Mo'Nique Takes F'At Women to Fr'Ance

Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn of the Associated Press brings a story given this headline:

Mo'Nique takes `F.A.T.' women to France

Uhm, this is America. You’re not allowed to put apostrophes in your name if you want to be taken seriously. If you are Irish or Italian or whatever, your surname may have retained one from the old country. But enough with these made-up names with numbers and punctuation and lower case letters where capitals should be.

Looking like a plus-sized black Barbie in a green polka-dot sundress, her hair in a playful flip, the 39-year-old actress-comedian is quickly engulfed by her "fat girls." She embraces them, trying not to muss her makeup with her own tears.

"I always think I'm going to do fine when I get to this point, but I know your tears," she tells them, each a finalist in the third year of her big-girl beauty competition, "Mo'Nique's F.A.T. Chance" — as in "Fabulous And Thick."

There’s a reason why they have a separate competition.

Of them, five were chosen to strut their stuff in glamorous gowns on a runway at the Le Grand Hotel in Paris in a weeklong adventure airing 8 p.m. Saturday.

Women who move more and eat less attract men who can afford to take them to Paris.

"We wanted to go beyond the beauty pageant," Mo'Nique says, kicking off her high-heeled sandals during a taping break. "We also wanted to create runway fashion shows, to give fat girls the option of saying, `Yeah, we've got this, too!' It's about taking the show to the next level."

You’ve got it, alright. Most straight men don’t want to see it.

He adds that the show encourages women to exercise and eat healthy. "It's a very positive message, and I think the reason it's gotten a big audience is that it does speak to all of us."

It’s gotten a big audience, alright.

And on television, there's a "huge distinction between Mo'Nique's show, which is celebrating fat beauty, and other shows on television which promote weight loss and reinforce prejudice," says "FAT!SO?" author Marilyn Wann, San Francisco-based board member of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance.

Great. You can hold mixers for your female members with groups of men who are poor and unmotivated to change that, and demand that people simply accept that they are poor.

I have yet to meet anyone who has lost weight, aside from those who lose too much weight because of a disease, who has said “I wish I was still fat!” I felt better when I was thinner. I do not say my extra weight is okay. I want to be thing again. I do not hate myself, but I recognize that I need to develop and keep better eating habits. I recognize that my problem is compulsively eating more food than I need.

The fact is, it is more acceptable for a man to be fat than a woman. It isn’t any healthier, but women are more willing to tolerate it because women are attracted more to other qualities in men than physical beauty. Yes, most women like a hardbody, too, but things like security (money) trump that. Men, however, are visual creatures and if they aren’t turned on by their woman, then there is going to be dysfunction in the relationship. A man can’t simply reach for a tube of lubricant to help things along.

The women in this article would rather not go through the effort of losing weight and staying thin. So, they want to get as many other women falling into their way of living and thinking as possible, because that will take away that advantage in the competition for men, jobs, etc.

Are fat women treated differently? They sure area. Poor men are treated differently from other men, too. That’s life. Can a fat woman be attractive? Yes, just like a poor man can be attractive. All other things being equal, though, most men prefer the lady who isn't obese, just like all other things being equal, most women prefer the man who earns more.

A Bad Hour of Leykis

I listen to a lot of talk radio. One of the hosts I listen to often is Tom Leykis. As he tells you at the start of each hour, he’s not a right-winger. I gather from listening to him that he leans mostly towards libertarianism. But I digress, because his show isn’t about party politics. I listen enough that I can probably be categorized as a “fan”, though I’m certainly not a “student” (fans will know what this means). If there are any fans reading this, I think Tom usually does an outstanding job as a radio talk show host and is very entertaining. He makes a lot of good points. His lines of reasoning are usually very logical. I do, however, disagree with him on some important things, because we have some very different starting points in our outlook on life.

Tom is apparently on yet another vacation this week. It seems that some radio hosts get a lot of vacation. Yesterday, I heard a repeated hour on his show in which Tom solicited calls from married persons who had homosexual feelings that their spouse didn’t know about.

One exchange with a caller stood out in my mind. Tom must not have had many callers on the topic, because he kept this woman in the air for a long time, haranguing her for her decisions, in between his characteristic long...


pointless...


pauses...


that someone turning the dial could easily mistake for dead air. Later that same hour, Tom got punked by a Phil Hendrie listener who called in as Doug Danger. Tom kept him on the air for a long time, too. So, my guess is that there weren’t a lot of people calling in to say they were closeted even to their spouse.

But back to the exchange with this woman. She called in claiming to be a 25-year-old Mormon who was married (of course) with two kids. She said her husband was a great husband and father. She claimed that she finds some women hot in a lustful way.

Since Tom is an individualist narcissist atheist, and nothing is more important in life than his orgasms, he insisted that she "must" be "honest" with herself and to truly be intimate with her husband, she had to tell him and, by implication, break up the family and leave it. Yes, every once in a while on the Leykis show you get marriage and relationship advice from a man who has been divorced four times and swears off marriage and encourages people to live alone and only do what they really want to do. Yeah, he knows how to get along with others on a deep level.

His advice to men who are looking for cheap, casual sex? Practical and effective. His advice here? Not so much.

This woman chose to get married. She made vows her and her husband and their families consider sacred. She chose to make two children with her husband. She has certain obligations to keep. Yet Leykis encouraged her to break her vows, break up her family, go against her religious beliefs and church, and hurt her husband and children, because she has lustful thoughts about women.

The assertion that she HAS to act on her feelings is absurd.

First of all, sexual encounters involve another consenting adult, and who is to say the women she is attracted to would reciprocate and act on it with her? People deal with their feelings without acting on them all of the time. There are married people who, at one time or another, feel like leaving their spouses. Later on, they are glad that they didn’t. There are recovering alcoholics who do not act on their feelings of wanting a drink. There are plenty of straight men who want to make passes at every somewhat attractive woman they see, but they don’t because they save sex for marriage or don’t want to get fired from their jobs. Some people are attracted to slightly underage teens… do they have to act on those feelings? There are people who feel like sleeping in all day every day instead of going to work, or punching out talk show hosts, or robbing a bank, or spending money they don’t have, or always eating more food than they need. There are people who decide to go kosher who still feel like eating bacon.

It sounded like she was doing a good job of dealing with her feelings, but Tom insisted that having the thoughts in the first place meant she HAD to act.

I disagree.

She was restricting herself to sex with her husband when she felt more like interacting with women. There are people who want sex to don’t have sex at all, or for long stretches of time. I have yet to see a headline that says “Woman Dies From Lack of Sex.”

As far as urging her to tell her husband – why? How would that help anything? All it would do is bring trouble. There are things you should not tell your spouse. Most of them are completely irrelevant to you relationship. I mean, do you describe every bowel movement you have to your spouse? Do you describe every sexual encounter you ever had with someone else before you met your spouse? Why not, if you really want to be open and honest with them?

The woman kept citing her deeply held Mormon faith as the basis for her decisions. Tom’s response? “You don’t have to be a Mormon.” While true, it is an answer from Tom’s dismissive attitude towards religion in general. It was said by Tom as if she woke up one day and said, "Hmmm, I could go to McDonald's today - or - I could join the LDS church." Some people have carefully and thoughtfully explored and pondered their choices in religion, and have committed to an organized one. I know that is hard for some people - like Leykis - to fathom. Not all religious people are mindless zombies who stick with a religion because they were born to parents who practiced it. She would lose a lot of she left the LDS church - probably including family and friends.

Don’t think I support the LDS church. The church is pseudo-Christian, false, and a cult from both a theological and sociological perspective. But because it is a very large cult, leaving it is very, very difficult. And I know that marriage is everything in the LDS church.

While this woman should have never have gotten married if she was primarily attracted to women and cared more about that than having children, what’s done is done. She apparently functions well with her husband, and she is giving her children both a mother and a father. She made decisions and vows, and should stick to them, and not let some radio entertainer who esteems casual sex over relationships and marriage sway her to do something she and many other people will regret.

Baca Has a Good Idea, But Wackos Want to Pamper Criminals

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca wants to deal with jail overcrowding by having some of less risky prisoners placed on home detention.

But get this - some activists are worried that the prisoners on home detention won't have tax-funded health care and housing!

From Patrick McGreevy's Los Angeles Times piece:

Some opponents of the legislation winding its way through the Legislature are not fighting it on the law-and-order grounds raised in the Hilton case.

Instead, they say the county has already made it difficult for inmates to get medical care and psychiatric services in the jails, and the new program will make it even harder.

"This bill may allow jails to place individuals who need critical medical or psychiatric care in home detention without identified services or funding to pay for these services," said Margaret Jakobson-Johnson of Protection and Advocacy Inc., a nonprofit group providing legal help and advocacy for the disabled.
[snip]
However, poor inmates may be left on their own entirely if put on home detention, Jakobson-Johnson said.

You mean like us law-abiding folks?

In addition, she is concerned that some of those on home detention will lack stable housing. "Release on home detention without housing, or a clear plan to find housing quickly, may do more harm to an individual," she said.

The proposed legislation would allow those assigned to home detention to receive vocational and housing assistance and to leave home for psychological and medical care, said state Sen. George Runner (R-Lancaster), a coauthor of the bill. He said the county does not give up its obligation to provide inmates with healthcare just because they are assigned to home detention.

He disputed Jakobson-Johnson's criticism that home detainees would be less likely to get the care they need than those behind bars.

"That argument doesn't make sense," Runner said. "What's happening now is these people are being released after a few days and sent home, or are not serving any time in jail. In those circumstances, they are not getting any care anyway."

Convicted inmates serving sentences should be performing work - preferably on behalf of their victims.

Los Angeles County is under a court order to end overcrowding, so some inmates are released after serving only 25% of their time, a practice that will probably be modified if Baca wins the new powers.

Hmmmmm, now why would Los Angeles County have jail overcrowding? Oh. That's right. How many illegal aliens are in there?

The bill would save counties money. It costs L.A. County an average of $10 a day for a prisoner on home detention, compared with $70 daily to keep the inmate in jail, Bilowit said.

The main drawback I could see to this is that for some people, home confinement is hardly punishment. Some people who aren't criminals voluntarily confine themselves to their homes. In the spirit of those concerned about the health care and housing for inmates placed on home confinement, we should make sure the home has all of the modern appliances, conveniences, and utilities, too. Why shouldn't my taxes to go make sure some criminal can watch HD cable television at home?

Seriously, we need a truly rehabilitative system for people who can be reformed, and restorative justice wherever possible. Quite often, a criminal's crimes are against specific people, not faceless "society". They should have to work for their victims to pay off their debt to them as much as possible.

Not Every Couple Should Stay Together and Get Married

Yet another example of people not right for each other making stupid mistakes:

A Scottish bride attacked her new husband with her stiletto shoe, striking the groom in the head in an upstairs hotel room while their wedding reception went on below, a prosecutor said Tuesday.

Teresa Brown, 33, told police she and her husband had "been accusing each other of different things," prosecutor Alan Townsend said. Brown said she hit him on the head after their April wedding because he grabbed her, Townsend added.

Sounds romantic.

The distraught groom, Mark Allerton, 40, staggered to the front desk, clutching a bloody towel to his head, Townsend said.

"He indicated that his wife had struck him over the head with a stiletto heel," the prosecutor said.

Police found Brown sitting on the hotel room bed, surrounded by broken glass. She spent the rest of her wedding weekend in a cell.

Can you say annulment?

Brown's lawyer Stuart Beveridge said the newlyweds began throwing things at each other after an argument in their room turned physical. He said Brown was on antidepressants at the time and had been drinking.

RED FLAG.

"She and her husband are still together although this incident has not helped," he said, adding she is receiving counseling.

Sheriff James Tierney dropped the assault charge against Brown by issuing a warning and fining her $505 for damaging the hotel room. He also ordered her to pay the hotel $1,150 in compensation.

Let’s Use Graffiti Vandals For Target Practice

Enough is enough. We as a society have tried and tried to control the graffiti problem. In the greater Los Angeles area, it is an ongoing and seemingly increasing problem. The illegal alien problem and the illegitimacy problem are no doubt helping to make it worse.

So many steps have been taken – locking up paint and markers, graffiti hotlines, painting over graffiti within and few business days. Still, it is there. Vandals defacing and destroying property just to mark their territories like dogs. Only, dogs are more admirable.

Graffiti lowers property values, creates a hostile environment, is ecologically harmful, destroys property, costs a lot of fight, clean up, and prosecute, and assists with gang activity.

The time has come to fight graffiti by allowing the police and the average citizen to shoot graffiti vandals if they witness them doing the deed. How quickly would it cut down on graffiti if a homeowner group could hire someone to drive around in a Humvee overnight, armed and ready to shoot any graffiti vandals? Or if the cops could slow down just enough to point a rifle out the cruiser window and shoot up some punk and radio for an ambulance as they keep driving down the street? Sure, some graffiti vandals would arm themselves to fight back, but I think most would quickly realize that putting their unreadable scribble on a brick wall isn’t worth the likelihood (not low probability… likelihood) of getting shot.

Sure, there would be the risk of people dumping their murder victims by a wall and planting a spray can in their hand as a way to cover up their crime, but I think the investigations into those attempted cover-ups would be worth it.

Stop Whining About EHarmony.com

A clinical psychologist spends decades counseling both-sex couples and learning why relationships fail and why they last, and what makes happy marriages happy. He figures out how to determine if a man and woman are compatible with each other in ways that will likely result in a happy, lasting relationship. He wants to increase marital happiness, reduce the divorce rate, and thereby help individuals, their children, their extended families, and thereby society as a whole.

He sees a business opportunity, and he takes what he has learned and modern day technology and launches EHarmony.com. Good for him, right?

It is a voluntary service that people have to log on to and pay to use. Nobody is obligated to use it, and there are many alternative online and offline services.

Yet this hasn’t stopped people from complaining and suing. The complaints and lawsuits are usually about what eHarmony.com isn’t, which is funny because it doesn’t claim to be those things in the first place.

It is a site dedicated to matching people based on their likelihood of entering into and maintaining happy, lasting marriages. It isn’t a “dating” site.

To determine if people are ready for such a relationship and with whom they’d be compatible, eHarmony has people fill answer an extensive list of questions to form and deliver a personality profile. The length and depth of the questioning is set up to smoke out people aren’t really serious or patient enough, may not know themselves well enough, may be misrepresenting themselves (intentionally or not), aren’t mature enough, or have some other emotional condition or character trait that renders them unlikely to be a good marriage partner. EHarmony does not take money from those people, because the people running the service do not think they will be able to successfully help those people find a lasting relationship. Such applicants are told that the site would be unlikely to find them partner. EHarmony also “rejects” people who are currently married, are “too young”, or have been divorced enough times to make another divorce likely.

There are people who are paranoid enough to believe that eHarmony “rejected” them because of their beliefs about religion or their weight, but there are at least thousands of eHarmony.com customers who can demonstrate that not to be true.

I find it curious when people balk at the results of the personality profile, get angry when eHarmony won’t take their money, or complain that they are consistently matched with losers. All of these things are a result of what someone has indicated about themselves. They only have themselves to blame.

Perhaps the most bitter attack against eHarmony.com is that it currently will only match people with someone from the other sex. A lawsuit was filed in California by a woman who was seeking to be matched with a woman. It is true that there are many, many services that already do this. However, none of them are based on the research and experience of Dr. Neil Clark Warren. Apparently, activists such as the one who filed this lawsuit really admire Dr. Warren’s matching abilities, which is interesting considering they usually are quick to bash his convictions as an evangelical Christian and his earlier ties to Focus on the Family. It seems these activists want it both ways – they want to benefit from Warren’s research while condemning the principles behind it.

Thanks to the Federal civil rights laws, businesses do not have the freedom to refuse to exchange goods/services/money with another party simply based on factors like race. You could have started the business with your own personal savings, built it from the ground up, etc., but you don’t have the freedom to choose to only serve certain races and exclude others. (And yes, this supposedly means that if you are “white” and a “black” business refuses to serve you because you are white, you can sue them.) In California, “sexual orientation” is one of those categories where it is illegal to discriminate. You can’t refuse to serve someone because he or she is a homosexual.

That is the law. I’d argue that everyone should have the freedom to hire, fire, and do business or not with whomever they want for whatever reason. If a woman only wants to work with women, she should be allowed to hire only women. If she only wants women as customers, she should be allowed to make that restriction. If she doesn’t want my money because I’m male, then she loses out when I take my money elsewhere. But, we must deal with the laws as they are, not as we want them to be.

I’d argue that eHarmony is not refusing service to anyone based on their sexual orientation. Any woman, regardless of sexual orientation, can take the personality profile and be matched with men – provided she isn’t excluded for the things I mentioned above, like being divorced too many times. If you’re a woman and you don’t want to be matched with a man, then eHarmony is not for you. I wouldn’t go to the Olive Garden and demand that they serve me Mexican food, or sell me footballs. You may not want to be matched with a man, but why is that eHarmony.com's responsibility? It is a voluntary subscription for a non-essential service.

Dr. Warren has pointed out that his decades of research has been with both-sex couples, and so he doesn’t have the experience to match up men with men and women with women. The critics have balked at this, howling and shrieking at his assertion that there could be any difference in the dynamic within the sexes and the dynamic between the sexes. I find this puzzling, because almost none of these critics are bisexual, so clearly they know there is a difference. Men and women are different, and that makes the dynamic between them different than it is between two men and two women. If this wasn’t true, then gay people could easily choose to be straight.

The lesbian can’t have it both ways. Either men and women are different and she is attracted to women and not to men, or there is no difference and therefore she should be attracted to both, and thereby eHarmony matching her with a man should not be a problem for her. But there is a difference, and eHarmony.com’s matching criteria is based on the dynamic between a man and a woman, and thus wouldn’t work it matching a man with a man or a woman with a woman.

Some people assert that the only difference is in body parts, but this doesn’t past muster, either. Is a lesbian really a lesbian only because she prefers vaginas to penises? Such an assertion is ridiculously simplistic, especially considering the use of phallic toys by some lesbians.

Rather than cursing the darkness, why not light a candle? Counselors and psychologists who specialize in counseling same-sex couples should build up, collect, and analyze research about such couples who have happily lasted, and figure out what has made their relationship work. Then, they can take that research, and start their own service. Maybe eHarmony.com would be willing to license its technologies to such a business or launch the service itself. Or is the lawsuit really just about trying to tear down a business because they’re selling chicken when you’re in the mood for tuna?

EHarmony.com has been successful enough that other matchmaking and dating sites compare and contrast themselves to eHarmony. Match.com’s Chemistry.com has gone so far as to appeal to the “rejects” from eHarmony. Great. Go to Chemistry.com if want someone who is already married, or has been divorced a few times already, or is too young or immature to get married, or has some other challenge to having a happy marriage with you. Sounds appealing, doesn’t it?

Finally, there are the people who simply don’t like the eHarmony.com ads with their happy couples and Dr. Warren. I don’t know - maybe they are lonely and bitter, or maybe they’d rather see a teen pitchman with a bunch of piercings, tats, and a rap sheet. People are entitled to their own tastes. The problem comes when they assert that everyone else has to cater to them and think like them and have the same exact experiences as them.

EHarmony.com is for people who want to find someone to marry - and in almost all of the world, that means someone of the opposite sex. There’s no guarantee you are ready for marriage, or that there’s someone out there who meets your needs/standards. Get over it. EHarmony.com has worked for a lot of people. If it doesn’t work for you, move on and stop wasting your time and energy with whining and consipiracy theories.

Oh, and if that lawsuit against eHarmony.com is succesful, they I'll sue any OB/GYN who refuses to examine my testicles.