Nobody's Business

Illegal Porn That Is Neither

When zero-tolerance zealots attack:

An Illinois National Guard soldier in Afghanistan has been charged by the U.S. Army with possessing child pornography over pictures of a young relative his mother says she sent him.

Terri Miller of Galesburg says she sent her son, Specialist Billy Miller, pictures of the little girl to help him get over his homesickness. The pictures show the child in a swimsuit playing in a wading pool and sitting on a truck. In one, the girl is wearing a swim suit and part of her buttocks are exposed.

What, like this Coppertone illustration? (Can you even imagine the tut-tutting and indignation this 1950s ad would provoke if it made its debut today? And for what?)

In the Miller case, it appears that

...the child is a relative Billy treated as his own child when the girl was diagnosed with cancer as her father was going through boot camp. The family notes that the same pictures are on family computers and on Facebook pages, and no one else has been investigated.

Interesting. If justice is blind and impartial, why isn't Billy's mother in jail? She is, after all, the self-confessed provider of the alleged smut.

What I hate about writing posts like these is that you're just about forced to make a disclaimer along these lines: Well, we have no access to the images, and they're not going to made public. Therefore, the photos could be just as objectionable as the military prosecutors believe. Yes, it could be that Specialist Billy Miller specializes in collecting lascivious pictures of undressed kindergartners.

But somehow, I don't think so.

I suspect these are the usual innocuous images that nonetheless get adults in hot water over and over and over. It's what happens whenever some "morally superior" asshole inadvertently lays bare the dark recesses of his own mind upon seeing others' leisure-time family photos and, in a panicky effort to suppress his own boner, loudly decries sexual overtones where there are none.

Even if Billy Miller is acquitted, suspicions will swirl, perhaps even in his own mind. The poison injected into his relationship with the little girl is nasty and ineradicable. In seeking to protect her innocence, investigators and prosecutors are more likely to destroy it, because the success of their actions depends in some measure on whether they can make a prepubescent cancer survivor believe that her loving Uncle Billy, deep down, is a vile, nauseating would-be abuser.

There's something vile here alright, and it isn't that the offending photos were posted on Facebook without anyone raising a stink.

Another Great Milestone in the War on Plants

Don't know about you, but thanks to brave North Carolina cops and their three-year investigation, I'm already feeling much safer from the intolerable evil that is the ginseng plant.

Salt Shake City

More meddling and food moralism from the tiresome Bloomberg administration:

First New York City required restaurants to cut out trans fat. Then it made restaurant chains post calorie counts on their menus. Now it wants to protect people from another health scourge: salt. On Monday, the Bloomberg administration plans to unveil a broad new health initiative aimed at encouraging food manufacturers and restaurant chains across the country to curtail the amount of salt in their products. The plan, for which the city claims support from health agencies in other cities and states, sets a goal of reducing the amount of salt in packaged and restaurant food by 25 percent over the next five years.

Of course there's a solid scientific basis for the plan, and all the pros and cos have been carefully charted and weighed.

Just kidding.

Some medical researchers have questioned the scientific basis for the initiative, saying insufficient research had been done on possible effects. While agreeing that reducing salt is likely to lower average blood pressure, they say it can lead to other physiological changes, some of which may be associated with heart problems. An elaborate clinical trial could weigh the pluses and minuses of cutting salt in a large group of people. But that would cost millions, and it has not been done.

Dr. Michael H. Alderman, a professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said the city's initiative, if successful in reducing salt, would amount to an uncontrolled experiment with the public's health.

Fat Chance

You gotta love the wide-eyed wonder in this study. Women who live with a long-term partner eventually pack on more pounds than women who don't, whether or not they have children. Stop the presses!

The differences, the scientists found, were stark. After adjusting for other variables, the 10-year weight gain for an average 140-pound woman was 20 pounds if she had a baby and a partner, 15 if she had a partner but no baby, and only 11 pounds if she was childless with no partner.

The numbers were obtained by self-reporting, and if bigger people are more apt to understate their weight, as seems likely, it's plausible that the difference is even more pronounced.

The Times spends the whole piece ignoring the, um, elephant in the room, citing experts who suggest explanations that for once seek to turn human fat into something vaguely positive. "Women are more social and therefore eat their fill of large restaurant meals," chirps one. Another crackerjack social scientist offers that

"...getting married or moving in with a partner and having a baby are events that trigger even further weight gain. From a prevention point of view, one can look at these as particular times when women need to be especially careful."

Brilliant analysis, that. Yeah, maybe, in the interest of public health, we ought to "prevent" people from marrying or moving in together. As for the admonition that "women need to be especially careful" during the time they're at risk for weight gain — hey, that happens to be the entire time, possibly many decades, that they live with their long-term boyfriend or their husband. What useless rot.

The socially impolite and admittedly unromantic truth is that in millions upon millions of cases, consciously or not, women and men who move in together have exited the "open market" and as a result give themselves permission to become less attractive. In popular parlance, they "let themselves go." There are well-known websites devoted to the subject; moreover, hundreds of relationship jokes derive their jollies from it.

I guess you'd have to be an ivory-tower dweller — say, a journalist for the world's foremost newspaper, or a politically-correct academic — to successfully pretend you've never even heard of the phenomenon. And you'd have to be a particularly stubborn ass to claim to want to investigate an issue, only to willfully ignore the stares-you-in-the-face explanation that eludes pretty much no one else.

Little Thieves Go To Jail. Big Thieves Go To the Senate.

They nailed a public-payroll janitor for sleeping on the job. The guy got canned, and fined. Good. But I wonder when the elected dipshits in places like Albany and Washington DC will start receiving the same treatment for essentially the same infraction. I don't begrudge people a work week that starts on Tuesday afternoon and ends on Thursday morning, except when you and I are paying their fucking $174,000-a-year salaries.

TSA: War on Play-Doh

Taking pillows away from sleeping children isn't enough to keep us protected from terrorists, so the TSA has now progressed to confiscating kids' Play-Doh. Bra-freakin'-vo, stouthearted Sirs!

Talk About Graphic

Over at the endlessly entertaining Clients from Hell, graphic designers and other creative professionals recount some of their most memorable experiences with the people who pay (or sometimes refuse to pay) the bills. Several of the entries provide evidence of the full-fledged moral panics that are frequently chronicled on this here blog. F'rinstance:

Backstory: Illustrating an educational book on hygiene for an NGO in a developing country. Client: "We don't want that illustration of a father bathing his child. It implies incest."

Another designer writes:

We were building a website for a client that has a preschool and sells curricula. Just before we went live, they called up and asked us to remove the word 'school' from all the page titles and URLs. I asked why. They responded: "We heard if the gays find out we have a preschool, they can force us to teach the children to be gay. We think it's safest if nobody can see that we're a school. And we don't want to come up on any Google searches dealing with 'school.'"

Defying the Smoking Bans

Pervasive, unreasonable smoking bans have gotten to the point where I, a non-smoker, would be happy to light up a cancer stick just to piss off the moralists who insist I shouldn't, mustn't, and can't. I suppose I'm not alone.

Plenty of New York City bars have thumbed their noses at the smoking ban for as long as it has been the law. As early as 2004, The New York Times wrote about neighborhood bars that allowed friends and regulars to light up after closing time. In 2008, at the opening of the Libertine, a Todd English restaurant in the financial district, cigarette girls handed out free smokes that guests consumed liberally.

But corner bars that tolerate smoking have traditionally relied on flying too far below the radar to be noticed. By contrast, at expensive paparazzi-flanked nightclubs that appear in gossip columns, there seems to be a new brazenness.