Category Archives: PC

It’s Always All About the Sex

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I live on an island of 700 people. I have spent most of my life in towns or townships of fewer than a few thousand. Very few. I’m used to my neighbors usually knowing that I wear yellow pants when I mow and what I had for breakfast yesterday morning.

“If you can’t pee off your front porch,” Joe Rainville once told me, “you don’t have enough land.”

I can’t do that here although I’ve never had any difficulty in North Puffin, nor on the former farm where I grew up. On the other hand, most regular readers and all of my neighbors know the details of my love life, my eye surgery a couple of months ago, and the color of my shorts today (blue).

I may be a bit unusual.

Still, in this day and age when peeps tweet about the quality of their morning poop, sext their cow-orkers, admit to NY Magazine “Yeah, I am naked on the Internet,” and blog about the in-laws from hell, abortions, their abusive parents and jailed kids, and going broke over and over and over again, maybe not all that unusual.

survey signThe conservative blogosphere (unrelated to Faux News favorite politician, “our Blago”) is all atwitter this week about how nosy Florida is about at your house. The conservative blogosphere is nutso about sex.

The Department of Health here has asked some 4,100 young women for intimate details of their sex lives. State officials said the survey will help them understand women’s need for and approach to family-planning services.

This may be the cheapest survey a government ever ran. Officials who say the survey determines women’s need for and approach to family-planning services gave participants a $10 CVS gift card. The state spent $45,000 on the 46-question survey over the last couple of months.

If that includes the $41,000 worth of gift cards, I want these folks to do all my future marketing surveys.

Participants were asked how many men they had sex with over the last year, whether a man ever poked holes in a condom to get them pregnant and how they felt emotionally the last time they had unprotected sex.

782 women have returned completed surveys.

“Some of the questions are incredibly offensive and invasive,” a male Broward County a political consultant, told the Sun Sentinel. Did I mention that the conservative blogosphere is nutso about sex?

The survey uses questions that already appear in other surveys in use nationally, state Surgeon General Dr. John Armstrong said. Not to mention appearing in most issues of Cosmopolitan. The magazine also “gets to the bottom of your intimate sex questions. Nothing (and we mean nothing) is off limits.”

Florida was perhaps gentler.

  • How did you feel emotionally when you had unprotected sex?
    The question delved into the mysteries of whether the women were trying to get pregnant, in the “heat of the moment and just went with the flow,” or found the man attractive and “thought it would be nice to have a baby with him?” Sounds like something family-planners need to know.
    They also asked if respondents felt “powerless” or “emotionally connected with [a] partner during sex.”
  • How old were you when you first had sex?
  • The last time you had sex with a man did you do anything to keep from getting pregnant? If not, why not?
  • Has a sexual partner ever ”Physically forced you to have sex?” or ”Hurt you physically because you did not agree to get pregnant?”
    That gets right to it. Unless you are a rug-chewing Republican with odd notions about rape.
  • How much do you weigh?
    OK, even I know better than to ask that.

I reckon I could come up with more intrusive (and less statistically useful) questions.

  • What date did you rob your last bank?
  • How often do you use crack cocaine?
  • Have you had gastric bypass surgery?”

“It’s really important to emphasize,” Dr. Armstrong said, “that we want people to be informed so that they can manage their health.”

I could wish the sampling methodology gave me a better sense of statistical accuracy about the answers so I could generalize it to the population. This survey reeks of problems with respondent motivation, honesty, memory, self-selection bias, and the simple ability to respond. Still Dr. Armstrong got it exactly right. We need people to be informed.

782 women have returned completed surveys.

Florida’s Gov. Rick Scott, unusually reactive to the blowing winds, is “glad to hear the department has stopped using it.”

Maybe if they had called it a Health Survey instead of a Sex Survey. Or asked Cosmo to run it…

Tuesday Tolerance: Why I’m a Liberal (And You’re Not)

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I may be the last real liberal.

Nancy Giles, courtesy Oberlin College Alumni Assoc CBS Sunday Morning looked at the line in the sand between liberals and conservatives by asking Nancy Giles and Ben Stein to do essays on why they come down on one side or the other.

Ms. Giles quoted what she called the Oxford English Dictionary definition:

liberal adj. Willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one’s own.

“I’m a liberal,” she said. “I love the mix of voices and the larger perspective.”
I’m down with that.

In fact, I couldn’t agree more that we need a mix of voices. Mine is right, of course, but others do add color and flavor and nuance and, yes, more data to what I say.

Hey! I must be a liberal.

The bad news is two-fold. One is the simple fact that none of the other liberals I know are actually willing to listen to other voices or see the larger perspective. The most recent example is that of picketers trying to shut down the voice of Lenore Broughton the driving force behind the Vermonters First super PAC.

Oh. I must be the only liberal.

And then there is the case of Islam. Many believe Islam is a religion of terror and war and destruction of women but, according to American liberals, there are only a “few warlike Muslims so we can’t damn the whole religion.” And yet. And yet, my liberal friends damn everyone to the Right of them for a few right wing nutcases at abortion clinics.

“I could only listen until that woman read that definition of Liberal and claimed that was what she was,” Rufus said. “Libruls are the least liberal people I know.”

Rufus leads us to the second bit of bad news. See, I own an O.E.D. “Willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one’s own” ain’t in it. On the other hand, Merriam-Webster does call liberal, “not literal or strict : loose <as in a liberal translation>.”

Looks like I am indeed a liberal in the first sense but Ms. Giles and the other self-proclaimed “liberals” I know hew to the second. They are as incorrect or inaccurate with the facts as possible. Or perhaps it was just an inexact translation.

Let’s go back to Ms. Giles’ dictionary.

liberal adj. Of or pertaining to representational forms of government rather than aristocracies and monarchies.

That’s interesting but it’s not in my printed copy of the O.E.D. Here’s her next definition.

liberal adj. believing the government should be active in supporting social and political change.

Oh, boy. That’s out of Wikipedia or the Socialist’s Bible but it has everything to do with politics and nothing to do with the dictionary.

liberal adj. Tending to give freely; generous.

Ooo. I’m down with that, too. Of course most people know that the leader of the American liberal party, Barack Obama, grudgingly started giving more than a pittance to charity about the day after he decided to run for president. In other words, once people would actually notice. The leader of the other guys (that would be Mitt Romney) has given away a big percentage of his, quietly, every year he’s had income. On a more personal level, all the liberals I know want to control my income while my efforts go into an arts council and Anne’s into the Special Olympics. Our choice.

Money and politics. Ms. Giles wants control of both and that’s not very liberal.

OEDIn fact, my actual O.E.D. includes definition #5 as

liberal adj. Favourable to or respectful of individual rights and freedoms; spec (in politics) favouring free trade and gradual political and social reform that tends towards individual freedom or democracy.

I may not respect but I do accept your incredible naivete, behavior, and opinions that differ from mine. I give of myself without asking you to do the same. I believe in local control, free trade and social reform that moves us toward individual freedoms and democracy.

Yup. I’m a liberal. And you’re not.

Everything I Know

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Everything I know about history, I learned from Thomas B. Costain.

That would truly annoy Frank Wright, the exceptional high school history teacher from whom I also learned a lot. I tell the Costain story often. It is mostly the truth.

Canadian journalist and editor Thomas B. Costain published his first best-selling historical novel, For My Great Folly, at the age of 57. He had toiled in the writing trenches for most of his working life before Folly. Mr. Costain’s fiction relied so heavily on historic events that one reviewer said “it was hard to tell where history leaves off and apocrypha begins.” Mr. Costain made the story of Joseph of Arimathea and the lowly Basil of Antioch come alive for millions of Americans, including me. The Silver Chalice may have been the first historical novel I ever read.

I had read Chalice, the Tontine, Below the Salt, and the Last Plantagenets before leaving for college. My mom, a Swarthmore alum, also knew American writer James A. Michener and introduced me to his work as well.

Mr. Michener penned some of the best known sagas in literature, novels that spanned the lives of uncounted generations in exotic or previously under reported locales. He was known for his meticulous research which let him work the entire history of each region into his stories. I can almost say I know more about the Chesapeake Bay from reading Mr. Michener’s Chesapeake than from growing on the water there.

The Italian government lauded biographical novelist Irving Stone for the way he highlighted Italian history in the Agony and the Ecstasy, the life of Michelangelo Buonarroti.

So.

How do we separate fact from fiction when our favorite novelists leaven their rising stories with actual history in search of a truth? Or in search of a good story?

It is hard, after reading Costain, not to mistake the Grail story as truth. It is hard, after reading Michener, not to mistake the many generations of the Buk, Bukowski, and Lubonski families as real.

Fast forward.

Jon Stewart is a brilliant satirist. Pew Research Center’s search for the most admired American journalist has Mr. Stewart, the fake news anchor, at Number 4, tied with actual news anchors Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw of NBC, Dan Rather of CBS, and Anderson Cooper of CNN. Dan Rather? OK, it was a 2007 poll. The Daily Show does have pieces of substantive news but satire can’t handle the whole truth and Mr. Stewart has repeatedly insisted that he is only a comedian on a fake news show.

Monologist Mike Daisey played the Lane Series at the Flynn Theater in Burlington, Vermont, this weekend. His The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs has caused a national foofah over what is and what isn’t true in his monologue about Apple and its manufacturing practices in China. In January, NPR’s This American Life and its host, Ira Glass, published a critical 39-minute story that detailed the appalling Chinese iPhone plants, a program adapted from Mr. Daisey’s theatrical monologue.

Last weekend, Mr. Glass retracted the story.

The most admired reporter of our times, Edward R. Murrow said, “To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful.” From Costain to Michener to Stewart to Daisey to Survivor we’re blurring the line between truth and fiction.

We in the news business must be truthful. But most of all, we must remember that entertainment has no such need.

“Get the facts, Dick,” Frank Wright would tell me. “It’s not the truth without the facts.”

Of course, I’m not sure Mr. Wright ever watched “reality TV.”

Anarchy

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We need a little more anarchy. I’m late in posting this because I had to write it from a New York jail.

See, I made a serious error in judgement. I texted my friend Liz Arden from my car. “On my way to Plattsburg Airport,” I wrote.

I was about to pull back out onto entrance ramp from the shoulder where I had stopped when I noticed flashing lights in the rear view mirror.

“May I see your license and registration, sir?” the trooper asked politely.

“What’s the trouble, officer?” I said.

“You are in violation of section 1225-d of the vehicle and traffic law of New York state,” he replied. “Texting while operating a motor vehicle.”

“I wasn’t moving, officer. My speed was zero. I pulled over and stopped deliberately to sit here so I could use my electronic device safely and legally.”

“New York does not require you to be speeding for me to consider that you are operating your vehicle, sir.”

I found that interesting, since motion is defined as the act, process, or state of changing place or position and some ΔV is necessary to effect that.

Sir Isaac Newton compiled his laws of motion in the 17th Century, some years before we started regulating vehicular communication. In fact, some years before we started thinking about vehicles powered by much other than hay. His three laws describe the relationship between the forces acting on a body and its motion due to those forces; they form the basis for classical mechanics.

Newton’s First Law: The velocity of a body remains constant unless the body is acted upon by an external force. It is often expressed as “a body in motion stays in motion and a car sitting dead on the street ain’t moving.”

“Now wait just a darned minute,” I said. Troopers like being told that. “Imagine this scenario, officer. Imagine that I am sitting in a public park, motionless, with a butter knife. A ground squirrel has chewed on my nuts. I am seriously enraged and am plotting the hideous death of that squirrel. Foam is coming out of my ears. Steam from my mouth. But the squirrel is still sitting in the tree, chattering. And I haven’t moved from my park bench.”

He moved his hand to the side of his utility belt.

“Step out of the car, please, sir.”

“You can’t arrest me for murder for sitting in a public park, motionless, with a butter knife,” I told him. “So you also can’t arrest me for a moving violation when I am sitting in my stopped car, motionless.”

Or not.

Vermont’s 2009 “Texting Law” (23 V.S.A. § 1099) states, “A person shall not engage in texting while operating a moving motor vehicle on a highway.” New York’s law is similar but longer winded. Police in New York can stop drivers for using handheld devices while driving, making it a primary traffic offense. That state’s law also increased the penalty from a two- to a three-point offense with a fine of up to $150.

The trooper is using a definition of “operate a motor vehicle” that means more than just “drive,” “driving,” or “driven.” Their definition seems to cover all matters related to having a car near a highway, whether you be in actual motion or at rest.

Under those circumstances, the New York law that states that “no person shall operate a motor vehicle unless all front seat passengers under the age of sixteen are restrained by a safety belt…” means that the trooper can cite me for sitting at the foot of my friend’s driveway in Rouse’s Point with my granddaughter if she’s not belted in.

“I’m thinking it’s time to tune up the law,” my friend Denny Crane might say.

Fortunately, the cursory examination of my car didn’t turn up the butter knife in my glove box.

Ho Hum, Just Another Crisis

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The news of the week is filled with such exceptionally crucial questions that it may be hard to get down to the merely important but mundane issues. Did a Massachusetts man really turn over 94 hamsters to the animal shelter because he ran out of room in his apartment? Should you really bring a chainsaw to the hospital so the white noise will help you sleep? And did Sweden really recognize the Church of Kopimism so it could avoid persecution? (Copy-Me-Ism‘s name is derived from the words “let me steal from the Internet”; persecution is the new spelling for “bring to trial.”)

Long time computer pundit and curmudgeon John C. Dvorak opined that “most countries, including the United States, will eventually shut down the ‘World Wide’ Web” in favor of a limited, ‘Nation-wide’ web. “It solves endless political problems with the Web that plague almost every country,” he wrote.

Countries are a wee bit nervous. After all, we might be able to watch reruns of Family Guy on Hulu. Or look up how to pronounce Mr. Dvorak’s name.

First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak out because I was Protestant.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
Pastor Martin Niemöller

North Korea has a national Internet so they can order nationwide mourning for their fearless leader.

China wants a national Internet so they can cut off access to Google. That regime is freaked that the China Spring has nothing to do with mattresses, unless the Chinese people suddenly go to them.

Iran wants a national Internet so they can cut off access to Faux News. The Ayatollahs are panic-stricken that the Arab Spring they fomented could spread to their house.

First McCarthy came for the communists,
and you approved because you hate communists and that would protect you.

Then Bush came for the air travelers,
and you approved because you hate terrorists and that would protect you.

Then Obama came for General Motors,
and you approved because you hate big business and that would protect you.

Then Scott Walker came for the trade unionists,
and you approved because you hate trade unionists and that would protect you.

Then Congress came for the Internet,
and you approved because you could still shop on Amazon.

Then they came for you.
and there was no way left to speak out …

Did you worry when the City of Lakewood, Ohio, seized private homes so a private developer could build yupscale condos or the City of Mesa, AZ, would “redeveloped” a multigenerational bike shop out so an Ace Hardware Store could pay higher taxes? You didn’t worry when the Administration nationalized Government Motors. Are you worried about the 94 hamsters yet?