[N]ot all sneezes are actually triggered through the nose. In fact, there appear to be multiple pathways involved. [Mahmood Bhutta, a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford who published a paper in 2008 titled “Sneezing induced by sexual ideation or orgasm: an under-reported phenomenon”] makes a pretty strong case for the parasympathetic nervous system as a common variable among the more bizarre sneezing triggers: photic sensitivity (sneezing when exposed to light, otherwise known as ACHOO syndrome); an exceptionally full stomach (otherwise known as snatiation, a portmanteau of “sneeze” and “satiation,” also an acronym among smug jerks in the medical community that stands for “Sneezing Noncontrollably At a Tune of Indulgence of the Appetite — a Trait Inherited and Ordained to be Named”); and, of course, sexy thoughts.
Essentially, the autonomic nervous system is so old and lizard-brain-like that it functions without our input. It formed before just about everything else in our bodies did, and because it’s so basic, certain pathways never really separated as our bodies developed.
If you’re saying it’s a pricey way to keep pets occupied because of the damage incurred to iPads, I have to tell you that after hours of fun with our cats and said apps we haven’t a single scratch on the screen. iPad screens are really tough.
Disclosure: This content is not sponsored by Apple.
The World Values Survey data do suggest that Asia and Africa remain more homophobic than the Americas and Europe, but change has been rapid nonetheless. In the 2006 wave of surveys, the majority of Indians and Chinese remained firmly against homosexuality. But the proportion of people who thought homosexuality was never justifiable fell from 93 percent to 64 percent in India from 1993 to 2006 and from 92 percent to 74 percent in China.
Christopher Jobson spotlights a mesmerizing work of art:
I’m Google is an ongoing digital art project by Baltimore artist Dina Kelberman that documents digital patterns through non-artistic photography found on Google Image Search. When I first started scrolling through her Tumblr I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at: frame after frame of airplanes pouring orange fire retardant on fires which slowly morphed into an orange kayak and then an orange bridge and on and on until I realized every single image shared a slight visual characteristic with the image before it. … I cannot urge you strongly enough to spend a few minutes scrolling through this impeccably curated collection of seemingly mundane photography that collectively creates something visually transcendent.
Rob Walker recounts the heartbreaking story of 46-year-old fast-food employee John Horner, who was caught by a police informant for selling painkillers. Under Florida law, Horner would be sentenced to 25 years unless he became an informant:
Horner says the problem for him, as someone with no previous drug arrests, was finding drug dealers to inform on.
“You start running the streets. You go to the places where drug dealers go, trying to find drugs. “I had gotten to the point at the end, I was desperate, I didn’t care who went to jail. I would have taken anybody down, just so I could be with my family,” says Horner.
[Law professor Alexandra Natapoff] says this is the danger the informant system poses. “We’ve created thousands of little criminal entrepreneurs running around looking for other people to snitch on,” she says. “And when they don’t have information we’ve created a massive incentive for them to create it.”
Horner is serving the full 25 years because he never found anyone to snitch on:
“What snitching does is it rewards the informed, so the lower you are on the totem pole of criminal activity, the less useful you are to the government,” says Natapoff. “The higher up in the hierarchy you are, the more you have to offer.”
In 1913, Joe Knowles decided to return to the wild. He lived to tell the tale:
There were an estimated 200,000 people on hand to greet the world’s most unkempt celebrity, Joe Knowles, who was arriving from Portland on October 9, 1913. … Joe Knowles emerged from the train, wearing a crude bearskin robe and grimy bearskin trousers. It wasn’t a costume, exactly—Knowles had established himself as the Nature Man. Two months earlier, he had stepped into the woods of Maine wearing nothing but a white cotton jockstrap, to live sans tools and without any human contact. His aim? To answer questions gnawing at a society that was modernizing at a dizzying rate, endowed suddenly with the motor car, the elevator, and the telephone. Could modern man, in all his softness, ever regain the hardihood of his primitive forebears? Could he still rub two sticks together to make fire? Could he spear fish in secluded lakes and kill game with his bare hands? Knowles had just returned from the woods, and his answer to each of these questions was a triumphant yes. In time, he would parlay his Nature Man fame into a five-month run on the vaudeville circuit, where he would earn a reported $1,200 a week billed as a “Master of Woodcraft.” He would publish a memoir, Alone in the Wilderness, that would sell some 30,000 copies. He would even have his moment in Hollywood, playing the lead in a spine-tingling 1914 nature drama also called Alone in the Wilderness.
Too bad it was a hoax:
He wasn’t gutting fish and weaving bark shoes, as the Post’s dispatches suggested. Rather, he was lounging about in a log cabin at the foot of Spencer Lake and also occasionally entertaining a lady friend at a nearby cabin.
John Sides points out the bleeding obvious – the GOP could easily win the presidency in 2016:
The GOP will … benefit from what political scientist Alan Abramowitz calls the “time for a change” factor: only once since the 22nd Amendment limited the president to two consecutive terms has a party held the White House for more than two terms in a row.
If that happens, perhaps we’ll realize that all this talk of a “liberal majority” or “Obama’s mandate” or even a “Democratic realignment” was overblown. And perhaps we’ll even remember that the exact opposite argument was made in 2004, when evil genius Karl Rove was supposed to have ushered in a Republican realignment and Democrats would never win another election unless they could appeal to “values voters.” Those predictions of a Republican majority were soon proved false. This is why it’s premature to make similar predictions about a Democratic majority or write the GOP’s epitaph.
If, through some act of God, Republicans nominate a relative moderate like Chris Christie in 2016, a Republican victory could move the party back towards the center. An ideologue with amnesia of the Bush presidency, i.e. the majority of the other Republican presidential hopefuls, is unlikely to do the same. For Democrats to get from Carter’s loss to Clinton’s win took three failed elections. For Republicans to get from Hoover to Eisenhower took significantly longer. The GOP could easily win in 2016, but, if the party is going to modernize itself, another loss or two may be required.
As a lawyer who used to include criminal defense (including indigent defense) among my practice areas, I will agree with the original post: there is a huge, huge disparity between the resources of the state and the resources of the criminal defendant. You should include in that disparity not only the budget of the prosecutor’s office, but that of every law enforcement agency that investigates and enforces the law, including the police and sheriffs departments, state police, regional drug task forces, federal and state bureaus of investigation, and the like. The State provides very limited resources to indigent defendants, when itself has practically unlimited resources available to prosecute. It is not a fair fight, but criminal defense attorneys do the best they can with what they are given to work with.
Another goes into more detail:
When a prosecutor needs something checked or needs a witness, a staffer places a call to the police and it’s taken care of; when a public defender wants something checked, s/he pays for the investigator out of the office budget. When a prosecutor in an arson case wants an expert, he calls the fire marshall’s office, and there’s no budget impact; the public defender has to find and pay for any help out of their budget. How about a multiple-defendant case? One prosecutor, but each defendant requires a separate attorney, most of which have to be hired outside the agency, at the agency’s expense, to prevent conflicts of interest.
The list goes on, but the important point is that if you segregated out all the government expense post-arrest and compared it to the public defender’s budget, the resource gap would be even more shockingly large.
Another reader:
“It should come as no surprise, then, that you’re more likely to wind up in jail if represented by a taxpayer-financed lawyer than by one you hire yourself.” I am a public defender in Florida and I have to push back against this.
Granted, I came out of a top law school with a robust loan repayment assistance program and I practice in one of the best public defender offices in the country, so my experience may not be representative. However, I disagree with the contention that funding disparities are the primary reason my clients are more likely to be incarcerated than defendants with private attorneys.
All of my clients have one thing in common: they’re indigent. Otherwise, they would not be entitled to my services. What does that mean? For starters, they tend to be underemployed or unemployed. After any conviction there is a sentencing hearing, where the defense attorney proffers mitigation in order to get a better sentence. One common argument is “Your honor, my client has a job and if you jail him for even a month he’ll lose his job. He’ll become destitute. The family that relies on him will become destitute.” This is a powerful argument and judges respond to that.
My clients tend to be undereducated. They tend to have prior histories. They tend to be black or brown. Studies show that similarly situated minority defendants get harsher sentences than white defendants, even controlling for the nature of the crime and the defendant’s prior convictions.
The person who can hire a private attorney tends to be the accountant who got a DUI after a happy hour or the doctor who smacked around his wife in a fit of anger. It can cost more than $5,000 to defend a petty misdemeanor if a trial is involved. Defending a serious felony can typically only be afforded by the affluent.
Yes, I wish I had more funding. I wish I had a smaller case load and more investigators. But even for the smallest misdemeanor case, I can pay $2,000 to an expert witness without even requiring office approval. In fact, the prosecutors that I fight against have higher case loads and routinely complain to me about their inability to adequately prepare their cases. I am always better prepared than they are for a case. Literally always.
My clients are more likely to go to jail. This is true. It’s not because of my inability to match the prosecutor’s ability to investigate or prepare for trial. It’s because of their socioeconomic background coupled with draconian maximum sentences that result in plea deals for the vast majority of cases.
Another:
Allow a public defender to offer her perspective. But where to begin? With the fact that I have a law degree, two master’s degrees, and a PhD from an Ivy League university, but still make only $40,000 per year at my job as an appellate-level public defender? My colleagues doing similar work for the State with similar levels of legal experience make at least $25,000 more. The disparity is a function of the particular politics of my state, but there is some level of disparity in every state, even though both public defenders and prosecutors are paid by the state.
I wonder if the ADA who wrote about how difficult her/his job is as compared to the defense really believes this. Whether an indigent criminal defendant is represented by a public defender or a court-appointed private attorney, he or she is being represented by someone with a lot of education and little money. I make $40,000 a year four years out of law school. The most experienced person in my office makes $95,000 after 35 years of practice and a U.S. Supreme Court victory. Court appointed attorneys in my state are paid about $60 an hour for their work, and they are at the mercy of the judge who signs their fee statement. The same judge who just presided over the trial and likely got frustrated with their many objections gets to decide whether they actually should get paid for the number of hours they claim to have put into the case.
These attorneys go into court knowing that the judge is going to have every reason to rule for the State on every contested issue. It is true that the safest defense is often one which involves calling no witnesses, but that doesn’t mean that the defense attorney’s job is easier. The State starts with the moral high ground and always has more resources at its disposal: law enforcement officers to investigate and put pressure on witnesses, money for expert witnesses, discovery rules that can be bent to their advantage … the list is endless.
I understand that prosecutors and defense attorneys have chosen their lot, and I don’t begrudge prosecutors their higher pay and advantages in the courtroom. But for any prosector to claim that advocating for an indigent criminal defendant who has, by definition, been charged with a crime against the State is easier than being the champion of law and order and protector of public safety is just ludicrous.
One more:
As a public defender in Oregon, I’m paid for my work, but at a level far below that of the prosecutor. An entry level lawyer at my office starts out around $40,000 a year, and the senior staff here caps out at $75 or $80k. Across the street, the district attorney pays its staffers $45,000 a year on the low end, with pay capping off at beyond $100,000 for experienced attorneys. In other counties in Oregon, it’s common to have entry level prosecutor positions start at least $20,000 a year more than public defenders in the county. (Oregon is considering legislation this year, HB 3463, that would require public defenders to be paid at equivalent rates of prosecutors in their respective counties, by the way.)
Your reader who talks about all the other things prosecutors do that public defenders don’t? Please. First, the police officer who writes a report has done almost all the heavy lifting on a prosecutor’s case. A prosecutor rarely interviews witnesses on their own, because if they do, they have to discover any exculpatory information they write down under Brady v. Maryland. Most cases that I’ve taken to trial, I’ve spent countless hours tracking down witnesses, verifying my client’s statements and coming up with a theory of defense. All the prosecutor has to do is call each witness the police officer talked to and prove the elements of the crime, which is little more than checking the boxes. As for discovery, in most states, there are reciprocal discovery rules that require the defense to turn over evidence that they intend to use at trial. So both sides have to employ staff to produce discovery.
Lawyers should be paid comparably on both sides of the aisle. When you can’t pay public defenders as much as the prosecutor, it’s harder to keep and retain good lawyers. When you don’t have an effective lawyer fighting for an individual’s rights, it not only harms that individual but society as whole. Who do you think foots the bill for a new trial when a client’s underpaid lawyer missed some critical evidence or failed to investigate a key issue and the client is granted post-conviction relief?
Isn’t evolution the perfect metaphor for politicians changing their positions? Those who evolve on gay marriage, given the new political reality where opposition to gay marriage could threaten one’s political career, are better adapted to new selection pressures in their environment. Those who fail to evolve (e.g. patriarchs within the Republican party like Boehner and Chambliss) will fall to those same selection pressures – and they might bring down the entire party with them. It only takes small changes in an environment to render some organisms’s adaptive practices moot!
Here’s my cynicism on display. Regular people do change their minds, deliberate, and engage their practical reasons. Politicians, on the other hand, only care about survival – so like an ideal Darwinian entity, they’re only capable of evolution. And that’s precisely why regular people have to put the pressure on, with their voices and their votes.
When you ask people why they don’t read fantasy, they usually say something along the lines of, ‘because elves don’t exist’. This makes no sense as an objection. Huge swathes of imaginative literature concern things that don’t exist, and as it happens, things that don’t exist feature particularly prominently in the English literary tradition. We’re very good at things that don’t exist. The fantastic is central not just to the English canon – Spenser, Shakespeare, even Dickens – but also to our amazing parallel tradition of para-literary works, from Carroll to Conan Doyle to Stoker to Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling, Pullman. There’s no other body of literature quite like it: just consider the comparative absence of fantasy from the French and Russian traditions. And yet it’s perfectly normal for widely literate general readers to admit that they read no fantasy at all. I know, because I often ask. It’s as if there is some mysterious fantasy-reading switch that in many people is set to ‘off’.
Of course some of this is part of the general disdain for “genre” in all its forms that permeates the respectable literary world. But I also suspect that there is a particular obstacle with fantasy that doesn’t exist with, say, horror novels or murder mysteries: The sheer immensity of the standard-issue fantasy saga, and the fact that committing to a bestselling fantasy author takes much more, well, commitment than reading Dean Koontz or Peter Straub, Michael Connelly or Tana French.
The Dish 