Peter Krupa

The New York Times continues its hand-wringing over immigration today, with an article about the long waiting lists to get into federally-funded ESL classes. You know the formula: about half of the article is made of up anecdotal sob stories about so-and-so Ramirez who had to wait six months to get into a federally-funded English class.

The other half drapes a doily over that elephant in the middle of the living room: How many of those 1.2 million adults enrolled in federally-funded ESL classes are in the country illegally?

The Times wants to give the impression that government just isn’t spending enough money to meet the need. I prefer to think of it this way: It’s not that the federal government is spending too little. It’s that the illegal immigrants are swamping a system designed to serve the limited amount of legal immigrants in the country.

Wow, brown people denying entitlements to other brown people - the Times national editor’s head just exploded.

Some researchers recently took an interesting approach to studying the phenomenon of repressed memory caused by a traumatic event. They poked around in books to look for characters who showed symptoms.

But while they found plenty of literary characters with repressed memories in works dating back to the 1800s (think Dr. Manet in A Tale of Two Cities), they came up blank in all works of literature before that. Meanwhile, other well-established clinical conditions like depression, schizophrenia, and epilepsy are described throughout human literature.

Could it be that trauma-induced amnesia is a “culture-based syndrome”?

Fortunately, if you think the good doctors have missed something in their extensive perusal, they welcome the correction. In fact, they’re offering a “$1000 award to anyone who can produce a published case of ‘repressed memory’ (in fiction or non-fiction) prior to 1800.”

Happy hunting.

I found it pleasant to watch a good movie of whose plot I hadn’t the faintest idea, so I won’t tell you much about Lucky Number Slevin, except that it was pretty good. Not great, just pretty good, meaning that you couldn’t exactly guess the plot twists (but you could see them coming) and Ben - excuse me - Sir Ben Kingsley’s New York Jewish accent was passable (but lacking pizzazz).

I had a few other minor complaints, but they were minor. Lucy Liu was very cute. For a mob assassin/silenced pistol/not-as-simple-as-it-looks thriller bit, it was well worth the one hour and 40 minutes.

From OverheardInNewYork.com:

Yuppie kid: Mommy shaves her hoo-hoo!

Yuppie dad: Okay, honey. Look, do you want your book?

Yuppie kid: I came in the bathroom this morning and asked Mommy what she was doing and she said shaving her hoo-hoo. Mommy shaves her hoo-hoo!

Yuppie dad: Dylan, remember when we discussed at-home conversations and outside conversations?

Yuppie kid: Yes.

Yuppie dad: Well, this is an at-home conversation.

Yuppie kid: Okay, daddy. [Sings to herself quietly] Mommmyyy shaves her hoo-hooo…

Black lady: See, home conversating, outside conversating — that’s bullshit. My kid says shit like that, I smack him. He won’t say shit like that again.

Yuppie dad: Okay, thank you, but I think our method works just fine.

Yuppie kid: Lady, do you shave your hoo-hoo?

Black lady: Oh, yeah, that shit is workin’ just fine. She’s all kinds of polite.

Yuppie dad: Okay, Dylan, this is our stop.

The political chattering class exploded in giddiness this week over some sort of spat between candidates in the “race” for the presidency. Some Hollywood guy who used to be a Friend of Bill said something mean about Clinton, so Clinton’s people demanded something from Obama’s people, and Obama’s people shot back. Now, ink has been spilled. So. Much. Ink.

I watch this with sadness, not because of the divisions and fractures within the Democratic yadda yadda, but because press coverage of elections has become so worthless and petty. Seriously, who gives a shit? There’s a fucking war going on. If I want gossip and personality spats I’ll read US Weekly. This should be a sidebar to the election coverage, not the main story.

Scientists have observed chimpanzees fashioning spears out of sticks to use as hunting weapons:

Using their hands and teeth, the chimpanzees were repeatedly seen tearing the side branches off long straight sticks, peeling back the bark and sharpening one end, the researchers report in today’s on-line issue of the journal Current Biology. Then, grasping the weapon in a “power grip,” they jabbed into tree-branch hollows where bush babies — small monkey-like mammals — sleep during the day.

After stabbing their prey repeatedly, they removed the injured or dead animal and ate it.

“It was really alarming how forceful it was,” said lead researcher Jill D. Pruetz of Iowa State University in Ames, adding that it reminded her of the murderous shower scene in the Alfred Hitchcock movie “Psycho.” “It was kind of scary.”

Keep an eye on Joost, brought to us by the same altruistic geniuses who invented Skype. The premise is: Watch TV, but on the internet, and for free, and whenever you want to. Everyone is happy. In fact, the news today is that Viacom just signed on.

How can this possibly happen? The real forehead-slapping, why-didn’t-I-think-of-that goodness of Joost is that when registered users select programming to watch, they will be shown ads based on their user profiles. As advertising quality goes, this is solid gold, and roughly the same concept used by Google in its search, e-mail, and blog ads. Only better.

Folks, these plucky Slovenians have already proven that they know how to run a world-class internet business, and Joost’s flashy design seems intended as an elegant kiss-off to the Web 2.0 aesthetic. I’d bet some cash that certain Silicone Vally-ites will not sleep well tonight.

Another word on the power of decree that Chavez has acquired. According to my Venezuelan human rights lawyer wife, there are some areas of law that a president with power of decree still can’t touch: for example, criminal law and taxes, and anything that would change the rights or the organizational structure of government guaranteed in the constitution.

All this, of course, has become sort of theoretical since Chavez packed the Supreme Court (he added 10 seats to the existing 20 and appointed his allies). But another interesting point comes out of his new power of decree.

In 1999, when Chavez changed the constitution through a special assembly, he made a tiny adjustment that was little noticed at the time. Article 190, Section 8 of the old constitution granted the president the right “to dictate extraordinary measures regarding the economy or finances when public interest requires it or when it has been authorized by a special law.”

The new constitution gives the president the right “to dictate, upon previous authorization of the assembly through an empowering law, decrees with the force of law.”

Notice something missing? That’s right, he can make decrees about anything now, not just the economy or finances of the country. My point is that the power of decree is not an afterthought: Chavez has obviously been planning it since at least 1999. And now, using his new power of decree, Chavez’s plans for the next overhaul of the constitution (I guess he likes to do this every eight years or so, sort of like an oil change) include top secrecy.

That is, he has decreed that the special council drawing up the new constitution be sworn to secrecy until the constitution is ready for the general assembly to rubber-stamp.

Draw your own conclusions.

Consider the following paragraphs found on Salon.com:

For contemporary Americans, however, “it” could signify our own more gradual and insidious turn toward authoritarian rule. That is why Lewis’s darkly funny but grim fable of an authoritarian coup achieved through a democratic election still resonates today — along with all the eerie parallels between what he imagined then and what we live with now.

For the first time since the resignation of Richard M. Nixon more than three decades ago, Americans have had reason to doubt the future of democracy and the rule of law in our own country. Today we live in a state of tension between the enjoyment of traditional freedoms, including the protections afforded to speech and person by the Bill of Rights, and the disturbing realization that those freedoms have been undermined and may be abrogated at any moment.

Now, I don’t know what Salon.com’s editorial position on Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela is because it has more or less steered clear of the whole topic. But I do know plenty of left-wing types who would agree with the above statements when it comes to American politics, yet shout down Venezuelans who express concern about this exact same thing happening in their own country.

The parallel’s are striking: A leader is democratically elected; the leader immediately starts consolidating power in the executive branch with the help of allies in the legislative branch; the leader wins reelection by constantly harping on the people’s fear of an external threat; and finally, the leader gets the power of decree, making the state, for all intents and purposes, a dictatorship.

That last part hasn’t happened in the U.S. because, thank God, our democratic institutions are still intact, and so in the 2006 election the legislature changed hands, forcing the executive to moderate a bit. Venezuelans haven’t been so lucky, and now they have a government run entirely at the whim of a single man.

Why should this situation be OK for Venezuelans, yet an outrage when it happens in the U.S.? This is the deep hypocrisy in the American left in its approach to the developing world, and it looks an awful lot like condescension and - dare I say it? - racism. What’s good for the upper-class east-coast champagne-swilling elite in the U.S. isn’t necessarily  good for those poor ignorant brown people south of the boarder, who need a caudillo to bring them social justice.

It’s with a similar line of thought that the left continues to justify Revolutionary Cuba. Some people never learn.

A bunch of school-marms (seriously) are up in arms over an award-winning children’s book that contains the word “scrotum.” The offending passage is found in a book called “The High Power of Lucky,” reports the New York Times:

The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

“Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much,” the book continues. “It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”

First of all, I want to say that no one ever, ever, in any circumstances, deserves to get bitten on the scrotum by a rattlesnake. Not even a dog. Now, on to the controversy. As is often the case with these kinds of things, partisans are forced to choose between two equally ridiculous positions: The position of the prudes, who claim the use of the word is “Howard Stern-like;” and the position of the author, who says that since the main character is learning about how to be a grown-up, “Learning about language and body parts … is very important to her.”

Right. Body parts. Elbow. Ear lobe. Heart. Nose. Scrotum.

Of course, as the title of this post suggests, “scrotum” is clearly a funny word, especially if you have a juvenile sense of humor. Scrotum. See? You kind of chuckled there. Part of the reason it’s funny, though, is because you’re not really supposed to say it in polite company. You can’t just walk up to the mail man and say, “My scrotum itches,” can you?

This, you see, is the real value of taboos: They give us something to giggle about when we get to middle school. Take away all the taboos and “scrotum” becomes just a medical term. That’s why I say, ban the book. Shelter the children. Cover their ears. Then when they’re all growns up, they can have a good hearty laugh when some frat boy staples his scrotum to a wooden chair.

No rattlesnakes though. Rattlesnakes are not funny.