Dr. X's Free Associations

Catching Up After Years of TV Neglect

Mad Men: Sex, lies, cigarettes & liquor circa 1960 Madison Avenue ad agency.

Breaking Bad: Death, lies, sex, drugs & murder.  An Albuquerque high school chemistry teacher diagnosed with terminal cancer becomes a meth manufacturer to provide for his family after he's gone.

Dexter:  Some sex, but mostly lies & murder.  A forensic blood spatter analyst by day, somewhat likable serial killer at night.

Rescue Me: Sex, lies, death, murder, cigarettes, liquor & drugs.  Post 911 life for NYFD firefighters.

Bank Card Thieves Getting More Sophisticated

Bank card fraud is hitting bank owned machines and thieves have moved beyond crude skimming devices.

Until recently, skimming equipment was relatively crude and clunky, attached to card-readers with double-stick foam tape and relying on small cameras to record hands punching in PINs. Newer devices include equipment that fits inside card readers, pinhead-sized cameras and well-crafted attachments that sit snugly on top of ATM card readers and PIN pads, looking just like the real equipment. Bluetooth technology allows the fake card reader and PIN pad to talk to each other, and data drives or wireless technology can make downloading of stolen information quick and easy.

My recent personal experience with this crime didn't leave me hopeful about police and banks keeping up with the thieves.

The Beam In Her Eye

 From a comment I made recently:

Your observation about double standards reminded me of something I read this week in the blog of a staunch Sarah Palin supporter. In the post, Michelle Obama was attacked because of her comment about being proud of America for the first time in her life. In my book, her comment is fair game, but those who were allegedly horrified by Michelle Obama's comment don't seem to care in the least that Todd Palin hated America so much that he belonged to a secessionist political party for years[..].

Can you imagine the howling from Sarah Palin's admirers if Michelle Obama belonged to a secessionist movement at any time in her life, even for a month in college? Yet there's no problem with Todd Palin being a secessionist well into his adulthood.

I pulled this comment up to the front page because I just learned that, in her new book, Sarah Palin actually snipes at Michelle Obama for making the statement about feeling pride in her country for the first time.  Ms. Palin's own husband was a secessionist and she has the audacity to sneer at Michelle Obama for not meeting proper standards for pride in her country.   She has thoroughly demolished the chutzpah meter and not in a good way.

via Joe Depinto

Skipped Days of Posting

It's difficult to come up with things to post.  My concentration isn't that great and I'm feeling cranky.  The shoulder problem is persisting and becoming quite painful, affecting my sleep.  I'm trying to remain civil in my dealings with people but it's obvious I'm not right.  Glad, at least, that I'm not working this week.

James O'Keefe's investigative tool kit: Women, alcohol, sex and humiliation

TNR:

Right-wing pseudo-journalist James O'Keefe decided to do an expose on the teachers unions. So he sent one of his flunkies to a bar after a teachers' conference to buy drinks for a special education teacher named Alissa Ploshnick, and prompt her to dish about incompetent colleagues while secretly recording her. One of Ploshnick's stories was that a colleague of hers referred called a student a nigger" and was demoted but not fired. She was clearly outraged. Guess what happened? O'Keefe released the recorded, and got Ploshnick suspended for using the n-word [note, she used the N-word in a quote that criticized the colleague for using the N-word]. Yes -- the teacher who, in what she thought was a private setting, complained about a colleague using a slur is suspended. Here, per Zaid Jilani of Think Progress, is O'Keefe's video ambushing Plotnick outside her home.

Women are O'Keefe's favorite targets.  Adding to O'Keefe's creepiness are the recurring themes of sexual power and humiliation behind his so-called investigations.

Let's review some history:

In a stunt that garnered lavish praise from conservatives, O'Keefe inhabited the role of a pimp sexually exploiting minors.  Then he publicized heavily edited videotape to falsely discredit an organization that registers the poor to vote.  One of the women he portrayed as cooperating with his prostitution scheme actually called the police on him.  O'Keefe didn't bother to reveal that.  When the original, unedited videos and the facts were reviewed by investigators, the organization was cleared of wrongdoing.

Then there was O'Keefe's failed scheme to ply a female reporter with alcohol, have sex with her and publicly humiliate her afterward.  In my book, attempting to have sex under such false pretenses isn't investigative reporting; it's attempted rape.

The idea behind the stunt wasn't that it would expose wrongdoing.  O'Keefe simply thought he could discredit this woman by getting her drunk, seducing her, filming the seduction and publicly humiliating her.   The fact that O'Keefe considers himself a journalist and that he thought the female journalist having sex with him would discredit her but not him reveals everything you need to understand about O'Keefe's mindset.  The piggishness of his double-standard is breathtaking.

Now O'Keefe sends out a flunkie to chat up a woman in a bar, buy her drinks and prompt her to reveal private thoughts about her coworkers.  Afterward, O'Keefe publicly betrays and deliberately humiliates the innocent woman, causing serious harm to her career.

O'Keefe's latest target did something millions of public and private sector employees, union and non-union, do every day.  They gossip about bosses and co-workers they dislike.  And remember, she didn't do this spontaneously.  She was plied with alcohol and encouraged to share her opinions about co-workers by someone she probably believed was flirting with her.  The woman was guilty of nothing except being insufficiently cynical and distrustful.  Moreover, we learn, O'Keefe's victim is a hero:

[In 1997] Alissa Ploshnick risked her life to save the lives of a dozen Passaic schoolchildren. She threw herself in front of a careening van to protect her students and landed in the hospital with broken ribs, a fractured wrist, a badly bruised pelvis and glass cuts in her eyes.

When you think it can't get worse, it does.  New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie disgraced himself by applauding O'Keefe's actions.  I wonder how Christie feels about drugging and raping women?  Would it be okay if it helps the Republican Party?

Increased Suicide Attempts Linked to Accutane

A new study finds attempted suicides double during treatment with the acne drug Accutane.

Rewarding Outcomes Instead of Decisions

Dan Ariely:

... Managers attempt to make sense of the environment and predict what will result from their decisions.

The problem is that there’s plenty of random noise in competitive strategic decisions. Predicting where the ball will go is equivalent to deciding whether to open a chain of seafood restaurants on the Gulf Coast. The dog running off with the ball is the BP oil spill. When the board reviews the manager’s performance, they’ll focus on the failed restaurants. The stock is down. The chain lost money. Since the manager’s compensation is tied to results, he’ll incur financial penalties. To save face and appear to be taking action, the board may even fire him—thus giving up on someone who may be a good manager but had bad luck.

The oil spill example is an extreme case. In the real world, the random noise is often more subtle and various—a hundred little things rather than one big thing. But the effect is the same. Rewarding and penalizing leaders based on outcomes overestimates how much variance people actually control.

Fading Memories

A family member has a large collection of old family audio recordings on magnetic tape.  The recordings have been stored away for at least 25 years and the tapes have decayed to the point that they will be gone forever if the material isn't digitized soon.

He's been sharing some of the files with me over the past few days.  We've had lots of laughs, but some of the recordings are quite moving.  There is one recording of an audio letter never sent by a then 11-year-old sibling speaking candidly about some serious challenges in his life.  He spoke with an equanimity that was almost too accepting of troubles that a little boy should not have to face.  He also seemed much more vulnerable than the child I remember.  Listening to his voice over the soft hiss of degraded magnetic tape made hearing him all the more poignant.

New Yawk, New York

The NY Times:

The online Yellow Pages includes more than a dozen listings for “New York accent reduction” specialists, and searching “New York accent” and reduction or elimination on Google generates about 4,000 hits. The process typically takes at least several months, with as many as three sessions a week, and can cost from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.

It's been so many years since I left that few people in the Midwest think I'm from New York, but they do generally peg me to the East Coast.

But this quiz identifies my accent as Inland North:

You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."

Yes, because when I say 'soda' people have no idea what I'm talking about.

This longer quiz, identifies my accent as Northeastern:

This could either mean an r-less NYC or Providence accent or one from Jersey which doesn't sound the same. Just because you got this result doesn't mean you don`t pronounce R's.(People in Jersey don`t call their state "Joisey" in real life)

Anywhere from New Jersey to Providence?  There's a lot of accent wiggle room in there, but I did, in fact, grow up in places between New Jersey and Providence.

Local Photo

Trailers and equipment for actors and film crew.

Used to be you could see film and TV crews at work almost every day in Chicago. In the mid-1990s, much of the industry moved up to Canada where it was cheaper to shoot.  Bad for local actors and tech people.  Well, the actors make most of their money on commercials, so that didn't matter as much. But it was very bad for people on the production side.

The industry has returned recently, the result of deliberate efforts to bring some of the work back to Chicago.  Though we aren't quite back to the '90s, there has been a lot of local work this year.  On Tuesday, studio trailers and equipment trucks lined our street.  Later, they shot a night scene for a Fox TV show on our front steps (blurry point-and-shoot images not worth posting). The show is "Ridealong." The producer, Shawn Ryan, was the executive producer for The Shield and Lie To Me.

I avoid involvement with our building association, so I'm not always up on what's happening.  I assume we made a little money renting out some of our property.  

Also on Tuesday, while driving on Ridge Avenue up in Rogers Park, I noticed fake snow covering the parkways and front yards.  They were shooting a scene for Contagion (Matt Damon & Gwyneth Paltrow) earlier in the day.