wrote an article about the Pentagon’s desecration of the Koran. It clearly enraged the White House. But the only error they could find was a misstated date. This led to one of the finest snarky corrections ever. Read it slowly to really appreciate it:

Last week I misstated the Friday evening on which the Pentagon buried its report certifying desecrations of the Koran by American guards. It was June 3, not May 27.

In fact, even David Brooks has done it. He wrote a rant about Spain’s decision to pull out of Iraq. It included this paragraph:

Does anyone doubt that Americans and Europeans have different moral and political cultures? Yesterday the chief of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, told Italy’s La Stampa, ’’It is clear that using force is not the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists.’’ Does he really think capitulation or negotiation works better? Can you imagine John Kerry or George Bush saying that?

While it might be a reasonable approach to consider the context in which terrorists act (as well as what gets defined as “terrorism”), I can’t even imagine Prodi saying that. Because he didn’t. Brooks issued this correction:

In Tuesday’s column I quoted the European Commission’s president, Romano Prodi, telling the Italian newspaper La Stampa that force was not the answer to terrorism. I was relying on an Agence France-Presse translation, which was incorrect. Prodi actually said force should not be the only answer to terrorism. He said terrorism would not abate until the Israeli-Palestinian dispute was resolved.

(Not that that causes Brooks to revisit any of his actual arguments.) But at least he issued a correction.

What gives this time? (Maybe it’s coming with his next column. But the Times usually appends its corrections on the website. It doesn’t just silently change the original article. We’ll see…)

UPDATE

Once again, my blog’s influence grows. With his next column, Brooks issued a formal correction. A correction has also since been added to the archived version of this column (which should’ve been done when they changed the column silently).

My brother-in-law just told me to read David Brooks’ current column to see if I could spot the glaring error. Fortunately for my dignity, I passed the test.

It appears in this paragraph (ignore the illogic of Brooks…this is just a factual error.):

All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action, like Ward Churchill and Thomas Sowell, and critics of the radical feminism, like Christina Hoff Summers, are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners.

I didn’t know Ward Churchill had swung so far to the right. Because he hasn’t.

However, I knew Ward Connerly, who funds anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives (e.g., Proposition 209 in CA), was a scumbug.

But you know people of color – all their names sound the same.

I’m surprised the Times let this slip through. Next blog post from me (I assume): The Correction.

So, it’s a little embarrassing to suggest a TV show that’s well into its second season, but I figured that we’re about to have tons of reruns on TV, so if you are looking for a good show to check out, this may be of use. If the producers continue to refuse to give the writers a decent contract we’ll be seeing reruns and non emoting pets for a lot longer.

Ugly Betty is an hour-long show on ABC adapted from a Colombian telenovela.

The show has some great acting but what makes the show more than just a guilty pleasure is its politics, in particular, its treatment of immigration and gay rights. The show isn’t didactic at all. But for a story set in the world of a fashion magazine, they do a great job weaving the issues real people face into the plot. In the second season they even show two men talking about their relationship (although I don’t think we ever see them kiss).

You can rent the first season as well catch up on the last few episode on ABC’s website. Or, you can just download the thing. But I don’t approve of that last option at all.

There are no spoilers in this review. Although I’d probably be doing you a favor if there were.

It’s the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. A new Coen Brothers movie is out. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 95%. My brother-in-law is in town. Seems like the perfect setup to go out to a “late” movie (9:45pm. Oy, I can’t believe I now consider that late) and have a good time.

Sure it’s supposed to have scenes of graphic torture, blah blah blah. (There’s some violence, but after some gruesomeness at the beginning, it was about as bad as episode of CSI).

The first two-thirds of this movie is great. Fantastic. Coen brothers at their best.

Then they decide to tell the audience to go screw. I believe the film makers enter into a social contract with the audience based on the kind of story they start to tell. The Coen brothers decided two-thirds of the way through to change everything. It felt like they just hated the audience. At least with Spiderman 3, Sam Raimi didn’t hate us – it just seemed like he was sick of making Spiderman movies.

I have not read the book. Perhaps they were being slavishly faithful to the book. But I doubt it. When making a movie, there’s a bazillion choices they can make and it seems like all of them were made to set the audience up for being disappointed.

I say this as a Coen Brothers fan. I even liked The Hudsucker Proxy. But Do Not see this movie. Or at least wait to rent it.

I would’ve been better off spending the time rewatching a movie I know that I like.

UPDATED (2007-12-13) Here’s a funnier, better version of my rant. I’d like to think I just was too angry when I wrote this post, but I think the person who wrote this may just be funnier than me. Peter – thanks for providing this. Your intellectual honesty is a great as your penchant for abuse (judging by your comments below).

Apparently, my last post was so biting that Bob Herbert felt the need to weigh in to also attack the idiot David Brooks (his words, not mine…. oh, okay, my words.).

Herbert does a great job. After doing a moving job of recounting the three murders, Herbert takes Reagan and Brooks (without naming him) to task. Here’s my favorite bit:

Everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was signaling at the fair. Whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans — they all knew. The news media knew. The race haters and the people appalled by racial hatred knew. And Reagan knew.

He was tapping out the code. It was understood that when politicians started chirping about “states’ rights” to white people in places like Neshoba County they were saying that when it comes down to you and the blacks, we’re with you.

And Reagan meant it.

There were also some great letters to the editor.

I assume David Brooks and the rest of the right that latched onto his work of fiction will now correct the record… and Bizarro Superman is going to save the world too.

There I was, still getting caffeniated this morning, when I accidentally started David Brooks’ op-ed piece. The last time this happened, I had to post about it.

And again, I have to say something. For some reason, Brooks is writing about how aggrieved Ronald Reagan is because people think he’s a racist. Is Brooks talking about Reagan’s record as governor, where he attacked the Black Panther Party using racist rhetoric? Is he talking about Reagan’s villification of the mythical black-welfare-queen? Or maybe his legislating more harshly against crack cocaine than powdered cocaine? Or could it be his staunch support for South Africa’s Apartheid government? Or maybe his dismantling of the Federal Government’s civil rights apparatus?

Uh, no. He’s angry because people keep talking about how Reagan called for “state’s rights” in the Mississippi county where three civil rights activists were killed in 1964. State’s Rights has become code for allowing segregation.

Writes Brooks:

You can look back on this history in many ways. It’s callous, at least, to use the phrase “states’ rights” in any context in Philadelphia. Reagan could have done something wonderful if he’d mentioned civil rights at the fair. He didn’t. And it’s obviously true that race played a role in the G.O.P.’s ascent.

Still, the agitprop version of this week — that Reagan opened his campaign with an appeal to racism — is a distortion, as honest investigators ranging from Bruce Bartlett, who worked for the Reagan administration and is the author of “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy,” to Kevin Drum, who writes for Washington Monthly, have concluded.

But still the slur spreads. It’s spread by people who, before making one of the most heinous charges imaginable, couldn’t even take 10 minutes to look at the evidence. It posits that there was a master conspiracy to play on the alleged Klan-like prejudices of American voters, when there is no evidence of that conspiracy. And, of course, in a partisan age there are always people eager to believe this stuff.

(Wow, writers as diverse as a former Reagan adminstration member and an author for the Washington Monthly!)

Well, you can look at this history in many ways. One of the most obvious is to place it in the overall context of Reagan’s approach to race – which was not exactly “enlightened.” He built a career on attacking the gains of the civil rights movement. It’s not unreasonable to think that his 1980 campaign – one widely regarded as a textbook-model of stagecraft – knew what it was doing. I find it almost impossible to believe that the location of their kickoff speech for the campaign was an accident. I’m not even going to get into his attacks on unions, his handling of AIDS (“Maybe the Lord brought down this plague [because] illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments.” [as he was quoted in his authorized biography]), massive slashing of social and education spending (remember ketchup as a vegetable?), Iran Contra, supporting death squads, etc. I’ll stay “on point.”

Brooks wants 10 minutes of reasearch? Fine.

First, Brooks justifies his non-sequitor of a column by claming that the story has recently been spreading “like a weed.” Not according to Technorati. Most of the hits for Reagan Mississippi States’s Rights are about Brooks’ article today. Even clicking backward in time, there is hardly a

But even when defending Reagan, his supporters are forced to acknowledge it is all a little awkward. From the National Review:

To be sure, it is difficult to imagine that Reagan was oblivious to the historical baggage of the phrase “states’ rights” in Mississippi, and it cannot be ruled out that he was conscious of the problematic implication of his choice of words, just as Jimmy Carter was not presumed innocent of his use of “ethnic purity” in 1976.

The author then goes on to defend Reagan, but still..

But the most important part of this is that Reagan’s strategists admitted to this kind of cynicism, as Lee Atwater said in an infamous interview:

Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he’s campaigned on since 1964… and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster…

Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps…?

Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’

My 10 minutes are up. I found nothing conclusive beyond Brooks’ blustering for his side of things.

Regardless, one’s time is well spent to read (or listen) to Democracy Now’s show on Reagan and Apartheid from when he died. It’s the first hit on Google for Reagan Racist Record I remember my relief when the show first broadcast. Amy Goodman spent the week on “Remembering the Dead” – the victims of Reagan.