Nobody's Business

Red States: "Porn Is So Dirty, We Can't Get Enough Of It"

The New Scientist takes a closer look at pornography consumption by those who loudly profess to be shocked, shocked by dirty pictures:

[S]tates that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds. "Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by," [Benjamin] Edelman [of Harvard Business School] says. ...

Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year's presidential election.

And where do the nation's biggest consumers of porn live?

Where else? Utah, which probably thinks of itself as the most exquisitely pure and moral place in God's Own Country.

All of this is of course wholly consistent with the Larry Craigs and Ted Haggards of this world going cruisin' for cock, and with the fact that the strictest Muslim nations lead the global pack in google searches for the word "sex."

As Andrew Sullivan wrote a few years ago:

Islamism, like Christianism, doesn't conquer sex; it just fetishizes it and forces it underground.

Happily, devout Christians are somewhat successful in suppressing their boners on Sundays:

Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays — a 1% increase in a postal code's religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in [porn] subscriptions that day.

Here's something to help them cope on the Lord's day:

Government Shuts Down DEA and ONDCP

OK, not quite. But this is magnificent.

Supporters of programs to provide legal marijuana to patients with painful medical conditions are celebrating Attorney General Eric Holder's statement this week that the Drug Enforcement Administration would end its raids on state-approved marijuana dispensaries. ...

"What the president said during the campaign ... will be consistent with what we will be doing here in law enforcement," [Attorney General Eric Holder] said. "What (Obama) said during the campaign ... is now American policy."

Obama indicated during the presidential campaign that he supported the controlled use of marijuana for medical purposes, saying he saw no difference between medical marijuana and other pain-control drugs.

"My attitude is if the science and the doctors suggest that the best palliative care and the way to relieve pain and suffering is medical marijuana, then that's something I'm open to," Obama said in November 2007 at a campaign stop in Audubon, Iowa. "There's no difference between that and morphine when it comes to just giving people relief from pain."

The lying sacks of shit at the ONDCP will be scrambling to redefine their mission, and they're hardly off to an auspicious start:

The Web site of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy had yet to catch up to the policy shift as of Friday afternoon, and was still prominently featuring a "Medical Marijuana Reality Check" declaring that "marijuana is not considered modern medicine” and arguing that “no animal or human data support the safety or efficacy of smoked marijuana for general medical use."

The federal drug warriors' decades-long campaign of cruelty and mendacity has been reined in, from the top, for the first time ever. No matter what else you may think of Obama and his campaign pledges, this is inspiring, even moving — a big point of light, a North Star, in these inky-black times.

I imagine John P. Walters and Barry McCaffrey are drowning their unhappiness in boilermakers right about now. Don't you wish you could have been a fly on the wall when they received the news?

A Word of Welcome to the New York DWI Foundation

There's a new addition to the Nobody's Business blog roll, and an odd duck it is: the New York DWI Foundation. They came to me looking for a reciprocal link. I didn't think they'd go for it after they realized that this blog is not exactly a fan of alcohol nannies, but they've been true to their word and swiftly added a mention of this blog to their website with the requested text:

Follow this link to learn how the alcohol neo-prohibitionists are lying to you.

The link leads to this post of mine.

I have to say, I'm impressed. I may have more in common with the DWI Foundation than I realized. Certainly — and this bears repeating — I have no issue whatsoever with groups that want to reduce drunk-driving fatalities. On the contrary. I just think they ought to refrain from the usual morbid sleight of hand — make that outright lies — used by Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and associated groups, and seriously rethink the draconian anti-liberty policies they continue to push.

The Post-Liberty Society

Guess the country:

People who lose their jobs could be denied unemployment benefit if they refuse to tell the government how much they drink. New powers will allow for individuals who apply for jobseeker's allowance to be forced to take compulsory alcohol tests if officials do not believe what they say about their drinking habits. Those who refuse to cooperate could be deprived of the benefit for six months.

What will happen to applicants who had a beer or a glass of wine with lunch? Will they be treated any differently from hardcore winos who are too far gone to be suitably employed?

Also, in the same post-liberty society:

Police are telling pubs, clubs, restaurants and off-licences they will not support their licensing applications unless they agree to train the intrusive cameras on their customers. Owners also have to promise to hand over to the police any CCTV footage requested.

Won't Someone Please Think of Convict the Children!

The following two articles appear on the same page of my local newspaper. Read them, try to reconcile them, and see if your head asplodes:

 

Alcohol and Minors: The Dangers of Not Toeing the Line

Last June, the forty-something assistant baseball coach of Deering High in Portland Maine, Frank Watson, went out celebrating with friends. His team had just won its seventh state championship in 10 years.

He arrived home to the remnants of a party, at which several members of the team and their friends were drinking beer that some of them had purchased. Watson's wife had gone to bed.

Watson will spend 10 days in the Cumberland County Jail, beginning today...

...for not shutting down the party. His wife Kimberly was also convicted to a jail term, though she will most likely be permitted to do 60-70 hours of community service instead. The charges against them were 'furnishing liquor to minors,' and 'furnishing a place for minors to consume liquor,' respectively. (A niggle: the charges are a bit of a misnomer, as there appears to have been no liquor involved, only beer.)

I tried in vain to find the ages of the minors involved, but it's a pretty good guess that the underage drinking was done by adolescents who were in the 17-to-19, um, ballpark. Odd that none of the local media I've seen think of this as relevant. In terms of moral (if not, alas, legal) culpability, it's surely one thing to provide a bottle of bourbon to a 13-year-old, and another to give a couple of cans of Budweiser to an 18-year-old.

It certainly matters not to District Attorney Stephanie Anderson. "There is no safe or responsible way for adolescents to consume alcohol," Anderson claims.

That's news to millions of older teenagers and their parents in Europe, where neither binge drinking nor teen drunk driving are anywhere near as big of a problem as in the United States. Younger kids over there are often allowed a few sips of wine at the dinner table, and graduate to being allowed to drink legally when they're 16 to 18 years old, depending on the country.

Crazy foreigners.

Also absent in all the reporting I've seen on the Watson case is any mention of actual harm done.

Hell, I'll even lower that standard; I'd be satisfied that there was some justice to the Maine verdicts if the police had nabbed one or more of the teenagers drunk at the wheel following the party at coach Watson's house.

No dice? Then how about lowering the standard further still, and saying that any of the underage drinkers' intent to drive while intoxicated would be sufficient justification to jail the Watsons?

From all I've read, the prosecution couldn't even meet that low threshold. Whether the revelers planned to sleep over, or had in fact picked a completely sober designated driver to eventually get them home (thereby endangering no one), never factored into the proceeedings.

The law is the law, and even when the law is an ass, we have no viable option but to prostrate ourselves before the magistrate thusly:

"I'm taking ownership of this. I made a mistake, there's no doubt about that. I wish that I could take it all back."

Maybe Frank Watson means that from the bottom of his heart. Or maybe the statement was part of a plea bargain. Or perhaps he was belatedly begging for the court's mercy.

Given that he originally saw no terrible harm in letting the party continue, the second and third scenarios are more likely than the first. Which, to my mind, only exacerbates the wrongness of these kinds of convictions: Those who do not openly profess to believe in the relatively new orthodoxy that anyone under 21 should be forbidden from drinking alcohol, will likely receive harsher punishments than those who refuse to pay lip service to that article of faith.

It's a form of coerced speech that ought to grate on the conscience of every American who prizes liberty.

Some semblance of sanity here.

Much Ado

I'm as allergic as the next guy to Barack Obama being portrayed as our Father, or our Lord and Savior. OK, not quite as allergic as this guy — our old friend Lew Rockwell.

Rockwell's memory must not be that great in order for him to cry foul over this image (right) of America's Baby-Daddy, without at least referring, however cursorily, to some of these:

Whatsthepoint Communications

Following a serious snowstorm, both our land lines are down, though we have power and Internet service. Our phone service is provided by Fairpoint Communications. I decided to e-mail or web-mail them a service request. Fairpoint's contact page is here. Note that in order to report a problem with your phone, however, you have to call them.

Which is more or less the same as your car breaking down, and the AAA operator telling you that if you just drive the vehicle right on over, they'll take care of it for you.

What the Undeserving (Apparently) Deserve

She's right:

Real estate broker Karen Coulters of Weare [NH] said further loosening of current rules to allow refinancing for mortgages that exceed 105 percent of property values would be "dangerous." She said "a lot of people who are in a good position" could say, "Why don't I just default on mine because if people are getting a break, then why am I making my payments on time?"

I've considered the exact same thing. If my wife and I, deliberately or not, stop making our mortgage payments, the federal government — first under Bush, now under Obama — will only be only too glad to give us a bag of money, or at least to give us opportunities not available to people who, through hard work, managing risk, and scrimping, pay off their mortgages like clockwork.

The San Francisco Chronicle puts it seemingly perfectly in a headline:

Housing plan must help the undeserving

except that the paper means it literally: Though spend-happy home buyers with poor financial skills and an appetite for big risk are wholly to blame for whatever predicament they find themselves in, it's somehow still incumbent on the rest of the country to help them out.

The missus and I, we won't default out of spite. We'll pay the bank. Every month. Always have, always will. But I understand where this guy is coming from [video found at Rolling Doughnut]:

America's Baby-Daddy

Today's New York Times Magazine celebrates the idea of Barack Obama as a father — not just a father to Malia and Sasha, but a daddy to the nation.

What is good governing if not good parenting?

the paper asks. For real.