No, not “airline” rockets. Ariane rockets. According to The Wall Street Journal, EU ministers are finally about to approve plans for a more affordable version of the Ariane series — the same family that launched Rosetta back in 2004. What counts as …
If Teslas are the cars of the future, the Quadrofoil hopes to be the boat of the future.
The electric personal watercraft looks like something James Bond would drive over Lake Como in a high-speed chase. Sleek and futuristic looking, the watercraft uses hydrofoil technology to “fly” above the surface of the water, making it virtually emission-free.
Hydrofoil technology is not new, but according to Quadrofoil’s president and CEO, Marjan Rožman, “What is new on Quadrofoil are electric drive and patented steering technology that enable stability and agility at the same time.”
As the boat reaches a speed of 6 knots (about 7 mph), its hydrofoil wings create lift and raise the boat out of the water, which, Rožman told The Huffington Post, enables it to be driven through most environmentally protected sanctuaries. Its nearly silent, all-electric motor also means there’s no oil or exhaust to muck up the marine ecosystem. The design’s hollow hull and composite, lightweight construction also makes the vessel “almost unsinkable,” as the website puts it.
Rožman boasts that the state-of-the art, touchscreen steering wheel is the only control mechanism on board. It displays how much battery power is left, as well as the boat’s speed and range. The Quadrofoil can travel more than 60 miles on a single charge, according to designers.
The smooth ride, however, comes at a cost. The boat comes with a $18,700 price tag, has virtually no onboard storage, and reaches a top speed of only 21 knots (about 24 mph). Rožman recognizes the challenges, but told HuffPost his goal is for “Quadrofoil to become a synonym for electrical personal watercrafts,” with future models offering more.
Quadrofoils are due to ship out in March next year, and available for pre-ordering on Quadrofoil’s website.
Eliza Coupe just had one of the most memorable Thanksgivings someone could ask for. The “Benched” actress posted a photo to her Instagram on Thursday revealing her engagement to Darin Olien, founder of lifestyle website SuperLife. Coupe wrote in the caption how thankful she was to find “someone with bigger hands than my mammoth man mitts.”
The 33-year-old actress later posted a photo of herself smiling with Olien and her engagement ring.
The former “Happy Endings” star was previously married to Randall Whittinghill, but the couple split in 2013.
H/T E! Online
They stack the odds, still we take to the street
For the kill with the skill to survive
It’s the eye of the tiger, it’s the thrill of the fight
-Survivor
BLIS http://www.bliscompany.com/ is a fascinating specialty insurance program run by Regi Schindler in Oregon. His customers are people paying for their own weight loss surgery.
Schindler uses the analogy that BLIS is similar to a warranty on a new car. It allow patients the comfort of knowing that if something goes wrong, they won’t be by additional medical expenses.
Schindler has some serious skin in the game. If a surgery goes wrong, his company is on the hook. Following the car warranty analogy, it could be the cost of some new wheel cover, but in today’s expensive health care world, it might be the cost of a new Mercedes or maybe a fleet of Mercedes with a Cadillac thrown in too.
Schindler is very choosy about who he insures. His data and loss ratio calculations come to the same conclusion: it is not where you do your bariatric surgery. What makes the difference is the surgeon who does the work.
Thus, when they wheel me into the operating room on Monday, December 1 to have gastric sleeve bariatric surgery, Dr. Derek Weiss, one of only three surgeons in Kentucky that BLIS has chosen to insure, will be the one doing the surgery.
The odds are with me. The mortality rate for gastric sleeve is about the same as gallbladder surgery and if I die during surgery, I will be the first death, after thousands of bariatric surgeries, for Dr. Weiss.
I’ve warned him several times that killing a best-selling author and journalist would not be a good career move for either of us.
Just in case, I’ve purchased the BLIS insurance. I’m not a smoker or drinker and I’ve followed Dr. Weiss’s instructions on pre-operation preparation to the highest degree. Weiss is my guru, and I am his pupil.
Derek is confident this will go well and his confidence is infectious. Confidence can replace fear in a life or death situation.
Using Business Skills to Pick an Expert
Taking care of business, every way
I’ve been taking care of business, it’s all mine
Taking care of business. And working overtime
-Bachman-Turner Overdrive
I was a very reluctant candidate for weight loss surgery. Even when I tipped the scales at 374 pounds and was past the point of morbid obesity, I kept looking for a way to avoid an operation. From my decades as a structured settlement consultant and working with trial attorneys, my knowledge of what could go wrong in a bariatric procedure is vast and littered with real life and really dead examples.
So when I got interested in weight loss surgery, I got all in. I told Dr. Weiss that I could do all of his job expect for the actual cutting. A slight exaggeration, but I find myself explaining the gastric sleeve to physicians who are not bariatric surgeons and letting them in on my insights.
I’ve read over 50 books on the topic, interviewed at least that many people related to the field and came together with an epiphany that will be articulated in my upcoming book, Project 199: My Business Plan for Losing 175 Pounds. https://www.facebook.com/DonMcNayAuthor
The best way to have a successful weight loss surgery is to treat it like a business project. I have definite goals, measurements, objectives, benchmarks, time frames, and a vision on where I want to be within a year.
I want to weigh 199 pounds. That will be a 175-pound loss from where I started in August. I’ve lost nearly 25 pounds before the surgery just by focusing my mind and habits towards that goal.
I can visualize what life will be like when I get to my goal weight. I can visualize throwing away my blood pressure and blood sugar pills. I can visualize being able to crawl around on the floor with my grandchildren and talk long walks with my wife. I can visualize buying just one airline seat, without a seatbelt extender, and feel comfortable sitting in coach. I visualize walking into a clothing store that carries Armani or Versace suits and knowing they have one in my size. I can visualize living to an old age.
Without a plan, I was frustrated with my overall health and not sure what to do about it. Now I am excited and enthusiastic.
I been in the right place
But it must have been the wrong time
-Dr John
I went into the process of weight loss surgery backwards. My first goal was to get a hospital that would allow me to do it.
My health insurance company, Anthem, does not cover weight loss surgery and it also does not cover the complications of weight loss surgery. I thought that the Affordable Health Care Act would be my way to make it happen, but I live in one of the 23 states where ACA does not cover bariatric surgery. I recently switched to an ACA plan, still with Anthem, but the surgery barriers remain the same. http://www.hhs.gov/healthcare/rights/
Four years ago, I went to a seminar (every bariatric program I makes you sit through a seminar like you are signing up to be a multi-level marketing program) for a hospital based in Central Kentucky, and they made me leave when they found out what kind of health insurance I had. I had to get up and walk out in front of the group.
Sometimes divine providence, combined with someone else’s boorish behavior, gets you to the right spot in life. If they had kept me, I would have never heard of BLIS, not been offered the gastric sleeve and not had the opportunity to meet Dr. Derek Weiss.
I’m still a few days from launch, but I am extremely confident it will go well. At least two of the major participants in my potential funeral told me that my dying on December 1 would really mess with their schedules and I needed to live through this. I’ve been blessed with successful friends and will do my part to keep them on track.
Any Member Of Your Staff Will NOT Be Able To Assist Me.
“Hot and cold emotion
Confusing my brain
I could not decide
Between pleasure and pain”
-Samantha Fox
I’m a big believer in experts. The fastest way to irritate me is to say (usually via a voice mail recording), “Any of our fine professionals will be able to assist you.” Big corporations like that concept as it allows them to treat employees like throwaway parts. Customers don’t develop a personal relationship with staff member s and the corporation is able to promote their brand more than the people who make up that brand.
A life of experience has taught me to connect with the very best experts I can find. In every form of endeavor there is always a handful of experts whose results dwarf others in the same category.
For example, I’ve been in the structured settlement business for 33 years and can demonstrate over and over again the difference between a good lawyer, a great lawyer, a mediocre lawyer and a bad one.
A good lawyer will get you a good settlement or jury verdict. A great one will usually get a great settlement. A mediocre one earns an okay result and a bad lawyer may get you zero. Or get you thrown in jail.
I had a stretch several years ago when I worked on nine different death cases involving trucks slamming into a car at the exact same intersection. The road was poorly designed and eventually corrected, but each of the nine people that were killed had similar demographics.
Each lived in the same neighborhood. Each was hit by a truck running a stop light. Each death was an individual driver without passengers, and each accident happened in the early morning when the sun was in the truck driver’s eyes and the passenger was on their way to work. I don’t remember any of the drivers drinking or taking drugs.
All of settlements were confidential, but I was there for the mediations and settlement conferences. Most of the families of the victims had mediocre lawyers and received about $400,000. One had a good lawyer who got about $600,000, and the one who had a superstar attorney received a settlement in the millions.
That family had a true expert. The rest were operating on a system of “any attorney will do” and never knew they could have had 500 percent more.
I can’t imagine a more important expert than a doctor. They literally have your life in their hands and a decision they make can have an overwhelming impact on the quality of your life.
I’ve made it a point to really get to know any medical professional in my life, from the receptionist in my physician’s office to every nurse, assistant and other person in the process. An expert can solve a problem that another cannot. Usually they attract good people around them too.
Let’s not forget that most aspects of the medical profession are run by big corporations. Thus, most buy into the “any of our staff members will do” approach. It’s mostly about money. If doctors become interchangeable parts, it’s easier to pay them less and replace them with another without losing customers or market share.
In the bariatric surgery field, the marketing focus is on the facility and not the physician. The facility has massive advertising budgets and public relations experts, and the doctor normally does not.
The American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery http://asmbs.org/ has a program called the Bariatric Surgery Center of Excellence. It is an excellent idea to weed out surgeons who “dabble” in weight loss surgery from full-time professionals, but the focus is on the hospital and not on the surgeon. The federal government pays for many weight loss surgeries through Medicare, Medicaid and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and their rules revolve around facilities not surgeons. Any hospital receiving Medicare and Medicaid money has to be a Level 1 Bariatric Surgery Center or a Center of Excellence.
The mindset of the federal government is the opposite of what BLIS does when it insures surgeries. BLIS is only focused on the surgeon and not the facility.
So who is right?
Being at a Center of Excellence was definitely a consideration for me. There was no way I would be at a facility that did not have that professional standard, but it was a first step and not an only step.
Being a Center of Excellence is an incredible marketing opportunity for the hospital. Ultimately it will, and probably should, result in an outcome where no one but Centers of Excellence can make it in the bariatric business. On the other hand, hospitals can make their reputation on a great run with one set of surgeons, replace them with a lesser group and still maintain their Center of Excellence standing in the short run.
You see an analogy in the financial business. Fidelity had an incredible run with its Magellan mutual fund when Peter Lynch was managing the fund. They moved Lynch to Vice Chairman, which was a dark time in Fidelity’s history as the company got into questionable practices like peddling contractual mutual funds with 50 percent commissions to soldiers fighting in the Iraq War. Congress shut down that practice, but in the meantime, Fidelity kept advertising the incredible returns on the Magellan fund long after Lynch was gone. http://articles.centralkynews.com/2008-04-01/news/24934264_1_fidelity-magellan-fidelity-traders-lynch-and-fidelity
Fidelity is one of the most aggressive, but a lot of financial companies do it. The line “past performance is no guarantee of future results” is not just a disclaimer; it is a mantra for how many corporations market. Including hospitals.
I am happy to be having my surgery at a Center of Excellence, but even happier that Dr. Derek Weiss is the one performing the surgery.
“I can call you Betty
And Betty, when you call me
You can call me Al”
-Paul Simon
I’ve known a lot of doctors in my life. My mother spent 27 years as an operating room nurse and for my first years in the financial business, all of my clients were doctors. I’ve learned a lesson about doctors that holds true for almost any professional: the less pretentious they are, the better doctor they are.
People hide behind titles are not people I want to do business with. Usually informal people have more self-confidence and the ability to allow others to buy into their self-belief.
Titles do have a purpose and I let you know about all of mine. I put all of my professional initials behind my name as it is a shorthand way to let people know that I’ve been to the rodeo and know what I am doing.
On the other hand, I want you to call me Don. My three grandchildren are the only people who refer to me by a title and “grandpa” is the title I’ve earned.
G. Derek Weiss, MD, FACS, FASMBS is “Derek,” not Dr. Weiss. He introduces himself as Derek and prefers it that way. He is friendly but oozes with self-confidence. He is an easy guy to like. http://www.bluegrassbariatrics.com/
Few medical professionals like to interviewed by the media and having a patient is writing a book about their performance can be nerve-racking. The facility where I am having the procedure DOES NOT (let me repeat DOES NOT) want to be mentioned in my writing and since I am a guest in their hospital, I am doing my best to accommodate them.
Derek is the opposite. He’s done three interviews with me and spent three hours on a Sunday afternoon answering a plethora of questions, from hardballs to softballs. His answers were 100% dead on and honest.
When you are a journalist or work with trial attorneys, you can get skeptical and cynical. I do both. You see people’s worst sides. It’s extremely hard to win me over, but Derek has. I buy into his confidence that things will go smoothly and I will be well on my way to better health. I’m three days from the surgery but anticipating it like a child waiting for Santa Claus. I can’t wait to it rolling and get my second chance at life started.
Derek is a man of strong opinions and not afraid to clash with those who disagree with his thoughts and beliefs. I’ve interviewed several of his former patients who adore him and read hundreds of messages on message boards about him. The overwhelming majority like him, and the ones that don’t focus more on his strong personality than his surgical skills.
I like Derek as a person, but my most important concern is that he be a great surgeon. I need him to be on top of his game on December 1, but he really doesn’t need me to write about him. He doesn’t chase publicity. He has patients lined up all day and night. He does not spend any personal money on advertising and doesn’t need to. After thousands of procedures, he pushes forward to continuously improve his craft with an intense enthusiasm.
He has been terrific on helping me keep costs down. He is also extremely affordable and highly aware that I am paying for every dime of the medical procedure without the help of my insurance company. The hospital has been helpful on the cost front as well. Picking up my own tab has made me an extremely cost conscious medical consumer and I am thrilled that my cost are dramatically less than others I am seeing on online message boards like www.bariatricpal.com. In fact, they are in the range of people who are going to other countries like Mexico to get the surgery done more cheaply.
The main thing you get from Derek is his zest for living. Derek Weiss loves being Derek Weiss, and it shows in his infectious zeal for his work. He is a great surgeon and I have done incredible and extensive research to make that statement. Even if I had not done the spadework, I would have guessed on our first meeting that Derek is a master of his craft.
Weiss talks about bariatric surgery the way that some people talk about sex, money or their grandchildren. It is his passion. He bubbles with enthusiasm and recognizes that his profession gives people a second chance at life.
Weiss was born into the surgical business. His father was a surgeon at the military base at Fort Knox and his mother was an operating room nurse. He grew up in Louisville, was Magna Cum Laude in Biochemistry at Dartmouth, was in the top 10 percent of his class at the University of Louisville Medical School and did his surgical training (residency) at Emory University where he worked under Dr. John Hunter, an internationally known leader in laparoscopy.
Derek brought his laparoscopy skills back to Louisville and spent eight years as a successful general surgeon when Dr. Tom Lavin, one of the nation’s most successful bariatric surgeons, asked Derek to move just outside New Orleans to join his booming weight loss practice.
Weiss has incredible respect and admiration for Dr. Lavin, who he has praised lavishly in every conversation that I have had with Derek. My wife is President of the Ursuline Academy, the oldest all-girls school in the United States, based in New Orleans, and I suspect the Kentucky to New Orleans connection plays into our multiple conversations about Dr. Lavin. http://www.whyweight.com
Weiss would have been happy spending his career in New Orleans, but a big opportunity came up for him to come home to Kentucky and partner with another surgeon in the bariatric field. They were together for several years and dominated bariatric surgery in Kentucky. His former partner now practices in Louisville, while Derek focuses on Lexington and Central Kentucky.
Derek fits all my criteria for an expert. He is well-educated, passionate about his craft, continuously learning, connected to other top experts and sees his work as his calling, not an occupation.
I want a surgeon who can’t wait to get up and get into the operating room. Since I am scheduled to be his first patient on Monday, I definitely want him to be enthusiastic about mine. He will be, but he also maintains that enthusiasm for everyone else he operates on. I recognize that I will probably get VIP treatment but he assures me that every patient gets that same level of care. I’ve talked to enough of his former patients to recognize that is true.
I went from a horrible fear and dread of the gastric sleeve surgery to anticipation. Not about the actual surgery, but the idea that I will recover quickly and be on a life journey that will allow me to give back and make a difference.
Like Dr. Derek Weiss is doing.
(You can track me on twitter @donmcnay and see how thing are going. I’ll post as soon as I get out of recovery on Monday December 1. ) Please offer your prayers and wish me luck.
Don McNay CLU, CHFC, MSFS, CSSC is a best-selling author and has been an award-winning syndicated business columnist. He is the founder of McNay Consulting www.mcnayconsulting.com and McNay Settlement Group http://www.mcnay.com He lives in Lexington, Kentucky and also in New Orleans. He is a member of the Eastern Kentucky University Hall of Distinguished Alumni and current a Director on their Foundation Board. He has Masters Degrees from Vanderbilt University and the American College
For More Information:
BLIS Insurance http://www.bliscompany.com
Don McNay http://www.mcnay.com
Dr. Derek Weiss http://www.bluegrassbariatrics.com/
Dr Thomas Lavin http://www.whyweight.com/
American Society of Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery http://asmbs.org/
Dr John Hunter and history of Emory Department of Surgery http://www.surgery.emory.edu/centers/endosurgery_unit/history.html
Ursuline Academy of New Orleans www.ursulineneworleans.org
Peter Lynch and the Culture of Greed http://articles.centralkynews.com/2008-04-01/news/24934264_1_fidelity-magellan-fidelity-traders-lynch-and-fidelity
Affordable Health Care Act http://www.hhs.gov/healthcare/rights/
NEW YORK (AP) — For some Americans on opposite sides of a national debate, Michael Brown has become a symbol, epitomizing their polarized views on who bears the blame for the toll of young black men killed by police officers. Brown was a gentle giant, in one version. A defiant troublemaker, in another.
Yet as more details of the 18-year-old’s life and death emerge, his legacy in the eyes of many is more nuanced, reflecting the ups and downs and challenges faced by many young Americans. “He was someone trying to come into his own, trying to grow up in a world that’s not that friendly to young people,” civil rights lawyer Barbara Arnwine said.
“Other young people see themselves in him. They’re not looking for someone who’s perfect. It’s his vulnerabilities that appeal to them,” said Arnwine, president of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
In the days after Brown’s Aug. 9 shooting death at the hands of a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, a warm, upbeat portrait emerged.
After academic struggles in high school, he had buckled down to get his diploma last summer and was soon to enter a technical college. Friends and family recalled a sizable young man — 6-foot-5, nearly 300 pounds — with a gentle, joking manner, a fan of computer games, an aspiring rap musician.
“His biggest goal was to be part of something,” said Charlie Kennedy, a health and physical education teacher at neighboring Normandy High School. “He was kindhearted, a little kid in a big body.”
Subsequently, some less flattering details surfaced. A toxicology report showed that Brown had marijuana in his system on the day he died. Ferguson police released a video showing Brown snatching some cigars in a convenience store shortly before he was killed.
Then came the release of evidence and testimony presented to the grand jury that decided not to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed Brown. Wilson testified that Brown scuffled with him while he was in his patrol car, trying to grab his pistol, and moments later — after stepping away from the car — started to charge back at him.
“The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked,” Wilson testified.
Some grand jury witnesses disputed Wilson’s testimony, saying Brown did not make a charge. But to Brown’s detractors, the officer’s account reinforced negative feelings about the young man and further fueled their efforts to make him a symbol for their pro-police arguments.
“Here’s the lessons from Ferguson America,” wrote rocker and conservative activist Ted Nugent on his Facebook page. “Don’t let your kids grow up to be thugs who think they can steal, assault & attack cops as a way of life & badge of black (dis)honor.”
The Rev. E.W. Jackson, a conservative black pastor based in Virginia, depicted Brown as “in many ways a typical kid growing up the in black community.”
“He imbibed a lot of negative attitudes about what manhood is all about,” Jackson said. “I wish this kid could have been redeemed to go on to live a wonderful life.”
“But something is wrong when you start wrestling with a police officer over his gun,” Jackson added. “I have nothing but sympathy for his parents, but you can’t absolve Michael Brown of responsibility for this situation.”
Arnwine, the civil rights lawyer, was infuriated that Wilson’s negative testimony had been made available to the grand jurors and to the public.
“It was meant to portray Michael Brown in the worst possible way, as a foul-mouthed, violent, rude, aggressive person,” she said. “It was meant to give people the impression of this scary black man who deserved to die.”
She said the turnout of throngs of young people of all races at rallies and protests nationwide gave a truer picture of Brown’s legacy.
“When you see their passion, hear the pain in their voices, you can see they honestly relate to this young man,” Arnwine said. “They feel that he absolutely embodied the struggles that they are going through.”
“He was someone struggling to create his identity, make his music, hang with his friends,” she said. “You’re caught betwixt and between, trying to be an adult but still in your teens.”
The president of the NAACP, Cornell William Brooks, said he met Brown’s parents and some of his young friends in the aftermath of the shooting.
“Michael Brown contained all the virtues and all the flaws of a great many young people, irrespective of race or class,” Brooks said. “There was something about him, and what happened to him, that inspired young people to transform a local social-justice challenge into a global civil rights issue, something that spoke to their sense of conscience.”
The intense scrutiny of Brown’s life and the accompanying moral judgments have angered some of those following the case.
“It’s not for us to say if he was angel or if he would have become a billionaire after he got his college degree,” said James Peterson, director of Africana Studies and an associate professor of English at Lehigh University.
“I hate the narrative that it’s more sad that he was two days away from starting college. What if he wasn’t?” Peterson asked. “It doesn’t matter what we think his legacy was. He was a human being who didn’t deserve to have his life snuffed out.”
___
Follow David Crary on Twitter at http://twitter.com/CraryAP
Los Angeles-based lifestyle expert, Sally Horchow invites us into her wrap studio.
photography by AMANDA FRIEDMAN
wrapping as a family
Sally learned the art of wrapping at her mother’s wrap desk at age 5, wrote thank-you notes before she could tie her own shoes, and worked in packing and shipping at the Horchow Collection (the mail-order company founded by her father) soon thereafter.
photography by AMANDA FRIEDMAN
staying organized
Sally’s closet doubles as a wrap desk, built to be comfortable for standing in front of. She stores grab-and-go host presents on the top shelves and wrapping accessories in drawers or on a slotted wall with movable hooks. A big roll of kraft paper–her favorite blank canvas–lives on the desk for easy access, as does her dry-erase board, to remind her of upcoming birthdays.
photography by AMANDA FRIEDMAN
organizing must-haves
Double-stick tape for seamless packages, a tiny hole punch, rubber stamps, and ColorBox Pigment Stamp Pads (they look like paint), baskets with dividers to separate cards by occasion.
organizing tip
An extra-tall drawer with dividers makes it easy to see wrapping-paper rolls. She hides leftover scraps in a basket and reuses them for accents for gift cards.
photography by AMANDA FRIEDMAN
gifting tip
Give small presents often, for no particular reason, and without expectation for reciprocation. Keep a birthday calendar and a stash of extra cards in your desk.
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Last week, Rolling Stone published an explosive story about a gang rape at a UVA fraternity. The article, “A Rape on Campus”, written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, is graphic and jarring and, for people not immersed in the topic, shocking. Erdely describes, in detail, a violent rape allegedly perpetrated during a frat party, by more than seven men, one of whom referred to the woman, Jackie, as “it.” As horrible as the rape itself is to read about, the aftermath was equally or actually more enraging. She and her friends knew she would be publicly shamed if she came forward and the school’s carelessness and willful denial verged on the criminal.
Erdely masterfully captured how the culture at UVA could lend itself to the circumstances of this rape and others. After publication, other survivors of rapes at UVA came forward and filled the article’s comments sections. There is, however, nothing new about rape at UVA, or gang-rapes on campuses, or the ways in which people in fraternities (small “f”) are prone to engage in rape.
Shamefully, only in the glare of public outrage, has school acknowledged what’s been going on for decades and has committed to change. UVA President Teresa Sullivan explained earlier this week that Jackie’s rape, and sexual assaults on college campuses, “points to an entrenched cultural problem in student life.” That assessment, while true, is critically insufficient and UVA will not solve the “rape problem” on its own.
Particularizing “rape on campus” in the search for real and lasting prevention and solutions will not solve the problem of rape on campus. The culture that enables rape is the broader one of male dominance, violence and exploitation.
The Rolling Stone article came fast on the heels of allegations made against revered Canadian radio host Jian Ghomeshi (who was arrested yesterday) and critical media coverage of decades old allegations of rape against American icon Bill Cosby (whose accusers now number 19). At the same time, lost in the awful news shuffle of the past two weeks, was a detailed story about the sexual abuse of girls, competing in USA Swimming, by their coaches and another about three high school girls in Oklahoma bullied at school after reporting their rapes. Even though the Internet has heightened public awareness, many people simply refuse to believe that one in five women in the United States experience sexual assault. For men that number is one in 77, although I suspect it is higher. But, these statistics are, if anything, low.
Rape, and unconscionably high institutional tolerance for rape, is a problem on campuses, and there are ways that schools can reduce its occurrence, but sexual assault is everywhere. It’s important not to focus on UVA when talking about UVA. Rape is a military problem. A Catholic Church problem. A celebrity problem. A respected media personalities problem. A Rotherdam problem. An early marriage problem. A gang problem. An elder care problem. A problem in mental institutions. A prison problem. A problem in the sciences. A problem in the Occupy movement. In police departments. In football. In swimming. On borders. In war. And, perhaps most frightening of all for many people a family problem. I say this because it’s in families where investments in, and the effects of, gender binaries and their hierarchical outcomes, are intimate and personal. Where people become complicit as individuals, for what is often referred to as “unpleasantness.” To understand how rape works as an oppressive, regulatory force in culture, it’s necessary to understand how gender stereotypes and binaries work as oppressive and regulatory principles.
What is almost impossible for some people to contemplate is that there are human cultures where rape is virtually unknown. Societies where women don’t calibrate themselves, for their entire lives, to its threat. More than 40 years ago, anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted an extensive cross-cultural study of rape involving more than 150 human societies around the word. She found that 47% of societies she studied had no rape, 36% had some incidence of rape, and 17%, of which we are one, were definitively rape prone.
What marked cultures where rape was missing were that women had authority in the community that was not related to reproduction — they were political or religious leaders and made valued economic contributions to society; feminine qualities were valued by communities; the relationships between men and women was not defined as hierarchical; boys were taught to respect girls and women (something altogether different from learning to protect them); these societies were stable and peaceful, making reliance on brute male physical dominance less likely; divinities were not uniquely male; and, lastly, these cultures had great respect for their environments and did not destructively exploit them.
On the other hand, rape-prone societies like ours are those which tolerate, encourage and often glorify violence as a marker of masculinity starting in early childhood. Boys learn that to be men meant being aggressive, competitive and dominant; work and access to authority are more rigidly sex segregated; women have minimal, if any authoritative roles in public or religious life or sports; femininity and feminine qualities are considered inferior and routinely mocked; “women’s work” is undervalued and considered demeaning to men; and, women’s roles were largely restricted to reproductive ones, their reproduction more likely to be regulated by men.
Sound familiar?
On campuses, where women students succeed academically (but continue to be marginalized by male dominant teaching hierarchies) it’s easier to ignore the evident connections between gender, power and abuse in heated and frankly, distracting, debates about alcohol abuse. Alcohol, however, is a weapon used strategically, not a cause, and conversations that focus on it tend to ignore power differentials and how schools themselves enable serial predator. Alcohol doesn’t explain how it is that rape is something many boys and men are very confident bragging about, especially to other boys and men. It doesn’t explain why they think it’s ok to issue instructions about “luring rapebait” or to secretly mark the hands of girls they’ve targeted for assault. What Erdely described is a textbook example of how rape is used by the powerful to abuse and dehumanize the less powerful and, often in the case of gang-rape, to form fraternal bonds. A study published by John Foubert, Jerry Tatum and J.T. Newberry in 2007 was one of four that found that frat members are more than three times as likely to perpetrate rape. For people concerned about false rape accusations, the best advice they could give their sons is to avoid frats, not girls.
Sanday turned her critical lens to American fraternities and published her findings and conclusions in a book, Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus, updated and reissued in 2007. She interviewed fraternity members and detailed specific rapes and the ways in which schools responded. In her painstakingly created portrait of daily frat life, she discusses pornography, initiations, hazing, and the role of bonding rituals, often built around degrading women. She also talks about efforts to create rape-free fraternity cultures. Sanday’s thesis is one among many theories of rape. However, it has the advantage of spanning decades, of being derived from details observations across cultures and of having highly relevant applicability to today’s stories. Her book about should be required reading for anyone even remotely interested in understanding the problem at UVA and elsewhere.
The UVA story has been catalytic, as have other similar related events elsewhere. Students are protesting, there have been public calls to shut down the Greek system on UVA’s campus and people previously confounded by the expression “rape culture” are now reconsidering what it means.
Schools, it is evident, should not be adjudicating felony crimes. College sexual assault dynamics are a microcosm of larger ones, however. Moving college rape cases to the legal system is hardly a successful solution in a country where police routinely downgrade complaints and harass survivors, where hundreds of thousands of rape kits are left unprocessed, and where courtroom biases are so thick you could
Rape is a gendered act of dominance, and popularly understood that way. It may be a sex crime, but it’s an abuse of power. Rapists easily intuit this and rely on status quo hierarchies to act with impunity. They are not strangers. They are not monsters. They are teachers who assault students, priests who assault alter boys, celebrities who assault fans, coaches who assault athletes, high ranking military officers who assault their soldiers, fathers who assault children, senior frat boys who assault freshman girls. They count on good people looking away and deferring to their privileged place.
Respect for female authority and seeing women as more than useful for their sexual and reproductive value, it is safe to say, are not central values in fraternities. But, this is also fundamentally true in so many of our major institutions, where women remain, uniformly either less than 17% of those with authority or completely cut out of power. Globally women still make up on average 20 percent of legislatures. The U.S. ranks 79th in the world for female representation. Women make up fewer than 15 percent of corporate board membership; religious hierarchies virtually all exclude women. These are not random facts disconnected from the issue of rape and the role it’s definition plays in how rights are understood and distributed.
It is a massive risk, and an act of bravery, to come forward and accuse a person, or several people as in Jackie’s case, of rape. It usually involves accusing a person with authority or higher social status. Awareness of this fact is very evident at UVA and in Bill Cosby and Jian Ghomeshi accusations. Importantly, higher status translates into credibility, a perk of status that rapists also exploit.
For anyone really interested in understanding how seven perfectly average boys could so viciously rape a female classmate at one of the nation’s most elite schools, how they could hold her down, violate her, call her “it,” and get away with it until now, I’d suggest a good place to start to put what is happening at UVA in context of the broader culture that we all live in and contribute to. It’s one still largely governed by the idea that complementary roles for men and women means separate but equal, which is demonstrably untrue when it comes to authority and status, and almost always conservatively protects the hierarchies that lend themselves to sexual abuse.
Fraternities on campus are powerful and impart status to boys, who then use it in traditionally acceptable ways. They can and do change. As disturbing as it is, we can and do challenge and create new norms. It is a good first stop to look at closely-held, family-friendly ideas about what makes “real” boys and girls and think about how they contribute to double standards in early childhood. The more stereotypes, the more binary, the more hierarchical and authoritarian, the higher the likelihood that rape will happen and be tolerated, as it has been at schools across the country. UVA’s rape problem is everyone’s rape problem.
There should be a sign here reading “Please don’t step on the sea lions.” That was my first thought as my 11 fellow passengers and I prepared to disembark from a Zodiac raft on the first day of our Galapagos Islands cruise.
We’d come to this remote place, about 600 miles west of the Ecuador mainland, aboard Celebrity Cruise Lines’ Xpedition, a 98-passenger luxury vessel built in Germany with the look and feel of a BMW.
Our rubber craft landed on the rocky shore of this island, one of several the ship visits on its various itineraries, and we were immediately greeted by a troop of sea lions, one of which plopped down on the path in front of us, blocking our way — not menacingly, just lazily.
Our trip took place in March, mating season for blue-footed boobies, so named because–you guessed it–their webbed feet are a striking baby blue colour. Consequently, the feathers were flying.
To attract females, the males make a weird whistling sound as they pull their wings back, puff out their chests and tilt their heads. The females squawk. And then they do their little mating dance, circling each other coquettishly. It’s survival of the fittest and Charles Darwin, who put these equatorial islands on the map, would approve.
“Qua-qua-qua-qua,” barked one female booby to a particularly persistent male suitor she wanted no part of. “Qua! Qua! Qua! What part of quaquaquaqua! don’t you understand, buster?”
The slight but pervasive smell of blue-footed booby poop filled my nostrils and I had a Tippi Hedren moment as I tiptoed through and around the throngs of birds. They clearly outnumbered me, but we weren’t about to remake “The Birds” here. Clearly, they didn’t want me for lunch.
A few steps later, we passed a cluster of big iguanas lying on top of each other, one big barely distinguishable mass.
Farther on, male frigate birds with big red neck pouches sat in the trees and or flew about. Viewing them I felt a bit like being in one of those animatronic wildlife displays at Walt Disney World. In fact, all the animals seemed oblivious to us.
That was one of the most amazing aspects of encountering the wildlife on these islands. The animals and birds showed no fear, or at least didn’t fly off or otherwise disperse in our presence.
Another remarkable thing was how clean and well kept these islands are. They really do look as pristine as in the movie “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,” the first film given permission to shoot on location here.
Not even a cigarette butt carelessly strewn on the ground marred the scene, let alone a Coke can. The national park prohibits smoking on shore and management controls access so no one island is ever swamped by tourists.
Here, what you see is essentially what Darwin saw in 1835. You really can step back in time in the Galapagos, which is why a trip here tops many travellers’ bucket lists.
On another outing, we viewed giant tortoises at home in their manmade but natural-looking environment at the Darwin Research Center on Santa Cruz Island. We were told that they can live to be hundreds of years old and they looked it, as leathery as “E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial.” These amazing creatures can last a year without food or water, which is why sailors in past centuries captured them and stored them onboard during long voyages, eating them one by one as they sailed. Even Darwin took 30 of them on the long voyage home to England.
Unfortunately, one tortoise you won’t get to meet is the famously huge Lonesome George. The last of his subspecies, he died in 2012. Naturalists had been trying to induce him to mate with a similar subspecies but no viable eggs were ever produced.
GENEVA (AP) — Police brutality, military interrogations and prisons were among the top concerns of a U.N. panel’s report Friday that found the United States to be falling short of full compliance with an international anti-torture treaty.
The report by the U.N. Committee Against Torture, its first such review of the U.S. record since 2006, expressed concerns about allegations of police brutality and excessive use of force by law enforcement officials, particularly the Chicago Police Department’s treatment of blacks and Latinos. It also called for restricting the use of taser weapons by police to life-threatening situations. But it had no specific recommendation or reaction to a grand jury’s decision not to indict the white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri who fatally shot a black and unarmed teenager. The report also criticizes the U.S. record on military interrogations, maximum security prisons, illegal migrants and solitary confinement while calling for tougher federal laws to define and outlaw torture, including with detainees at Guantanamo Bay and in Yemen. It also called for abolishing interrogation techniques that rely on sleep or sensory deprivation “aimed at prolonging the sense of capture.”
“There are numerous areas in which certain things should be changed for the United States to comply fully with the convention,” Alessio Bruni of Italy, one of the panel’s chief investigators, said at a news conference Friday in Geneva. He was referring to the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which took effect in 1987 and the United States ratified in 1994.
The U.N. committee’s 10 independent experts are responsible for reviewing the records of all 156 U.N. member countries that have ratified the treaty against torture and all “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
Most Pokemon aren’t terribly frightening. Take Pikachu and Weezing, for example. One is a tiny yellow rodent with a goofy smile and Nutcracker-esque red cheek circles and the other is a pair of dull looking floating orbs. They’re like raccoons in that, unless they’re named “Rocket,” simply not antagonizing them seems like it would be good enough to avoid any irritating scratches. That wouldn’t be the case with zombie Pikachu or zombie Weezing, as illustrated by JR Coffron III and Stephen Oakley.
I think these “Pokemonstrosities” should be added to a new Left 4 Dead 2 campaign, set in the Pewter City. Can’t you just see it now? Ellis is firing at a horde of incoming zombies while Pikachu is zapping Rochelle, Weezing is billowing noxious gas at Coach, and Nick just startled the Mewtwo. Things are going downhill quickly, but perhaps a chainsaw-wielding Ellis can get his companions out of this mess. He’ll have to avoid the charging Bulbasaur to do it though.
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