pardon me?

Last night, an intelligent, rational guy at a dinner party announced that women don't have it as bad in Iran as we think they do. That touched off a brief conversation that was quickly abandoned to keep the peace. (I couldn't disagree more with him and wonder if he knows Shirin Ebadi, Zahra Kazemi, or Jafar Panahi's stories.)

Meanwhile, here is news from Saudi Arabia, where twisted notions of honor are even more problematic for women.

Pardon Reported for Saudi Rape Victim
By KATHERINE ZOEPF
Published: December 18, 2007

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — King Abdullah has pardoned a woman who was sentenced to 200 lashes after pressing charges against seven men who raped her, a Saudi newspaper reported Monday.

There was no immediate confirmation from the Ministry of Justice or the Ministry of Information, but the newspaper, Al Jazirah, is close to the religious establishment that controls the Justice Ministry, Reuters reported.

The case has provoked a rare and angry public debate in Saudi Arabia, leading to renewed calls for reform of the Saudi judicial system.

The rape took place a year and a half ago in Qatif, a small Shiite town in the Eastern Province, center of the Saudi Arabia’s oil industry. The woman, who has been publicly identified only as the “Qatif girl,” said she met a former boyfriend to retrieve a photograph of herself. They were sitting in a car together when seven men attacked, raping them both.

The woman and the former boyfriend were originally sentenced to 90 lashes each for being together in private, while the attackers received sentences ranging from 10 months to five years in prison, and 80 to 1,000 lashes each. For a woman to be in seclusion with a man who is not her husband or a relative is a crime in Saudi Arabia, whose legal code is based on a strict Wahhabi interpretation of Islamic law.

Her lawyer, Abdulrahman al-Lahem, a well-known human rights activist, appealed, saying the attackers’ sentences were too lenient and that of the victim was too harsh. The appeal brought down the wrath of the court. In November, it doubled the woman’s sentence and stripped Mr. Lahem of his license to practice, but also increased the sentences of her attackers to prison terms of two to nine years.

Mr. Lahem could not be reached by phone late Monday, but the editor in chief of Al Watan, a leading Saudi daily that Mr. Lahem writes for, said that it has been known in Riyadh political circles since early this month that the woman would be pardoned. The editor, Jamal Khashoggi, said he believed that the timing of the pardon, on the eve of the Id al-Adha holiday, was coincidental.

“I’ve been hearing for two or three weeks now that the pardon would be issued,” Mr. Khashoggi said in a telephone interview.

“It has been expected that the girl would be pardoned in the end — in similar cases, very public cases like this, it has been the same. One of our writers was recently sentenced to a number of lashes and received a pardon from the king.”

Mr. Khashoggi said that the woman, who has married, had been living freely while her case was being appealed. There have been reports that her brother has tried to kill her to remove the “stain” to the family’s honor, and bloggers and international human rights activists have expressed concern for her safety.

The Saudi minister of social affairs, Dr. Abdul Mohsin Alakkas, reached by telephone, said that Saudi women who run into trouble with the law frequently fear retribution from their relatives. Some women who serve prison time refuse to leave prison at the end of their sentences, he said. The Ministry of Social Affairs operates special shelters for these women, and Dr. Alakkas said the Qatif victim would be able to live in one.

“If after the pardon she decides that she needs housing because of her circumstances, then we will offer that,” he said.

Commenting on the pardon, the Saudi justice minister, Abdullah bin Mohammed al-Sheik, told Al Jazirah that the king fully supported the verdicts against the woman but had decided to pardon her because it was in the “interests of the people.”

Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University who specializes in Saudi Arabia, said that this is a kind of “double message” that is commonly employed by the Saudi government.

“On one hand this tells people, ‘We support our system and we will punish you if you violate it,’ ” he said. “Yet he’s also showing mercy. Throughout, he’s making it clear that he is not disagreeing with the judge’s opinion on this sensitive issue of sexual chastity, but he believes that there is a higher interest to be served by the pardon, whether that’s relationships between Shiites and Sunnis, or international opinion.”

“Conservative scholars and judges will still take this pardon as a slap in the face,” Dr. Haykel continued.

“These decisions are always made like this, ad hoc, so that the core values and institutions of the Saudi state are not questioned or threatened.”

overcoming the tyranny of the gift

I have been registered as an organ donor since I turned 18. In college, I was typed and registered with the National Marrow Donor Program. But nowadays, I can't even give blood. To be fair, no one wants my blood, marrow, or organs because they carry the stigma (and risk) of cancer.

My bout with kidney cancer left me with one kidney instead of two. Although my creatinine, BUN, and other tests still have me in the "normal" kidney function range, I am very careful with the kidney that's left. I'm just hoping that I'm not in the position where I need a transplant or any medical heroics later in life.

This story left me thinking about how we as a society can better help those who in need of a transplant. I like the author's suggestion that we find ways to create incentives for donors. I realize that it's a sticky subject and a difficult public policy issue, but if we provided Medicare for life or some other long-term benefit (not short-term/ coercive incentives), I believe that we'd have a great deal more matches made and lives saved. (The simple fact is that charity/ altruism alone are not enough of an incentive.)

Meanwhile, when my time on this planet comes to an end, my living will stipulates that my organs be offered for transplant to anyone who needs (and wants) them. Failing that, I'd like for my body to be used for science. After all, I won't be needing it. And in the end, knowing that my body can help someone else (by saving a life or advancing human knowledge) is the best and highest purpose I can think of for something that I've quite literally outlived.

Desperately Seeking a Kidney
By SALLY SATEL
Published: December 16, 2007

In the fall of 2005, I started my first online relationship. He was a 62-year-old retiree from Canada; I was a 49-year-old psychiatrist living in Washington. Beginning in early October of that year, we talked or e-mailed several times a week. This arrangement was novel to both of us, so our conversations were tentative at first, but we soon grew more comfortable, and excitement over our shared vision blossomed. After a few weeks, we decided to meet for a uniquely intimate encounter. After New Year’s, the Canadian would fly to Washington to meet me — at a hospital, where he would give me one of his kidneys. Thank God.

My own kidneys were failing. On a steamy day in August 2004, I went to the doctor for a routine checkup. I was feeling fine, but a basic test revealed that my kidneys were shot, functioning at about 16 percent of normal capacity. One nephrologist I went to predicted that within roughly six months to a year I would need to begin dialysis. Three days a week, for four debilitating hours at a time, I would be tethered to a blood-cleansing machine. Even simple things like traveling to see friends or to give talks would be limited. This would very likely continue for at least five years until my name crawled to the top of the national list of people waiting for kidneys from the newly deceased. On average, 12 names, the death toll from the ever-growing organ shortage, would be scratched off the list each day.

A much better option would be to get a transplant from a living person. I had tried that and failed. Thus my plans for a rendezvous with a man I had never met. But shortly before Thanksgiving, he disappeared. I panicked. Everything turned to radio silence as my e-mail and phone messages went unanswered. Was I, a psychiatrist no less, crazy to have put my trust in a stranger who goes on the Internet to relinquish an organ?

Friends wanted to know why my kidneys were giving out, but there was no good answer. I didn’t have diabetes or hypertension, the most common causes of end-stage renal disease. My doctor’s theory was that my kidney damage may have been caused by a medication I had taken during my 20s. The one thing we knew was that whatever was destroying my kidneys did so stealthily. Like most organs, kidneys have impressive reserves, and the slower they deteriorate, the longer they can keep up a good front, maintaining blood pressure, balancing the salt and electrolytes in the blood and, of course, producing about one to two liters of urine a day. I remembered a line from “The Sun Also Rises,” when a drunkard is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he answers. “Gradually and then suddenly.” That was how my kidneys went out of business too.

The obvious place to find a donor is your own family, but that was not really an option for me. My parents were not alive and would have been far too old to help me even if they were. I have no siblings and only three cousins; I hadn’t seen two of them since high school; and the third I see maybe once every two or three years. I couldn’t call out of the blue with this news. I could just imagine my relatives tsking into the phone, “You only call when you want something.” Indeed.

Theoretically, kidneys should be in booming supply. Virtually everyone has two, and healthy individuals can give one away and still lead perfectly normal lives. Yet people aren’t exactly lining up to give. At the beginning of 2005, when I put my name on the list, there were about 60,000 people ahead of me; by the end of that year, only 1 in 9 had received one from a relative, spouse or friend. Today, just under 74,000 people are waiting for kidneys.

I wanted my donor to be completely anonymous so I could avoid the treacherous intimacy of accepting an organ from someone I knew. I would have gladly paid someone to give me a kidney, but exchanging money for an organ is a felony in this country. Altruistic giving is the metaphorical bedrock of our transplant system. Organ donation, we are told, should be the ultimate gift: the “gift of life,” a sublime act of generosity. The giver — whether living or deceased — must not expect to be enriched in any way.

In late 2004, not long after I learned my kidneys were failing and a little over a year before I met the Canadian online, I told one of my best friends about my diagnosis. She and I first met more than 20 years before at the medical school at Yale, when I was finishing my residency in psychiatry and she was an instructor in the same department. Dr. Yale, as I’ll refer to her to protect her privacy, is a feisty blend of bubbly energy (last summer she made me ride the Cyclone with her at Coney Island) and intellectual seriousness (she is training to be a psychoanalyst). She immediately offered to check her blood type. I needed someone with type A or O, and in uncomplicated cases like mine, blood-type matching is usually one of the biggest hurdles to compatibility. Dr. Yale was type O. Presto!

She said she needed to talk it over with her husband but thought it would be fine. A week later, however, she said it wasn’t. “Giving you a kidney seemed a perfectly natural thing to do,” she told me. “I had the time, and I wanted to do what I could and in a clear way, far clearer than the vague helpfulness of say, psychiatry. But then I mentioned my plan to donate to a fellow alto at chorus rehearsal one evening.” As it turned out, the alto in question was no typical acquaintance: she was a transplant surgeon. My friend continued: “She was very surprised that I was planning to donate to a friend and then pulled an article out of her bag about hemorrhaging after donating.” The exchange set off a spiral of anxiety in Dr. Yale’s mind — What if my brother or kids need my kidney? What if I had complications from surgery? I’m sorry, she said matter-of-factly, and that was that.

I understood that my friend wanted to spend her kidney wisely. What mystifies me still is how she got so spooked. After all, Dr. Yale was a physician herself, capable of weighing the risks. The operation is done by laparoscope, leaving only a modest three-inch scar; she would have been out of the hospital after two or three nights. Most important, the chance of death is tiny — 2 in every 10,000 transplants — and the long-term health risks are generally negligible.

More baffling to me, though, was the fact that she was talked out of donating by a person who removes and implants organs for a living. I was outraged. A transplant surgeon, of all people, knows how hard it is to find a donor, how grueling dialysis can be and how significant the health benefits of a “pre-emptive” transplant (that is, one received before the patient goes on dialysis) are. Not to mention the fact that hemorrhaging after donation is unusual. How dare she discourage someone who was ready to donate! Or had my friend been ready? It doesn’t matter now. But at the time, the surgeon was such a ready scapegoat that I could push the uneasy question about Dr. Yale aside.

I fumed for a week and then got over it because I figured it was early and it wouldn’t be hard to find someone else. And sure enough, two more friends quickly stepped forward to have their blood typed. It turned out they were poor matches for me.

A week after my 49th birthday in January 2005, half a year after being given a diagnosis of renal failure, a friend and I were drinking coffee at a Starbucks when I wondered aloud if I would find a donor before I reached 50. I wasn’t hinting. I knew she would never offer because she was so squeamish about blood and pain. My friend, whom I met a decade before when we were both new to Washington and worked together on an advocacy project, was a little older than I; she was charming, stylish, smart — and a hypochondriac.

Nor, to be honest, did I want her kidney. Anyone as anxious about health as she was would surely view donation as a white-knuckle ordeal. And the bigger the sacrifice for her, the heavier the burden of reciprocity on me. The bigger the burden on me, the more I would resent her. Then I would feel guilty over resenting her and, in turn, resent the guilt. Who could survive inside this echo chamber of reverberating emotions? Thank goodness my friend would be holding on to her kidney.

But then to my amazement, within a minute or so of my speculating when or if a donor would ever appear, she offered to do it. Later that night we talked on the phone and she rhapsodized about what a “mitzvah” it would be. Yes, her sentiments were lovely, but I felt secretly annoyed because I knew it was her habit to embark upon grandiose plans; when they fizzled, she would just shrug. I told her that giving me a kidney was out of the question — “It would be too weird,” was what I kept saying — but she persisted. I couldn’t quite believe it when she told her family of her decision (they were graciously in favor) and then had blood tests and consulted with my transplant team.

Gradually, I began to believe that she meant it, and I decided to embrace her just as you might accept an in-law, as someone who could drive you a little mad but whom you loved because they were the source of something very precious to you — in my case, not a spouse but a kidney. But then after a few months she stopped talking about it. When I finally broke the silence, she said her doctor had advised against it. More likely, I thought, she was scared. I felt sorry to have put her in this position, but I was also bitter: just when would she have gotten around to telling me?

Such near-transplant experiences are not uncommon. All of the transplant candidates I spoke to, as part of my own small nonscientific sample, mentioned at least one person who promised to donate, had some tests done and then developed cold feet. Transplant teams explicitly, and properly, offer face-saving “medical alibis” to potential donors who don’t really want to go through with it, which suggests that bailing out isn’t all that rare. They might tell the person needing the transplant and the rest of the family, for example, that additional tests on the prospective donor revealed a compatibility problem or some evidence that the donor might be putting her own health at risk.

What’s next, I wondered? I couldn’t imagine asking friends or colleagues to donate; it was too momentous a request. Not because the risks are great, but because the idea scares the hell out of a lot of people. Also, the recent drama with my friend was a potent reminder of just how suffocating a lifelong obligation might be. Maybe when I began to feel really ill, I would force myself to ask. But not now.

The “tyranny of the gift” is an artful term coined by the medical sociologists Renée C. Fox and Judith P. Swazey to capture the way immense gratitude at receiving a kidney can morph into a sense of constricting obligation. In their 1992 book, “Spare Parts: Organ Replacement in American Society,” the authors write, “The giver, the receiver and their families may find themselves locked in a creditor-debtor vise that binds them one to another in a mutually fettering way.”

I had read of a brother who was so overwhelmed by feelings of obligation that he could “not even stand to look at” his donor sister. And I was also aware of the lengths people went to to avoid the vise: the son who refused a kidney from an overbearing mother, telling his surgeon, “She’s devoured enough of me already”; the young man who chose to remain on dialysis rather than accept a kidney from his long-term girlfriend lest he be forced to reciprocate by marrying her.

Maimonides, the 12th-century Jewish physician and philosopher, believed that anonymous giving was nobler than charity performed face to face because it protected the beneficiary from shame or a sense of indebtedness. He was onto something. I ruminated constantly about what it would mean to be related to someone “by organ.” Would my future donor assume a proprietary interest in how I lived my life, since she had made it possible? Would she make sure I was taking proper care of “our” kidney or lord her sacrifice over me? Or would I hold it over my own head, constantly questioning whether I might have said or done anything that could offend or disappoint my donor, anything that might be taken as ingratitude? How could a relationship breathe under such stifling conditions? It was exhausting to think about; I wanted no part of a debtor-creditor relationship. I didn’t want a gift, I wanted a kidney.

Naturally, I was preoccupied with the ways in which the gift might tyrannize me, but for every patient who wonders, “Do I want to accept?” there are many more prospective donors who ask, “Do I want to give?” News that a patient needs a transplant quickly leads to anxious glances among relatives, wondering who the future donor will be. “I and others had seen refusal of donation lead to ostracism within a family or donation made as a reluctant sacrifice to someone for whom there was little or no affection,” wrote Thomas E. Starzl, the pre-eminent transplant surgeon, in his memoirs. “If a prospective donor was deficient in some way, usually intellectually, the family power structure tended to focus on his or her presumed expendability.” This so troubled Starzl that he stopped performing live kidney transplants in 1972.

Donors can have their own agendas, too. The academic literature on donor psychology offers many examples, like a man who sought the adulation of his community by offering a kidney to his minister, a daughter who competed with her own mother to be the rescuer of another family member and a woman who told researchers that her motive for wanting to give a kidney to a stranger was to become “‘Daddy’s good girl.” Then there is the “black-sheep donor,” a wayward relative who shows up to offer an organ as an act of redemption, hoping to reposition himself in the family’s good graces. For others, donation is a sullen fulfillment of familial duty, a way to avoid the shame and guilt of allowing a relative to suffer needlessly and even die.

By comparison, friends are better insulated from emotional pressures; their compassion is less likely to be tinged with obligation, let alone tainted by it. And the rare Good Samaritan donor who cold-calls a transplant center to donate to the next suitable person in the queue, not even knowing who will get his kidney, surely embodies the purest form of altruism. In the end, though, people who don’t want to donate usually manage to extract themselves. They miss appointments for screening tests or just drop out of the process.

People who actually do become donors, however, usually regard it as a supremely gratifying experience: they were given a blessed opportunity to save a life, a chance that relatives of a dying cancer patient can only dream of. I’ve read of siblings jousting to give an organ to a cherished parent and of adult children who were heartbroken when doctors ruled them out on medical grounds. According to a review of published surveys on donor attitudes by Mary Amanda Dew, a psychologist as the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, about 95 percent of donors say they would do it again. Most experience a boost in self-worth and enjoy feelings of deep purpose, while only a small minority regret having donated or report that their relationships with recipients changed for the worse.

From my medical training, I was familiar with some of the ins and outs of end-stage renal disease. I had an especially morbid dread of dialysis. The playwright Neil Simon received a kidney from his longtime publicist in 2004 — “The Odd Donor Couple,” as The New York Times put it — but before that he endured 18 wretched months on dialysis, suffering cramps and vomiting spells that kept him largely confined to his house. His memory deteriorated, and he hated the time away from his writing. Shortly before his donor came forward (unsolicited, it should be noted), Simon’s doctors said he might have to start spending more time on dialysis. If that were necessary, he said, he had decided, “I didn’t want to live my life anymore.” Neither, I thought, would I.

It is possible that I was overestimating how miserable I would be on dialysis. An avalanche of psychological data shows that people are far better at handling adversity when it actually befalls them than they expect they will be. Still, I was quite sure I would flout the longstanding evidence attesting to human adaptability. On dialysis I would be disconsolate and maybe even suicidal if the wait for an organ were to stretch for years. As dispiriting, I would lose all my friends. Not that I expected them to abandon me. I would abandon them out of anger for not rescuing me.

By the end of the summer of 2005, a year after the diagnosis, there was no donor in sight. I was mentally preparing myself to undergo the standard predialysis operation to create “access” to the machine. A vein and artery in my arm would be joined to create a large superficial vessel for the insertion of needles and tubing that would carry my blood to and from the machine. I resisted, but I knew that soon I wouldn’t be able to put off dialysis any longer.

The “tyranny of the gift” now took on a new meaning for me. It was no longer about moral debt; it was about the very fact that an organ had to be a gift, about the tyranny of the system. I heard of people trying to persuade strangers to give them organs. They put up bulletin boards or started Web sites (GordyNeedsAKidney.org, whose opening page carried the plaintive headline, “Please Help Our Dad”). I flirted with the idea of becoming a “transplant tourist” in Turkey or the Philippines, where I could buy a kidney. Or going to China, where I would have to face the frightful knowledge that my kidney would probably come from an executed prisoner. Grim choices, but I was afraid I could die on dialysis if I didn’t do something to save myself.

In October 2005, I stumbled across a Web site called MatchingDonors.com that helps link potential donors and recipients. Once a match is made, the process follows the standard path, with physicians at a transplant center determining whether to proceed. I was given space to describe myself and to post photos. I read a few of the requests. There were parents wanting to see their young children grow up; a new husband hoping to have children with his wife before her kidneys failed; a 70-year-old grandmother yearning to see her only granddaughter get married.

My God, how could I possibly compete with these people? I wouldn’t leave children motherless or miss the milestones of life; were I a prospective donor, even I wouldn’t have picked me. I took a minimalist approach to my statement, hoping it would attract a no-nonsense donor who appreciated reserve. I wanted to stand out as the “applicant” who wasn’t begging; no emotional blackmail here. Of course, I would have poured out every detail of my moribund state most operatically if I were living on dialysis or near death. I thought of boosting my stock by mentioning that I was a psychiatrist at a methadone clinic, but the prospect of heroin addicts bereft of their shrink might not conjure a poignant Hippocratic tableau. In the end, I simply wrote: “Type A blood. 49 yr old female physician . . . idiopathic kidney failure. Otherwise healthy. Aug 2004 discovered chronic renal failure during routine blood test. BUN 80, Cr 7. Not yet on dialysis. Doctor predicts organ would be needed by Jan. 06.”

Three days later, the Canadian called. He told me he considered becoming a donor five years ago when he heard through his church about someone who was failing on dialysis. That was the most personal thing I ever learned about him. Well into November, we were in regular contact, yet our phone calls rarely lasted more than 10 minutes. He asked about my health, and we would talk about logistics — whether my insurance would pay for his tests, whether he could take time away from a project he was working on and so on. I ended the calls blubbering with gratitude, and he would tell me to stop.

Although the Canadian seemed kind and steady, he had enormous power over me. I deliberately kept our calls brief to minimize my chances of saying something that might antagonize him. I wondered why he chose me, but I dared not ask, lest his decision was based on a misconception of who I was. Would I then be morally bound to set him straight so that he wasn’t giving a body part under false pretenses? What if he loathed conservatives? After all, he was involved in politics, and I was associated with a right-of-center think tank.

This is ridiculous, I told myself; a person whose inspiration to donate is forged in church is surely above partisanship in such matters. Still, until both of us were snug in our adjoining operating rooms, I could never relax — everything was tentative, conditional and prone to collapse. I prayed the Canadian wouldn’t talk about his decision to donate (and the identity of his recipient) with his family or friends. They could look me up online and not like what they saw or think I wasn’t sick enough to warrant heroics on his part or turn him against the idea of donating altogether.

Yet from what I could tell, the Canadian’s only agenda was the act itself. Had I detected any hint of ambivalence, I would have cut him loose immediately, since each false hope ate up irreplaceable time. But, it turned out, I misread him. About a week before Thanksgiving, the Canadian went dark. By then I was fatigued most of the time and fluid was pooling in my ankles. I took four antihypertensive drugs a day and had injections of a hormone that stimulated my body to make more red blood cells. Dialysis was closing in.

Around Christmas, the Canadian finally called. The conversation went as if nothing had happened. I didn’t dare ask about his silence; instead, I forced myself to sound upbeat and touched on the few things I knew about his life: that he was volunteering on a political campaign and that his father had been ill. He swore he was still “raring to go with the transplant,” which my transplant coordinator, a young woman named Julie, had tentatively scheduled for January. I wanted to press him for a firmer promise, but I worried that if I betrayed my irritation, he might be offended: “That’s it!” I imagined him saying, just before he slammed down the phone like a twisted character in a “Seinfeld” episode. “No kidney for you!”

A few days later, Julie contacted him. Straight-talking and bright-eyed, Julie spoke to the Canadian in a way I could not. “We need to know how to proceed,” she told him firmly. “There is no time to spare. Can you be here in January for the surgery?” He conceded that the campaign he was working on was too unpredictable. Julie said he seemed to feel genuinely bad about reneging, but he did not tell her to convey that disappointment to me, and I never heard from him again.

I was astonished at the Canadian’s . . . what? Negligence, cowardice, rudeness? It was a sickening roller-coaster ride: hope yielding to helpless frustration, gratitude giving way to fury. How dare he reduce me to groveling and dependence? Yet I assume he intended no such thing. I think the Canadian was actually quite devoted to the idea of giving a kidney — just not necessarily now or to me. Then, again, it occurred to me that one of the most brilliantly cruel games a sadist could devise would be to promise an organ with the plan of later snatching it away.

The Canadian knew that I was relying on him, that I suspended my donor search when we settled on a date for the transplant. At the very least, he owed me an apology — not so much for backing out, although by now I was frantic over that, but because he led me on for weeks. And would have continued doing so had Julie not pushed him. The truth, naturally, was that I had no right to anything of his, let alone something so absolutely and intimately his as a kidney. Who could dare to presume — or even appear to presume — that his kidney was meant for me? I was thoroughly confused about how entitled I was to hate him. Meanwhile, my kidneys were deteriorating, and I didn’t have time for more cycles of commitment, silence and rejection.

Salvation came out of nowhere. In early November 2005, a few weeks before the Canadian withdrew, I received an e-mail message from a friend — a fond acquaintance really — whom I knew from the think-tank circuit. “Serious offer” was the message in the subject line. It was from Virginia Postrel, a 45-year-old author and journalist. (She has written for the business pages of The Times and for this magazine.) Known for her original mind, she is especially popular within libertarian intellectual circles. Virginia ran into a mutual friend at a meeting, who told her about me, and she sent an e-mail message within days: “If I’m compatible, I’ll be a donor. Best, Virginia” Two weeks later, she sent this: “By the way, I absolutely promise you that I will not back out.” Intuitively, she had grasped the golden rule of responsible donorship.

Mercifully, Virginia was the right blood type; even better, she was the right personality type. In early March, four days before our operations, she came to D.C. from her home in Dallas. On March 4, 2006, I became the proud owner of Virginia’s right kidney. She was out of the hospital after three nights; I was home after seven; our recoveries were uneventful. I require no drugs except medication that prevents my body from rejecting the new organ.

Though Virginia never before gave blood or even signed an organ donor card, the decision to donate, she told me, was quick and sure: “I felt intense empathy and imagined how desperate you must feel,” she said.“I liked the idea of being able to help in a straightforward way — to be able to cure a sick friend rather than just bring food or send a card.

Virginia was the perfect donor for me. For one thing, she lives far away. She also has an ingrained respect for personal privacy. She never suggested that I might owe her a thing beyond the extraordinary gratitude that decency demands. And she is bracingly pragmatic. “I have a very instrumental view of my body,” she told me, “so when you needed a part, I was happy to give it. I knew you had no family. I wouldn’t have done this for a stranger, but I would do it, I did do it, for someone I cared about even though we weren’t close.”

My story, it turns out, is a triumph of altruism. Looking back, I see that my anxiety over my future donor was a neurotic luxury. I worried about finding the ideal donor, but thousands of people have no donor at all — no relative who will do it out of love or obligation, no friend out of kindness, no stranger out of humane impulse. Alas, I have no kidney to give away. Instead, I am urging wherever I can — in articles, in lectures, from assorted rooftops — that society has a moral imperative to expand the idea of “the gift.”

Altruism is a beautiful virtue, but it has fallen painfully short of its goal. We must be bold and experiment with offering prospective donors other incentives for giving, not necessarily payment but material reward of some kind — perhaps something as simple as offering donors lifelong Medicare coverage. Or maybe Congress should grant waivers so that states can implement their own creative ways of giving something to donors: tax credits, tuition vouchers or a contribution to a giver’s retirement account.

In short, we should reward individuals who relinquish an organ to save a life because doing so would encourage others to do the same. Yes, splendid people like Virginia will always be moved to rescue in the face of suffering, and I did get my kidney. But unless we stop thinking of transplantable kidneys solely as gifts, we will never have enough of them.

Sally Satel is a psychiatrist and lecturer at the Yale University School of Medicine and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

quotable

"Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest."
-Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), better known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American humanist, humorist, satirist, lecturer and writer.

that's amore

It all began when we visited San Francisco. Zack, the adorable boyfriend of one of Leo's Boston buddies, turned on trash TV and left the "A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila" marathon on.

Yes, it was trashy. Yes, it was MTV. Yes, it was "reality" tv. But we got sucked in anyway.

We've watched the episodes (online) since then and even sent Zack a thank-you note last month where we waxed on about our love of Domenico and Dani.

We know they both have no chance in hell of winning, but he's a good comic foil to all the testosterone freak boys and Dani's a boyish breath of fresh air compared to the surgically enhanced, vacuous bitches "in love" with Tila.

... and Domenico is just fabulous. They should do a reality show focused on him.

Several weeks later, it's down to two contestants and a finale next Tuesday. Also, rumors are surfacing that Tila's not really bi (or single, for that matter). And, yes, we still want Domenico and Dani to have their own tv show, with Dani's grandma, of course. (I just found out that Domenico is getting his own show, called "That's Amore.")

But if Tila breaks Dani's heart, I may just hate her forever. Meanwhile, I thought this piece, on Tila being a bi tv pioneer, was interesting:

AlterNet: Tila Tequila’s Bisexual Dating Show Is More Than Just Trashy Fun
By Nicole Kristal, American Sexuality Magazine. Posted December 13, 2007.
MTV's reality dating show A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila takes on some of society's worst stereotypes about gender and sexuality.

For those of you who haven't noticed, we bisexuals finally scored our own show -- A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila. Unfortunately, it's a reality program made by a former producer of The Bachelor that places Tequila, an exotic Asian American femme with plenty of tattoos, cleavage, and low-cut halter tops, at the center of a battle between sixteen straight men (who have the maturity of frat boys on Jägermeister) and sixteen trashy lesbians (many of whom resemble strippers much like the woman they're pursuing). Despite the contestants, the show proves to be trashy fun that grows less superficial -- mostly due to the maturity of its star -- with each episode. A surprising feat considering that most of us, that is most of us over the age of twenty-one, didn't even have a clue who Tequila was until MTV aired this show.

Known for having two million MySpace friends, writing provocative songs like "Fuck Ya Man" and "Stripper Friends," and being a Maxim cover girl, Tequila (for obvious reasons) isn't the ideal bisexual poster child. During the first episode Tequila's slutty behavior and ignorant commentary made me want to hurl things at my television. Aside from her penchant for approaching the contestants in the house and randomly making out with them then walking away, Tequila also reinforces another major bisexual stereotype -- she keeps her sexuality a secret from her potential suitors. When they arrive at the house, Tequila hasn't told any of the men or women that she's bisexual, let alone that they will be competing with members of the opposite sex for her affections. Even worse, when she tells them her sexuality in a dramatic ending to the first episode, she says, "I'm a bisexual," not "I'm bisexual." That's like Ellen DeGeneres saying, "I'm a gay." Not exactly confidence inspiring. Neither is her admission that she's a complete horndog. Tequila confides to a male Italian contestant that she has to masturbate nine times a day in order to be satisfied. Not exactly helping our image there, either, lady!

Despite claiming that both men and women have broken her heart, Tequila's clearly a new bisexual, which makes her comments and influence somewhat dangerous to seasoned members of the bi community like me. In earlier episodes she has a proclivity for turning to the camera and saying unintentionally damaging things like, "This show's the perfect experience because it's really going to help me figure out -- do I really like a guy or do I really like a girl?" Umm, the point isn't to determine whether you're straight or gay. You're allegedly bisexual, you idiot!

The point of a bisexual dating show shouldn't be to prove that we all eventually develop a preference, abandon our fence-sitting ways, and settle into a heterosexual or homosexual lifestyle. And it definitely shouldn't be to center an entire show around a bi-curious straight girl who'd make out with a woman at a nightclub after a few cocktails for the pleasure of her boyfriend. And after watching the first few episodes of the show, I wasn't entirely sure Tequila wasn't that girl. When she screams things like, "I don't know about you guys but I love strip clubs. Are you ready to party?" I can't help but miss Ani DiFranco.

The competitions on the show are designed to highlight gender roles and thus help Tequila better decide whom to eliminate. In many cases she behaves like a straight man. In the first episode she makes the female contestants play dress up and walk a runway in maid, Catholic school girl, and dominatrix-style outfits so she can objectify them like a dude, then eliminate the least sexy ones. She eliminates the male virgin for inexperience in the first few episodes, but keeps the female virgin around, excited about exploiting her innocence. She doesn't hesitate to scream, "Look at that ass!" as both men and women slither around in a tub full of bath bubbles looking for chips that will grant them alone time with her. But as the season progresses Tequila also proves to be genuine and multi-faceted despite her superficial packaging and dirty talk.

After the first few episodes Tequila stops consoling the lesbians with comments like, "I'm just trying to figure it out right now," and starts saying intelligent things like, "It just depends on the person, it's not 'a guy' or 'a girl.'" She puts looks aside, opting to eliminate pretty boys in order to keep goofy guys with senses of humor around and drops most of the trashy, self-centered lesbians, one of whom physically attacks another contestant when she isn't chosen to stay in the house. But Tequila's openness and lack of superficiality truly shines when despite her claim that she only likes "lipstick lesbians," she falls for a warm-hearted soft butch who puts on no airs and refuses to dress in the skimpy outfits chosen by the producers. As the number of contestants is narrowed and Tequila truly begins to get to know the men and women, even traveling to meet their families, she encounters a very bisexual dilemma -- the former Playboy model starts to connect emotionally and fall in love with both the men and the women.

Getting to observe this on television is a first. I, too, have fallen simultaneously for a man and a woman, and if you're not bi, you'll never understand the unique challenge it poses. I've never had the opportunity before to watch a fellow bisexual woman struggle on national television with the disadvantages and advantages of dating both sexes, and for this reason alone, the show is truly groundbreaking. It also exposes the common prejudices and assumptions straight men and lesbians have about bisexual women.

Some of the guys on the show predictably say they want to be Tequila's primary relationship but admit they are open to threesomes. Other men express anxiety and insecurities about competing for a woman with other women. One lesbian is so repulsed after she learns Tequila is bi, she quits the show, while other lesbians try to undermine each other by telling Tequila they believe other female contestants are "confused" and not sure they're only into women. These are all realistic scenarios most bisexuals encounter while dating monosexuals, and I truly feel Tequila's frustrations as she tries to sort through the drama. But I don't have a lot of sympathy for her given the venue where she's chosen to come out. Perhaps the most frustrating element of the show is why a bisexual woman would close herself off from the possibility of dating another bisexual. It would seemingly solve a lot of problems but not Tequila's own insecurities. Early in the show she expresses her concern that the contestants will lose their focus on her and start hooking up with each other. The concern proves valid when a "lesbian" contestant fools around with a man and another woman, showing viewers much to my delight that even static sexuality can be fluid in the monosexual community, let alone when the cameras are rolling.

But after Tequila ultimately gets real and eliminates the contestants who cheat on her or who don't seem capable of a genuine connection, she impresses me again by realizing her original assumptions about bisexuality were wrong. She admits, "You know when I first started out it was more 'do I want to be with a girl' or 'do I want to be with a guy?' and that was it. But now that I'm involved, I have two girls left and one guy. They're people that I really love and in this case, love has no gender." Pretty evolved commentary for someone who hasn't even come out to her own parents.

Who will Tequila ultimately pick? Who cares? I, along with bisexuals everywhere who bothered to watch this far, are just breathing a collective sigh of relief that she actually goes both ways -- not just in her loins, but in her heart.

Nicole Kristal is the co-author of The Bisexual's Guide to the Universe: Quips, Tips, And Lists for Those Who Go Both Ways.

food for thought

I'll admit that I love to hate fast food joints. I avoid them for the same reason I do WAL-MART: giving money to the corporations behind them (instead of your local mom and pop businesses) means killing your local economy. As someone who tries to be a conscientious consumer, I can't support that.

I also avoid fast food because I prefer not to eat a heart attack on a plate (not to mention the fact that it takes 3 gallons of water to quench my thirst after the sodium overload most processed foods deliver).

But this article reminds me to remember the politics on my plate and to be cognizant of the healthiness (or lack thereof) of the food options at my local greasy spoon, as well.

Where's the Beef?: Thank McDonald's for keeping you thin.
Greg Beato | January 2008 Print Edition

Imagine if McDonald’s picked up your bill any time you managed to eat 10 Big Macs in an hour or less. What if Wendy’s replaced its wimpy Baconator with an unstoppable meat-based assassin that could truly make your aorta explode—say, 20 strips of bacon instead of six, enough cheese slices to roof a house, and instead of two measly half-pound patties that look as emaciated as the Olsen twins, five pounds of the finest ground beef, with five pounds of fries on the side? Morgan Spurlock’s liver would seek immediate long-term asylum at the nearest vegan co-op.

Alas, this spectacle will never come to pass. McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and the rest of their fast food brethren are far too cowed by their critics to commit such crimes against gastronomy. But you can get a free dinner with as many calories as 10 Big Macs at the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo, Texas, if you can eat a 72-ounce sirloin steak, a baked potato, a salad, a dinner roll, and a shrimp cocktail in 60 minutes or less. And if you’re craving 10 pounds of junk food on a single plate, just go to Eagle’s Deli in Boston, Massachusetts, where the 10-storey Challenge Burger rises so high you practically need a ladder to eat it.

Fast food makes such a savory scapegoat for our perpetual girth control failures that it’s easy to forget we eat less than 20 percent of our meals at the Golden Arches and its ilk. It’s also easy to forget that before America fell in love with cheap, convenient, standardized junk food, it loved cheap, convenient, independently deep-fried junk food.

During the first decades of the 20th century, lunch wagons, the predecessors to diners, were so popular that cities often passed regulations limiting their hours of operation. In 1952, three years before Ray Kroc franchised his first McDonald’s, one out of four American adults was considered overweight; a New York Times editorial declared that obesity was “our nation’s primary health problem.” The idea that rootless corporate invaders derailed our healthy native diet may be chicken soup for the tubby trial lawyer’s soul, but in reality overeating fatty, salty, sugar-laden food is as American as apple pie.

Nowhere is this truth dramatized more deliciously than in basic-cable fare like the Food Channel’s Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives and the Travel Channel’s World’s Best Places to Pig Out. Watch these shows often enough, and your Trinitron may develop Type 2 diabetes. Big Macs and BK Stackers wouldn’t even pass as hors d’oeuvres at these heart attack factories.

Yet unlike fast food chains, which are generally characterized as sterile hegemons that force-feed us like foie gras geese, these independently owned and operated greasy spoons are touted as the very (sclerosed) heart of whatever town they’re situated in, the key to the region’s unique flavor, and, ultimately, the essence of that great, multicultural melting pot that puts every homogenizing fast food fryolator to shame: America!

Instead of atomizing families and communities, dives and diners bring them together. Instead of tempting us with empty calories at cheap prices, they offer comfort food and honest value. Instead of destroying our health, they serve us greasy authenticity on platters the size of manhole covers.

As the patrons of these temples to cholesterol dig into sandwiches so big they could plug the Lincoln Tunnel, they always say the same thing. They’ve been coming to these places for years. They started out as kids accompanying their parents, and now they bring their kids with them.

While such scenes play out, you can’t help but wonder: Doesn’t that obesity lawsuit trailblazer John Banzhaf have cable? Shouldn’t he be ejaculating torts out of every orifice upon witnessing such candid testimonies to the addictive power of old-timey diner fare? And more important: Shouldn’t we thank our fast food chains for driving so many of these places out of business and thus limiting our exposure to chili burgers buried beneath landfills of onion rings? Were it not for the relative restraint of Big Macs and Quarter Pounders, the jiggling behemoths who bruise the scales on The Biggest Loser each week might instead be our best candidates for America’s Next Top Model.

Three years ago, when Supersize Me appeared in theaters and fast food replaced Osama bin Laden as the greatest threat to the American way of life, the industry sought refuge in fruit and yogurt cups and the bland, sensible countenance of Jared the Subway Guy. Today chains are still trying to sell the idea that they offer healthy choices to their customers; see, for example, Burger King’s plans to sell apple sticks dolled up in French fry drag. But they’re starting to reclaim their boldness too, provoking the wrath of would-be reformers once again.

Last summer, when McDonald’s started selling supersized sodas under a wonderfully evocative pseudonym, the Hugo, it earned a prompt tsk-tsking from The New York Times. When Hardee’s unveiled its latest affront to sensible eating, a 920-calorie breakfast burrito, the senior nutritionist for the Center for Science in the Public Interest derided it as “another lousy invention by a fast-food company.” When San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford saw a TV commercial for Wendy’s Baconator, he fulminated like a calorically correct Jerry Falwell: “Have the noxious fast-food titans not yet been forced to stop concocting vile products like this, or at least to dial down the garish marketing of their most ultra-toxic products, given how the vast majority of Americans have now learned (haven’t they?) at least a tiny modicum about human health?”

Culinary reformers around the country have been trying to turn such microwaved rhetoric into reality. In New York City, health officials have been attempting to introduce a regulation that will require any restaurant that voluntarily publicizes nutritional information about its fare to post calorie counts on its menus and menu boards. Because most single-unit operations don’t provide such information in any form, this requirement will apply mainly to fast food outlets and other chains. When a federal judge ruled against the city’s original ordinance, city health officials went back for seconds, revising the proposal to comply with his ruling. If this revised proposal goes into effect, any chain that operates 15 or more restaurants under the same name nationally will have to post nutritional information on the menus and menu boards of the outlets it operates in New York City.

In Los Angeles, City Councilmember Jan Perry has been trying to get her colleagues to support an ordinance that would impose a moratorium on fast food chains in South L.A., where 28 percent of the 700,000 residents live in poverty and 45 percent of the 900 or so restaurants serve fast food. “The people don’t want them, but when they don’t have any other options, they may gravitate to what’s there,” Perry told the Los Angeles Times, gravitating toward juicy, flame-broiled delusion. Apparently her constituents are choking down Big Macs only because they’ve already eaten all the neighborhood cats and figure that lunch at McDonald’s might be slightly less painful than starving to death. And how exactly will banning fast food outlets encourage Wolfgang Puck and Whole Foods Markets to set up shop in a part of town they’ve previously avoided? Is the threat of going head to head with Chicken McNuggets that much of a disincentive?

Suppose reformers like Perry get their wish and fast food chains are regulated out of existence. Would the diners and dives we celebrate on basic cable start serving five-pound veggie burgers with five pounds of kale on the side? Only diet hucksters and true chowhounds would benefit from a world where the local McDonald’s gave way to places serving 72-ounce steaks and burgers that reach toward the heavens like Manhattan skyscrapers. The rest of us would be left longing for that bygone era when, on every block, you could pick up something relatively light and healthy, like a Double Western Bacon Cheeseburger from Carl’s Jr.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato is a writer in San Francisco.
Via Leo

man-ning up

Leave it to the Onion to provide some post-finals laughs. (Leo found this funnier than I did, but it might have been the fact that I was still on the crashing side of the post-exam adrenaline rush/panic that came from two in-class exams yesterday.)

Man Finally Put In Charge Of Struggling Feminist Movement | The Onion
December 3, 2007 | Issue 43•49
WASHINGTON—After decades spent battling gender discrimination and inequality in the workplace, the feminist movement underwent a high-level shake-up last month, when 53-year-old management consultant Peter "Buck" McGowan took over as new chief of the worldwide initiative for women's rights.

McGowan, who now oversees the group's day-to-day operations, said he "couldn't be happier" to bring his ambition, experience, and no-nonsense attitude to his new role as the nation's top feminist.

"All the feminist movement needed to do was bring on someone who had the balls to do something about this glass ceiling business," said McGowan, who quickly closed the 23.5 percent gender wage gap by "making a few calls to the big boys upstairs." "In the world of gender identity and empowered female sexuality, it's all about who you know."

McGowan, who was selected from a pool of roughly 150 million candidates, made eliminating sexual harassment his first priority before working on securing reproductive rights for women in all 50 states, and promoting healthy body images through an influx of strong, independent female characters in TV, magazines, and film.

"It's about time," McGowan said upon returning from a golf game with several "network honchos" in which he brokered a deal to bring a variety of women's sports to prime-time television. "These ladies should have brought me on years ago."

McGowan claimed that one of the main reasons the movement enjoyed so little success in the past was that the previous management was often too timid and passive and should have been much more results-focused.

"You can't waste time pussyfooting around with protests and getting all emotional about a bunch of irrelevant details," McGowan said. "If you want to enjoy equal rights, you have to have a real man-to-man chat with the people in charge until you can hammer out some more equitable custody laws."

"And don't get me started on how disorganized and scatterbrained their old fundraising methods were," McGowan added. "Let's just say the movement never really had a head for numbers."

After McGowan successfully appointed three of his best men to lead Smith College's women's studies department and called in some favors to a number of powerful board chairmen to triple the number of female CEOs in Fortune 500 companies, analysts predicted that the feminist movement could achieve all of McGowan's goals by as early as 2009.

"With a charismatic, self-assured guy like Pete pulling the strings, we might even see a female elected president one of these days," said Nathan Roth, an analyst at the Cato Institute. "Finally, the feminist movement has a face that commands respect."

McGowan, however, said he didn't get into the business of women's rights for the praise.

"What these women were able to accomplish with the little manpower they had is very impressive," McGowan said. "I just bring a certain something to the table—I'm not sure what—that gave us that extra little push into complete female independence. I guess it just comes naturally."

But despite his modesty, McGowan continues to garner praise from those closest to the cause.

"The whole movement just seems more legitimate with Buck in charge," leading feminist Gloria Steinem said at a gala dinner Friday. "His drive, focus, and determination are truly remarkable. Mr. McGowan is a man with a plan."

Although he has not hinted at any future projects after all forms of gender discrimination are a thing of the past, McGowan has vehemently denied rumors that he will leave the feminist movement to head up the struggle for gay rights.

"The wife would kill me if I took on any more hours," McGowan said. "I'm sure those fellows know how that goes."

excuse me?

Because you can only use "my grandmother died" so many times.

Weird News: Company Offers 'Excuse' Service For U.S. Employees, Students
2007-10-25 - Weird News
Preciosa Dumlao - AHN News Writer
Company Offers 'Excuse' Service For U.S. Employees, Students
(AHN) -- A company has launched a excused absence service for U.S. employees and students.

The Excused Absence Network services all your excuse letter needs for just $25 per excuse note, which appears to come from professional doctor or hospital. They also offer fake jury summons and an authentic-looking funeral service program with poems and pallbearers.

The legitimacy of products they offered are being questioned by some people whether it is legal or ethical. But the company owner says that they are just helping people who needed an excuse, which the people would have done anyway.

Co-founder of the Internet-based company Vision Matters, which sells notes to Excused Absence Network John Liddell said, "Millions of Americans work dead-end jobs, and sometimes they just need a day off. People are going to lie anyway. How many people go visit their doctors every day when they're not sick because they just need a note?"

The procedure in getting the company's service is very simple. Prospective customers will receive templates and they can input the name and address of the local doctor or hospital. Whereas those who prefer jury duty, clients can input their county courthouse information on the form.
Via Jerry

who invited the dog?

I love dogs. And I love socializing with friends, some of whom have severe dog allergies.

I was rather permissive when it came to spoiling my beloved pooch, Casey. At points in his life, he was fed cheese straight from the refrigerator. He even slept in bed with me for a few years. But it wasn't until Leo came into my life that Casey got to go to other people's houses on a regular basis or had a birthday party.

It began when Leo suggested that we take Casey (a reasonably well-behaved geriatric golden retriever) along for picnics, barbecues, and outdoor social events in public places and friends' homes. (Leo always asked our hosts if Casey was invited/ could come along.) Looking back on it, I'm glad that he encouraged us to do it, because it meant that Casey wasn't left behind as much in his golden years. Still, if he hadn't been housebroken and reasonably slow, I doubt that I would've gone for it, because taking him out of his environment meant a level of unpredictability and risk that I wasn't comfortable with.

I remember the time when Casey was on the losing end of a tennis ball tussle with a fellow golden (Spirit) and how emotionally stressful (and expensive) that was for my good friend and colleague, Sydney. I also remember a few times when well-intentioned friends dropped by with their own pooches and the hijinks that ensued, including a (literal) pissing contest between a Bichon Frise and Casey — on my white living room carpet — and another time when Casey literally hopped into my lap to get away from Shiri, an exuberant Aussie Shepherd puppy. Lastly, I can't help but chuckle when I remember Casey letting loose on Josh's driveway and nearly peeing on Ruttenberg on Labor Day 2007 ...

When Leo and I have a dog again, I would like to take it to outdoor events on neutral territory with our non-allergic friends. But that's only gonna happen once das poochums is housebroken, obedience trained, and has shown itself to be trustworthy and calm in situations that are distracting.

Who Invited the Dog?
By JOYCE WADLER and ABBY AGUIRRE
Published: December 13, 2007

IT was a dark and stormy night — actually four stormy nights — when Jayme Otto, 31, and her husband, Ryan Otto, 33, drove 1,200 miles from their home in Boulder, Colo., to her parents’ house in Cleveland for Christmas.

“We traveled all this way to bring our yellow Labrador, Cody Bear, home to spend time with his grandparents,” Ms. Otto said, “grandparents” being dog-person-speak for her parents.

Besides wanting Cody Bear “to participate in his favorite yearly activity of unwrapping gifts and destroying all the boxes,” as Ms. Otto put it, they wanted the dog to meet her brother’s fiancée.

But on Christmas morning, a commotion ensued: the fiancée was allergic to dogs and broke out in hives.

“The dog was banished to the guest bedroom and we were unable to share our Christmas morning with Cody Bear,” Ms. Otto said bitterly. “The family blowup between my brother and I over the dog resulted in my mother not speaking to me for two months and my brother for four.” This Christmas will mark the first time that the Ottos will not be returning home.

Where, one might ask at times like these, are the elegantly embossed cards people really need, ones reading: “I can’t believe I could have been so insensitive.” Or better yet, “I can’t believe you could have been so insensitive.”

They might also include a sketch of a sophisticated, well-traveled pet. Something for an animal that understands, even if others do not, that it is a valued family member. And of course a handwritten note, the tone bemused but firm.

“Rex is truly sorry he sent Granny to the emergency room with the oxygen mask, but it isn’t like anyone told me she was allergic. All is forgiven, see you next New Year’s. Leaps and Gloppy Drooly Kisses — R.”

Difficult guests are no longer limited to humans. The boundaries between humans and animals have been so eaten away by pet therapists, pet designer outfits and pet bar mitzvahs, that it has reached a point where devoted owners, who treat their animals as privileged children, lose all perspective on the pet’s role in their social lives.

More American households have pets than ever — 68.7 million of them in 2006, according to a new survey by the American Veterinary Medical Association, up 12.4 percent from 2001.

Among dog owners, 53.5 percent considered their pets to be members of the family, the survey found. For cats, the number was 49.2 percent.

And the term “family member” should not be used lightly. Ari Henry Barnes, who works in a New York law firm, is so devoted to his cat, Romeo, that he wipes the animal’s behind every time he does “a stinky boom boom.”

When the cat became an extended houseguest at the home of good friends, Mr. Barnes found it stressful, because despite his wishes, the cat was allowed outside. “I think anybody who is taking care of someone else’s child or pet, they should protect the parent’s wishes.”

Many four-legged family members are routine travelers.

Derek Welsh, the president of www.bringyourpet.com, a “pet-friendly” hotel and lodging directory, estimates the number at roughly 10 million a year.

Mr. Welsh also said that in a Bring Your Pet survey of 100,000 self-selected pet owners, 38.5 percent said they had difficulty finding pet-friendly lodging.

This means there’s a very good chance they may be visiting soon. And so, for animal owners and those on the hosting end of the equation, a guide.

OMITTING THE WORDS ‘PLUS ONE DOG’ ON THE INVITATION WAS NOT A PRINTER’S ERROR
A legion of two animal experts interviewed agreed that taking an unexpected animal to a party is impolite. “You never spring a doggy or any other uninvited guest on a host,” said Claudia Kawczynska, the editor in chief of Bark magazine. “If you do get a green light, bring a lot of treats for both your dog and the human host.”

What if the owner cannot bear to leave the dog at home?

“Many pet owners exhibit hyper-attachment,” said Victoria Stilwell, the British host of “It’s Me or the Dog,” a show on the Animal Planet network. But that is not fair to the dog, she said, because it may suffer intense separation anxiety when it is left alone. Also, she pointed out, “If you allow your pets to become hyper-attached, you’d better understand that it will limit your human relationships.”

ADMITTING YOU HAVE A PROBLEM IS THE FIRST STEP
Her name is Elisabeth Montoya. She is a 30-year-old lawyer who lives in Bozeman, Mont., with her husband, Johnny, an architect, their 2 ½-year-old son, Jack, and their 88-pound golden retriever, Diego del Mar de la Joya Montoya.

Before her son was born, Ms. Montoya admits, she was “really annoying” with the dog. “We nearly expected him to be given a place setting at the table.” Even now, she remains a dogaholic.

“The first time we brought Diego to my mom’s house was a disaster,” Ms. Montoya said. “He walked straight to the white-carpeted living room and proceeded to lift up his tail.”

The dog dragged himself perhaps 6 to 8 feet. “He left a noticeable brown streak in his wake. Horrifying.”

Now, Diego is even worse, Ms. Montoya said. He even bolted off the porch and bit a passer-by the other day.

“I babied him so much,” she said. “That’s why he’s like this.”

“We used to bring him to other people’s houses,” she said, “but now we don’t bring him around. He’s the cover dog for the worst dog ever.”

BEING WILLING TO MAKE AMENDS IS A NICE GESTURE, BUT NOT NECESSARILY A SOLUTION
Ms. Montoya appears farther along the road to recovery than the couple who attended a catered dinner for out-of-town wedding guests with their puppy.

The setting was not far from Aspen, Colo., in a home so lovely it is frequently featured in shelter magazines. The name of the puppy — a truly out-of-control guest — was Dude.

“It was unbelievable that good friends of mine and good friends of the parents of the bride would even consider bringing this dog,” said the hostess, a photographer and amateur landscape gardener named Sally who, perhaps because of the trauma, would not permit her last name to be used.

“The first thing Dude did was jump into the outdoor pond,” Sally said. “He shakes off on the grass lawn, then promptly heads inside and leaps onto the white couches, leaving a trail of pond scum. Then he runs outside, jumps onto one of the dining chairs, jumps on the table and helps himself to the hors d’oeuvres and fillet.”

A week later Sally received a note of apology, suggesting that she let bygones be bygones, signed with a paw print. Sally did not respond, which, she said, very much annoyed Dude’s owner.

This happened five years ago, and they have not spoken since.

The owners declined to discuss the matter with a reporter, but sent a comment through the bride: “Dude categorically denies everything.”

NEVER ASSUME
Problems can also occur when the guests assume that if the hosts have dogs, they, too, can bring theirs. This was the case with Donna Engelson, a 65-year-old former clothing designer, and her husband, Mel Engelson, a hardware manufacturer who for a time shared a Southampton home with Mr. Engelson’s brother and business partner, Larry, along with his wife, Tina, and Tina’s golden retriever, Cooper.

Although Donna Engelson had had asthma as a child, she did not worry about the dog. Her sister-in-law kept the house vacuumed and the dog upstairs.

One summer, the couples had a big Labor Day party. Since the Engelsons had a dog, friends brought theirs. After the third dog, Donna Engelson wound up in the emergency room. “It was very scary,” Ms. Engelson said. “My breathing capacity was 65 percent of what it was.” The couples are still close, but they have their own houses.

GIVE THAT PUPPY A TREAT
There was the time Rosi Kerr, today a 32-year-old New York energy consultant, then a teaching intern in an elite boarding school, brought her golden retriever puppy, Gus, to a meeting with the school’s director, who happened to be a cat owner. Ms. Kerr wanted to extend her stay at the school, but had a feeling the director did not feel the same.

She certainly had not planned to bring her new puppy, but she was running late.

“I sat in the living room trying to keep an eye on my dog as he wandered and sniffed,” Ms. Kerr said. “Somewhere along the line, I lost track of Gus. As she described how I was not a very good listener, I frantically craned my neck looking for my puppy.”

Gus reappeared just as the director told Ms. Kerry she was being dismissed and dropped a large, kitty litter-encrusted deposit at the director’s feet.

google earth from above

I love Yann Arthus-Bertrand's photography. His "Earth From Above" work is stunning, beautiful, and thought-provoking. I'm glad to see Google Earth incorporating it.

Official Google Blog: Earth From Above
French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand's beautiful images of the planet have become a coffee table favorite across the world. Today we are excited to present a new Google Earth layer of nearly 500 of his images, many taken from hot air balloons and all taken from above the earth. Each image is paired with thought-provoking statistics about the current environmental situation they depict. The facts and figures were put together by GoodPlanet.org, Yann's non-profit organization established to promote environmental awareness and sustainable development.

In June this year, we launched Google Earth Outreach, a program to empower non-profit groups with resources and tools to use Google Earth to promote their cause. Today's new "Earth From Above" layer (located in the Global Awareness folder in Google Earth) is an excellent example of what such groups can accomplish.

Not only can you enjoy these stunning new photographs on Google Earth -- we're also launching an iGoogle gadget you can add to your personalized Google homepage to see a different image each day. You can find the iGoogle gadget and a YouTube interview with Yann here. We hope you enjoy them!

why bad kissers don't get to second base

My friend Bill once gave a speech on the do's and don'ts of kissing.

Leo's response when he saw this headline: "Well duh. How is that article more than 3 words long? You don't finish your meal if the first bite tastes like ass."

Why bad kissers don't get to second base
By Jocelyn Voo
(LifeWire) -- Bad kissers -- we've all locked lips with one: the lizard, the washing machine, the cannibal, the spelunker.

"I knew this girl that I'll call Big Tongue," recalls Craig Hinkle, 38, a Westminster, California-based network administrator. "Her tongue was massive, and she insisted on trying to put the entire thing in my mouth. She was very forceful with it, and I started choking."

You can guess that relationship didn't last. And now, what Hinkle knows from experience is actually backed up by science: Bad kissers have little chance of getting to second base.

In a study published recently in the scientific journal "Evolutionary Psychology," 59 percent of men and 66 percent of women said they've been in the position of being attracted to someone -- until they kissed the person. Check out some famous kissing »

"At the moment of the kiss, there's a very complicated exchange of information ... that may tap into underlying evolved mechanisms" cluing us in on whether we're genetically compatible, explains Gordon Gallup, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Albany. "A kiss can be a deal-breaker in terms of whether a relationship will flower or flounder, so to speak."

Rachel Myeroff, 26, can attest to that. On a second date with a guy, says the New York City-based sales manager, "he just went in for it and attached himself to me in the sloppiest, most horrible kiss ever. He was just consuming my mouth. I most definitely did not call him again."

Why we kiss
Gallup's research suggests that men and women have different agendas when it comes to kissing, an act that occurs in 95 percent of human societies and is believed to have been first recorded in Vedic Sanskrit texts around 1500 B.C. in India.

For men, kissing is more often used as a means to an end -- namely, to gain sexual access. Men also are more likely to literally kiss and make up, using kissing to attempt reconciliation.

Women on the other hand use kissing as a mate-assessment technique, Gallup notes. They subconsciously evaluate mating potential from the chemicals in their partner's saliva and breath, for instance.

Women also use kissing as a bonding gesture, as well as to monitor the status of the relationship. If her partner's kissing frequency or technique suddenly changes, that perhaps is a sign of his waning interest.

Other gender differences uncovered by Gallup's research:

• Men show a greater preference for tongue contact and open-mouth kisses.

• Men are more willing than women to have sex with someone without kissing, as well as to have sex with someone they are not attracted to or consider to be a bad kisser.

• Women place more importance on kissing throughout a relationship, whereas men place less importance on it as the relationship progresses.

Improve your kiss
If you've ever been told to kiss off after smooching someone beneath the holiday mistletoe, fear not. Like other skills, one's kissing technique can be improved upon. Michael Christian, author of "The Art of Kissing" (under the pen name William Cane), offers classes, and there's a myriad of how-to books and DVDs.

To improve your technique, Christian suggests switching up your repertoire with different types of kisses:

• Vacuum kiss, in which you suck the air out of your partner's mouth while kissing

• Neck kiss, in which you kiss up and down your partner's neck

• "Lip-o-suction," in which you kiss the upper lip while your partner kisses the lower lip, and then you reverse.

Bad kisses, on the other hand, are relatively easy to pinpoint. "Bad kisses trigger the gag reflex," Christian says. "Bad kisses are also static and repetitious. Varying the speed, intensity and style can help."


Spontaneity also can help you get out of a slump.

"The best kisses are always the ones that happen accidentally," observes New York City resident Benjamin Kayne, 25, a digital media sales director. "(Planned kisses) are just tedious, and I'm sitting there thinking, 'Is this over yet? The commercial is over and I'm missing "CSI".'"

LifeWire provides original and syndicated lifestyle content to Web publishers. Jocelyn Voo is a freelance journalist and relationships editor at the New York Post.

the most wonderful time of the year

Having been in a mixed-faith relationship before, lots of these conflicts were all too familiar. Lucky for me, I'm no longer in the relationship and am free to enjoy a smorgasbord approach to chrismahanukwanzaeidfestivusice (enjoying all the tasty and fun parts and avoiding the heavy, distasteful ones).

A Holiday Medley, Off Key - New York Times
By JULIE SCELFO
Published: December 6, 2007

WHEN her sons were toddlers, Amy Manata, a Jewish woman with a Catholic husband, began conducting a silent war. In the months leading up to Hanukkah, she would ask the boys, now 4 and 6, which toys they wanted most, then bestow them at Hanukkah to ensure that it was a better holiday than Christmas.

She and her husband, Frank, who live in Skokie, Ill., are raising their sons with both Catholic and Jewish traditions. Still, with so much Christmas everywhere, “Hanukkah was sort of getting lost, and I felt like I couldn’t compete,” she said.

Ms. Manata willingly put up Christmas decorations, but she sometimes felt weird about the wreath on her front door and the tree in her living room. “Skokie was very Jewish when I was growing up,” she said. “I wasn’t in a house with Christmas lights until I was a sophomore in high school, and I remember feeling so uncomfortable about it, like it was a totally foreign place.” Years later, a tree in her own living room brought back some of those feelings.

It is a familiar problem, widely known as the December dilemma: the annual conflict faced by millions of adults in interfaith marriages over how to decorate homes, how and when to give gifts, and which rituals to celebrate.

As of 2001, more than 28 million Americans lived in mixed-religion households, according to the American Religious Identification Survey, which is widely viewed as providing some of the best data on the subject. Of those households, the largest group of interfaith marriages (distinct from interdenominational Christian ones) was Christian-Jewish, and few types of couples seem to experience the December dilemma as acutely as they do.

One reason for this is that few non-Christian religions other than Judaism have significant holidays in December. (The Muslim holiday Eid-al-Adha, the end of the pilgrimage to Mecca, begins on Dec. 20 this year, but it often falls in other months.) Another reason is that many Jews, both despite and because of their assimilation into American society, are particularly conscious of threats to Jewish culture.

According to the United Jewish Communities’ National Jewish Population Survey, about 47 percent of Jews in the United States who married in 2001 married non-Jews, up from an average of 13 percent before 1970.

“You get this kind of difficult blend of family-of-origin issues as well as religious and cultural issues all at the same time,” said Karen Erlichman, a licensed clinical social worker in San Francisco who specializes in counseling interfaith couples. “They kind of sweep it under the rug for 10 months of the year, and Thanksgiving comes and it’s like, ‘Uh-oh, here we go.’”

When Scott Gamzon, who is Jewish, and his Episcopalian partner, Rick Draughon, adopted their son, Noah, three years ago, they agreed to raise him Jewish but get a tree and spend Christmas with Mr. Draughon’s family in Texas. Despite the agreement, Mr. Gamzon said he cannot help but engage in a few guerrilla tactics.

Two weeks ago he told Mr. Draughon that “it would be really nice if the house had lights all around it this year,” then sat back and did nothing to help beyond instructing him how to arrange the lights and manage the cords.

“I pretty much stood around and gave him opinions,” Mr. Gamzon said. “I had no idea how much work it actually was.”

Mr. Draughon got his revenge days later when picking up Noah from his Jewish preschool. “I put Christmas music on, and later, when Daddy Scott was in the car, Noah was singing, ‘Up on the rooftop, reindeer pause.’ Scott was like, ‘Where did he learn that?’ I was like, ‘Hmm, I don’t know.’”

Then, on Saturday, while entertaining guests for dinner, Mr. Draughon set an iPod to play a mix of holiday songs by Diana Krall. “Scott was like, ‘Would you please turn that off,’” Mr. Draughon said. “I was like, ‘It’s not “Jingle Bells.” It’s Diana Krall.’”

But even sultry jazz versions of Christmas standards can alienate someone who does not celebrate the holiday, a concern frequently overlooked by those who grow up Christian and never experience the isolation of being part of a religious minority.

While Mr. Gamzon said he enjoyed the “forbidden fruit” aspect of decorating a tree, he said he also felt guilty about it, and vividly recalled the scolding his mother gave his younger brother more than 30 years ago when he asked for one. “My mother said, ‘If you really want a Christmas tree you can go live with the neighbors,’” he said. “We were not the Jews who had a tree.”

Jewish-Christian couples may also experience tension more acutely because “having a tree in your house can feel like just a big huge announcement that says I’ve gone over to the other side,” said Micah Sachs, the managing editor of interfaithfamily.com, a Web site that encourages interfaith couples to observe Jewish traditions. “The world is full of all these symbols: it’s full of Santa, it’s full of trees.”

That helps to explain various commercial efforts at making Hanukkah, which is not considered a primary holiday in Judaism, a festive competitor to Christmas. Among the innovations: inflatable lawn menorahs.

Early on, Danielle Kolker and her husband, Donald Viscardi, a self-described Christmas fanatic, negotiated detailed rules about holiday decorating.

“What can be seen from outside has to be completely 50-50,” Ms. Kolker said of their house in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. “If there are Christmas lights up, there have to be Hanukkah lights up too. I don’t want it to look outwardly like we’re more one than the other.”

The compromise, raising their boys Jewish but celebrating Christmas, is working well, they said. At least it was until last summer, when their 7-year-old son, Zachary, asked Ms. Kolker whether she and his father helped Santa buy presents. “He said, ‘Mom, tell me the truth.’ I said, ‘Mommy and Daddy help buy some of them.’ I didn’t say, ‘There’s no Santa Claus.’”

Mr. Viscardi, a private tutor who has twice been a Macy’s Santa, was disturbed that his wife even suggested that the mythology of Christmas could be anything less than true. “I was upset she said that without thinking about the repercussions,” he said. “Going through Macy’s program, being trained as a Santa, I know you never want to destroy that illusion, at least until they get to be a little bit older, anyway.”

For her part, Ms. Kolker cannot help but be annoyed that she has to shop for and wrap a bunch of gifts and then put Santa’s name on them. “He gets credit for everything,” she said.

Susan Needles, a clinical social worker in Manhattan who holds workshops for Christian-Jewish couples sponsored by an organization called Interfaith Community, said the only way to reach a mutually satisfying arrangement is through careful discussion and negotiation.

“Attention has to be paid to how they’re going to incorporate their dual faiths as they go forward in marriage and in their life together,” she said. “That requires work: finding the language to communicate how they feel; discovering what they feel and what they know about their own faith; and discovering what they know and feel about their partner’s faith. It’s harder than buying furniture you both like, and that can be hard.”

Outreach programs across the country have lately tried to help couples achieve this goal. But they can do little to relieve the stress caused by another major source of holiday conflict: extended families.

Frank Manata, Amy’s husband, said that his wife has been supportive of his desire to share Christmas with their sons, but that his in-laws have been less than enthusiastic. Three years ago they clashed over his practice of allowing the boys to play with their Lionel train set around the holidays, then packing it up with the ornaments.

“Her parents think I’m a terrible person for putting it away,” Mr. Manata said. “I’m like: ‘No, it’s a Christmas tradition. It’s up for a month, that’s what makes it special, that’s how we did it.’ So my father-in-law bought a huge Lionel train set and put it up in his basement, so the boys have a train to play with all year long.”

Mr. Manata, who was annoyed by the train episode, never said anything to his in-laws because, he said, they are otherwise wonderful. But now he finds himself facing another indirect assault: he chipped in with them to buy a big gift for the boys, a Nintendo Wii, but his mother-in-law wants to give it at Hanukkah and not on Christmas.

“Well, maybe I don’t want to give it to them on Hanukkah,” said Mr. Manata, whose wife explained her parents’ behavior as a reaction to feeling threatened by Christmas.

Even the anticipated disapproval of a parent can influence family dynamics. Twenty-one years ago, when they married, Ron Klain and his wife, Monica Medina, struck a deal: their daughter and two sons would be raised Jewish (for him), but they would celebrate Christmas (for her).

Despite their satisfaction with the arrangement, the couple, who live in Chevy Chase, Md., have never put up the tree while Mr. Klain’s mother is visiting from Indianapolis. Instead, they wait until after her annual December visit.

“I grew up in Indiana, with a decent-size Jewish community, but we were a distinct minority,” Mr. Klain said. “Not having a Christmas tree was very much part of our Jewish identity in a place where everyone else did.”

Ms. Manata said that after her struggles, she no longer feels there is any holiday battle to fight. Several years ago a friend who is Catholic told her, “Nothing is going to be as big as Christmas; you’re not going to be able to make it as big as Christmas,” Ms. Manata said. “As soon as she said that, it kind of clicked with me. It’s not a race. We’re not keeping score. If I compete, my kids are not learning much from me.”

Many interfaith families who have managed to create their own traditions enjoy at least a bit of domestic peace. The first year of Brad and Linda Simon’s marriage in 1978, Mr. Simon, who is Jewish, sought the perfect everything bagel: seasonings evenly distributed, a symmetrically round shape and a hole that was just right for a red holiday light to poke through. Then he shellacked it, and it has adorned the top of their tree — Ms. Simon is Catholic — every year since. (“In the late ’80s it finally fell apart, and I had to shellac another one,” he said.)

Dana Reynolds, a mother of two toddlers in Albuquerque who was raised Jewish, has struggled to accept having a tree in the house ever since she married a Catholic man nine years ago. Although she put up with it every year that her husband, Jeff, decided to have one, she never really participated. “I kind of tolerated him doing it,” she said.

But lately she has been rethinking her attitude. After Mr. Reynolds left last week on a trip to Africa, she arranged to have a nine-foot tree delivered to the house. Then she and the boys, whom the couple are raising Jewish, spent Monday decorating it, to surprise Mr. Reynolds on his return next week.

“He’s not just my husband anymore — he’s the father of my kids,” Ms. Reynolds said. “I want my kids to celebrate diversity and coexist with everyone.”

It was a gesture worthy of a Christmas — or Hanukkah — TV special. “I’m hoping that he’ll see I’m not just saying I’m comfortable and open to him, but that he really believes it,” she said.

how iran's nutty leader views america?

Whenever I get an e-mail including the line "God save our Republic" from my friend Chris (an expat in France), I know that the article's gonna be good. This one is no exception.

Op-Ed Columnist: Intercepting Iran’s Take on America
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: December 5, 2007
There are two intelligence analyses that are relevant to the balance of power between the U.S. and Iran — one is the latest U.S. assessment of Iran, which certainly gave a much more complex view of what is happening there. The other is the Iranian National Intelligence Estimate of America, which — my guess — would read something like this:

To: President Ahmadinejad

From: The Iranian Ministry of Intelligence

Subject: America

As you’ll recall, in the wake of 9/11, we were extremely concerned that the U.S. would develop a covert program to end its addiction to oil, which would be the greatest threat to Iranian national security. In fact, after Bush’s 2006 State of the Union, in which he decried America’s oil addiction, we had “high confidence” that a comprehensive U.S. clean energy policy would emerge. We were wrong.

Our fears that the U.S. was engaged in a covert “Manhattan Project” to achieve energy independence have been “assuaged.” America’s Manhattan Project turns out to be largely confined to the production of corn ethanol in Iowa, which, our analysts have confirmed from cellphone intercepts between lobbyists and Congressmen, is nothing more than a multibillion-dollar payoff to big Iowa farmers and agro-businesses.

True, thanks to Nancy Pelosi, the U.S. Congress decided to increase the miles per gallon required of U.S. car fleets by the year 2020 — which took us by surprise — but we nevertheless “strongly believe” this will not lead to any definitive breaking of America’s oil addiction, since none of the leading presidential candidates has offered an energy policy that would include a tax on oil or carbon that could trigger a truly transformational shift in America away from fossil fuels.

Therefore, it is “very likely” that Iran’s current level of high oil revenues will last for decades and insulate our regime from any decisive pressures from abroad or from our own people.

We have to note that obtaining open-source intelligence in America has become more difficult, because traditional news shows have become more comedic and more comedic news shows more authoritative.

For instance, CNN’s nightly business report is hosted by a man named “Dobbs.” Real journalists come on his show and present transparently propagandistic stories about immigration and trade and then he fulminates about them, much the way our ayatollahs used to do about “Satanic Americans” on late-night Iranian TV. So viewers have no real idea what’s happening in the U.S. economy.

Meanwhile, at 11 p.m., something called “The Daily Show,” which appears on Comedy Central, has fake journalists presenting what turns out to be the real news.

Yes, our last I.N.I.E. in 1990 concluded that after the collapse of communism, America was on track to become the world’s sole superpower and most compelling role model for Muslim youth — including our own. We were wrong. We now have “high confidence” that America is on a path of self-destruction, for three reasons:

First, 9/11 has made America afraid and therefore stupid. The “war on terrorism” is now so deeply imbedded in America’s psyche that we think it is “highly likely” that America will continue to export more fear than hope and will continue to defend things like torture and Guantánamo Bay prison and to favor politicians like Mr. Giuliani, who alienates the rest of the world.

Second, at a time when America’s bridges, roads, airports and Internet bandwidth have fallen behind other industrial powers, including China, we believe that the U.S. opposition to higher taxes — and the fact that the primary campaigns have focused largely on gay marriage, flag-burning and whether the Christian Bible is the literal truth — means it is “highly unlikely” that America will arrest its decline.

Third, all the U.S. presidential candidates are distancing themselves from the core values that made America such a great power and so different from us — in particular America’s long commitment to free trade, open immigration and a reverence for scientific enquiry wherever it leads. Our intel analysts are baffled that the leading Democrat, Mrs. Clinton, no longer believes in globalization and the leading Republican, Mr. Huckabee, never believed in evolution.

U.S. politicians seem determined to appeal either to the most nativist extremes in their respective parties — or to tell voters that something Americans call “the tooth fairy” will make their energy, budget, educational and Social Security deficits painlessly disappear.

Therefore, we conclude with “high confidence” that there is little likelihood that post-9/11 America will, as they say, “get its groove back” anytime soon.

Who needs nukes when you have this kind of America?

God is Great. Long Live the Iranian Revolution.
Via credo

quotable

"The Jesus freak outside is wicked hot. What a waste."
-Status message on my gay co-worker Jerry's Gmail profile

oh sweet irony

Who watches the watchers?

MPAA caught infringing copyright
Author: Phil Cogar
Published: 4th December 2007
Last month, the MPAA began sending out a "university toolkit" to several universities across the US. These toolkits monitor network traffic and created graphs and charts showing the prevalence of file sharing across the school networks.

The whole aim was to bring more attention to copyright infringement happening in these networks but the toolkit itself is chock full of irony - it's violating the GPL agreement.

The toolkits were built upon open source software that is licensed under the GPL. As we all know, when you use any GPL'd code in your software and distribute it, you're required to provide the modified code to all. Well, that's the part that the MPAA apparently does not understand.

After being contacted by Matthew Garrett, one of the coders of the GPL'd software, several times in an attempt to have the source code distributed, Garrett took matters into his own hands. The fine gentleman contacted the MPAA's ISP and had the content removed from the servers. Take that MPAA.

So far, the source code and changes have yet to be made available so this could get even more interesting if the MPAA does not provide them. Maybe Garrett will take them to court like other GPL holders have done lately. That would certainly make this man's day/week/year.

Are you laughing from the irony yet? Poke fun at the MPAA over in the forums.
Via Taner