For posterity and your convenience, I’ve storified the recent discussion a bunch of us geoscientists on Twitter had that started with conference “booth babes” and inevitably led to the advances of and roadblocks for female (geo)scientists. Use at will.

(Oh, has anyone figured out how to edit a Storify? Can you?)

Allergies. Tree, weed and grass allergies. They threaten to turn into colds and bronchitis, but the main treachery is the woozy head. That ideas, sentences and decisions come out of me but I am not the one making them. Hate that feeling of not being in control while things miraculously get done (for varying values of “done”). Wonder if psychologists have studied these different states of being of a person in whom histamines and their enemies engage in battle.

Hey, at least, I’m not coughing like a dog any more.

Whoops, spoke to soon. Here comes another attack. Welcome back to a normal spring in the South.

As an (over-)analytical, career, married and childless woman progressing in a mostly desirable career path, I feel compelled to dissect some of the legislation coming out of the escalating Republican War on Women.

First, we frame. Is the goal here marginalizing women because God said Men First!, increasing what is believed to be a dwindling birth rate, moving America forward in innovation and jobs, ensuring that Americans become blue-collar workers while intellectual jobs stay abroad, something not mentioned or a combination of the above? What is the desired end result of passing laws that punish miscarriages, abortions, birth control, equal pay, female career choices and being a single, working mother?

So, if an unmarried woman wants to have sex, she cannot have birth control and must be married. If a married woman wants to do the same, she, too, has no access to family planning. Following that, should she get pregnant, she has to bring the fetus to term to avoid jail time and is allotted little to no maternity leave and equal pay when she returns to work. The time she spent giving birth to that beloved fetus and recuperating from the strenuous experience is not then something to be valued by society, but an opportunity to penalize a woman for having successfully used her uterus for what God intended, something men cannot do. We want you to have children, but you had a child, therefore no longer qualified to earn what your husband or other male peers do. Leave alone the primacy of the unborn fetus but not the actual born child itself.

Then comes the disconnect. This is happening at the same time that gender parity is increasingly more important in the workplace because of heightened recognition that women do the same work as men here and there are only so many of all of us. The pool of qualified professionals grows smaller.  Therefore, issues like fair maternity leave as well as equal pay and promotions are being identified and addressed in corporate America (at least in companies like mine) and it is known that the company that makes benefits more attractive to men and women alike gains the competitive advantage.

Of course, we still have a long way to go. Childbirth, for instance, will one day no longer be considered a short-term disability or long-term career kneecap and the dinosaurs of government and industry who don’t come to terms with this will be left behind to die. (Or they’ll buy themselves politicians and get government subsidies to stay afloat, but that’s not truly sustainable as we’ve repeatedly seen.)

As far as the conservatives go, let them see how far this plan to address low birth numbers or uppity women or whatever alongside the dire national need for qualified workers goes. If most of this War On Women legislation sticks, we’re going to end up with unmarried, childless, working women (tapping into a birth control black market) and equally smart and qualified women simply dropping out of promising careers to stay at home and raise children. Either way, we end up doing less with less and we lose.

Of course, none of this has anything to do with the increase in stay-at-home dads. Or, gasp, shared responsibility. Those men must not really value their paychecks.

Thanks to my brand spanking new Ultra Pride+ wet grinder and mom’s dosai batter recipe. It’s 4 cups of Ponni parboiled rice to one cup of urad dal; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

The injustice is not that his killer is not black. Nor does justice lie in that George Zimmerman is not white. You don’t have to be white to act from a place of irrationality and strange fears. Justice and injustice lie in the aftermath.

This is why I ask friends and members of my own brown family who tend to indulge in throwaway racist remarks about black people and the president not to do so. First, you are the cause of “the decline of civilized society” about which you complain so loudly, but, more importantly, such talk only makes it easier for Americans to look away from Just Another Black Kid Getting Killed. That’s injustice. Don’t do it. Don’t have any part of that mind rot.

As for justice, here’s an exercise: Compare the reaction of the Sanford police to a) the circumstances as they are and b) if Martin had shot Zimmerman in self-defense, because he felt threatened by a crazy, older dude following him on a poorly-lit street. If you came up with very similar answers, I’d like to move to your world.

While appraising items made in, say, Sri Lanka, the Dominican Republic or China for purchase, I wonder who made it, under what conditions, how they live everyday and, almost concurrently, how this purse will look against a pair of slacks in my closet back at home or that hard drive will satisfy my space requirements, and whether I can get the item for cheaper elsewhere. When the next disaster hits one of these countries, I will most probably send money.

To top it all off, I recognize that to entertain all of these thoughts in one sitting is horrifyingly privileged and, at the same time, all too normal. That we can live with these dichotomies, but that’s life. Then, why do I rage on hearing of the latest young American who moved to New Orleans to “do good” or “make a difference” in the world?

In the wake of Kony 2012 (consider moving out from under your rock if you haven’t heard of this documentary and its fallout yet; on second thought, stay there), writer Teju Cole tweeted up a storm of a response. It started with “From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex.” Six of these followed touching on the injustices levied against minorities and women all the way from the “microaggressions of American racism” to the stark contrast between American foreign policy on certain countries and our sentimentality towards what we consider charity cases in many of those same nations. Cole then hashed all of this out in a long-form Atlantic essay that is so civilized while not holding back. Please read it, take it all in and return.

Amen to our not-really-post-racial society, the repulsiveness of “civilized” journalism about topics inherently messy and barbaric and it being way past time we reclaim the ability to talk openly and directly about issues that pertain to us, especially when people who are not us do so fearlessly. Think Trayvon Martin, Wendell Allen, Robert Bales and even Joseph Kony and Jason Russell. But, here, I want to address the White Savior Complex specifically (leaving out “Industrial” on purpose for now, I’ll get to that later).

I disagree with Cole. I completely agree with him. Again with that pesky co-existing duality.

American sentimentality is a tremendously useful thing. It’s what drives the haves to replenish food banks and medical supplies in disaster-ravaged areas and offer money to people who need it NOW, to make it to TONIGHT, much less tomorrow. Back in 2008, when a group of us in New Orleans loaded up supplies for the United Houma Nations Old Store after Hurricane Gustav laid waste to Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes in southern Louisiana, a volunteer asked, “What’s the point in taking all of these things down there if Hurricane Ike will come along next and wipe their homes off the map?” Another volunteer replied, “They’re still alive and need these things now, to make it to that next hurricane.” Even if there are grim and farther-reaching political reasons behind floods, wars and homelessness, up to and including the way we ourselves vote, those in need are in need right now. Food, drugs and money – stat.

I also noted at the time that the hurricane-flood victims themselves acknowledged the batshit-insane but economically-real logic with which they live in coastal Louisiana. In the interest of that cherished due diligence, let’s understand that those being helped are not utterly ignorant of their circumstances, too.

They spoke of the irony of working for [the offshore oil and gas] industry that destroys their land and ecosystem but offers them a steady paycheck. If they give up working as oilmen and start a petition for the removal of oil-producing infrastructure from their area, how else will they stay economically viable?  Everyone agreed that digging their own graves is what feeds them, but their hands are tied.

But, when we went down from New Orleans to the southern parishes after days of the roads being closed off by FEMA and other authorities, when the midwest-based First Draft crew came down to New Orleans to gut houses that had been allowed to flood in the first place and then fester for months thanks to federal-state-local government turf wars, we did so only on being invited by homeowners and communities themselves, to address very specific material wants and knowing fully well that the loss these folks suffered was our loss, too. That, as First Draft’s Athenae has tattooed on her arm since: Our fate is your fate. Intent, “[connecting the dots and seeing] the patterns of power behind the isolated ‘disasters’” and having a clue before intervention. This is where I fully agree with Teju Cole.

It goes back to Nicholas Kristof’s response to Cole’s tweets in which he says, “It seems even more uncomfortable to think that we as white Americans should not intervene in a humanitarian disaster because the victims are of a different skin color.” Good grief, way to miss the point entirely. White is not just a skin color, Mr. Kristof, it’s also a state of mind and an economic paradigm. To put it in more blunt terms, even though my husband is white and understands the instant privilege that comes with the territory, I have more in common with boojie America than he does solely based on our respective families’/societies’ economic backgrounds and prevailing notions of success. To intervene with this mindset and little prior research into people’s cultures, what they consider home and their larger sociopolitical picture is nothing short of cultural proselytism.

With this in mind, too many times have I seen bright, young things armed with college degrees, blogs, social media cred and TED/Davos appearances come to New Orleans to “make a difference,” to “save them because they can’t save themselves.” They show up, make Connections, tweet a lot about Warehouse District parties and their new Friends in the Lower Ninth and Treme, raise some money for the latest charitable organization by getting a big corporation involved (which only gets the company more advertising and the community unsustainably dependent on a large outside source for financing and survival), find that they actually need money and real jobs to live in New Orleans, grow bored of keeping the charitable-organization-that-has-taken-on-a-life-of-its-own alive and weary of living amid the people they came to help and leave for New York or Los Angeles leaving a mess behind for someone else to clean up.

Because it is the only way they know how. And this is what I mean by intent: your only goal should be to want to help people restore or change themselves with self-respect based on their own cultural and economic dispositions and not remake them and their home in your image, much less feel good about yourself, pad your resume and make some money in the process.

Real help is not a sanitary or unique solution. Never ever help from a place of pity, misplaced self-confidence, an attempt to define your identity in externalities, self-justification or, worst of all, with no respect for the fact that the people you want to save are most probably doing their best to save themselves. Find out more about that and help that or get out of the way.

As for Industrial, this Charitable Behavior also reminds me a lot of emails from budding entrepreneurs asking if they can do you a favor by guest-writing on your blog about gardening equipment or child-rearing when that’s clearly not your territory or are Just Plain Clueless. And then you build up a whole infrastructure around it with flashy conferences in exotic locales and, there you have it, your insta-money-making scheme: Sound passionate about a current hot philanthropic topic, put a logo on it, cash in. You know why I like Warren Buffett? Because he made and still makes money honestly and doesn’t look blatantly inauthentic doing it.

I keep going back to First Draft because they are a great model of how to be (relatively more) privileged and effect real change. Girl loves her sexy boots and specialty soaps but, every single day, the time, money, sweat and tears Athenae and the other bloggers pour into no-bullshit, informational and passionate posts about politics, society and foreign policy and fundraisers for vetted causes – it’s amazing and stuff gets done. You would never see her or some others post the Kony documentary’s promo video as it is and then say something trite about the power of story, because (journalists, take note) they know the story changes based on who’s telling it. It’s so easy to feel good.

Please send money to Mexico. Also read up on why this most recent earthquake was destructive but not deadly, research our political relationship with Mexico, write your politicians on the way we treat Mexicans (and perceived Mexicans)  in America and think about how foreign stories are reported in our mainstream media. The more we inform ourselves, the more we participate and help in a really effective way, and the less antiseptic we are in our interaction with those different from us.

At the very least, it helps us recognize that the world is full of people different from us and they are all worthy of the same respect we expect. That right there is a ton of help.

Books prices plummet.
Literacy rates soar.
Education rates soar.
Old structures crumble, as did the Church.
Scientific Revolution.
Industrial Revolution.
Humanitarian Revolution.

Inventor of the electronic book and my dear friend Michael S. Hart would have been 65 today. Each time I say or think that – “he would have been 65 today” – the spirit of Michael frowns at me reproachfully, “Stop being so sentimental about the past. I am the past. Focus on the future!” This is the man who, if he were given the tough choice of saving his parents, wife or children from a sinking ship, would always pick his children. They are the future.

Reverence for the future, for what we cannot yet see but can begin to make, is the very core of the philosophy from which Michael created and ran Project Gutenberg. But, he was always looking at the land beyond the horizon. After eBooks, what next? While getting taxpayer-funded research back into public hands, making DRM more fair and continuously fighting draconian copyright laws all the way from Disney to SOPA and PIPA are extremely necessary and require our immediate energy, they are merely the taking-down of roadblocks to get us back to zero. What needs done in order for us to achieve true progress? What do we create next?

As I type this, I am suddenly wrecked and sobbing my eyes out. Not just because the world lost such a man and many don’t even realize what he signified, but because Michael was my friend and loved the people of now as much as he did those of tomorrow.

A friend who convinced me I could learn anything if I let go and think about it, taught me never to apologize for my personality and high standards, was proud of my achievements as he was of his own and I could call in the middle of the night with an Aha! moment or a broken heart.

A goofball who would chide me for spending too much on retail products but would buy at garage sales ten widgets that went into a machine he didn’t own or five tubes of toothpaste on super-sale because you never know when that make will be discontinued.

A teacher who broke down the quadratic formula for me visually so I understand what it physically means to complete the square.

A technophile who didn’t like that I work for the oil and gas industry because it isn’t forward-thinking enough but relished the technologies the industry fosters and drove his and friends’ cars into the ground (and in no way near a fuel-efficient manner).

A bat out of hell. But NEVER a cynic.

The world needs people like that to effect change while bringing others to realize that that change, the constant push towards better, is what keeps people and civilizations from brain and physical death.

Speaking of death, did I ever tell you Michael wanted to live forever? I am still upset we didn’t have his brain and some cells cryogenically frozen in a DQ Mr. Misty. Then again, it’s probably for the best, for who wants to deal with The Holocene Park Of Dr. Hart? *GROAN*awful*OW* Yeah, well, Michael would have appreciated that whole setup and delivery!

Happy 65th, my friend. Thinker, do-er and ever in my heart and actions. I love and miss you, but I draw the line at having a red Mr. Misty in your honor.

A request: If you read and love eBooks and understand the need to protect the public domain, please consider donating your time or money to Project Gutenberg.

Thank you, L.A. Eyewear, for donating the above image to the public domain.

Oh no, yet another culture is better than us at something!

The social media outlets are now blowing up with a WSJ article by Pamela Druckerman about how French parents are superior to their neurotic American counterparts.

… After a few more harrowing restaurant visits, I started noticing that the French families around us didn’t look like they were sharing our mealtime agony. Weirdly, they looked like they were on vacation. French toddlers were sitting contentedly in their high chairs, waiting for their food, or eating fish and even vegetables. There was no shrieking or whining. And there was no debris around their tables.

Shivers ran down my spine while reading this paragraph. See, none of this would have happened in the households in which D and I grew up because if you had by some stroke of ill luck lost the fear of God (our parents) and a sound thrashing, it would be reintroduced with a quickness. Act up at dinner? Too bad. You were turned away from the table and no, no plate saved for you in case you hungered later that night. In a house full of boys (D’s) or in which Indian and Arab food was prepared fresh everyday (mine), there were no leftovers. Should’ve pitched a fit after swallowing a few spoonfuls. Survival of the most strategic, baby. Act up at dinner outside the confines of home? Can you say “Dead Kid Walking?”

Be it due to low self-esteem, co-dependence issues or the need for unconditional love, Americans today, generally speaking, are way too indulgent of their children. Mine will not be raised that way. D says it’s all talk, I’m a big softie and will cater to their every whim. What he fails to realize is that authority is not my concern as much as being a good parent, and that is not being the kid’s friend or even the purveyor of morality but someone who makes him or her see that he or she is not the center of the universe. This is a very critical life lesson and lots more important than math, music, swimming, debate or religion. It breaks my heart to see my friends’ kids having kids or roped into being parents because their parents just could not and did not put their feet down to say and repeatedly, “Hey, I know life isn’t fair, but ruining yours and mine is not the way to deal with it” or “If you think suburbia is so boring, go downtown and volunteer or get a job.”

Back to French parents who

are raising happy, well-behaved children without all the anxiety.

Consistently-enforced parental discipline makes for well-behaved children but if you want your kids to be happy and have anxiety-free futures, you absolutely cannot beat the tar out of them, either. Occasional, warranted spanking is a-ok in my book, but whaling on your kid with the flyswatter, bottle of lotion or whatever is within reach is not. Such incoherence may stop the behavior but not the underlying cause and only builds resentment. (And all you white people who think spanking is corporal punishment or child abuse? You don’t know anything. Spanking! Ha! Haha!)

So, the trick is to stay cool but simultaneously firm. It’s a hard balancing act, especially with respect to this human being you created and provokes you like no other. It’s easy to indulge, relent or rage. And then I think of a certain sibling of mine and his family, in which the chill-but-rigorous approach to parenting has largely succeeded. It’s not impossible.

Another highly-effective child-rearing tool mentioned in the article is Alone Time. Except we didn’t have a term for it growing up because we were supposed to entertain ourselves for whole chunks of time while parents took care of, heaven forbid, themselves and their affairs. What ever happened to leaving or being thrown out of the house to go run around and get scraped up with the neighborhood kids? (And don’t tell me you can’t do it in the city or the America of today because I grew up among high-rise buildings in the sand-and-concrete desert of Kuwait.) Sitting in your room reading, doodling, thinking up stories and next adventures, rifling through your brother’s stuff or generally farting around the house? And, that’s just it, if you have to call it Alone Time and schedule it into your kids’ calendars along with similarly vacuous, antiseptic activities on the order of Play Dates, Tumbling Time, Mommy & Me or whatever the hell have you, you’ve discovered the root of the problem with modern American parenting. Leave the poor kid alone to build an imagination and independence. Give yourself a break, too, while you’re at it. Parenting is probably the most important responsibility one will ever have, but that doesn’t have to mean subsuming your whole identity in the Creature That Came From Uterus.

Or The Powerful Posse Of Playground Power Parents, for that matter. *shudder*

When I think of a general philosophy for any future kid, this is what comes to mind: I love you with all of my heart and will never harm your trust in me, but cross me and I will put you back whence you came. I joke and laugh with you and let a lot of things slide, but not the important things because I am not here to win a popularity contest. You will always be physically and mentally safe here, but there are things you need to hear and others you will have to figure out on your own. Everyone screws up, including parental unit over here, but please don’t do it in a bad way because your life is supposed to be better than mine, not a repetition or justification of my own mistakes. And I truly hope you become the best possible you, but even if you don’t, that’s ok. As long as you’re a good, self-reliant person and not moving into my basement in a few years. Because, sweet jesus, I want to retire in peace.

Didn’t mean to get all Kahlil Gibran on you, but if humans are not willing to think about at least some of these things ahead of time, we have no business reproducing. This is why I often think that the best parents are the ones that don’t have children.

Last night, a friend introduced me to a guy who seemed pretty jovial and decent to be around at a Cheers-esque Christmas celebration. “This is Maitri,” my friend said to the guy. The guy at once waved his hand in my direction as if to dismiss and said, “Oh, she’s just an Oriental.” I didn’t know if it was a joke (and if I was simply supposed to take it because some people these days jokingly, i.e. passive-aggressively, like to make points to “politically-correct liberals who can’t take a joke” or some vomit like that) or if he meant it. Or if he was just a drunk tool. Any way, it was uncouth. Maybe if the guy had done the same to D with an “Oh, he’s just White,” I wouldn’t have crinkled my nose and walked away as my friend frowned in apology for his friend’s statement.

Today, Amardeep pointed out this lengthy response by Korean-American Wesley Yang to Amy Chua’s Tiger Mother phenomenon – Paper Tigers: What happens to all the Asian-American overachievers when the test-taking ends?

… Here is what I sometimes suspect my face signifies to other Americans: an invisible person, barely distinguishable from a mass of faces that resemble it. A conspicuous person standing apart from the crowd and yet devoid of any individuality. An icon of so much that the culture pretends to honor but that it in fact patronizes and exploits. Not just people “who are good at math” and play the violin, but a mass of stifled, repressed, abused, conformist quasi-robots who simply do not matter, socially or culturally.

I’ve always been of two minds about this sequence of stereotypes. On the one hand, it offends me greatly that anyone would think to apply them to me, or to anyone else, simply on the basis of facial characteristics. On the other hand, it also seems to me that there are a lot of Asian people to whom they apply.

I saw the article before when it came out in May, but was reminded of it at an interesting time. The more I talk with my parents and older adults of my family, the more I realize how Asian, or more specifically Indian, my thought processes are not. Increasingly, I am of it, but I am not it. They’ll probably never get me – my priorities and quirks, but mostly my logic – and they cannot. Of course, my thoughts and decisions will forever be shaped to a certain degree by being raised in Kuwait by Indian parents, but I am, for better or for worse, American.

It comes down to expectations because of what we look like. The ones our immigrant parents have of us because they bore us and we look like them. And those the “native” Americans of this country to which our families came have of us because, well, we look Asian, so we had damned well better behave that way.

That way. The high-achieving, hard-working, deferential and thus quietly successful way we Asians are expected to go through life. For all my defiant Other-ness, I am able to (barely) deliver everyone’s expectations because I happen to be well-versed in science, mathematics and American English, am pathologically obsessed with employment and can slide in and out of different cultural and sub-cultural contexts. It most definitely hasn’t been easy, as described above, but I get by.

What of my counterparts and the hordes of Asian-American kids behind me, however, who cannot partially differentiate their way out of a wet paper sack and also have the personality and spine of that same wet paper sack? The ones who really want only to draw, write poetry and play soccer or, heaven forbid, have no apparent skills and charms and subsequently no clue what to become when they grow up. I know several beautiful, young people whose future paths haven’t been walked by anyone else yet, but who live in constant, secret fear of being compared to the achievements of the rest of their model society as well as the inevitable rejection of their parents. Is a profound lack of imagination and cruelty the best these kids can hope to get?

It’s the last paragraph of Yang’s article that reminded me hope lies in readjusting expectations from what our parents want of us or what America expects of us to the forgotten What We Want Of Ourselves.

… though the debate [Chua] sparked about Asian-American life has been of questionable value, we will need more people with the same kind of defiance, willing to push themselves into the spotlight and to make some noise, to beat people up, to seduce women, to make mistakes, to become entrepreneurs, to stop doggedly pursuing official paper emblems attesting to their worthiness, to stop thinking those scraps of paper will secure anyone’s happiness, and to dare to be interesting.

Because let’s face it, we’re not either of them. Then the truth that it’s really us and neither our parents nor anyone else who ultimately have to live our lives, think our thoughts, feel our joy and pain and feed, clothe and shelter us. Once we accept this fact, the strange third place in which we find ourselves is actually a boon and we can be anything we want from here. So, to the All-Asian-American Rejects, I say: Look beyond your face and into who you are. Take your difference and define your own identity and success. There is no set path, so you have to figure out what you want and build from there. Your secret weapon is America – this still-undiscovered country that socializes you into smiling, talking with others, being the salt of the earth and even an honest, comforting, calming mediocrity – and having been born and raised here by parents who, at some point, were risk-takers, too. If you fail, you will have failed, but it will have been on your terms.

Updated December 12th, 2011: Today’s USA Today has a column on the “All-American Muslim” controversy written by an American Muslim. In it, the author is asked by an Ohio man if Muslim girls can own dolls. It’s a valid question and understanding starts with honest curiosity, respectful interrogation and civil cross-cultural dialogue, which also seems to be the purpose of the show. But, Ohioans are no strangers to super-conservative Abrahamic sects whose women have to cover their heads and are subservient to the males of their culture, and that have crazies who form cults and conduct acts of physical and sexual violence. They’re known as the Amish. If “normal” Americans in Ohio and Pennsylvania are willing to tolerate and live side by side with the American Amish, why not extend the same courtesy to American Muslims? More importantly, if Christian Americans cannot recognize within their own religion what they object to in others, then it’s not unAmerican precepts and acts they fight against in Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus but just the fact that they are ethnically different. Those of us who are non-Christian are then absolutely being judged by the color of our skin.

Again, I keep pointing things like this out because an overwhelming majority of non-Christian non-whites who live in America are just trying to make it to tomorrow like everyone else, without some nosy, jobless, hateful assholes trying to chip-chip-chip-chip away at our American-ness and peace of mind because we happen to be superficially Other. The economy sucks, one-third of the families without shelter in America are in Florida and the FLORIDA FAMILY Association is busy fighting a television show called All-American Muslim, which in all likelihood was invented to educate and prevent against just an ignorant situation such as this. And there you have it.

***

Washington Post: Lowe’s stands by decision to pull ads from show about Muslims despite growing backlash

Lowe’s is planning to stick by its decision to yank its ads from [TLC’s All-American Muslim] despite the growing opposition the home improvement chain is facing over the move.

But Lowe’s knows that the consumers they alienate will shop there anyway for, unless Khalid the halal butcher branched out into nationwide hardware stores, where else are they going to shop?

This started over “American liberties and traditional values” and the Florida Family Association’s seeming obsession with them. Phillygrrl over at Sepia Mutiny has more suggestions for the American Wholesomeness Crusade.

I applaud the strongly-worded email you sent to the FFA, in which you wrote, “While we continue to advertise on various cable networks, including TLC, there are certain programs that do not meet Lowe’s advertising guidelines, including the show you brought to our attention. Lowe’s will no longer be advertising on that program.” I definitely agree with you that unless a certain program accurately displays every single variation of a certain demographic it has no place on American television. Incidentally, while we are on the subject of advertising, may I humbly suggest a few more dumb reality shows that I believe could benefit from your advertising guidelines? In no particular order:

1. 19 Kids and Counting. The Dugger family. Super Christians. Super fertile. Super nice. But this show only profiles Christians who appear to be somewhat ordinary folks while excluding those fringe-radical Christians that pose a clear threat to our American values.
2. Sister Wives. One man. Four wives. Sixteen children. This show purports to innocuously depict a harem of weepy, cake-baking mothers. But it riskily hides the Mormon agenda’s clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values.
3. Strange Sex. Glamorizes strange sex acts without fully portaying the dangers that can accompany certain fetishes. Erotic asphyxiation is a silent killer, people.

Read the whole thing, it’s pretty good.

And why should Lowe’s hog the media attention? The following companies – Bank of America, the Campbell Soup Co., Dell, Estee Lauder, General Motors, Goodyear, Green Mountain Coffee, McDonalds, Sears, and Wal-Mart – have also pulled advertising support from All-American Muslim.

Hope you’re happy, true Americans! Traditional values have been kept alive where values equals the constitution minus the smelly bits that, by the way, assure that you can practice your own religion in this country without harassment! Merry Christmas!

Speaking of Christmas, did you know that Sikh-Americans are single-handedly killing Christmas in Stockton, California? Fox & Friends says so! Never mind that Sikhs got Republican Nikki Haley elected to the office of governor in South Carolina.

OH NOES NON-CHRISTIANS HAVE JOINED THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AND SUPPORT AMERICAN LIBERTIES AND TRADITIONAL VALUES … uh … wait a second.

The thing is I’m not going to stop shopping at Lowe’s because of this. If I were to boycott all the American companies that forget human rights, decorum, cultural sensibilities, community relations, i.e. the true American values, I couldn’t shop anywhere. Go over to Home Depot instead? The ones with a strong union-free policy and who sell old-growth lumber? As I was saying, I’m not going to stop buying Lowe’s hardware, Dell laptops or Campbell’s soup, Republican Sikh-Americans aren’t going to stop watching Fox News and we’re not all going to give up habits that support large, multi-national companies which put mom-and-pop shops with real values out of business.

And these companies are fully aware of it, which is why they get away with this shit.