Acing the Citizenship Test

Posted on December 6, 2013 by wellsdc

Pictured: Not a natural-born U.S. citizen.

The concept of “citizenship” is pretty silly if you think about it. Acquiring United States citizenship is generally based on one of four factors:

The birth canal through which you begin life happens to be located on sovereign United States territory at the moment of your birth;
Said birth canal belongs to a U.S. citizen, regardless of where it is located at the moment of your birth;
The sperm that successfully fertilized the egg that eventually became you came from a United States citizen, regardless of where any of the reproductive organs involved are located at the moment of your birth; or
You complete a metric fuck-ton of paperwork, are not a “terrorist” based on the vague definition du jour, and pass a citizenship test.

The people who seem to be the most protective (defensive?) of their status as U.S. citizens tend to belong to the first group. Really, though, the privileges and immunities of United States citizenship accrued to them entirely by chance, not through any particular accomplishment or merit.

People in the fourth group, however, have to work for it, yet they don’t seem to get all that much respect for their efforts. It’s difficult to argue that one person who fits in the first group should be a U.S. citizen by virtue of birth, and another shouldn’t, but that is exactly what some people want to do in the cause of preventing so-called “anchor babies.” All this would accomplish, in reality, would be creating a secondary class of people born here but not really of here, because of the identity of their parents. That probably only seems like a fair arrangement if you genuinely believe that the location or identity of the birth canal through which you emerged somehow affects your identity as a person.

There is a point to all of this, I assure you. Read on… Continue reading →

Lululemon’s Founder on “How Lululemon Came Into Being”

Posted on December 5, 2013 by wellsdc

I’m unclear on how someone who seems to have such a low opinion of living, breathing women (or “females,” as he might call them) came to found a successful company that sells yoga clothing to women. Lululemon’s CEO and founder has been in the news here and there for saying this or that inane (at best), sexist (at worst) drivel, but it doesn’t appear to be anything new. He wrote a blog post on the company’s blog dated March 30, 2009, that details the company’s origins through a, shall we say, creative interpretation of the last forty years of history—starting with “the pill” and culminating in a surge of breast cancer among “cigarette-smoking Power Women who were on the pill.” Here is his conclusion, and you can decide if it piques your interest enough to learn how the events of the 1970’s through the 1990’s shaped the company:

Ultimately, lululemon was formed because female education levels, breast cancer, yoga/athletics and the desire to dress feminine came together all at one time. lululemon saw the opportunity to make the best technologically advanced components for the Super Girl market.

I, uh, um…..ugh. Continue reading →

This Is a Man’s Randomly-Generated Sequence of Letters and Numbers!

Posted on November 21, 2013 by wellsdc

It’s so hard to be a man these days, right, fellas? Everything in the world is getting so dang….well, I don’t quite want to say girly, but it’s something…. As we all know, manhood is the epitome of strength and courage, yet at the same time it is so fragile that the mere sight of the color pink, let alone an inappropriately long hug between two dudes, might send the entire edifice of manhood crashing down in a cascade of testosterony chaos.

“Femininity is depicted as weakness, the sapping of strength, yet masculinity is so fragile that apparently even the slightest brush with the feminine destroys it.” –Gwen Sharp (via unfocus)

There is hope, though. Consumer culture has made a heroic effort to help us hold on to our fleeting masculinity. We have specially-formulated (I assume) manly calories in our low-carb soft drinks. We have the guyet, a masculine alternative to girly diets. And whatever would we do without brogurt, which is totally a real thing.

At least one huge, glaring hole in our defensive edifices remains, though, and it yawns mockingly before us, almost as though it were laughing at our feeble efforts to kindle the dying embers of our manhood. Obviously, I’m talking about internet password generators, but you need cower in the shadows no more!

Web developer John Polacek, working with the Draftcb Open Source Project, has created Passwords for the Manly Man (h/t Jeff). Its passwords are “so strong and secure they breach the gates of hell.” I tried it, and was in fact able to log on to Hell’s servers. (It was disappointing. The porn was pretty meh.)

So crack open a Dr. Pepper Ten, help yourself to some brogurt, and enjoy a manly internet experience with a manly password. Just don’t try to hug me, dude.

Let Them Eat Small Pieces of Cake

Posted on November 20, 2013 by wellsdc

Corporate America just can’t hold back its largesse this holiday season. The other day, we learned about a Wal-Mart in Cleveland that is trying to help its underpaid employees by soliciting donations from its underpaid employees. (Call it “benthic redistribution,” if you will. Or don’t, because it’s not a very good name.) Not to be outdone, McDonald’s is offering its underpaid employees tips on how to make the money last during the holidays (h/t Adam Lee):

McDonald’s McResource Line, a dedicated website run by the world’s largest fast-food chain to provide its 1.8 million employees with financial and health-related tips, offers a full page of advice for “Digging Out From Holiday Debt.” Among their helpful holiday tips: “Selling some of your unwanted possessions on eBay or Craigslist could bring in some quick cash.”

Elsewhere on the site, McDonald’s encourages its employees to break apart food when they eat meals, as “breaking food into pieces often results in eating less and still feeling full.” And if they are struggling to stock their shelves with food in the first place, the company offers assistance for workers applying for food stamps. [Emphasis added.]

ThinkProgress focused on the advice to sell stuff online (which makes me wonder if the person who wrote this has tried to sell anything online since the dot-com crash.) I’m more perturbed by the suggestion to “break apart food,” especially since it comes from the people who coined the term “super-size.” I’m not sure even Marie Antoinette would have been that cold.

How Not to Get Arrested

Posted on November 19, 2013 by wellsdc

A former police officer and prosecutor, Dale Carson, has written a book offering his pointers on how to avoid police trouble. It’s both scary and depressing. Via Mike Riggs at Business Insider:

“Law enforcement officers now are part of the revenue-gathering system,” Carson tells me in a phone interview. “The ranks of cops are young and competitive, they’re in competition with one another and intra-departmentally. It becomes a game. Policing isn’t about keeping streets safe, it’s about statistical success. The question for them is, ‘Who can put the most people in jail?'”

His book includes tips on how to “be invisible to police,” and seemingly reasonable things one should never do when a cop is talking to you. The theme, at least as presented in Riggs’ article, is the importance of compliance over any issues of personal pride. Being questioned by police is likely to be humiliating, Carson says, but getting arrested is worse, so suck it up.

The other day, Clark at Popehat wrote about a police chief who thinks cops should be prepared to tackle nearly any suspect:

[U]nless the citizen is “bracing for submission” and maintaining eye contact, the cop should consider “tackling” him.

On light of that, being invisible seems like the better course of action, but I’m still looking around for someone with an idea of how to actually improve things.

Let Them Donate Cake

Posted on November 18, 2013 by wellsdc

LE - Food Drive A Wal-Mart store in Cleveland is holding a food drive to support its own employees (h/t Myerman, Business Insider). The Cleveland Plain Dealer has good coverage of the controversy, which pits store spokespeople, who say that this is for employees who have suffered recent hardships, against employees and others, who argue that this demonstrates that the retail chain knows it doesn’t pay its workers enough to survive without government assistance, but isn’t willing to do anything except redistribute wealth between those same employees to address the issue. If the poll on the Plain Dealer’s website is any guide, a large number of people think this is a less than gracious gesture on Wal-Mart’s part.

Here we have a massive corporation whose size rivals the GDP of some small countries (just behind Taiwan’s 2010 GDP, and just ahead of Norway), whose owners came into their substantial wealth largely through inheritance, and whose employees often barely scrape by on their wages. One of this corporation’s many stores decides to act on the dire financial straits of its employees by asking similarly destitute employees to chip in. The people at the top, as far as I know remain silent on this particular matter and, in general, largely indifferent to the plight of those on the bottom. I can’t think of a single historical analogy here in which those at the top ever had to reckon with the manner in which their wealth was built on the backs of others.

Nope, no historical analogies at all.

Anyway, this is depressing to talk about so close to the holidays. Let’s just listen to some music instead. Here’s a song from Rush that I totally picked at random:

Photo credit: “LE – Food Drive” by vastateparksstaff [CC BY 2.0], on Flickr.

Living under Human Rules in the Wild

Posted on November 17, 2013 by wellsdc

A photogenic elk was reportedly euthanized by park rangers last week for, as far as I can tell, being too interested in people (h/t Ryan Clinton), as Knoxville’s WBIR reported:

An elk who went viral after a close-up encounter with a photographer was euthanized Friday, Great Smoky Mountains National Park officials confirmed Friday evening.

Park officials said the elk could not be re-trained to be fearful of humans. They said the elk had been coming back to that area in search of food, and had begun associating humans with food.

Spokesperson Molly Schroer said placing the animal elsewhere would be passing along a potentially dangerous problem.

If you haven’t seen the YouTube video, I have to imagine that the experience was terrifying for the photographer (those antlers look pointy), but at the same time, this seems like an elk being an elk.

WBIR reports biologists said elk normally mate during the September to October time-frame, and may have thought [photographer James] York was competition for a lady-elk.

The phrase from WBIR’s article that keeps bothering me is “the elk could not be re-trained to be fearful of humans.” We require dogs, cats, horses, and other domesticated animals to live by our rules, even if they don’t understand them. This makes a certain amount of sense, because we bring these animals into our homes. Plus, we have bred them over millenia to be dependent on us. The burden is on humans to train domestic animals how to behave. In a cruel twist of fate, however, the animals pay the ultimate price if the humans’ lessons don’t take. I don’t have a better way to do it, necessarily, but I think we can all at least acknowledge the cruelty.

But what about non-domesticated animals like elk? They live in the wild, while we mostly only visit there. Whatever that elk was doing, it was doing it on its home turf. Maybe it’s still on us humans to watch what we do in that world.

As I said, I don’t have a ready-made solution here, but I hope the wild gets to stay wild a bit longer.

In other news, some people are far more interested in pretending to dominate the wild, but at least they can’t do it without well-deserved public backlash:

Outdoor television show host and avid hunter Melissa Bachman caused a huge controversy after she shared a photo of herself with a dead lion yesterday with the accompanying tweet:

“An incredible day hunting in South Africa! Stalked inside 60 yards on the this beautiful male lion… what a hunt!”

My favorite comment on the story (aside from Ricky Gervais’ uncouth tweet) came from Ona Lynn Nass, who offers a local perspective:

Melissa….He was beautiful before you so savagely killed him…..She should be ashamed of herself. This is a total disgrace….what we called “canned hunting”. Wipe the smile off your face,. any idiot can take a high-powered rifle and a hunt lions that cannot escape and have got ‘human imprinting”. I wish there was a way to get rid of these places that offer these facilities to tourists. It’s all about the money. Btw Melissa, did you need to eat the lion to survive? Wasn’t he so beautiful and majestic while alive, before you took his life? Why didn’t you rather shoot him with a camera. I hope you, never, ever put a foot in our country again….and that goes for ALL you trigger happy tourists. Keep your blasted dollars, yen, euros or whatever. The average South African doesn’t want your kind or your money here. Just ……. off. We don’t want you here and if we could close those shooting ranches down somehow we would. I hope you have nightmares about that lion for the rest of your life……..

How to Help People in the Philippines (i.e. Don’t Send Old Shoes)

Posted on November 13, 2013 by wellsdc

The typhoon that hit the Philippines has caused damage measured by the shitload, and we Americans are admirably pitching in to help. The problem is that some of what we’re doing apparently isn’t helping at all.

Jessica Alexander, a humanitarian aid worker writing at Slate, says that the best thing we can do is send money, not hand-me-downs (h/t Anne Laurie, Avicenna):

After the tsunami, similarly well-intentioned people cleaned out their closets, sending boxes of “any old shoes” and other clothing to the countries. I was there after the tsunami and saw what happened to these clothes: Heaps of them were left lying on the side of the road. Cattle began picking at them and getting sick. Civil servants had to divert their limited time to eliminating the unwanted clothes. Sri Lankans and Indonesians found it degrading to be shipped people’s hand-me-downs. I remember a local colleague sighed as we passed the heaps of clothing on the sides of the road and said “I know people mean well, but we’re not beggars.” Boxes filled with Santa costumes, 4-inch high heels, and cocktail dresses landed in tsunami-affected areas. In some places, open tubes of Neosporin, Preparation H, and Viagra showed up. The aid community has coined a term for these items that get shipped from people’s closets and medicine cabinets as SWEDOW—Stuff We Don’t Want.

It’s a very noble instinct that leads us to donate, but I suspect the best place to donate our used stuff is somewhere local.

The Red Cross is generally a good place to go if you want to contribute. Hemant Mehta also has a good list of places you can donate. Let’s all do what we can to help, but let’s do it in the way that is most helpful.

Halloween’s Apotheosis

Posted on October 30, 2013 by wellsdc

The trend of preceding all women’s Halloween costumes with the descriptor “sexy” may have reached its point of artistic nirvana (or something) with Yandy’s “Sexy Bert & Ernie” costume, a regular feature of “ridiculous costume” lists at this time of year.

A Reddit user brought this to the world’s attention last year, but I’m not sure if the famous ambiguously-gay Muppet roommates will be available for long in a “sexy” format, especially after last year’s cease and desist from Sesame Street:

Sesame Street Workshop has advised Yandy.com to “cease and desist” selling sexy costumes based on Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie.

On the heels of U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s comments about PBS and the possible firing of Big Bird, the sexy Big Birdlike outfit was positioned as a hot seller, according to the New York Daily News.

Unsurprisingly, Yandy.com, a costume, dress, and lingerie online retailer at the forefront of the sexualized Halloween costumes movement, has reaped the rewards of Romney’s comments during the first presidential debate.

On its site, Yandy.com features a sexy yellow bird costume that one can pair with an officially licensed Big Bird headband manufactured by Disguise Inc. Yandy.com has been careful to avoid accusations of copyright infringement or otherwise get in legal trouble, but the increased attention occasioned by Romney’s comments caused Sesame Street Workshop to step in.

Basically, if you can’t get a “sexy” Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, or Snuffleupagus costume this year, I recommend blaming Mitt Romney. As far as I can tell, though, the costumes are still available, so the warping of our childhood memories may continue.

“The last time hundreds of Texans showed up at the Alamo with rifles…”

Posted on October 19, 2013 by wellsdc

Jerry Patterson, the current Texas Land Commissioner and candidate for Lieutenant Governor, is promoting a rally (or some other sort of event with people) at the Alamo in San Antonio, at which everyone is encouraged to carry their guns openly. This would be in violation of a city ordinance that gun people think is unconstitutional, and openly flouting the law in massive numbers is just so much more fun than challenging it in court, right?

Anyway, there’s a term for this: civil disobedience. Of course, when liberals practice civil disobedience, they often expect to get arrested. We’ll see how the liberty-loving folk packing heat at the Alamo handle it today.

One thing Patterson said causes me some concern, though: “The last time hundreds of Texans showed up at the Alamo with rifles, they were hailed as heroes in their stand against a tyrannical government.”

They also all died.

Photo credit: “The Fall of the Alamo” by Robert Jenkins Onderdonk [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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