yes, juan williams

hmmmm, from eye candy to free speech in one fell swoop...

NPR, bastion of freedom and protector of democracy, has fired someone for honesty. it's not the first time someone is fired or punished or banished or ridiculed or censured for saying the truth (as they see it), but coming from a leftee organization that 'may not agree with what i have to say, but will defend to the death my right to say it' (this was on the wall of the ACLU when i interned there...)it's kinda more glaringly hypocritical.

so, juan williams admitted that when he sees people in traditional muslim garb, it unsettles him. um, ok. let's put aside the fact that if you are wearing a floor length black cape dress and your face is completely covered (except for your eyes sometimes) you are creepy. even if you are a superhero coming to save the day, you are freaking me out. if you are a man in a similar dress (although your eyes are allowed to show, since you have a soul... gotta love that koran!) you are almost as freaky. now, the fact that your ankles may show is cool. the fact that you are not wearing a mask (at least not a synthetic one) in public is very welcoming and all. but if you could comfortably be holding a loaded AK47 under your dress and nobody would even notice a bump, that's a bit unsettling. especially if, being a committed member of the religion of peace, you are actually likely to be carrying said weapon, if not a shrapnel packed bomb belt. am i saying that all muslims are terrorists? potentially, yeah. but i don't work for NPR so i can be honest.

let's alternate the scenario. i am walking down the street, or in my local pub and in walks a bald white guy with blue eyes, a tight t-shirt, steel-toed doc marten boots, and swastika tattoos. he has the freedom to dress however he wants. he can express himself and identify himself however he chooses- but in this case, since he's proclaiming that he is -most likely- a neo nazi skinhead, i'm gonna get the heck out of dodge. why would i do such an offensive thing? maybe he is just an all around solid citizen going out to buy some chicken soup for his poor ailing grandma's sick kitten. maybe he is a cancer patient who works on a loading dock and just has some leftover tattoos from his days as a rebellious teenager. but why should i take that chance? he makes his choice and i make mine. no, my choice is not to kill someone's baby (that would make me bona fide 'pro choice', or at least a muslim terrorist), but my choice might be to preserve my own skin just in case he is who he looks like he is. i CHOOSE to err on the side of prudence.

another option. i am in a movie theater and a teenager walks in with his pants around his ankles (ok, not that far down). his cap is pulled so far down over his face you can just about tell he is not a burn victim. he speaks in 4 letter words, but not in full sentences. his multiple layers of basketball jerseys, t-shirts, and sweatshirts are capped of with a down coat that might be appropriate for an expedition to the north pole, and you can tell he is showing off and posturing for all the young girls around. guess who i am not sitting next to in the movie? guess who i don't want standing between me and the nearest exit? might he be a member of a youth gang? might he possibly be carrying a weapon? perchance will he start a fight in said theater? all good questions. even though he may be a straight-A honors student who got a full scholarship to harvard med school, i'm not gonna go out on that limb. you know what is sadder than a victim? a potential victim who shoved caution aside to be more politically correct. if it's s a choice between my moral conscience and good old common sense, i'm gonna be the one walking out the door before things fall apart.

another example just for your entertainment (because i'm guessing by now you've got my point). you are in the mall (no, i am not really ever in a mall, but let's say for the sake of discussion...) and there is a 15-going-on-25 year old there. her skirt is so small you can see into her intestines when she moves even slightly forward. this will, of course be paired with 'i'm a sexually repressed catholic school girl, so come break me free!' knee socks. her shirt clearly came from the drawer of her toddler sister, except that it has some fleshy advertisement like "juicy" or bootylicious" across her burgeoning chest. she chews her gum in a way that suggests what else she might be willing to chew on, and if she was any more obvious about being on the prowl she would have to move to las vegas and get a license. is it possible that i will make incorrect assumptions about the moral character of this fine specimen? yep. could i make a convincing argument that she is just being 'trendy' and stylish? yep. does that change the fact that she chooses to look like she charges by the hour for her services? not at all. and to say any different would be either disingenuous or downright left-wing.

so, back to juan williams. he is a journalist, but he is a human being. he is blessed with all of his 5 senses in working order, and he has the courage to say the truth on top of it. he admits to being a little skeeved out when people dress like terrorists. does that mean they are terrorists? no. does that mean they want to be terrorists? obviously not. they are not even dressing like that because they like the style- they wear what they wear out of religious conviction. the same religious conviction held by the same religious fanatics who blow up babies so they can cohabitate with virgins in the afterlife. their fashion statement just happens to coincide with the fashion statements of those who believe it is their moral obligation to murder other people. hmmmmmmmmm. kind of gives you pause, huh?

so juan williams said what most of us (who are not purposely brain dead) also think. and he said it out loud. and he works for NPR. or he worked for NPR. so, what's his crime again?

please someone reconcile for me being pro free everything but firing juan williams. just try- i am really listening...

res ipsa loquitur

fisher price doesn't hurt kids; kids hurt kids

so fisher price is recalling 87 hundred thousand million gajillion toys because of safety concerns. as a mom, this piqued my concern, so i figured i'd better pay close attention to the toys being recalled and the circumstances surrounding such a massive recall.

and here's where we get all 2010: the toys are being pulled because kids playing on them could get hurt. huh? can't kids playing on pretty much anything get hurt? don't kids get hurt fairly regularly even without toys? not that i advocate being a neglectful parent, but i think kids getting hurt is part and parcel of being a kid. i remember scrapes and cuts and gashes and bruises and that is without any more than a bicycle, a swingset, and some grass. my own kids, no matter how much i hover, stubbornly insist on falling down, tipping over, and tripping on patterns in carpeting. although we've managed to avoid stitches (hurray for crazy glue!), we've seen other (equally careful) families whose children sport black eyes, busted lips, and nearly broken noses. one of my daughters has a scar through her eyebrow from a plastic bucket like you put sand in at the beach. one of my sons has a large silvery purple badge of honor on his leg from a broken mason jar that was inside a bag of garbage he was carrying out to the trash cans.

so, what's my point? why would fisher price be coerced into a major recall because kids are kids??? i know that parents are overly paranoid about every little thing these days. women have been driven so far away from their natural instincts that they now obsess over everything from BPA in water bottles to chemicals in flame retardant pajamas to kids needing full safety gear to so much as break a sweat.

which reminds me- the other day my daughter was riding her new roller skates. actually, she was kind of clomping her feet in big ungainly steps in the kind of toddler roller skates that clamp on over shooes and have four wheels for stability and an automatic brake preventing the wheels from going backward. so a well meaning friend says to me, "um, don't you think she should be wearing a helmet?" and i told her my helmet rule: unless the child can move faster on a toy than she could walk unassisted i really don't think she needs a helmet. so, this friend was inappropriately horrified, which i always chalk up to being way too brainwashed by the wrong people. seriously, should your child wear a helmet if he wants to play tag? or if he is riding a bigwheel? i'm thinking it is more important to concentrate on balance and have better awareness of what is going on in their peripheral vision. i would rather have them see and hear a car that is pulling into a neighbor's driveway that have their heads ensconsed in a foamy dome in case of violent ejection from a tricycle.

but back to the recall. what ever happened to kids being kids? what ever happened to adults using reasonable caution in choosing age-appropriate toys for their own children and just accepting that sometimes, accidents happen. even with all of our good intentions and all the baby-proofing in the universe, sometimes kids will just get hurt. that's why accidents are not called deliberates. sometimes, stuff happens and it's not really anyone's fault. even a super rich toy company which we should apparently all hate on principal because their toys are-gasp- engaging -and they don't give them away to starving AIDS infested orphan kids in subsaharan africa.

or do they???