Wednesday, August 14, 2013
Dear Daughter: I Hope You Have Awesome Sex
There’s a piece of twaddle going around the internet called 10 Rules For Dating My Daughter, which is packed with “funny” threats like this:
“Rule Four: I’m sure you’ve been told that in today’s world, sex without utilising some kind of ‘barrier method’ can kill you. Let me elaborate: when it comes to sex, I am the barrier, and I will kill you.”
All of which boil down to the tedious, “Boys are threatening louts, sex is awful when other people do it, and my daughter is a plastic doll whose destiny I control.”
Look, I love sex. It’s fun. And because I love my daughter, I want her to have all of the same delights in life that I do, and hopefully more. I don’t want to hear about the fine details because, heck, I don’t want those visuals any more than my daughter wants mine. But in the abstract, darling, go out and play.
Because consensual sex isn’t something that men take from you; it’s something you give. It doesn’t lessen you to give someone else pleasure. It doesn’t degrade you to have some of your own. And anyone who implies otherwise is a man who probably thinks very poorly of women underneath the surface.
Yes, all these boys and girls and genderqueers may break your heart, and that in turn will break mine. I’ve held you, sobbing, after your boyfriend cheated on you, and it tore me in two. But you know what would tear me in two even more? To see you in a glass cage, experiencing nothing but cold emptiness at your fingers, as Dear Old Dad ensured that you got to experience nothing until he decided what you should like.
You’re not me. Nor are you an extension of my will. And so you need to make your own damn mistakes, to learn how to pick yourself up when you fall, to learn where the bandages are and to bind up your own cuts. I’ll help. I’ll be your consigliere when I can, the advisor, the person you come to when all seems lost. But I think there’s value in getting lost. I think there’s a strength that only comes from fumbling your own way out of the darkness.
“Rule Four: I’m sure you’ve been told that in today’s world, sex without utilising some kind of ‘barrier method’ can kill you. Let me elaborate: when it comes to sex, I am the barrier, and I will kill you.”All of which boil down to the tedious, “Boys are threatening louts, sex is awful when other people do it, and my daughter is a plastic doll whose destiny I control.”
Look, I love sex. It’s fun. And because I love my daughter, I want her to have all of the same delights in life that I do, and hopefully more. I don’t want to hear about the fine details because, heck, I don’t want those visuals any more than my daughter wants mine. But in the abstract, darling, go out and play.
Because consensual sex isn’t something that men take from you; it’s something you give. It doesn’t lessen you to give someone else pleasure. It doesn’t degrade you to have some of your own. And anyone who implies otherwise is a man who probably thinks very poorly of women underneath the surface.
Yes, all these boys and girls and genderqueers may break your heart, and that in turn will break mine. I’ve held you, sobbing, after your boyfriend cheated on you, and it tore me in two. But you know what would tear me in two even more? To see you in a glass cage, experiencing nothing but cold emptiness at your fingers, as Dear Old Dad ensured that you got to experience nothing until he decided what you should like.
You’re not me. Nor are you an extension of my will. And so you need to make your own damn mistakes, to learn how to pick yourself up when you fall, to learn where the bandages are and to bind up your own cuts. I’ll help. I’ll be your consigliere when I can, the advisor, the person you come to when all seems lost. But I think there’s value in getting lost. I think there’s a strength that only comes from fumbling your own way out of the darkness.
by Ferrett Steinmetz, GMP | Read more:
Image: Stewart Black/Flickr
A Day in the Life of the Ku Klux Klan, Uncensored
by David Rosenberg, Salon | More photos:
Image: Anthony S. Karen
America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
A molecule? That sounds crazy. What molecule could be responsible for a steep and sudden decline in violent crime?
Well, here's one possibility: Pb(CH2CH3)4.
In 1994, Rick Neven was a consultant working for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development on the costs and benefits of removing lead paint from old houses. This has been a topic of intense study because of the growing body of research linking lead exposure in small children with a whole raft of complications later in life, including lower IQ, hyperactivity, behavioral problems, and learning disabilities.
But as Nevin was working on that assignment, his client suggested they might be missing something. A recent study had suggested a link between childhood lead exposure and juvenile delinquency later on. Maybe reducing lead exposure had an effect on violent crime too?
That tip took Nevin in a different direction. The biggest source of lead in the postwar era, it turns out, wasn't paint. It was leaded gasoline. And if you chart the rise and fall of atmospheric lead caused by the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, you get a pretty simple upside-down U: Lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early '40s through the early '70s, nearly quadrupling over that period. Then, as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions plummeted.
Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the '60s through the '80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early '90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years.
So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a 2000 paper (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the '40s and '50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.
And with that we have our molecule: tetraethyl lead, the gasoline additive invented by General Motors in the 1920s to prevent knocking and pinging in high-performance engines. As auto sales boomed after World War II, and drivers in powerful new cars increasingly asked service station attendants to "fill 'er up with ethyl," they were unwittingly creating a crime wave two decades later.
It was an exciting conjecture, and it prompted an immediate wave of…nothing. Nevin's paper was almost completely ignored, and in one sense it's easy to see why—Nevin is an economist, not a criminologist, and his paper was published in Environmental Research, not a journal with a big readership in the criminology community. What's more, a single correlation between two curves isn't all that impressive, econometrically speaking. Sales of vinyl LPs rose in the postwar period too, and then declined in the '80s and '90s. Lots of things follow a pattern like that. So no matter how good the fit, if you only have a single correlation it might just be a coincidence. You need to do something more to establish causality.
by Kevin Drum, Mother Jones | Read more:
Image: Gérard DuBois
The Sense of an Ending
More than five million Americans have Alzheimer’s or similar illnesses, and that number is growing as the population ages. Without any immediate prospect of a cure, advocacy groups have begun promoting ways to offer people with dementia a comfortable decline instead of imposing on them a medical model of care, which seeks to defer death through escalating interventions. The Green House Project, based in Arlington, Virginia, pushes for the creation of small group homes in which medical care is less intrusive; the Pioneer Network, based in Chicago, urges reforms such as less reliance on psychotropic medications.
Many of these approaches overlap with the methods of the Beatitudes Campus, which, over the past decade, has become an incubator for a holistic model of care. “When you have dementia, we can’t change the way you think, but we can change the way you feel,” Alonzo said. Ann Wyatt, the consultant on residential care at the New York City chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association, calls Beatitudes a “magical place”—a phrase rarely used to describe a nursing home. She is currently coördinating an effort to implement the Beatitudes approach in several New York City facilities, including Jewish Home. “Beatitudes has sort of put the pieces together,” she told me. “It all—embarrassingly and intuitively—makes sense.”
In the advanced-dementia unit at Beatitudes, the elevator is blocked by a velvet rope attached to silver stanchions. Visitors must unhook the rope to proceed. The rope is meant to dissuade a resident from wandering onto an elevator and out of the building; a black square of carpet in front of the elevator performs the same function, since people with dementia have been shown to be unwilling to step onto such a black space, taking it to be a hole. At other nursing homes, exits are often marked with “Stop” signs, or blocked with the kind of fluorescent banners that police use to cordon off crime scenes. The velvet rope at Beatitudes makes a subtle, more positive suggestion: that residents are ensconced in an exclusive club.
The unit is on the fourth, uppermost floor of a nineteen-sixties-era medical building. Its residents are men and women who can no longer live alone safely: they may not remember the location of the bathroom in the house where they have lived for fifty years, and they may have virtually lost the power of speech. (Residents on the lower floors have less advanced dementia, or are undergoing rehab for, say, a stroke.) Across from the elevator is a large, sunny sitting room, where the nurses’ station used to be. “We took that out because they deserved the real estate, and we didn’t need it,” Alonzo told me as she showed me around what is always referred to as the “neighborhood”—a semantic adjustment meant to signal that Beatitudes is a place where residents live, rather than an institution where they are confined.
by Rebecca Mead, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Phillip Toledano
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Bob Dylan
Looks like tomorrow is coming on fast
Ain't complaining 'bout what I got
Seen better times, but who has not?
Silvio
Silver and gold
Won't buy back the beat of a heart grown cold
Silvio
I gotta go
Find out something only dead men know
Honest as the next jade rolling that stone
When I come knocking don't throw me no bone
I'm an old boll weevil looking for a home
If you don't like it you can leave me alone
I can snap my fingers and require the rain
From a clear blue sky and turn it off again
I can stroke your body and relieve your pain
And charm the whistle off an evening train
I give what I got until I got no more
I take what I get until I even the score
You know I love you and furthermore
When it's time to go you got an open door
I can tell you fancy, I can tell you plain
You give something up for everything you gain
Since every pleasure's got an edge of pain
Pay for your ticket and don't complain
One of these days and it won't be long
Going down in the valley and sing my song
I will sing it loud and sing it strong
Let the echo decide if I was right or wrong
Silvio
Silver and gold
Won't buy back the beat of a heart grown cold
Silvio
I gotta go
Find out something only dead men know
Music and Lyrics -- B. Dylan
How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets
[ed. A portrait of modern journalism -- it's definitely not your smoke-filled, desk-crammed newsroom of yesteryear.]
The stranger responded with instructions for creating an even more secure system to protect their exchanges. Promising sensitive information, the stranger told Poitras to select long pass phrases that could withstand a brute-force attack by networked computers. “Assume that your adversary is capable of a trillion guesses per second,” the stranger wrote.
Before long, Poitras received an encrypted message that outlined a number of secret surveillance programs run by the government. She had heard of one of them but not the others. After describing each program, the stranger wrote some version of the phrase, “This I can prove.”
Seconds after she decrypted and read the e-mail, Poitras disconnected from the Internet and removed the message from her computer. “I thought, O.K., if this is true, my life just changed,” she told me last month. “It was staggering, what he claimed to know and be able to provide. I just knew that I had to change everything.”
Poitras remained wary of whoever it was she was communicating with. She worried especially that a government agent might be trying to trick her into disclosing information about the people she interviewed for her documentary, including Julian Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks. “I called him out,” Poitras recalled. “I said either you have this information and you are taking huge risks or you are trying to entrap me and the people I know, or you’re crazy.”
The answers were reassuring but not definitive. Poitras did not know the stranger’s name, sex, age or employer (C.I.A.? N.S.A.? Pentagon?). In early June, she finally got the answers. Along with her reporting partner, Glenn Greenwald, a former lawyer and a columnist for The Guardian, Poitras flew to Hong Kong and met the N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, who gave them thousands of classified documents, setting off a major controversy over the extent and legality of government surveillance. Poitras was right that, among other things, her life would never be the same.Greenwald lives and works in a house surrounded by tropical foliage in a remote area of Rio de Janeiro. He shares the home with his Brazilian partner and their 10 dogs and one cat, and the place has the feel of a low-key fraternity that has been dropped down in the jungle. The kitchen clock is off by hours, but no one notices; dishes tend to pile up in the sink; the living room contains a table and a couch and a large TV, an Xbox console and a box of poker chips and not much else. The refrigerator is not always filled with fresh vegetables. A family of monkeys occasionally raids the banana trees in the backyard and engages in shrieking battles with the dogs.
Greenwald does most of his work on a shaded porch, usually dressed in a T-shirt, surfer shorts and flip-flops. Over the four days I spent there, he was in perpetual motion, speaking on the phone in Portuguese and English, rushing out the door to be interviewed in the city below, answering calls and e-mails from people seeking information about Snowden, tweeting to his 225,000 followers (and conducting intense arguments with a number of them), then sitting down to write more N.S.A. articles for The Guardian, all while pleading with his dogs to stay quiet. During one especially fever-pitched moment, he hollered, “Shut up, everyone,” but they didn’t seem to care.
by Peter Maas, NY Times | Read more:
Images: Olaf Blecker and Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
Castaway
Our pinnace returned from the shore of Juan Fernández Island and brought an abundance of crawfish—and a man clothed in goatskins who looked wilder than the first owners of them. He had been on the island four years and four months, being left there by Captain Stradling of the Cinque-Ports. His name was Alexander Selkirk, a Scotchman. While marooned on the island, Selkirk saw several ships pass by, but only two came in to anchor. As he went to view them, he found them to be Spaniards and retired from them—upon which they shot at him. Had they been French, he would have submitted, but he chose to risk his dying alone on the island rather than fall into the hands of the Spaniards in these parts, because he apprehended they would murder him or make a slave of him in the mines, for he feared they would spare no stranger that might be capable of discovering the South Sea.
He told us that he was born at Largo in the county of Fife in Scotland and was bred a sailor from his youth. The reason of his being left here was a difference betwixt him and his captain, which, together with the ships being leaky, made him willing rather to stay here than go along with him at first; and when he was at last willing, the captain would not receive him. He had been in the island before to wood and water, when two of the ship’s company were left upon it for six months till the ship returned, being chased thence by two French South Sea ships.
He had with him his clothes and bedding, with a firelock, some powder, bullets, and tobacco, a hatchet, a knife, a kettle, a Bible, some practical pieces, and his mathematical instruments and books. He diverted and provided for himself as well as he could, but for the first eight months had much ado to bear up against melancholy and the terror from being left alone in such a desolate place. He built two huts with pimento trees, covered them with long grass, and lined them with the skins of goats, which he killed with his gun as he wanted, so long as his powder lasted, which was but a pound—and that being near spent, he got fire by rubbing two sticks of pimento wood together upon his knee. In the lesser hut, at some distance from the other, he dressed his victuals, and in the larger he slept and employed himself in reading, singing psalms, and praying—so that he said he was a better Christian while in this solitude than ever he was before or than he was afraid he should ever be again.
He might have had fish enough but could not eat them for want of salt, because they occasioned a looseness—except crawfish, which are there as large as our lobsters and very good. These he sometimes boiled, and at other times broiled, as he did his goats’ flesh, of which he made very good broth, for they are not so rank as ours. He kept an account of five hundred that he killed while there and caught as many more, which he marked on the ear and let go. When his powder failed, he took them by speed of foot, for his way of living and continual exercise of walking and running cleared him of all gross humors, so that he ran with wonderful swiftness through the woods and up the rocks and hills, as we perceived when we employed him to catch goats for us. He told us that his agility in pursuing a goat had once like to have cost him his life; he pursued it with so much eagerness that he caught hold of it on the brink of a precipice, of which he was not aware, the bushes having hid it from him, so that he fell with the goat down the said precipice, a great height, and was so stunned and bruised with the fall that he narrowly escaped with his life; and when he came to his senses, he found the goat dead under him. He lay there about twenty-four hours and was scarce able to crawl to his hut, which was about a mile distant, or to stir abroad again in ten days.
He told us that he was born at Largo in the county of Fife in Scotland and was bred a sailor from his youth. The reason of his being left here was a difference betwixt him and his captain, which, together with the ships being leaky, made him willing rather to stay here than go along with him at first; and when he was at last willing, the captain would not receive him. He had been in the island before to wood and water, when two of the ship’s company were left upon it for six months till the ship returned, being chased thence by two French South Sea ships.
He had with him his clothes and bedding, with a firelock, some powder, bullets, and tobacco, a hatchet, a knife, a kettle, a Bible, some practical pieces, and his mathematical instruments and books. He diverted and provided for himself as well as he could, but for the first eight months had much ado to bear up against melancholy and the terror from being left alone in such a desolate place. He built two huts with pimento trees, covered them with long grass, and lined them with the skins of goats, which he killed with his gun as he wanted, so long as his powder lasted, which was but a pound—and that being near spent, he got fire by rubbing two sticks of pimento wood together upon his knee. In the lesser hut, at some distance from the other, he dressed his victuals, and in the larger he slept and employed himself in reading, singing psalms, and praying—so that he said he was a better Christian while in this solitude than ever he was before or than he was afraid he should ever be again.
He might have had fish enough but could not eat them for want of salt, because they occasioned a looseness—except crawfish, which are there as large as our lobsters and very good. These he sometimes boiled, and at other times broiled, as he did his goats’ flesh, of which he made very good broth, for they are not so rank as ours. He kept an account of five hundred that he killed while there and caught as many more, which he marked on the ear and let go. When his powder failed, he took them by speed of foot, for his way of living and continual exercise of walking and running cleared him of all gross humors, so that he ran with wonderful swiftness through the woods and up the rocks and hills, as we perceived when we employed him to catch goats for us. He told us that his agility in pursuing a goat had once like to have cost him his life; he pursued it with so much eagerness that he caught hold of it on the brink of a precipice, of which he was not aware, the bushes having hid it from him, so that he fell with the goat down the said precipice, a great height, and was so stunned and bruised with the fall that he narrowly escaped with his life; and when he came to his senses, he found the goat dead under him. He lay there about twenty-four hours and was scarce able to crawl to his hut, which was about a mile distant, or to stir abroad again in ten days.
by Woodes Rogers (1709), Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
Image: Isla Juan Fernandez via; Wikipedia
.jpg){kind=link}
The Poorest Rich Kids in the World
"Slow down! Please! Please!" 12-year-old Georgia begged from the passenger seat. In the back, her twin brother, Patterson, sat frozen in horror.
"Shut the fuck up!" their stepmother, Daralee Inman, snarled. Her right hand shot out to smack Georgia's face, while her left clutched a glass filled with Trix cereal, leaving no hands on the steering wheel. Pine trees whizzed by to their right, a cliff to their left. "Did I ever get you into a motherfucking wreck?" Daralee demanded, as faster and faster they descended the steep road that served as the family's half-mile-long driveway. "Did I ever get you into a motherfucking wreck?"
The kids reached for their seat belts, too late, as the Tahoe hit a bump, tipped toward the cliff – "God take my soul! Forgive me all my sins!" Georgia cried out – and then veered left and slammed into a tree. The exploding air bags felt like a punch, the windshield like cement. The twins struggled free of the car. Dazed, they began limping back up the mountainside, their stepmother staggering close behind.
As they crested the hill, their house finally came into view: a 10,000-square-foot log-and-stone cabin of preposterous proportions, filled with expensive antiques, valuable artwork and, stashed behind the steel door of a walk-in vault, sacks of gold Krugerrands, bars of silver and gold, jewelry, and millions of dollars' worth of collectible firearms. This wasn't some no-name clan of backwoods hillbillies, Georgia and Patterson Inman were among the wealthiest kids in America: When they turn 21, the family claims, the twins will inherit a trust fund worth $1 billion. They and their father were the last living heirs to the vast Industrial Age fortune of the Duke family, tobacco tycoons who once controlled the American cigarette market, established Duke University and, through the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, continue to give away hundreds of millions of dollars.
The twins' father, Walker Inman, 57, lumbered from the mansion, his tattooed sleeves visible under a black T-shirt, drinking his morning rum, bellowing, "What the fuck did you do to my children?" Morbidly obese after a lifetime of debauchery and heroin addiction, he looked past his keening kids to glare at his fifth wife. "Honey," Walker rumbled, "we're going for a ride." He grabbed Daralee, hopped into his red Dodge truck and took off in a spray of gravel toward the wreckage down the mountain – then promptly lost control of the vehicle, which rolled onto the driver's side and skidded to a stop.
Inside the house, the twins called 911. The dispatcher at the police station couldn't make out what the hysterical children were saying, but local troopers knew exactly where they were needed, and quickly left for the remote Inman property, which Walker had dubbed "Outlaw Acres." Later on, in the presence of the Inmans' high-priced attorney, an officer would confront Daralee with the fact that she'd been driving with a blood-alcohol content of .05 – violating her probation – with her stepkids in the car, and Walker would admit he'd been drinking and driving too. And yet no charges would be levied that November 2009 morning; the Lincoln County Sheriff's department would simply close the case. As ambulances and police cars came screaming up the hill, past the demolition derby of wrecked cars to where Georgia and Patterson sobbed in the grand arched entryway to their palace, it was just another day at the Inmans', home to the poorest rich kids in the world.
Raised by two drug addicts with virtually unlimited wealth, Georgia and Patterson survived a gilded childhood that was also a horror story of Dickensian neglect and abuse. They were globe-trotting trust-fund babies who snorkeled in Fiji, owned a pet lion cub and considered it normal to bring loose diamonds to elementary school for show and tell. And yet they also spent their childhoods inhaling freebase fumes, locked in cellars and deadbolted into their bedrooms at night in the secluded Wyoming mountains and on their ancestral South Carolina plantation.
by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Photo: Danielle Levitt
Monday, August 12, 2013
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)