When somebody is vocally advocating beating liberals with a baseball bat, I tend not to bother analyzing whether they are actually planning to assault me — I'm willing to take them at their word and treat them as actively dangerous.
This seems in line with the idea that "no matter what the original purpose of an organization, before long the purpose will have shifted to 'preserve the organization's existence'".
Does that have an actual name (like "Overton Window" or "Whoozit's Law")?
The "hmm, chicken-foot leather — what's that look like?" feeling was too strong to resist, and I managed to find a page on exotic leather. From the shape of the piece, I'm guessing that this page shows a piece of chicken-foot leather (not merely chicken leather). Abi, does this look like what you have?
Caroline @ 63: I have a Sunray II lightbox from these people that's made a big difference for me in the winters. They're not cheap (I got mine second-hand), but they are solidly made and put out a lot of light (10,000 lux at 14" distance). I spend 15 minutes in front of it every morning to help keep me going when it gets dark outside.
(Huh. The page says to replace the bulbs every few years to maintain the correct light output. I think I last replaced the bulbs in mine... um, never. Off to order some replacement bulbs.)
Craig R #333: Like others, I'd be more inclined to give you points for noticing and working on it, rather than dock you points for not managing 100% equity at all times.
My calculus prof related a similar story to me once. What made it even more eye-opening for my prof was that this was at a women's college whose undergraduate programs are women-only; graduate programs admit both women and men. One of Prof. B's classes was made up of all undergraduates plus one male graduate student, and Prof. B started keeping track of how often each student was getting called on during class.
A couple of weeks into the class, Prof. B requested a meeting with the graduate student in order to tell him, "Don't take it personally, but I'm basically going to stop calling on you in class. This class has 19 female students and one male student, and the male student — you — has been taking up almost 50% of the class discussion time. That's not right, especially in an undergraduate-level class at a women's college, and I feel I can't allow that kind of imbalance to continue." (As Prof. B related it to me, the student understood the reasoning and didn't take offense.)
A quick check of the prices at Penzey's shows them selling ground chipotle for a little more than twice the cost of ground cayenne, in case that helps decide whether your local store's price is reasonable.
I love ground chipotle. Because it's hotter it's not quite as omni-useful as smoked paprika, but it's definitely one of the spices I turn to regularly.
Disclaimer: this is anecdotal, and one problem with being an only child with no cousins who grows up not to have children of her own is that you're working with only one data point. That said...
When I read excerpts from Dobson, or things others have written about his writings and method, what stands out to me is the assumption that children must be made to comply with their parents' orders immediately and without question, or they'll never do what they're told to. (That's a bit of a simplification, I recognize.) What's interesting to me is that that's basically the exact opposite of how my mother raised me. Apparently (she told me this later), when I was just learning to speak, she decided that if she told me to do something and I asked "why?", if she didn't have a reason for it she had to back down. Because she almost never invoked "because I said so" or "because I'm the mom, that's why", I never got into the habit of rebelling against her when she said to do something (or not do something). And the seemingly counterintuitive result was that on the rare occasions that she did say "just do it because I say so", I'd hop to and do what she wanted me to, knowing that there'd be opportunity to discuss it later (and argue about it, if necessary).
(Note, I did flake off on things like raking the leaves and other household chores like any other kid — "have a reason for what you tell them to do" isn't a magical child-rearing technique that yields perfectly-behaved offspring, unfortunately.)
Did somebody say mega shark?
Charles Pergiel @ 52: Drugs are never going to be legalized. There's too much money in keeping them illegal.
Over the years, I've come to be highly dubious about statements like "[x] will never happen." It's just too difficult to predict the future. When I was a teenager and becoming politically aware, if you had asked me, "Will the US elect a black president in your lifetime? What about a woman as president?" I would have said no, of course not, and what kind of starry-eyed idealist are you, anyhow?
I'm very pleased to have been wrong about the first point, and I hope to be wrong about the second.
And as for too much money to be made in keeping them illegal, there's a lot of money to be made in legalizing it. California has an estimated $10-15 billion of unregulated, untaxed cannabis sales every year. Cannabis users here have been voting to impose sales tax on cannabis sales already, so the state's already had that first taste...
From the CBC: Doubt cast on cannabis, schizophrenia link.
And NORML's comment about this.
pericat # 35 — thanks, that makes it clearer.
I think that just as jokes about rope are likely to be received badly by relatives of the hanged, analogies about fires in California may well be misinterpreted (badly) by Californians when there's a wildfire currently burning.
Apologies for misinterpreting the intention of your comment, Charlie.
Charlie Stross @ 31: If it had happened in California, given the way things work there I bet that student would have ended up on death row for arson in the royal dockyard ...
It sounds as though you think it's unreasonable to have strict penalties for carelessly discarding a burning cigarette butt. Is that accurate?
Because as a Californian looking at the latest wildfire (alight for more than a month; 160,000 acres/250+ square miles burned; more than 90 homes destroyed; 2 firefighters killed; firefighting costs estimated at US$70 million), I strongly, strongly disagree.
How on earth does an anecdote about drunken students starting a small garden fire and being charged appropriately generalize to "California's penalties for starting fires are too strict"?
Relatedly, Google Video has Britain BC and Britain AD, hosted by Francis Pryor. (One-sentence summary of AD: "Britain did NOT descend into the dark ages after the Romans left, dammit; if anything, the Britons turned up the lights!")
John Stanning @ 38: It’s useful to say “some people are in prison who don’t need to be locked up†which I think is certainly the case, though I’ve no idea what proportion.
Probably at least 1 in 6:in the federal system, about one out of every six federal inmates is in federal prison for marijuana. That's a very large number. There are more people now in federal prison for marijuana offenses than for violent offenses.… Most of them are marijuana growers and marijuana dealers, although there are instances of people being put away for remarkably small amounts of marijuana. I've come across more than one case of people getting life without parole for a joint or for less than a joint. They tend to be habitual offenders and that's their third strike, but that's still a very severe punishment for possessing a joint.…Under the laws of fifteen states, you can get a life sentence for a nonviolent marijuana offense. And the average sentence for a convicted murder in this country is about six years. In the state of California, the average prison sentence for a convicted killer is about 3.3 years.Source.
From an article in today's SFGate/SF Chronicle:Driver hardly scratched in Devil's Slide plungeThe extent of his injuries? "A bump to the head", according to the police.
Despite plunging 150 feet over a cliff on Highway 1 at Devil's Slide, a San Francisco man escaped with only minor head injuries today because he was wearing his seat belt and the car miraculously landed on its wheels, police said.
David Dyer-Bennet @ 78: Can I interest you in a membership in the King Canute Memorial Society? If we have our next meeting over dinner, we can start with discussing "a martini is gin and vermouth, dammit" over drinks and move on to the definition of a proper pizza over the meal.
Although, as a Californian heretic, I'd have to stay mostly quiet during the pizza discussion. (I think goat cheese and zucchini make a delicious pizza, which probably disqualifies me from any pizza purist debates.)
Striving @ 86: Regarding having to act as your mother's therapist at age 10, you write I guess it's not fair to call that abuse.
In the past this may not have been considered abuse. I believe that's changed, and these days many (most?) specialists consider this kind of parental sharing of age- and role-inappropriate information to be abuse.
It's not a reasonable thing to expect a 10-year-old to do. If officially recognizing that "yes, that was abusive" would help you work with how it affects you today, I think giving it that label would be entirely suitable.
Much respect to everybody who has shared here, and strong wishes that you may find your way to the best place of healing and strength for you.
When I look at the dysfunctions between my mother and her parents, or my father and his, I'm profoundly grateful to them both for having managed to pass along as few of them to me as they did.
My husband and I are in the market for new bikes and have been shopping around to find a bike store we like. It took a couple of tries, and walking out of a couple of stores feeling annoyed, but when we walked into the one we're now planning to buy from... ahhh. They were friendly and helpful, there was zero attitude, and I can't wait to give them my money and get rolling again. Their motto is something along the lines of "everything for the everyday biker", which I think probably helps with the lack of attitude.
Q: how do you keep a Lexi in suspense?
A: Say "Our stock is low right now and the new 2010 models won't be in for another month or so. Want me to email you when they arrive?"
Waiting to hear from them is serving as an outstanding practice opportunity. *sigh*
As long as we're bringing up Bujold references, this discussion has been reminding me of an interaction between Miles and Ekaterin in Komarr:"What my mother told me—I can still see her, holding her head—was the way to get him to stop was for me to just not react. She said the same thing when I was teased at school, or upset about most anything. Be a stone statue, she said. Then it wouldn't be any fun for him, and he would stop. …I never unlearned to respond to attack by turning to stone.… I'm stone all the way through, now, and it's too late."Miles bit his knuckles, hard. Right. So at the dawn of puberty, she'd learned no one would defend her, she could not defend herself, and the only way to survive was to pretend to be dead.I feel fortunate (in retrospect) that I was only an outcast and never really bullied. Still, I learned the "don't let them see they've affected you; don't let them know you care" lesson well, early on, as so many others seem to have.
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| 2006 | 80 |
| 2005 | 39 |
| 2004 | 3 |
| 2003 | 2 |
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