THE OTHER SHOE DROPS: Updates To Previous Posts
† The Dark Side Of Daylight-Saving Time (second item): According to The New York Times, Benjamin Franklin - famous for his impish wit – was only joking back in 1784 when he proposed getting Parisians out of bed an hour earlier during the summer to save money. Having lost an hour of sleep this week-end that she could ill afford to lose, The Stiletto is not amused. Turns one of Benjie’s aphorisms is equally injurious to her – and your – well-being: Time is money:
[T]he quest to spend time the way we do money is doomed to failure, because the time we experience bears little relation to time as read on a clock. The brain creates its own time, and it is this inner time, not clock time, that guides our actions. In the space of an hour, we can accomplish a great deal — or very little. …
Believing time is money to lose, we perceive our shortage of time as stressful. Thus, our fight-or-flight instinct is engaged, and the regions of the brain we use to calmly and sensibly plan our time get switched off. We become fidgety, erratic and rash.
Tasks take longer. We make mistakes — which take still more time to iron out. Who among us has not been locked out of an apartment or lost a wallet when in a great hurry? The perceived lack of time becomes real: We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed. …
And it costs us time. People in industrial nations lose more years from disability and premature death due to stress-related illnesses like heart disease and depression than from other ailments.
† Waterboarding: The Latest Fad To Sweep The U.S.: President Bush vetoed a bill passed by Congress banning waterboarding and other “harsh interrogation” techniques by the Central Intelligence Agency because, the legislation “would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror,” adding “This is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe. Because the danger remains, we need to ensure our intelligence officials have all the tools they need to stop the terrorists.” Americans remain free to engage in consensual waterboarding.
† Mexico Declares War On The United States: Based on his evaluation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement efforts to reduce illegal entry across the United States-Mexico border in San Diego and Tucson, Jorge A. Bustamante, a United Nations advisor on migrant rights, told the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva that he had “serious concerns … especially in the context of deportation and detention policies,” reports The Associated Press.
Noting that some “immigrant detainees spend days in solitary confinement, with overhead lights kept on 24 hours a day, and often in extreme heat and cold,” Bustamante, a Mexican citizen, contends that “[t]he overuse of immigration detention in the United States violates the spirit of international laws and conventions and, in many cases, also violates the actual letter of those instruments.” Bustamante’s report also complained that the uptick in ICE raids of houses and workplaces had “terrorized immigrant communities” and separated families.
Jan Levin, deputy political councilor with the United States mission to Geneva, disputed Bustamante’s findings, pointing out that from 2000 to 2006 the U.S. granted legal residency to six million foreigners and citizenship to four million others.
Levin might have also mentioned that illegal aliens and their children enjoy free public schooling at taxpayer expense; free medical care at clinics and hospital emergency rooms at the expense of paying patients whose charges are jacked up beyond what their healthcare insurers are willing to pay; and, in many states and large cities, food stamps and housing vouchers. Compare this largesse to how survivors of the Nazi Holocaust were treated when they came to New York City in the 1950s as “displaced persons.”
In contrast to European Jews who suffered unspeakable horror under the Nazis and came to the U.S. to begin their shattered lives anew free from religious persecution, Mexicans who cross our borders uninvited are leaving economic hardship caused by successive corrupt and/or inept governments. Mexico is rich in natural resources, particularly petroleum, and a case can be made that it is among the wealthiest countries in the world – in fact, it is home to the richest man on Earth.
It should go without saying that each of the issues Bustamante raises in his report could most easily be resolved if forged documented aliens simply stayed on their side of the border while their green card or visa application is pending. And fewer of them would want to leave their homes if their country’s government and elite class spread some of the wealth around instead of lining their pockets with it, or hoarding it.
† CAIR: OfficeMax Drops Ads On Michael Savage’s Radio Program Because He Is "Anti-Muslim" (second item; “The Other Shoe Drops,” first item): U.S. District Judge Susan Illston said that she was leaning toward tossing out Michael Savage's copyright theft lawsuit against the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Savage contends that CAIR posted a four-minute clip from the “The Savage Nation” show on October 29th on its Web site "for purely commercial purposes” – to solicit donations - and to “damage" the show by pressing for an advertiser boycott, reports The Associated Press. Savage's attorney Daniel Horowitz argued that, “This property is Michael Savage's and they have to justify why they are taking it.” Despite a history of trying to squelch other people’s First Amendment rights, CAIR is claiming a free speech right to use the clip, and the group’s attorney Thomas Burke points to a 1986 ruling by a federal appeals court allowing the Moral Majority “to use Hustler Magazine's unflattering parody of … Rev. Jerry Falwell to raise money for a legal fund.” Illston said she found CAIR's arguments “persuasive,” but will allow Horowitz to revise the lawsuit to keep Savage's alive.
† Another Fake Autobiography: The New York Times reports that Margaret Seltzer, whose memoir, “Love and Consequences,” turned out to be an entire box of Kleenex® of lies, also “appears also to have made up a foundation that she claimed was helping ‘to reduce gang violence and mentor urban teens’” and that “[n]o record of the foundation could be found with the Internal Revenue Service or the states of Oregon, where Ms. Seltzer lives, or California.” The fictitious foundation, International Brother/SisterHood, is mentioned in the author bionote printed on the back flap of the book cover. A Web site launched by Seltzer’s agent Faye Bender to describe the foundation – but did not solicit donations - and promote her book has been taken down.
Meanwhile, novelist and screenwriter Mark Leyner unmasks none other than Franz Kafka as a fraud: It seems that his seminal work “The Metamorphosis” – which he claimed to his dying day was a fictional account of neighbor Gregor Samsa turning into a enormous cockroach – is true. Kafka’s editor tells Leyner: “We were duped. The whole story is pure, unadulterated non-fiction. This guy’s a complete con man.”
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