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Boy, 13, Invited Out for Free Drinks and Strippers {ParentDish}

May 18th 2011 3:23PM Teen drinking was widespread during the 1950s.

Accidentally inviting a thirteen-year-old male for free drinks and strippers is "shocking" because secular American society understands these things are restricted to adults.

Similarly, according to a 2003 Zogby poll, two of every five Americans say “the government should treat marijuana the same way it treats alcohol: It should regulate it, control it, tax it, and only make it illegal for children.”

Close to 100 million Americans, including over half of those between the ages of 18 and 50, have tried marijuana at least once. Military and police recruiters often have no alternative but to ignore past marijuana use by job seekers.

In 1996, California voters passed a law to regulate medical marijuana within the state. In 2000, voters in California approved an initiative allowing people who are arrested for simple possession of drugs to go through a rehabilitation program rather than through the court process that would result in prison. Since the program began, most agree it has been very successful. It results in less recidivism and is considered cheaper than imprisonment.

Richard Posner, Chicago's chief judge of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and one of the nation's leading legal scholars, says marijuana use should be legalized as a way of reducing crime. Posner, a Reagan administration appointee once described by American Lawyer magazine as “the most brilliant judge in the country,” explained his views on marijuana in The Times Literary Supplement, a British publication, and in later interview:

“It is nonsense that we should be devoting so many law enforcement resources to marijuana," says Posner. "I am skeptical that a society that is so tolerant of alcohol and cigarettes should come down so hard on marijuana use and send people to prison for life without parole.”

Posner is the highest-ranking judge to publicly favor the repeal of marijuana laws. Several judges of the federal district court, a level lower than the appeals court, have made similar calls, including Robert Sweet of New York and James Paine of Florida, both Carter Administration appointees.

New York University law professor Burt Neuborne said it's significant that “one of the leading intellectuals in the judicial system recognizes that the laws don't seem to be working well.”

Posner and other federal judges have complained that sentencing guidelines force them to give unjustly severe prison sentences to relatively minor drug offenders.

Says Posner: “Prison terms in America have become appallingly long, especially for conduct that, arguably, should not be criminal at all. Only decriminalization is a sure route to a lower crime rate. It is sad that it appears so far below the horizon of political feasibility.”

Rufus King, a Washington, DC lawyer who has served on the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, calls the drug war, “A worthless crusade.”

According to King, drug use is a social problem, not a law enforcement problem. He observes:

“Cigarette use is declining through changes in cultural values in the population. Like most smokers and alcoholics, most users of illegal drugs poison themselves because they want to be intoxicated. No human force can do them much good until they want help.”

King is optimistic that the current anti-drug hysteria will subside, and responsible and reasonable drug law policies will be adopted.

Let's put things in perspective, people!

Kings of Leon's Matthew Followill and Wife Welcome First Baby {Spinner}

May 9th 2011 6:05PM The only Kings of Leon song I really like is "Crawl", which I think came out at the end of 2009.

Getting Kids to Try New and Healthy Foods {ParentDish}

May 6th 2011 3:51PM Veganism Is Direct Action!

"A diet that can lead to heart attacks, cancer, and numerous other diseases cannot be a natural diet," writes Keith Akers in A Vegetarian Sourcebook (1983).

"A diet that pillages our resources of land, water, forests, and energy cannot be a natural diet. A diet that causes the unnecessary suffering and death of billions of animals each year cannot be a natural diet."

I understand there are conservative Christians who fear vegetarianism...which is kind of like being afraid of nonsmoking, nondrinking, or recycling. Ronald J. Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action, in his 1977 book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, pointed out that 220 million Americans were eating enough food (largely because of the high consumption of grain fed to livestock) to feed over one billion people in the poorer countries.

A pamphlet put out by Compassion Over Killing says raising animals for food is one of the leading causes of both pollution and resource depletion today.

According to a recent United Nations report, Livestock's Long Shadow, raising chickens, turkeys, pigs, and other animals for food causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars, trucks and other forms of transportation combined.

Researchers from the University of Chicago similarly concluded that a vegetarian diet is the most energy efficient, and the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by not eating animal products than by switching to a hybrid car.

The following points and facts are excerpted from Please Don't Eat the Animals (2007) by the mother-daughter writing team of Jennifer Horsman and Jaime Flowers:

"Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."

--Albert Einstein

"Each year, the meat industrial complex abuses and butchers nearly nine billion cows, pigs, sheep, turkeys, chickens, and other innocent, feeling animals just for the enjoyment of consumers.

"Each year, nearly 1.5 million of these consumers are crippled and killed prematurely by heart failure, cancer, stroke, and other chronic diseases that have been linked conclusively with the consumption of these animals.

"Each year, millions of other animals are abused and sacrificed in a vain search for a 'magic pill' that would vanquish these largely self-inflicted diseases."

--Alex Hershaft, PhD, president, Farm Animal Reform Movement

When analyzing 8,300 deaths in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany among 76,000 men and women in five different, large studies, researchers concluded that vegetarians have a 24 percent reduction in death from heart disease.

Similarly, in the famous Oxford Vegetarian Study, where 6,000 vegetarians were compared with 5,000 meat-eaters over nearly two decades, scientists found that the rate of death from heart disease was 28 percent lower in vegetarians than in meat-eaters.

One study analyzed eighty scientific studies in leading medical journals. The analysis found that vegetarians had lower blood pressure, and were less likely to suffer from stroke, heart attack, and kidney failure.

A large German study of nearly 2,000 vegetarians found that deaths from heart disease were reduced by over one-third, and that heart disease itself was far less than that of the general population.

Another large study examined the coronary artery disease risk of young adults ages 18 to 30 and vegetarians were found to have much higher levels of cardiovascular fitness and a greatly reduced risk of heart disease.

"The process of gradual blocking of the coronary arteries begins not in adulthood but in childhood...and the main cause of this arteriosclerosis is the steadily increasing amount of fat in the American diet, particularly saturated animal fats such as those found in meat, chicken, milk and cheeses.

"If there was another disease that caused half a million deaths a year, you can be sure that the public would be acutely aware of the danger, and that the cure or prevention would be universally practiced."

--Dr. Benjamin Spock, author, child expert

"I don't understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open and put them on powerful cholesterol-lowering drugs for the rest of their lives."

---Dr. Dean Ornish, author, Reversing Heart Disease

Stroke is the third leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer. Vegetarians have a 20 to 30 percent reduced risk of having a stroke. Stroke, like heart disease, is associated with diets high in saturated fats, and the vegetarian diet is naturally low in these fats.

The Oxford Vegetarian Study found cancer mortality to be 39 percent lower among vegetarians when compared with meat-eaters. The European Prospective Investigation of Cancer found vegetarians suffer 40 percent fewer cancers than the general population.

Studies have shown that decreasing a woman's animal fat intake can reduce the chances that she will die from breast cancer. A large-scale, long-term study in the Netherlands found a powerful connection between the amount of animal fat consumed and the rate of prostate cancer. A review of a dozen studies found dietary fat strongly correlated with prostate cancer.

Ovarian, uterine, and endometrial cancers have all been shown to be strongly correlated to the amount of animal fat in one's diet, and vegetarian women have significantly lower rates of these cancers.

"The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all the natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined."

--Dr. Neal Barnard, Executive Director, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine

"Vegetarians have the best diet. They have the lowest rate of coronary disease of any group in the country. They have a fraction of our heart attack rate and they have only 40 percent of our cancer rate."

--William Castelli, MD, Director, Framingham Heart Study

"Human beings are not natural carnivores. When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings..."

--Dr. William Roberts, editor-in-chief, American Journal of Cardiology

Les Brown of the Overseas Development Council calculates that if Americans reduced their meat consumption by only ten percent per year, it would free at least twelve million tons of grain for human consumption--or enough to feed sixty million people.

The number of animals killed for food in the United States is nearly 75 times larger than the number of animals killed in laboratories, 30 times larger than the number killed by hunters and trappers, and 500 times larger than the number of animals killed in animal pounds.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is challenging those who think they can still be "meat-eating environmentalists" to go veg, if they really care about the planet.

peta2 is now the largest youth movement of any social change organization in the world.

peta2 has 267,000 friends on MySpace and 91,000 Facebook fans.

A few years ago, PETA was the top-ranked charity when a poll asked teenagers what nonprofit group they would most want to work for. PETA won by more than a 2 to 1 margin over the second place finisher, The American Red Cross, with more votes than the Red Cross and Habitat for Humanity combined.

“If anyone wants to save the planet,” says Paul McCartney in an interview with PETA's Animal Times magazine from 2001, “all they have to do is stop eating meat. That’s the single most important thing you could do. It’s staggering when you think about it.

"Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty. Let’s do it! Linda was right. Going veggie is the single best idea for the new century.”

9 Sexy Swimsuits With The Most Awkward Tan Line Potential {Stylelist}

May 2nd 2011 6:04PM (Did sexy really say nine? Like the song says, till I hear it from you..)

I can see awkward tan lines arising from these swimsuits, though the models look fantastic in them.

Zoe's Very Good Year {BV Newswire}

Apr 30th 2011 9:35PM I knew Lenny Kravitz is half-Jewish. I didn't know Lisa Bonet is also half-Jewish.

I consider Lenny Kravitz's first album, Let Love Rule, one of the finest albums ever recorded. It was released at the end of the 1989, so technically it's an '80s album, even if it propelled Lenny Kravitz to rock star status in the 1990s.

I saw Lenny Kravitz perform in San Francisco in early 1996. It was an incredible show, with strobe lights and other psychedelic effects.

A lot of his songs (especially on the first album) go for a neo-'60s sound, so in this case, it was appropriate.

Similarly, "Flowers for Zoe" appeared on his second album, Mama Said, from 1991. The track "It Ain't Over till it's Over" sounds like '70s music. Lenny does retro again!

Michelle Pfeiffer: Style Evolution {Stylelist}

Apr 29th 2011 3:39PM "Part of feeling sexy is feeling comfortable in your own skin, and less inhibited, and that goes along with getting older," says Michelle Pfeiffer.

I fell for a young, sexy Michelle. Unfortunately, the Michelle I fell for hasn't responded to any of my romantic overtures toward her!

Today Michelle Pfeiffer celebrates a birthday.

She's five years older than me.

Joanna Rodger writes in this online Stylelist article:

"It was nearly impossible to find pictures of the star before the age of 50 where she wasn't attached to her husband. More recently, however, she seems empowered and confident enough to stand alone."

Katy Perry Sues Over 'Other Man' Allegations {AOL Music Blog}

Apr 29th 2011 11:00AM "No one knows for sure what's going on in these stars' lives except them and their intimate circle," comments Carla Peele.

Agreed. Unless their being held electronically hostage, unwillingly under surveillance, there's no way anyone can know for certain what they do. And their private life is their own business!

'Poetry Man' Singer Phoebe Snow Dies at 60 {PopEater}

Apr 26th 2011 3:19PM Here's a blast from the past!

I remember hearing about Phoebe Snow in the mid-'70s, but was unfamiliar with any of her music. Years later I heard "Poetry Man" on the radio. I've heard Phoebe Snow wrote "Poetry Man" for Jackson Browne.

'The Girl's Guide to Homelessness' Author Brianna Karp Offers Advice to Young People on the Streets {ParentDish}

Apr 26th 2011 1:09PM Caddy girl writes:

"She was probably another CA uber Liberal who thought all those great Social programs were great unitl SHE needed some help and was told see you. We have to take care of all the illegal aliens..."

Hey, I myself am a progressive, in CA, a "blue" state!
I think your comments are out of line.

Shortly before passing away, my friend Dave Browning (1959 - 2007), a conservative, pro-life Republican in San Diego, said he'd learned to "like socialism", because the government was paying for the surgeries necessary to correct the heart condition that would eventually cause his demise.

Though it's hard to tell from such a brief interview, I'm left with the impression Brianna Karp, author of The Girl's Guide to Homelessness, might be conservative.

Victoria's Secret Miraculous Bra: Does It Really Add Two Cup Sizes? (Video) {Stylelist}

Apr 19th 2011 10:47AM Thank you for reminding me of my favorite MILF and her "girls."