A horoscope that actually MAKES SENSE! It still provides no useful information whatsoever, but it is upfront and honest about that fact, for once.
Are you having a hard time deciphering the code? No matter how hard you try to figure it out, the current stars treat you to a variety of mixed messages. You may as well put your detective tools away for now -- despite your best guesses, the outcome is shrouded in mystery. If you must make a trip to the stores this evening, be sure to shop with care. Your purchase may morph into something unexpected by the time you get it home.
The part about my purchase morphing into something unexpected is a little weird, but it makes sense, at least for some purchases, and, the horoscope did tell me to shop with care. Like if I buy a bag of crawtators, it may morph into a shredded empty bag by the time I drive the short distance home. But if I take care with my shopping and buy, say, lip gloss, it will still be lipgloss when I get home. So the lesson is that I should buy lipgloss, not food. You're preachin' to the choir, horoscope-writer. Laying down the crack-pipe before writing horoscopes turned out to be a good idea after all, now didn't it?
The story just seems to lose a crucial element if you replace "mobile home" (in its various forms) with "house." The most interesting stuff seeems to happen in trailer parks.
1:43 PM
Uneasy Compromise
To Keep Teens Safe, Some Parents
Allow Drinking at Home
When Gregg Anderson told his parents that he planned to celebrate his senior prom at an all-night beer blast, they were alarmed. Gregg and his pals intended to party at Scarborough Beach, a 40-minute drive from this Providence suburb. Worried that the teens would drink and drive, William and Patricia Anderson came up with a compromise -- they invited Gregg and his friends to party in their backyard.
On the night of the party, Mr. Anderson stationed himself near the raspberry-colored front door of the four-bedroom house where he'd raised three sons. He read a Michael Connelly novel and collected car keys from his young guests. Then he slipped them into a bureau drawer.
I think this is both a good idea and a stupid one. It's good in that it allows kids to do what they want while minimizing if not totally eliminating any negative consequences. It's stupid because parents can get in so much trouble for it as to make it not worth the risk. But my point here isn't so much to debate the merits of parent-thrown beer bashes for kids as to point out a stark contrast in approaches to similar problems.
Last year 2,395 teens died in alcohol-related car accidents, according to a report released last month by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. For parents of teens, alcohol's lure presents almost unbearable choices. Advocacy groups, such as MADD and the American Medical Association, sternly preach "zero tolerance" for teen drinking. But many parents feel that's unrealistic.
Some parents think teen drinking is inevitable, and warmly recall their own beer-guzzling youth. Others, who don't want their kids to drink, simply look the other way and hope. But still others make a heart-wrenching decision: They risk arrest and the wrath of their neighbors and allow their children to drink at home, where they can keep a close eye on the action.
"We knew the chances we were taking," says Mr. Anderson, now 50 years old. "We knew the party was probably flouting the law one way or the other. But we aren't trying to make a statement. We aren't trying to take a stance. We simply said, 'We aren't just going to let our kids go out drinking and driving, because we are the ones who will have to live with it later on -- live with knowing we didn't do what we did -- if somebody got hurt."
Underage drinking rates have remained stubbornly high for roughly a decade. About 31% of high-school seniors reported getting drunk at least once in the previous month in a 2003 survey conducted by the University of Michigan and sponsored by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute on Drug Abuse. Ten years earlier a survey by the university showed that roughly 29% of high-school seniors reported getting drunk at least once in the previous month.
Most antidrinking advocates strongly disagree with the Andersons' strategy for dealing with the problem. "We want parents to understand that underage drinking is not just kids being kids, or a rite of passage. It is a serious -- even deadly -- problem," says Wendy Hamilton, president of MADD.
What we have here is parents that realize the risks of unsupervised underage drinking and have decided to take the approach of allowing the undesirable behavior on the condition that it be done in a safe manner, rather than locking their kids up to be assured that they aren't drinking, or sticking their heads up their (parents) asses and pretending it ain't happening. There are arguments to be made in favor of the lockup method, which can certainly be effective if carried out properly, and in favor of the risk-minimizing method. Not much can be said for the head up the ass method, which makes one wonder why it's so damn popular.
Parents who take the risk-minimizing approach are villified and perhaps even prosecuted. Parents who lock up their kids and parents with their heads up their asses are less likely to be prosecuted or vilified, albeit for different reasons. But why must it be this way? It would be pretty hard to argue that parents who supervise underage drinking are motivated by malice or laziness. They're actually creating hassle for themselves in the interest of kids' safety. They are being realistic about a risky behavior and focusing on minimizing risks rather than attempting to stop the behavior. In other words, being realistic about underage drinking is a strict no-no. The reason I bring this up is because of the contrast in the approach to this particular risky behavior as opposed to another that's been in the news recently.
Now, I don't have a handy-dandy link to a story, but there have been numerous stories about sex education and textbooks and whatnot in Texas. Apparently, some people believe that teenagers, in order to eliminate the possibility of undesirable consequences, should abstain from sex entirely. People who believe this are being mocked by damn near everybody as unrealistic. The most popular approach to the risky behavior of teen sex is to be realistic and teach kids about contraception, etc. Why is this behavior treated in exactly the opposite manner as underage drinking? Kids can be stopped from having sex just as easily as they can be stopped from drinking. Notice I didn't say "easily" I said "just as easily" because I recognize that it is damn difficult to stop kids from doing either. But nobody ever said raising kids was supposed to be easy. In fact, I think it's said to be pretty damn hard. Furthermore, the consequences of sex are worse than those of drinking. With sober adults around who are paying attention, the risk of alcohol poisoning goes down near zero. Ditto for drunk driving if the parent collects and keeps the car keys. The greatest risk for supervised underage drinkers is, uh, getting drunk and acting stupid.
In contrast, using condoms reduces the risk of pregnancy significantly and the risk of disease slightly less significantly, but it certainly doesn't bring it down to near zero. Teenage pregnancy and disease are much more undesirable than temporary drunkenness. Yet parents who teach kids about condoms (either directly or by sending them to public school) and/or buy them some at the drug store face no risk of prosecution, even though they are encouraging a much more risky behavior. Government punishes parents for taking a realistic approach to one less risky behavior, while confiscating tax dollars and forcing them to take the realistic approach to the other, more risky behavior.
As you may have noticed, dear reader, I have been avoiding visiting sfgate.com in my daily readings, due to the unbelievable asininity that can invariably graces those pages. But alas, I let my guard down, clicked on an obscurestore link to an sfgate article, and found myself bombarded with unwashed liberal claptrap. (To clarify, "unwashed" describes both the liberals AND their claptrap.)
NRA huffs -- weapon ban falls
Politicians loath to tangle with the power of gun lobby
I'd be lying liar telling a great big lie if I said I was surprised to learn that the fine staff at the San Francisco Chronicle are big fans of gun control. And I'm also not surprised that, given a sizeable chunk of newspaper/web space for their words, access to various research materials not available to, say, casual bloggers, and most probably a fairly decent budget, they find themselves unable to come up with anything at all useful or convincing. For that is par for the course. But this is a particularly good example of bad, bad liberal hysteria.
The first few paragraphs pretty much sum it up:
Anyone wondering why the federal assault-weapons ban -- a law that regularly draws support from more than two-thirds of Americans in polls -- will expire today should look at former President Bill Clinton's best-selling autobiography.
In a grudging tribute to the enduring power of the National Rifle Association, Clinton acknowledges that when he was pushing for the ban's enactment in 1994, he was warned by Democratic House leaders that forcing Democrats to vote for the measure could cost them their seats. Clinton persisted, believing the measure that banned 19 types of guns by name, along with ammunition clips of more than 10 rounds, was the right thing to do.
The assault-weapons ban passed, but the result was the Democrats' worse loss in congressional elections since 1946. In losing a whopping 54 House seats, a rout in which such powerful figures as Speaker Tom Foley of Washington and Judiciary Committee chairman Jack Brooks of Texas were swept out of office, the Democrats gave up control of the House for the first time since the 1952 election. The rifle association said 19 of the 24 House members it targeted for defeat lost in 1994.
Those who warned him "were right, and I was wrong,'' Clinton wrote. "The price for a safer America would be heavy casualties among its defenders.''
Fast-forward to 2004, and it's still clear that many members of Congress, especially those facing competitive re-election contests, don't want to tangle with the NRA, a group of about 3 million members whose clout shows that a relatively small bloc of motivated single-issue voters can wield vast influence in American politics.
So, it would seem that the point is that a small group of people influence elections against the will of the vast majority of voters. Granted, the NRA would probably think that was a good thing, were it true. But would any group really complain if they found out that their education/outreach efforts were actually educating, reaching out, and, by extension, influencing elections? However, that isn't the point. Our fine SFGate staffers make this assertion, then make no attempt whatsoever to back it up. No mechanism by which the NRA gets people to vote for candidates they don't want to vote for is even proposed. No, they merely make an off-the-wall assertion, then get a few like-minded folks to repeat said assertion, then consider the matter finished. Typical.
Also, the first paragraph (of the manifesto excerpt) mentions "polls." I feel that some comment here is in order as well. These scientific polls are often worded in such a way as to nearly guarantee the desired answer. You know, ask "Do you believe murderous lunatics should be provided with as much firepower as possible?", get a bunch of "no" answers, then declare, "like, everybody is, like, so totally in favor of an assault weapons ban, ya know."
