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Profiling Will Never Work

Roarman — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 12:16:42 -0800

Remember when conservatives believed in color blindness? Before 9/11, when affirmative action was a hot topic; they were positively weepy on the subject. Discrimination based on skin color is just plain wrong, they used to declare, no matter whom it benefits. Martin Luther King was invoked. It was a matter of high principle. Conservatives had a dream.

That was then. Now, when it comes to terrorism, color blindness is the problem. With Pavlovian predictability, right wing pundits greet terror scares with the chant: Profile the swarthy! Stop treating people of all races alike! Don’t let political correctness (once known as the high principle of color blindness) put us all at risk.

Religious profiling, in reality, is often racial profiling. And racial profiling is not only ugly, but counterproductive.
Actually, it’s a bit more subtle than that. Conservatives don’t call for racial profiling; they call for religious profiling. Strip-search the Muslims! After all, as my Daily Beast colleague Tunku Varadarajan recently put it, “incidents of terrorism by non-Muslims are trivial these days.”

Really? The biggest terrorist attack in U.S. history prior to 9/11-the 1996 Oklahoma City bombing-was carried out by a white ex-Marine with a crew cut. The only major WMD attack of the “war on terror” era-the 2001 anthrax mailings-was apparently the handiwork of a white, Christian microbiologist angry that prominent Catholic politicians were pro-choice. And who stormed the Holocaust Museum last year, killing a security guard? Ayman-al Zawahiri? No, neo-Nazi octogenarian nutcase James Wenneker von Brunn.

Not all terrorism is jihadist Muslim terrorism. And for that matter, not all mass murder is terrorism. When Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007, it wasn’t terrorism, since he didn’t have a political motive. But the Homeland Security Department has to stop that kind of stuff from happening on airplanes nonetheless. And frisking people named Ahmed won’t do the trick.

So even religious profiling has its problems. But religious profiling is also a backdoor to racial profiling. The reason is that people don’t wear their religions on their foreheads, or even on their passports. Yes, you can give special scrutiny to travelers from certain overwhelmingly Muslim countries, something the U.S. has done in various forms since 9/11. But last time I checked, Britain, Canada, France and Germany-all of which have produced terrorists trying to reach U.S. soil in recent years-weren’t on the special scrutiny list. Nor was India, the country with the third-largest Muslim population in the world. Screening for nationality, in other words, is not the same as screening for religion.

So what are conservatives really demanding when they demand that airport officials profile Muslims? Whether they recognize it or not, what they’re demanding, in practice, is that screeners profile people who look like Muslims. The normally sensible Stuart Taylor put it bluntly. Screeners should look for “Islamic-world origin, as evidenced by speech patterns, facial characteristics [and] skin color.”

OK, go look for it. You’d likely miss Shoe bomber Richard Reid (British citizen of Afro-Caribbean descent), London subway bomber Germaine Lindsay (ditto), alleged dirty bomber Jose Padilla (Puerto Rican), Beltway snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo (African-American), Taliban fighters John Walker Lindh and David Hicks and Al Qaeda operative Adam Gadahn (white, white and white).

You’d also get some problematic false positives. In 2005, when the British Police went on a profiling spree after the London subway bombing, they ended up shooting a Brazilian electrician named Jean Charles de Menezes who they mistook for one of the bombers because, according to one officer, he had “Mongolian eyes.”

Religious profiling, in reality, is often racial profiling. And racial profiling is not only ugly, but counterproductive. The reasons are simple. Airport officials have finite resources. The more they concentrate those resources on a profiled subset of the population, the less scrutiny everyone else gets. And the less scrutiny everyone else gets, the greater al Qaeda’s incentive to recruit terrorists who fall into that less-scrutinized category. Profile people who “look Muslim” and they’ll sign up Jose Padilla or David Hicks. Profile men and they’ll hire women. (Women have already committed suicide attacks in Russia and Israel). Profile people who “dress Muslim” and they’ll dress up as Orthodox Jews. (It’s happened in Israel). It’s not that hard to move from Category A to Category B.

Profiling is also counterproductive because the best way to catch terrorists is by gathering intelligence about specific plots. And the people who are best-placed to give you that intelligence are the very people you’re likely to profile, and thus potentially alienate. Imagine if officials had singled out Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s father for unfriendly attention on his way through some U.S. airport? Would he have been as likely to report his son to the CIA? Would the Yemeni-American outside of Buffalo who in 2002 sent the FBI the letter that led to the busting of the al Qaeda cell in Lackawanna have done so if he had been given the once over? After the profiling frenzy that followed the 2005 London subway attack, London police admitted that their efforts had had a “hugely negative impact” on their relationship with British Muslims, whose help they desperately needed.

There’s nothing wrong with paying more attention to people who have recently traveled to terrorist hotspots (something the feds have always done). But the harsh truth is that if you want more security at airports you have to get tougher on everybody. Longer, testier interrogations by better-trained personnel. Higher-tech screening equipment. More opening of bags. More intrusion. More schlep. And that’s exactly what the profiling-demanding conservatives hate. They’re sure they can have more security and more privacy, if only the feds would violate the privacy of others instead. At root, they simply don’t believe that people who look and pray like them could ever be terrorists. But they’re wrong. People who look and pray like them are terrorists. And we have to stop them, too.

Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-01-08/profiling-will...

From the UK: Climategate reveals 'the most influential tree in the world'

Grandpa — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 07:36:24 -0800

Climategate reveals 'the most influential tree in the world'

Leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit show how the world's weightiest climate data has been distorted, says Christopher Booker

By Christopher Booker Published: 7:41PM GMT 05 Dec 2009
The magical faraway tree: a larch in the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, sampled by Dr Keith Briffa, has been called 'the most influential tree in the world' Photo: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE Coming to light in recent days has been one of the most extraordinary scientific detective stories of our time, bizarrely centred on a single tree in Siberia dubbed "the most influential tree in the world". On this astonishing tale, it is no exaggeration to say, could hang in considerable part the future shape of our civilisation. Right at the heart of the sound and fury of "Climategate" – the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in East Anglia – is one story of scientific chicanery, overlooked by the media, whose implications dwarf all the rest. If all those thousands of emails and other documents were leaked by an angry whistle-blower, as now seems likely, it was this story more than any other that he or she wanted the world to see. To appreciate its significance, as I observed last week, it is first necessary to understand that the people these incriminating documents relate to are not just any group of scientists. Professor Philip Jones of the CRU, his colleague Dr Keith Briffa, the US computer modeller Dr Michael Mann, of "hockey stick" fame, and several more make up a tightly-knit group who have been right at the centre of the last two reports of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). On their account, as we shall see at this week's Copenhagen conference, the world faces by far the largest bill proposed by any group of politicians in history, amounting to many trillions of dollars. It is therefore vitally important that we should trust the methods by which these men have made their case. The supreme prize that they have been working for so long has been to establish that the world is warmer today than ever before in recorded history. To do this it has been necessary to eliminate a wealth of evidence that the world 1,000 years ago was, for entirely natural reasons, warmer than today (the so-called Medieval Warm Period). The most celebrated attempt to demonstrate this was the "hockey stick" graph produced by Dr Mann in 1999, which instantly became the chief icon of the IPCC and the global warming lobby all over the world. But in 2003 a Canadian statistician, Steve McIntyre, with his colleague Professor Ross McKitrick, showed how the graph had been fabricated by a computer model that produced "hockey stick" graphs whatever random data were fed into it. A wholly unrepresentative sample of tree rings from bristlecone pines in the western USA had been made to stand as "proxies" to show that there was no Medieval Warm Period, and that late 20th-century temperatures had soared to unprecedented levels. Although McIntyre's exposure of the "hockey stick" was upheld in 2006 by two expert panels commissioned by the US Congress, the small group of scientists at the top of the IPCC brushed this aside by pointing at a hugely influential series of graphs originating from the CRU, from Jones and Briffa. These appeared to confirm the rewriting of climate history in the "hockey stick", by using quite different tree ring data from Siberia. Briffa was put in charge of the key chapter of the IPCC's fourth report, in 2007, which dismissed all McIntyre's criticisms. At the forefront of those who found suspicious the graphs based on tree rings from the Yamal peninsula in Siberia was McIntyre himself, not least because for years the CRU refused to disclose the data used to construct them. This breached a basic rule of scientific procedure. But last summer the Royal Society insisted on the rule being obeyed, and two months ago Briffa accordingly published on his website some of the data McIntyre had been after. This was startling enough, as McIntyre demonstrated in an explosive series of posts on his Climate Audit blog, because it showed that the CRU studies were based on cherry-picking hundreds of Siberian samples only to leave those that showed the picture that was wanted. Other studies based on similar data had clearly shown the Medieval Warm Period as hotter than today. Indeed only the evidence from one tree, YADO61, seemed to show a "hockey stick" pattern, and it was this, in light of the extraordinary reverence given to the CRU's studies, which led McIntyre to dub it "the most influential tree in the world". But more dramatic still has been the new evidence from the CRU's leaked documents, showing just how the evidence was finally rigged. The most quoted remark in those emails has been one from Prof Jones in 1999, reporting that he had used "Mike [Mann]'s Nature trick of adding in the real temps" to "Keith's" graph, in order to "hide the decline". Invariably this has been quoted out of context. Its true significance, we can now see, is that what they intended to hide was the awkward fact that, apart from that one tree, the Yamal data showed temperatures not having risen in the late 20th century but declining. What Jones suggested, emulating Mann's procedure for the "hockey stick" (originally published in Nature), was that tree-ring data after 1960 should be eliminated, and substituted – without explanation – with a line based on the quite different data of measured global temperatures, to convey that temperatures after 1960 had shot up. A further devastating blow has now been dealt to the CRU graphs by an expert contributor to McIntyre's Climate Audit, known only as "Lucy Skywalker". She has cross-checked with the actual temperature records for that part of Siberia, showing that in the past 50 years temperatures have not risen at all. (For further details see the science blog Watts Up With That.) In other words, what has become arguably the most influential set of evidence used to support the case that the world faces unprecedented global warming, developed, copied and promoted hundreds of times, has now been as definitively kicked into touch as was Mann's "hockey stick" before it. Yet it is on a blind acceptance of this kind of evidence that 16,500 politicians, officials, scientists and environmental activists will be gathering in Copenhagen to discuss measures which, if adopted, would require us all in the West to cut back on our carbon dioxide emissions by anything up to 80 per cent, utterly transforming the world economy. Little of this extraordinary story been reported by the BBC or most of our mass-media, so possessed by groupthink that they are unable to see the mountain of evidence now staring them in the face. Not for nothing was Copenhagen the city in which Hans Andersen wrote his story about the Emperor whose people were brainwashed into believing that he was wearing a beautiful suit of clothes. But today there are a great many more than just one little boy ready to point out that this particular Emperor is wearing nothing at all. I will only add two footnotes to this real-life new version of the old story. One is that, as we can see from the CRU's website, the largest single source of funding for all its projects has been the European Union, which at Copenhagen will be more insistent than anyone that the world should sign up to what amounts to the most costly economic suicide note in history. The other is that the ugly, drum-like concrete building at the University of East Anglia which houses the CRU is named after its founder, the late Hubert Lamb, the doyen of historical climate experts. It was Professor Lamb whose most famous contribution to climatology was his documenting and naming of what he called the Medieval Warm Epoch, that glaring contradiction of modern global warming theory which his successors have devoted untold efforts to demolishing. If only they had looked at the evidence of those Siberian trees in the spirit of true science, they might have told us that all their efforts to show otherwise were in vain, and that their very much more distinguished predecessor was right after all.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6738111/...

Is China headed toward collapse?

Grandpa — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 04:33:42 -0800

Is China headed toward collapse?
By EAMON JAVERS

The conventional wisdom in Washington and in most of the rest of the world is that the roaring Chinese economy is going to pull the global economy out of recession and back into growth. It’s China’s turn, the theory goes, as American consumers - who propelled the last global boom with their borrowing and spending ways - have begun to tighten their belts and increase savings rates.

The Chinese, with their unbridled capitalistic expansion propelled by a system they still refer to as “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” are still thriving, though, with annual gross domestic product growth of 8.9 percent in the third quarter and a domestic consumer market just starting to flex its enormous muscles.

That’s prompted some cheerleading from U.S. officials, who want to see those Chinese consumers begin to pick up the slack in the global economy - a theme President Barack Obama and his delegation are certain to bring up during next week’s visit to China.

“Purchases of U.S. consumers cannot be as dominant a driver of growth as they have been in the past,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said during a trip to Beijing this spring. “In China, ... growth that is sustainable will require a very substantial shift from external to domestic demand, from an investment and export-intensive growth to growth led by consumption.”

That’s one vision of the future.

But there’s a growing group of market professionals who see a different picture altogether. These self-styled China bears take the less popular view: that the much-vaunted Chinese economic miracle is nothing but a paper dragon. In fact, they argue that the Chinese have dangerously overheated their economy, building malls, luxury stores and infrastructure for which there is almost no demand, and that the entire system is teetering toward collapse.

A Chinese collapse, of course, would have profound effects on the United States, limiting China’s ability to buy U.S. debt and provoking unknown political changes inside the Chinese regime.

The China bears could be dismissed as a bunch of cranks and grumps except for one member of the group: hedge fund investor Jim Chanos.

Chanos, a billionaire, is the founder of the investment firm Kynikos Associates and a famous short seller - an investor who scrutinizes companies looking for hidden flaws and then bets against those firms in the market.

His most famous call came in 2001, when Chanos was one of the first to figure out that the accounting numbers presented to the public by Enron were pure fiction. Chanos began contacting Wall Street investment houses that were touting Enron’s stock. “We were struck by how many of them conceded that there was no way to analyze Enron but that investing in Enron was, instead, a ‘trust me’ story,” Chanos told a congressional committee in 2002.

Now, Chanos says he has found another “trust me” story: China. And he is moving to short the entire nation’s economy. Washington policymakers would do well to understand his argument, because if he’s right, the consequences will be felt here.

Chanos and the other bears point to several key pieces of evidence that China is heading for a crash.

First, they point to the enormous Chinese economic stimulus effort - with the government spending $900 billion to prop up a $4.3 trillion economy. “Yet China’s economy, for all the stimulus it has received in 11 months, is underperforming,” Gordon Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” wrote in Forbes at the end of October. “More important, it is unlikely that [third-quarter] expansion was anywhere near the claimed 8.9 percent.”

Chang argues that inconsistencies in Chinese official statistics - like the surging numbers for car sales but flat statistics for gasoline consumption - indicate that the Chinese are simply cooking their books. He speculates that Chinese state-run companies are buying fleets of cars and simply storing them in giant parking lots in order to generate apparent growth.

Another data point cited by the bears: overcapacity. For example, the Chinese already consume more cement than the rest of the world combined, at 1.4 billion tons per year. But they have dramatically ramped up their ability to produce even more in recent years, leading to an estimated spare capacity of about 340 million tons, which, according to a report prepared earlier this year by Pivot Capital Management, is more than the consumption in the U.S., India and Japan combined.

This, Chanos and others argue, is happening in sector after sector in the Chinese economy. And that means the Chinese are in danger of producing huge quantities of goods and products that they will be unable to sell.

The Pivot Capital report was extremely popular in Chanos’s office and concluded, “We believe the coming slowdown in China has the potential to be a similar watershed event for world markets as the reversal of the U.S. subprime and housing boom.”

And the bears also keep a close eye on anecdotal reports from the ground level in China, like a recent posting on a blog called The Peking Duck about shopping at Beijing’s “stunningly dysfunctional, catastrophic mall, called The Place.”

“I was shocked at what I saw,” the blogger wrote. “Fifty percent of the eateries in the basement were boarded up. The cheap food court, too, was gone, covered up with ugly blue boarding, making the basement especially grim and dreary. ... There is simply too much stuff, too many stores and no buyers.”

More about the Writer's Strike

Whiplash — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 06:38:24 -0800

Buzz posted a few links to this stuff but I figured I'd highlight it here.

First of all, here is a Strike Chart to tell us how many episodes of our favorite shows are left to air:

30 Rock: Ten episodes will be produced. Five episodes have aired, so there are five left.

Aliens in America: Seventeen episodes will be produced. Six episodes have aired, so there are 11 left.

Back to You: Nine episodes will be produced. Six episodes have aired, so there are three left.

Bionic Woman: Roughly nine episodes will be produced. Six episodes have aired, so there are three left.

Bones: Twelve episodes will be produced. Six episodes have aired, so there are six left.

Boston Legal: Fifteen episodes will be produced. Six episodes have aired, so there are nine left.

Brothers & Sisters: Twelve episodes will be produced. Seven episodes have aired, so there are five left.

Carpoolers: Thirteen episodes will be produced. Five episodes have aired, so there are eight left.

Cavemen: Thirteen episodes will be produced. Five episodes have aired, so there are eight left.

Chuck: Thirteen episodes will be produced. Seven episodes have aired, so there are six left.

CSI: NY: Fourteen episodes will be produced. Seven episodes have aired, so there are seven left.

Desperate Housewives: Ten episodes will be produced. Seven episodes have aired, so there are three left.

Dirty Sexy Money: Eleven episodes will be produced. Six episodes have aired, so there are five left.

Friday Night Lights: Fifteen episodes will be produced. Seven episodes have aired, so there are eight left.

Gossip Girl: Thirteen episodes will be produced. Seven episodes have aired, so there are six left.

Grey's Anatomy: Eleven episodes will be produced. Seven episodes have aired, so there are four left.

Heroes: Eleven episodes will be produced. Seven episodes have aired, so there are four left.

House: Twelve episodes will be produced. Six episodes have aired, so there are six left.

Jericho: Seven episodes will be produced. None have aired yet, so there are seven episodes left.

Law & Order: SVU: Fourteen episodes will be produced. Six episodes have aired, so there are eight left.

Life is Wild: Twelve episodes will be produced. Six episodes have aired, so there are six left.

Lost: Eight episodes will be produced. None have aired yet, so there are eight episodes left.

Medium: Nine episodes will be produced. None have aired yet, so there are nine episodes left.

Men in Trees: Nineteen episodes will be produced. Six episodes have aired, so there are 13 left.

Numbers: Twelve episodes will be produced. Eight, so there are four left.

One Tree Hill: Twelve episodes will be produced. None have aired yet, so there are twelve episodes left.

The Office: Twelve half-hour episodes will be produced. Eleven half-hour episodes have aired, so there is one half-hour episode left.

Prison Break: Thirteen episodes will be produced. Seven episodes have aired, so there are six left.

Private Practice: Ten or 11 episodes will be produced. Six episodes have aired, so there are four or five left.

Pushing Daisies: Nine episodes will be produced. Five episodes have aired, so there are four left.

Reaper: Ten to 12 episodes will be produced. Seven episodes have aired, so there are three to five left.

Samantha Who?: Twelve episodes will be produced. Four episodes have aired, so there are eight left.

Scrubs: Twelve episodes will be produced. Three episodes have aired, so there are nine left.

Shark: Eleven episodes will be produced. Seven episodes have aired, so there are four left.

The Shield: All 13 season-seven episodes will be completed. None have aired (the final season gets underway in '08), so there are 13 left.

Smallville: Fifteen episodes will be produced. Seven episodes have aired, so there are eight left.

Supernatural: Ten to 12 episodes will be produced. Six episodes have aired, so there are four to six left.

Ugly Betty: Twelve or 13 episodes will be produced. Seven episodes have aired, so there are five or six left.

And Buzz also posted insight from two of my favorite TV writers: Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy) and Damon Lindelof (creator of Lost).

Here's what Joss has to say:

And here is Damon's New York Times Op-Ed piece:

TELEVISION is dying.

I should have realized this four years ago when I first got my TiVo box, but denial is always the first stage of grief. I simply couldn’t acknowledge that this wonderful invention heralded the beginning of the end.

TiVo stores your favorite movies and shows on its hard drive, allowing you to pull up last night’s episode of “The Daily Show” as easily as you click open documents on your laptop. In fact, once you download the original broadcast - sorry, I meant to say “record” it - you can watch it at your leisure. The next morning. Next year. Your call. Because now? You own that episode.

Best of all, you got it free.

Television has always been free. Sure, if you want all the N.F.L. games in high definition, you have to pay the piper, but the broadcast networks still offer their entire schedules for absolutely nothing. The only catch, of course, is that you have to watch commercials. Economically, it’s a fair deal. The network pays for the shows, gives them to viewers, and makes its cash back through advertising. Which regrettably brings us to the most wonderful thing TiVo does: It enables you to ignore the commercials that keep the whole system running.

Twenty percent of American homes now contain hard drives that store movies and television shows indefinitely and allows you to fast-forward through commercials. These devices will probably proliferate at a significant rate and soon, almost everyone will have them. They’ll also get smaller and smaller, rendering the box that holds them obsolete, and the rectangular screen in your living room won’t really be a television anymore, it’ll be a computer. And running into the back of that computer, the wire that delivers unto you everything you watch? It won’t be cable; it will be the Internet.

This probably sounds exciting if you’re a TV viewer, but if you’re in the business of producing these shows, it’s nothing short of terrifying. This is how vaudevillians must have felt the first time they saw a silent movie; sitting there, suddenly realizing they just became extinct: after all, who wants another soft-shoe number when you can see Harold Lloyd hanging off a clock 50 feet tall?

Change always provokes fear, but I’d once believed that the death of our beloved television would unify all those affected, talent and studios, creators and suits. We’re all afraid and we’d all be afraid together. Instead we find ourselves so deeply divided.

The Writers Guild of America (of which I am a proud member) has gone on strike. I have spent the past week on the picket line outside Walt Disney Studios, my employer, chanting slogans and trudging slowly across the crosswalk.

The motivation for this drastic action - and a strike is drastic, a fact I grow more aware of every passing day - is the guild’s desire for a portion of revenues derived from the Internet. This is nothing new: for more than 50 years, writers have been entitled to a small cut of the studios’ profits from the reuse of our shows or movies; whenever something we created ends up in syndication or is sold on DVD, we receive royalties. But the studios refuse to apply the same rules to the Internet.

My show, “Lost,” has been streamed hundreds of millions of times since it was made available on ABC’s Web site. The downloads require the viewer to first watch an advertisement, from which the network obviously generates some income. The writers of the episodes get nothing. We’re also a hit on iTunes (where shows are sold for $1.99 each). Again, we get nothing.

If this strike lasts longer than three months, an entire season of television will end this December. No dramas. No comedies. No “Daily Show.” The strike will also prevent any pilots from being shot in the spring, so even if the strike is settled by then, you won’t see any new shows until the following January. As in 2009. Both the guild and the studios we are negotiating with do agree on one thing: this situation would be brutal.

I will probably be dragged through the streets and burned in effigy if fans have to wait another year for “Lost” to come back. And who could blame them? Public sentiment may have swung toward the guild for now, but once the viewing audience has spent a month or so subsisting on “America’s Next Hottest Cop” and “Celebrity Eating Contest,” I have little doubt that the tide will turn against us. Which brings me to the second stage of grief: anger.

I am angry because I am accused of being greedy by studios that are being greedy. I am angry because my greed is fair and reasonable: if money is made off of my product through the Internet, then I am entitled to a small piece. The studios’ greed, on the other hand, is hidden behind cynical, disingenuous claims that they make nothing on the Web - that the streaming and downloading of our shows is purely “promotional.” Seriously?

Most of all, I’m angry that I’m not working. Not working means not getting paid. My weekly salary is considerably more than the small percentage of Internet gains we are hoping to make in this negotiation and if I’m on the picket line for just three months, I will never recoup those losses, no matter what deal gets made.

But I am willing to hold firm for considerably longer than three months because this is a fight for the livelihoods of a future generation of writers, whose work will never “air,” but instead be streamed, beamed or zapped onto a tiny chip.

Things have gotten ugly and the lines of communication have broken down completely between the guild and the studios. Perhaps it’s not too late, though, for both sides to rally around the one thing we still have in common: our mourning for the way things used to be. Instead of fighting each other, maybe we should be throwing a wake for our beloved TV.

Because the third stage of grief is bargaining.

And bargain we must, because when television finally passes on, there will still be entertainment; there will still be shows and films and videos, right there on a screen in your living room. And just as the owners of vaudeville theaters broke down and bought hand-crank movie cameras, the studios will figure out a way to make absurd amounts of money off of whatever is beaming onto whichever sort of screen.

And we’ll still be writing every word.

An Open Letter to Liberals

Eleuthera — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:03:55 -0700

By Robin of Berkeley
Hello, my name is Robin of Berkeley and I write for American Thinker. I was left but last year turned right, and, if you'd like to know more, you can read Everything You've Ever Wanted to Know About Robin (But Were Afraid to Ask) by clicking on my byline (at American Thinker.)

Thank you for taking the time to read this letter which I've been meaning to pen for a while. I just had a provocative conversation with my editor extraordinaire at AT which has prompted this piece.

He informed me that I'm getting more attention from liberals, though not the venerating kind. Luckily, he spares me the real ugly missives (the main reason, by the way, that I don't post my email address; opening e mails that read, "Hi, I'm looking forward to your tribe being exterminated," would not make my day. I can barely stand the ones that say, "Hello, my name is Niger, and you have just inherited big money from Ethiopia.")

But in this strange new world, more hate mail is a compliment. It means I'm generating more readership; therefore my Homeland Security risk level has gone up from green to orange. I'm no longer just an aging, working stiff in Berkeley, but I'm considered a planetary threat on the level of carbon dioxide.

Most of the nastygrams are in the form of trolls. The concept of "trolling" is news to me, as is everything these days. I have to admit that the idea of people cyberspying and then posting insults is a bit creepy.

But more than this: growing up I loved trolls. Adored them. (For you young un's, trolls were these ugly beige dolls that resembled little cavemen.) I had several, with flaming green and blue and yellow hair, and I carried one everywhere. So the idea of my precious childhood dolls invading my work place is a tad unsettling.

Maybe I should just be grateful because I always wanted to be popular growing up, to be in with the in crowd. But back then, the pay off was more dates not more hate.

So I'm writing to ask a burning question: Why are liberals still so angry? Given that you own almost everything, how come you're not just chilling on the couch, gaming and partying, rather than posting and trolling?

Now, I shouldn't even ask the question given that only last year, I was you. I blew a gasket every time I heard the words "Bush" or "Cheney." But the difference is that my party had lost. Defeated underdogs tend to be all pissy and indignant. How could any of us survive bosses without being able to sit around at lunch and vent about how stupid they all are?

But it's different when the winners are on the attack. If the top dogs go ballistic, all hell can break loose. When the boss spies on you, calls you a c___t, wishes you were dead, and curtails your free speech, well it's time to hightail it out of there.

Some people say this is politics as usual, but I don't think so. I've never witnessed this level of anger from the party in charge. When Clinton was elected, for instance, I was happy as a clam. I really believed in the dude. So I could snooze in the back of the car, not paying much attention to Washington, confident that my beloved (at the time) Democratic Party was in the driver's seat.

My gut tells me that three factors are at work: One is power; that by remaining hypervigilant, like hawk eyed sentries, your movement won't lose a moment of traction.

My second theory is more troubling: that the Left is motivated by revenge, so pissed off about George Bush that many liberals are still foaming at the mouth.

On one level, I get it. Anger releases pent up frustration, and it's an adrenaline rush.

But pretty little Carrie Prejean was trotting off to high school geometry class while Bush was waging war. Sarah Palin was cleaning up Alaska -- which thrilled the liberals at the time -- while Cheney was crafting policy.

That's the problem with revenge; it rarely hurts the true miscreant. Bush, of course, is whacking weeds happily in Crawford, and will rake in the bucks on his memoirs. As the old adage warns "an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind," because revenge only create more destruction and new wreckage.

But the deeper reason for all the animosity is, I think, the indelible and searing power of trauma. We are a traumatized nation. World War II offered some redemption to a country reeling from slavery, the Civil War, WW I, the Great Depression. It produced the "Greatest Generation'" and the pride and honor of defeating fascism.

But Vietnam devastated families all over the country, including my own. I don't know if you're old enough to remember, but people sat transfixed in front of their TV, waiting to see which numbers would be picked. When my brother's number was called, I thought my parents would collapse. When he went off to the front lines of Vietnam, I wasn't sure how we'd all survive.

He did and we did, but he almost died, and our family was never the same. People spit on him when he returned, and his personality went from happy go lucky to bitter.

Many Baby Boomers are still traumatized by the specter of Vietnam and loathe this country and the "older generation" who sent them there. But, though understandable, bitterness makes old wounds fester. Rather than grieve, learn, and move on, we remain mired in the past. And our nation loses something vital: a new older generation who models forgiveness, unity, and national pride.

And then there are more recent traumas: The Gore/Bush election debacle that fostered deep resentments; 9/11, of course, which shattered our illusions of safety and invincibility; and the Iraq War with body bags and national division. Now we have a broken economy that threatens our status as a world power.

Trauma, unacknowledged and unexpressed, ravages not only people, but whole nations, because trauma can harden into aggression. And so the Palestinians kill Israelis, and the Israelis kill Palestinians, and it goes on and on forever, and it will not cease, not with new leaders or new money.

It will never end until we get so sick and tired of it that we scream "Enough," not just at each other but at ourselves; and we stop the war within. We heed Martin Luther King Jr.'s counsel, "You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him."

And trauma will not stop until we see that there is a deeper, more pernicious reason why we keep fighting each other: that government, any government, whether left or right, likes it that way. The politicos want us battling, and afraid, and inattentive. And at the same time that they're dividing and conquering us, they're raiding the Treasury for themselves and friends like Goldman Sachs.

So we can continue with business as usual, as foot soldiers and serfs for the elite, battling each other for scraps like lab rats in a cage. Or we can declare a truce like a group of British and German soldiers did during W.W. I.

Sick to death of warfare, they announced an armistice for Christmas. Instead of blowing each other's brains out, they drank together and sang Christmas carols; they played football; they exchanged small gifts like chocolate and whisky, and even shared their addresses. They held services where they mourned their dead together and read from the Bible.

For a brief time they became who they really were -- young boys, barely out of their teens, more brothers to each other than the old men who sent them there.

I've discovered as a therapist that human beings are all basically the same. We try to be happy, to avoid suffering, and to carve out a little place for ourselves in this bittersweet world. We crave love and respect and to feel that we matter.

And deep inside of us, in those places we keep hidden, we know the Truth: that our lives are short and fragile, and they hang by a single tattered thread. And in the end, everyone we love and everyone we despise will be gone, including ourselves; and all our joy, and hurt, and hate will pass away with us, for our lives are as fleeting as a brief summer storm.

So I write to you, one struggling, flawed mortal to another. I write as someone who is bone weary of fighting, and afraid of where all this anger will lead. And I am tired of my government manipulating me into hating one group this year, and another the next. And I offer this prospect to you, as articulated by the ancient poet Rumi in the 1200's:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
There is a field.
I'll meet you there.

What do you say? Is there really any other alternative?

When dissent was patriotic - Did Speaker Pelosi say opposing the Health Care Bill is un-American?

Grandpa — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 14:08:15 -0700

Videos showing clips of Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi saying it's patriotic to dissent:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJxmpTMGhU0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5GuzruICwQ&feature=fvw

USA Today Op-Ed Co-written by Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hyer

'Un-American' attacks can't derail health care debate

By Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer

Americans have been waiting for nearly a century for quality, affordable health care.

Health coverage for all was on the national agenda as early as 1912, thanks to Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose presidential run. Months after World War II came to an end in 1945, President Harry Truman called on Congress to guarantee all Americans the "right to adequate medical care and protection from the economic fears of sickness." From President Lyndon Johnson to President Bill Clinton, to President Obama's winning campaign on the promise of reform, there hasn't been a more debated domestic issue than the promise of affordable health care for all.

(Steny Hoyer)

(Nancy Pelosi/USA TODAY)

We believe it is healthy for such a historic effort to be subject to so much scrutiny and debate. The failure of past attempts is a reminder that health insurance reform is a defining moment in our nation's history - it is well worth the time it takes to get it right. We are confident that we will get this right.

Already, three House committees have passed this critical legislation and over August, the two of us will work closely with those three committees to produce one strong piece of legislation that the House will approve in September.

In the meantime, as members of Congress spend time at home during August, they are talking with their constituents about reform. The dialogue between elected representatives and constituents is at the heart of our democracy and plays an integral role in assuring that the legislation we write reflects the genuine needs and concerns of the people we represent.

However, it is now evident that an ugly campaign is underway not merely to misrepresent the health insurance reform legislation, but to disrupt public meetings and prevent members of Congress and constituents from conducting a civil dialogue. These tactics have included hanging in effigy one Democratic member of Congress in Maryland and protesters holding a sign displaying a tombstone with the name of another congressman in Texas, where protesters also shouted "Just say no!" drowning out those who wanted to hold a substantive discussion.

Let the facts be heard

These disruptions are occurring because opponents are afraid not just of differing views - but of the facts themselves. Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American. Drowning out the facts is how we failed at this task for decades.

Health care is complex. It touches every American life. It drives our economy. People must be allowed to learn the facts.

The first fact is that health insurance reform will mean more patient choice. It will allow every American who likes his or her current plan to keep it. And it will free doctors and patients to make the health decisions that make the most sense, not the most profits for insurance companies.

Reform will mean stability and peace of mind for the middle class. Never again will medical bills drive Americans into bankruptcy; never again will Americans be in danger of losing coverage if they lose their jobs or if they become sick; never again will insurance companies be allowed to deny patients coverage because of pre-existing conditions.

Lower costs, better care

Reform will mean affordable coverage for all Americans. Our plan's cost-lowering measures include a public health insurance option to bring competitive pressure to bear on rapidly consolidating private insurers, research on health outcomes to better inform the decisions of patients and doctors, and electronic medical records to help doctors save money by working together. For seniors, the plan closes the notorious Medicare Part D "doughnut hole" that denies drug coverage to those with between $2,700 and $6,100 per year in prescriptions.

Reform will also mean higher-quality care by promoting preventive care so health problems can be addressed before they become crises. This, too, will save money. We'll be a much healthier country if all patients can receive regular checkups and tests, such as mammograms and diabetes exams, without paying a dime out-of-pocket.

This month, despite the disruptions, members of Congress will listen to their constituents back home and explain reform legislation. We are confident that our principles of affordable, quality health care will stand up to any and all critics.

Now - with Americans strongly supporting health insurance reform, with Congress reaching consensus on a plan, and with a president who ran and won on this specific promise of change - America is closer than ever to this century-deferred goal.

This fall, at long last, we must reach it.

Source

Irrational Thinking

Monique Marie — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:08:03 -0700

We tend not to perform at our optimum level when we are not feeling well. The truth of that statement is self-evident when applied to mountain climbing. It might not be so evident when applied to thinking. Sickness makes us vulnerable. When we perceive ourselves to be weak, not in control, and threatened, our vulnerability can distort our thinking. In turn, distorted thinking can increase our sense of vulnerability.

Sandra is a successful real estate agent. Her income has been over $100,000 five years in succession. She is known by her colleagues as very bright, imaginative, “on the ball.” Sandra was diagnosed with lupus five years previously. Her self-description during an interview with Dr. Donogue and Dr. Siegel follows:

“I come from a fairly big family. I have two sisters and two brothers. They all have been mildly successful in their careers but I’m the only one who has really succeeded-thought I’ve never believed that I could maintain the success. I am always uptight. A couple of years ago, I found I had lupus. Before that I had begun to feel more relaxed; I was even beginning to believe that I could achieve without worrying. But with lupus, I am so often tired. Most of the time I don’t have energy to get my work done very effectively. Lupus has made me more “uptight” than I ever was. Last week I showed a house to a couple. They were very excited about the house and said they were so grateful that I had understood exactly what they needed. I was embarrassed that they were so grateful. After all, isn’t a real estate agent supposed to tune in to what the client needs? The next day they called with a bid for the house, however, I had had a very bad night so when they called I was pretty distracted and I didn’t take the figure in accurately. This is a very bad habit I have. A very bad habit. When I’m tired, I tend to let things slide rather than concentrate more. I don’t develop habits like writing things down instead of committing them to memory. In this case my bad habit could cause disastrous results. I called this couple’s bid in at a figure of about $5,000.00 lower than they said. Can you believe I could make a mistake like that? I’m afraid to go into the office or to call these people. They’ll be furious with me. I’m sure I’ll lose the sale and these people will lose the house. I have been debating for some time whether I should give up being a real estate agent entirely. I just don’t feel well most of the time and I’m so scared that I will make mistakes more frequently. It’s a sad thought for me because I’m not sure what else I could do. I have so called people skills-but so what. You don’t get a degree for being able to talk easily with people. You have to be able to produce, to make money."

Sandra manifests faulty thought processes that are characteristic of the vulnerable person’s thinking. She underestimates her strengths. Evidence of self-deprecating thinking can be seen in her words. She demeans herself and downplays her natural gifts for understanding her client’s needs. As much as she ignores her strengths, Sandra focuses on her weaknesses-a thought process called selective abstraction, another cognitive distortion.

Two other self-defeating cognitive distortions are magnification, exaggerating each mistake, and catastrophizing, concluding total disaster. Sandra’s account demonstrates both behaviors.

Faulty Assumptions
People suffering from ICI often hold as truths what are in actuality dangerous assumptions. These assumptions are often false and as such victimize the ICI patient. Fears of being unloved, unsuccessful, and out of control give rise to these faulty assumptions. The assumptions provoke irrational thinking in specific situations.
Faulty Love Assumptions:
1. If I am not healthy, I am not really loveable.
2. I am nothing unless I am loved.
3. I am not attractive if I am sick.
4. I am of no value if I can not do things for you.
Examples of Irrational thinking:
1. A woman has a partial hysterectomy to remove a diseased ovary caused by endometriosis. The surgery fails to relieve symptoms of severe pain. “How can my husband lobe me in this condition?”
2. A man becomes increasingly impotent from MS and is infrequently able to have intercourse. “No woman wants a man who can’t make love.”
3. A woman with lupus finds being in the sun dangerous. She refuses to participate in any outdoor activity. “People can’t possible want to be with me if I can only do things indoors. I feel like a scourge in my family.”
4. A woman suffering from irratble bowel syndrome is invited to a summer cookout. “I can’t go and wear something summery. I feel totally ugly.”

Faulty Success or Competence Assumptions
1. I’m worthless if I’m not successful. I can’t be successful and sick.
2. I can’t be a good mother if I can’t always be available for my children.
3. I’m no use as a father if I can’t provide for my family.
4. You can’t be a good parent if you’ve harmed your child.
Examples of Irrational Thinking:
1. A woman with chronic fatigue immune dysfunction syndrome has reluctantly rearranged her schedule and changed jobs to live with her chronic fatigue. “I fee; worthless. They call this job low stress-AKA deadend.”
2. A woman with MS finds herself depressed and contemplating divorce. Chronic fatigue keeps her from being her husband’s companion in sports and other activities. “How can I be a wife if I can’t do anything he want me to?”
3. A man who has Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease recently learned that his daughter probably has the disease. He rages at his wife, “I knew I should never be a father.”

Faulty Control Assumptions
1. I can’t tolerate not being in control.
2. I have to be perfect to be in control.
3. I can’t bear this pain. I couldn’t live the rest of my life with this pain.
4. I’d die if I were incontinent-I just couldn’t handle the humiliation.
Examples of Irrational Thinking:
1. A man who has been told that he probably has MS will not talk about the disease to his family. “If I told my sister how scared I am, I would fall apart.”
2. A woman with Crohn’s disease breaks down and sobs uncontrollably when she realizes that she has made an error in a computer program. “I have no room for mistakes, I’ll get fired.”
3. A woman with endometriosis who has grown up being told by her mother that men do not want to discuss menstruation and pain keeps her home so clean as to be sterile and is flawlessly organized. “The only way I can live with myself is to be neat.”

We have seen that being sick and vulnerable can affect the way we think. Feelings themselves affect our thinking. Feeling very depressed certainly affects the way that we think about everything-an upcoming birthday, Christmas, the world situation. Feeling guilty affects our thoughts about events, as does feeling happy. One morning we might think that we can accomplish anything; another morning we might want to avoid the day itself. Feeling energetic, we think positively, feeling lonely and sad triggers very different thoughts.

It is important that we know our feelings and their effect on the way we think. It is especially important to realize that certain feelings can lead us to faulty thinking. Jack, for example, tends to feel guilt, and this guilt overwhelms his thinking:

“I think the worst part of being sick is the guilt I feel. I was married three months when I had my first symptom of MS. They were pretty mild. We went on a delayed honeymoon to Bermuda and it was a particularly hot summer. My speech was slurry and my right leg started to drag. It scared the hell out of my wife. Since that time I haven’t had any major problems but I have had a lot of vague odd symptoms, which has created this subtle gloom over our lives all the time. I think I have really let my wife down. She had everything to look forward to and then this came in and took that away from her. Life seems grim.”

Jack’s guilt at having MS distorts his thinking. He has not only assumed responsibility for his wife’s happiness but has also concluded that she is without joy and without hope due to his illness. Unless he realizes that he is assuming far more than might be valid, he will begin to act out his feelings by withdrawing. Such behavior could isolate him from his wife and indeed trigger in her the feelings that he has already ascribed to her.

Confronting Feelings and Irrational Thoughts

When you contemplate situations in your life that provoke feelings of fear, guilt, anxiety, sadness, anger, and shame, try to state the thoughts that go through your mind in these situations. Now ask yourself, “What is the evidence to support such thinking?” For example, the man growing impotent with MS is asked for evidence to support his thought, “No woman wants a man who can’t make love.” The woman with lupus who must avoid the sun is asked for evidence to support her conclusion that “People can’t possibly want to be with me if I can only do things indoors.” Usually no present evidence can be given and the client is led to see the irrational, self-defeating nature of the thought. Even if some evidence is proffered, other explanations are explored.

Source of Irrational Thinking

Challenge tour irrational thinking not only by asking yourself to justify your thinking but also asking where these thoughts come from. It is intellectually satisfying and eventually liberating to identify the source of thinking. This exploration leads into the past, into childhood, into present relationships. Assumptions that seemed like absolute truths can be unmasked and seen as stemming from mother or father-and for them the “truth” was often not reflective of happiness or success. The assumption that one must be “totally competent to be worthwhile” might have governed a person’s father, but it probably didn’t make him competent and it surely didn’t foster in him feelings of self worth/ The notion that we are lovable to the degree that we are successful is a sad and untrue message propagated in sad, humorless families. Yet it is in our families and in early, repetitive experiences that we develop the subconscious mental structures with which we define ourselves and our basic attitudes.

These basic mind sets toward the world are ones of trust or distrust, hostility or friendliness, enthusiasm or depression. From these subconscious schema come automatic thoughts.

Source: Monique Marie
Dr. Paul Donoghue
Dr. Mary Siegel

Quote by Jean Cocteau

Beachwalker — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 03:21:26 -0800

"Art produces ugly things which frequently become
more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand,
produces beautiful things which always become ugly with
time."

Jean Cocteau - French poet, novelist, dramatist,
designer, boxing manager, playwright and filmmaker.

Goodbye skinny metrosexuals, the beefcake is back

Cassandra57 — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 21:22:26 -0700

* PUBLIC POST *

The article is a bit long and some of the references don't translate, but I'm sure you ladies get the point.
Of course, I am sharing this for the sociological significance and the deep discussion I'm sure will result.
There are a couple more pictures at the link, but I included the best ones here.

=================================================================================

Metrosexual twigmen who admire your shoes are all very well in good times, but when the going gets tough, what you actually want is a REAL man, says Tanya Gold.

As I stick my head out of my window, I smell a change in the evening air. Everywhere I look big, dark, hairy, slightly fat men are staring at me - from advertising billboards, cinema screens and the pages of glossy magazines.

They growl, they glower, they exude menace and demonic sex appeal. I wonder, could it be - could it really be - that the beefcake is back?

Every credit crunch cloud has a silver lining. We are already saying goodbye to haute cuisine, ugly, overpriced handbags and £60 knickers. Why did we ever pay so much for a bit of ribbon and a label? What was wrong with us? Were we mad?

We are kissing hello to supermarket own brands, holidays in Cornwall, making do and mending, and knitting. Even Scrabble is making a comeback.

And, best of all things - better than Christmas every day, better than a pay rise, better than me - men who look as if they might actually be men are back.

Goodbye metrosexual twigman with your sad little manbag - you never did it for me - and hello beefcake beast. Where have you been?

It should come as no surprise. Economic depressions have always walked hand in hand with the worship of raw machismo. That is just the way it goes.

Ask Hollywood, if you don't believe me.

Who was the No. 1 box office star of the troubled Thirties? Fred Astaire with his tiny feet and silly hats?

Not a chance. It was dark, dangerous Clark Gable (he of 'Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn') with rugged Spencer Tracy - a man who looked as if he'd kill anyone who wouldn't serve him a drink - right behind him.

The next big recession was the Seventies, when Hollywood gave us Robert De Niro, Gene Hackman and Jack Nicholson, none of whom you'd want to throw a punch at. The era also produced Burt Reynolds. He was so masculine he was just testosterone with a face stuck on.

And this time it's no different. Leonardo DiCaprio and Ed Norton - chinless drips the both of them - are ebbing away in the popular consciousness.

They have been replaced by Hugh Jackman, the massive Australian with the massive chest, and Clive Owen, the British Sin City star with the nasty growl.

We also have Jon Hamm, the gorgeous one from TV show Mad Men, and even Sylvester Stallone as Rambo has seemingly risen from the dead to make another movie.

And this time he has bigger arms than ever. If Sylvester Stallone is part of the zeitgeist, then the beefcake must be back. In the fickle fashion industry, things are changing, too. In the affluent Nineties, the men on the billboards simply shrank.

They were tiny, childlike men with no body hair and spindly legs. They had concave faces, hollow cheekbones, jutting hips and the open, bewildered expressions of children.

They were the size zero men, men by genitals alone, and to me they were as sexy as toast. They looked ill. They looked dead.

By 2005 you could put the average male model in a matchbox and still have room for all his friends. The king of the twigmen, Russian model Stas Svetlichnyy, was 6ft and weighed 10st. Ten stone? That is disgusting.

Yet, back then, he was so popular that even fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld decided to lose a third of his body weight to get the 'Stas' size zero look.

In the Nineties we had Jarvis Cocker of Pulp. Now he just looks like a girl - and not a pretty girl either.

In fact, he looks like a girl on the run from an eating disorder unit. But how we drooled and screamed and tried to rip his manbag off his scrawny frame.

We also had to put up with James Blunt as the popular icon of manhood in the early Noughties. I met him a few years ago at a party and I towered over him. He only came up to my knee.

And what about Michael Jackson? First, he decided he wanted a white face, then a woman's face and, finally, no face at all. And don't even get me started on David Beckham. A man in a skirt? What went wrong?

But that is all over. Fashion has spun, mutated and spat out beefcake. Yes, he is back. Back! I scream it with joy from the rooftops - back! Male icons will no longer weigh less than me.

In fashion, twigman has gone, to be replaced by David Gandy, the male model of now. I find it hard to pay attention to male models - I always forget a pretty face - but even I can see that Gandy, the Dolce & Gabbana model from Essex with the tiny white pants, looks like a Mexican bandit on steroids.

He looks as if he'd cut your throat for 10p and a packet of crisps and then give the entire female readership of the Daily Mail a fireman's lift into work.

I have always fancied men like him. Even when I was a tweenager, I yearned not for Rick Astley, but for Orson Welles as Mr Rochester in the Forties version of Jane Eyre.

Yes, he was fat - he apparently had to take a steam bath every night and wear a corset to squeeze him- self into his costume - but he stomped around Thornfield like a dog with toothache, his cloak flapping in the wind.

I can't imagine Jarvis Cocker doing anything in the wind, except falling over and getting his mummy to bandage his head. But why has the beefcake returned? Why has Bruce Banner become Hulk again? What has brought him back?

It's simple. It's so simple even David Gandy could understand it. The 'rise of the drip' was clearly an expression of our collective affluence.

In the last boom, we had computers, call centres and automation - and money, so much money, to do everything for us.

We lived in a highly sophisticated, fantastical, touch-screen culture where beefcake man was surplus to requirements. (OK, you might occasionally see one in a garage, stuck under a car, wielding a spanner, but it was rare.)

Everyone seemed to want to be gay and middle class, even the men who were straight and working class. You couldn't squeeze into a bar without being slapped with an over-styled Paul Smith suit and a noxious cloud of girl cologne.

In this sexless world of money and style, beefcake was nowhere. Because you don't need a beefcake if you live in a penthouse with blinds that go up and down at the touch of a button.

Beefcake looks weird in such a setting. Beefcake looks sad. Beefcake has nothing to do. He doesn't belong and he knows it.

Better to have a girl-man who looks like Keira Knightley and can discuss all your consumerist junk with you.

'Look,' says the perfect Nineties man. 'Shoes!' Ugh. It was not a good time for dating.

But things have changed. Our economy is splintering, our seas are rising and house prices are falling. Look away from the page and look back. Yes, your house just lost another £50 in value. We are afraid, and we should be. So what do we do?

We should choose beefcake. Fashion has decreed it. In times of hardship and uncertainty, what sane woman wants to cuddle up to a man she knows she could beat in a fight?

Who needs a sensitive accountant when all the money is going? Who needs a man to talk shoes when all the shoes have gone?

It is better to have a man who can mend things for you. And butcher sheep. And build houses and grow vegetables and make things out of bits of wood.

Won't you feel safer? Won't you feel better, knowing that there is a serious lump of muscle between you and the cold, cruel world outside?

Then there is sex. Shopping may be dead, but sex is one of the few commodities that is booming. All the supermarkets are reporting increased condom sales. Because sex is a cheap form of entertainment and it is also comforting.

I believe the boom and all the aspirational rubbish that went with it was essentially about denying who we were. Look, I have a handbag/ dress/car/tiara fit for a princess! Except I wasn't a princess, I was a journalist. And now I am a journalist in a lot of debt.

And now we can't afford to pretend to be other people, we can have better relationships. A real person with another real person? Who could believe it?

Hardship gives great love, if you let it.

Do you remember the Blitz? Everyone had great sex in the Blitz, even my Auntie Marie, who hated men.

And who do you have sex with? Big, brawny, hairy men, proper men, that's who.

When did we start thinking masculinity was threatening? Probably when Mummy said we had to marry a lawyer/accountant/doctor to buy us all the rubbish we now can't afford, and we don't need anyway

Now a sensible Mummy will say: 'Marry a man who is nifty with a drill, darling. A man who can dig a well. Because in the dark times coming, you won't need someone to do your VAT returns. There probably won't be any VAT.'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1169498/Goodbye-skinny-metrose...

The Ugly Truth About Gerard Butler

smryna — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 11:15:59 -0800

Gerard Butler and Katherine Heigl keep close in this new movie still from their upcoming rom-com The Ugly Truth, out April 3.

Plot details: A romantically challenged morning-show producer (Heigl) is reluctantly embroiled in a series of outrageous tests by her male chauvinist correspondent (Butler) to prove his theories on relationships and allow her to find love. His clever ploys, however lead to an unexpected result.

”They embark on this ridiculous pairing of two people who are from polar opposite sides of the issue,” Heigl tells EW. ”The whole men are from Mars, women are from Venus thing… [In comparison to my last romantic comedy,] it’s not so soft, and everything isn’t so perfect. This movie was just a little more edgy…enough to make it at least more interesting to the guys who take their girlfriends.”

The Ugly Truth is directed by Robert Luketic (Legally Blonde). The trailer is available at the official movie site at TheUglyTruth-Movie.com.