The UK Daily Mail posted a story that I’m sure will soon be making the rounds of major news outlets: U.S. soldier ‘waterboarded his own daughter, 4, because she couldn’t recite alphabet’. The only problem with the headline and the story is that, notwithstanding the irrelevant photo run alongside them — of demonstrators simulating a waterboarding outside the U.S. Justice Department — what this worthless sperm donor father did to his defenseless child wasn’t waterboarding.
Quoting the story, a few paragraphs in:
During a police interview Tabor allegedly admitted grabbing his daughter, placing her on the kitchen counter and submerging her face into a bowl of water.
But submerging someone’s face in a bowl of water isn’t waterboarding. Whether it’s done to a grown man or a four-year-old, submerging the face into water and holding it there presents a real danger of drowning rather merely a simulation of drowning.
Why are the news media deliberately conflating two unrelated issues? Why are the news media calling child abuse by attempted drowning “waterboarding”? Why did this particular instance of child abuse make international news when the overwhelming majority of them don’t?
Could it be that someone wants to make the case that, because some terrorists got waterboarded a few years back by American interrogators, all American soldiers are scarred mentally such that they come home and “waterboard” their toddlers? Or is it just that waterboarding hasn’t made the news in a week or two, and it was time for the Obligatory Waterboarding Story? Or was it just a slow news day?
Did anyone stop to think how calling this despicable act of child abuse “waterboarding” trivializes it in relative terms? Do they want to help this evil man concoct some sort of lame insanity defense and go free?
City Journal’s Bruce Bawer reports the sorry state of affairs in the Netherlands. Dutch member of parliament Geert Wilders is on trial, charged with such unthinkable crimes as
stating facts about Islam and its adherents; drawing logical conclusions from, and forming opinions based reasonably on, those facts; correctly quoting the Koran; and making a film that shows actual imams doing actual preaching and that shows other Muslims expressing violently hateful opinions about Western liberties, gays, Jews, and so forth.
Outrageous? Yes.
Couldn’t happen here? Not so fast. We just lost 13 soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, because the superiors of a Muslim “soldier” who had flaunted his radicalism for years didn’t feel they could respond to his outrageous behavior because they might be accused of prejudice or racism if they did. So they sat on their hands and kept their mouths shut until, one day, Nidal Hasan showed us all just what a poor decision his craven superiors had made.
So the Dutch are a decade or so ahead of us in their kowtowing to barbarity. They’ve moved on to preemptive strikes against the pesky truth-tellers in their midst. They think this will prevent a Nidal Hasan-type massacre in their own country. Appease the barbarians, they think, and they’ll leave the gates intact. The British are scarcely any better.
But we are headed down the same path, and the Hasan debacle should be our canary in the coal mine.
Muslim protesters outside Geert Wilders's London speech.
The GED Testing Service 2009 Fact Sheet includes a reminder that commonly-held beliefs about GED holders — that they are slackers, misfits, and dullards — is not just unfair but simply wrong. That reminder comes in the form of a list of notable GED holders — phenomenally successful people like Michael J. Fox, Bill Cosby, and Mary Lou Retton.
There are many reasons why someone might hold a GED instead of a conventional high school diploma. I don’t know, but I suspect in the cases of Fox and Retton, their careers might have taken off so early in their lives that they simply didn’t have time to waste on high school. My husband hired a non-degreed, GED-holding software programmer about a year ago and couldn’t be happier with that young man’s work. (Tech is one of those fields where — sigh — it’s still possible to succeed based on abilities alone, without much in the way of paper credentials. Would that I were the technological type!)
The Fact Sheet, which I just read about courtesy of About.com Continuing Education, brought to mind a high school classmate of mine who ended up skipping her senior year and earning a GED instead. She took this route because she wanted to get married and move out of state, and her parents would only agree to allow it if she got the GED first. Now, don’t get me started on the astounding lack of common sense that led my friend to marry a shithead who made her skip her senior year (in addition to making her quit the cheerleading squad, stop cutting her hair, and quit wearing makeup). But anyone who assumed she was weak academically just because she had a G.E.D. instead of a diploma could not have been more wrong. She was near the top of her class and was on track to graduate with honors.
Just one more reason that judging people is a highly tricky proposition.
Please consider at least borrowing a few hundred-dollar bills to use in your ad before blanketing the metroplex with a postcard featuring a photo of a ridiculously happy guy clutching $13.
A handful of philosophical quotes are attributed to Albert Einstein, and some of them are regularly trotted out by religious people to “prove” that the smartest human being ever was a man of faith. Among these is the famously enigmatic “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” Who knows what the great man meant by that?
But this letter Einstein wrote in 1954 to philosopher and author Erik Gutkind is much less equivocal. In it, Einstein makes it clear that, although he respects religious people’s ethics and finds much common ground with them, he does not in any way subscribe to their notions of the supernatural:
The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.
[...]
. . . it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, i.e. in our evaluation of human behavior … I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.
I believe the essence of Einstein’s genius here is that he, unlike some other atheists, honestly expressed his views without rancor or derision toward those who believe otherwise. He further recognized that, not unlike the laws of physics, certain moral and philosophical principles are universal independent of belief in gods. We should all strive to be so intelligent.
Modest Needs is doing charity in a way that I don’t think anyone else does. My favorite things about Modest Needs:
It helps primarily the working poor — those who don’t qualify for government assistance specifically because they made the responsible choice to work to support themselves rather than sit back and collect taxpayer-funded aid.
As a donor, I can choose to review individual applications for help and choose which ones to apply my donations toward. Of course, sometimes it can be extremely difficult to choose among the pleas of so many deserving and needy people. For donors for whom this is just too much, there is an option to have Modest Needs apply donations where it sees fit.
The Modest Needs staff thoroughly vets each application, verifying income, liabilities, eligibility for other types of aid, and more.
There’s never been a better year in which to express thanks for what we have by spending some of our gift budgets on a cause like Modest Needs.
I’ve invented a brand new meme. I’m not saying I’m the only person who has invented it, as it does seem rather an obvious joke, but a quick Google search doesn’t turn up anyone else doing this. So for now, at least, I’m claiming it as a Limits of Experience Original™.
The new meme will be riffing on that silly, sanctimonious e-mail signature addendum I keep seeing these days:
Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.
Anyway, I’ll occasionally post my own slightly more interesting and — I hope — more amusing variations on the “Please consider ____ before ____ing” theme.
See, I said it was obvious!
Sometimes they’ll be political, as in this timely admonition for CNN:
A handful of philosophical quotes are attributed to 
