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semiotic_pirateNot by me, over on Slate of course. Why would I use up my precious time (which should be spent studying) figuring out what Balls to the Wall refers to?
Balls in the Air
Where does the expression "balls to the wall" come from?
By Jesse Sheidlower
Posted Friday, Feb. 10, 2006, at 6:12 PM ET
Somewhat disappointingly, it has nothing to do with hammers, nails, and a particularly gruesome way of treating an enemy. The expression comes from the world of military aviation. In many planes, control sticks are topped with a ball-shaped grip. One such control is the throttle—to get maximum power you push it all the way forward, to the front of the cockpit, or firewall (so-called because it prevents an engine fire from reaching the rest of the plane). Another control is the joystick—pushing it forward sends a plane into a dive. So, literally pushing the balls to the (fire)wall would put a plane into a maximum-speed dive, and figuratively going balls to the wall is doing something all-out, with maximum effort. The phrase is essentially the aeronautical equivalent of the automotive "pedal to the metal."
The expression is first found in military-aviation sources that date from the Vietnam War, and it was recorded in the slang of U.S. Air Force Academy cadets in 1969. Although no evidence from the period has come to light, Korean War veterans have also reliably claimed to have used the expression in the 1950s. An earlier parallel is balls-out, in the same sense, which is found in military-aviation sources that date from World War II. (The phrase was also painted on the nose of at least one fighter plane.) In both cases it's likely that the possibility of an anatomical interpretation has helped the expressions gain wider use.
In other news:
Olympians are abstaining from sex to boost their performance, despite evidence that they should have sex instead. Triathletes, skaters, swimmers, boxers, ice dancers, and others avoid nookie before big contests; one says he abstained for 233 days. The Canadian swim team required an abstinence pledge; Pittsburgh Steelers coaches order players not to stay with wives or girlfriends the night before games and enforce this with room checks. Rationales: conserving strength, energy, focus, or your edge. But studies refute all these benefits and suggest sex can actually help by steadying you, increasing your tolerance for pain, and boosting your testosterone levels, which is so performance-enhancing it would be illegal if you did it with dope. Cynical theory: Abstinence rules are a fraud used by coaches to make sure their athletes get enough sleep.
The face-transplant patient showed her face at a press conference. The good: 1) She can talk. 2) She can eat normal food, which used to be impossible. 3) She can drink from a cup. 4) She's regaining sensation. 5) She can "show emotions through my face," sort of. 6) You can hardly see her scar from a distance. 7) She can go out now without drawing stares from everyone—unless you recognize her. The bad: 1) Her face hardly moves. 2) Her voice is slurred, since her lips do nothing. 3) You can see her teeth all the time. The unknown: 1) She might not regain much facial mobility. 2) Her body tried to reject the face once and might do so again. The worst: 1) Here's how she discovered her face was gone: "When I woke up, I tried to light a cigarette and didn't understand why it wouldn't stay between my lips. That's when I saw the pool of blood and the dog beside it." 2) She's still smoking.
Cops are busting minors for "internal possession" of alcohol. The old rule required police to find a can or bottle on you, but under new laws in some states, booze on your breath, wobbly walking, and/or a .02 blood alcohol level is proof enough. Critics' complaints: 1) How can you assert proof of possession when you can't see the thing allegedly possessed? 2) How can you hold someone responsible for intoxication unrelated to a criminal act, especially since intoxication, unlike drinking, is a state, not an act?
Eating less fat won't reduce your risk of cancer or heart disease, according to a huge study. Also, low-fat diets don't reduce weight, and high-carbohydrate diets don't increase it. This is the latest study to debunk conventional diet wisdom; previous studies debunked theories that fiber and vitamins helped avoid cancer. Excuses/interpretations: 1) The key is to cut saturated fat, not all fat. 2) The key is to eat fruits and vegetables. 3) The key is to eat fewer calories. 4) The key is exercise, not diet. 5) Maybe you'll get the benefits if you eat even less fat than people ate in this study. 6) You should still eat less fat, because maybe it helps you in some other way. 7) You "experts" don't know squat, so stop telling us what to eat. 8) Give it up; it's all controlled by genes.
Promiscuous French kissing nearly quadruples your risk of spinal meningitis, at least if you're a teenager. The disease is "potentially life-threatening." The good news: A vaccine can block one version of the illness (but not others). Reactions: 1) Happy Valentine's Day! 2) Let's see—genital contact is unsafe; kissing is unsafe; how about holding hands? Would that be too much to ask? 3) Pity the (formerly lucky) teens who French kiss multiple partners.
Polygamous inbreeders are pumping out children so retarded they need constant care. Ninety percent of the 8,000 members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which occupies two towns on the Arizona-Utah border, are reportedly related to at least one of two founding families. Most members carry a recessive gene for fumarase deficiency. Relations among these relations have produced at least 20 kids with the full-blown disease; doctors expect many more as the inbreeding, which began with the community's founding 76 years ago, continues. Community's view: We marry our kin because we're the chosen people. Outsiders' view: We draw the line when you ruin kids and dump their lifetime medical costs on taxpayers.
FrankenFido
Our creepiest genetic invention, the dog.
By William Saletan
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2005, at 12:35 AM ET
Have you heard the latest news? We've decoded the DNA of dogs. Here's how the media-approved version of the story goes: We're showing our love for "man's best friend" by discovering and treating the genetic causes of his ailments. In return, we'll learn to treat the same ailments in ourselves.
It's a heartwarming story, but it's a fraud. The reason we targeted the dog genome for decoding is that it's useful for genetic research. The reason it's useful for genetic research is that dogs are neatly divided into breeds, each of which is plagued by specific diseases. And the reason dogs are divided into diseased breeds is that we made them that way. Dogs are the world's longest self-serving, ecologically reckless genetic experiment, perpetrated by the world's first genetically engineering species: us.
Dogs were just a loose category of wolves until around 15,000 years ago, when our ancestors tamed and began to manage them. We fed them, bred them, and spread them from continent to continent. While other wolf descendants died out, dogs grew into a new species. We invented the dog.
We didn't pick just any wolves for this project. We picked the ones that could help us and get along with us. Dogs are dumber than monkeys and other mammals in many ways, but they excel at one thing: interpreting human behavior. Three years ago, scientists tested this talent in wolves, adult dogs, puppies raised in households, and puppies raised in kennels. The wolves couldn't read humans well, but the puppies could—even the puppies raised in kennels. Through selection, we've hardwired human compatibility into dogs. We've made a species in our image.
But that wasn't enough. We had specific needs. We bred hunting dogs, herding dogs, sled dogs, and guard dogs. (We also tried a few unauthorized uses.) We turned reproductive separation and inbreeding into a science, multiplying and dividing the species into more than 400 breeds. The American Kennel Club sorts them into the Sporting Group, Working Group, Herding Group, Hound Group (whose ancestors were "used for hunting"), Terrier Group (whose ancestors "were bred to hunt and kill vermin"), and Toy Group. "The diminutive size and winsome expressions of Toy dogs illustrate the main function of this Group: to embody sheer delight," says the club's Web site. Every dog has his duty.
Each need, each breed, called for special traits. We bred collies for vigilance, Rottweilers for aggression, retrievers for obedience. In a span of decades, we bred ferocity into Dobermans and then, with equal deliberateness, bred it out. We treated dogs like guns. We designed and bought them for protection, then complained when they hurt us. When cities banned pit bulls, we bought Rottweilers. It was as easy as replacing an illegal assault weapon with a legal one.
Not all our designs were utilitarian. We made some breeds just for fun. Some, like the Pharaoh Hound, were thought to be ancient because they looked like dogs drawn on Egyptian tombs. But last year, when we checked their DNA, we found no evidence they were older than modern breeds. Apparently, breeders crafted them by mating dogs that looked like the drawings. Life imitated art.
In the course of engineering dogs to look, feel, and act as we wanted, we ruined millions of them. We gave them legs so short they couldn't run, noses so flat they couldn't breathe, tempers so hostile they couldn't function in society. Even our best intentions backfired. Nature invented sexual reproduction to diversify gene pools and dilute bad variants. By forcing dogs into incest (which we ban among humans, in part for biological reasons), we defied nature. We concentrated each bad gene in a breed, magnifying its damage: epilepsy for springer spaniels, diabetes for Samoyeds, bone cancer for Rottweilers. That's why the dog genome is so nifty: We can find disease genes just by comparing one breed's DNA to another's.
Well, too bad for the dogs. But three cheers for us and our experiment. "The dog genome is a wonderful playground for geneticists," exults the New York Times. "A treasure trove," says the San Francisco Chronicle. "A convenient laboratory," agrees Reuters.
Man's best friend, indeed.
Right to Wife
Why does Judge Alito treat women like girls?
By William Saletan
Posted Thursday, Nov. 3, 2005, at 7:55 AM ET
Judge Alito, it's a pleasure to have you before our committee this morning. You're obviously an accomplished jurist, and my colleagues on the other side of the aisle speak very highly of you. I really have only one question for you, and it's my hope that you'll be able to put my mind, and the public's mind, at ease about it. What I'd like to know is, why do you think it's constitutional to treat a pregnant woman like a child?
I'm referring, of course, to your dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey 14 years ago. As you know, that case involved a Pennsylvania statute that required women to notify their husbands before having abortions, on pain of criminal sanctions. You voted to uphold the statute.
First of all, Judge, I notice that in your concluding footnote to that case, you mentioned that the plaintiffs had asked your court to hold the statute unconstitutional because it "violates the rights to marital and informational privacy and equal protection." You wrote that you wouldn't address those arguments because your colleagues had relied on a different argument, the right to abortion. Since you rejected the abortion argument and didn't bother addressing the other arguments, I guess we can infer that they wouldn't have changed your vote. So, you don't think privacy or equality entitles a woman, constitutionally, to make the decision without consulting her husband.
Now, about the abortion argument. The trial record in Casey, as you recall, included testimony that mandatory spousal notification might inhibit some women from having abortions because they'd be afraid to tell their husbands for fear of physical abuse or other kinds of retaliation. You concluded that this inhibition effect, to the extent it was substantiated in the record, did not rise to the level of an "undue burden" as defined by Justice O'Connor and was therefore not severe enough to make the statute unconstitutional. And to prove that this fear and inhibition didn't meet the undue burden standard, you cited two previous Supreme Court decisions: Hodgson v. Minnesota and H.L. v. Matheson. With regard to Hodgson, you wrote,
Justice O'Connor found that no undue burden was imposed by a law requiring notice to both parents or judicial authorization before a minor could obtain an abortion. Justice O'Connor reached this conclusion despite statistics adduced by Justice Marshall to show that mandatory parental notice may inhibit a significant percentage of minors from obtaining abortions … and despite the district court's finding, noted in Justice Marshall's dissent, that the judicial bypass option "so daunted" some minors that they felt compelled to carry to term.
Then you went on to say that Justice O'Connor didn't think the statute in Matheson presented an undue burden, even though Justice Marshall, in that case, wrote that a girl who's required to tell her parents about an abortion "may confront physical or emotional abuse, withdrawal of financial support or actual obstruction of the abortion decision."
Now, in your opinion in Casey, right after that quote from Justice Marshall, you write this: "These harms are almost identical to those that the majority in this case attributes to Section 3209." Section 3209 is Pennsylvania's spousal-notice provision. Then you conclude, "Justice O'Connor's opinions disclose that the practical effect of a law will not amount to an undue burden unless the effect is greater than the burden imposed on minors seeking abortions in Hodgson or Matheson." And you uphold the spousal notice law because its burden doesn't exceed the burdens in those other cases.
Now, here's my question, Judge. Do you really think an undue burden for a grown woman is the same as an undue burden for a teenager? Do you think a woman deserves no more deference than a girl?
That seems to be the gist of your opinion here. Let me quote from your explanation—well, actually, this is the entirety of your explanation for what you call the rational basis of the spousal notice provision:
The Pennsylvania legislature could have rationally believed that some married women are initially inclined to obtain an abortion without their husbands' knowledge because of perceived problems—such as economic constraints, future plans, or the husbands' previously expressed opposition—that may be obviated by discussion prior to the abortion. In addition, the legislature could have reasonably concluded that Section 3209 would lead to such discussion and thereby properly further a husband's interests in the fetus in a sufficient percentage of the affected cases to justify enactment of this measure.
Now, I'm seeing two arguments there. One is that the woman has some kind of misperception about her marriage or her situation, and her husband can set her straight. And the other argument is that the husband has such a profound interest in keeping the fetus alive—and his wife has such a small interest in controlling what happens to her body—that the government can force her to consult him even if she's so afraid of him, or so certain she can't have this baby, that she won't talk to him unless we threaten her with criminal charges. And you implied that Justice O'Connor, the justice you're planning to replace on this court, would agree with you.
In point of fact, you were wrong about that, weren't you, Judge? I mean, we have the actual answer to that question, because Justice O'Connor, along with Justices Kennedy and Souter, wrote the Supreme Court's controlling opinion in Casey a year after you issued your dissent. And she pretty flatly rebuked you, didn't she? She says the spousal notice provision "is an undue burden, and therefore invalid." Couldn't be any plainer. And in the very next sentence, she addresses those parental notification cases you cited, and here's what she says:
Those enactments, and our judgment that they are constitutional, are based on the quite reasonable assumption that minors will benefit from consultation with their parents and that children will often not realize that their parents have their best interests at heart. We cannot adopt a parallel assumption about adult women.
And here she is a bit later, talking specifically about the provision you voted to uphold:
The husband's interest in the life of the child his wife is carrying does not permit the State to empower him with this troubling degree of authority over his wife. … A husband has no enforceable right to require a wife to advise him before she exercises her personal choices. … A State may not give to a man the kind of dominion over his wife that parents exercise over their children.
That's kind of a slap there, isn't it, Judge? All that stuff you wrote about the woman not being sufficiently informed to make the decision without her husband's help—not being competent, evidently, to decide whether consulting him was a good idea—Justice O'Connor pretty much whacked that one out of the park, didn't she? And the same for your point about the husband's interest in the fetus—"Does not permit the State to empower him with this troubling degree of authority," she says. That's pretty clear, isn't it?
Now, Judge, I'm sure you're going to tell me the same thing Chief Justice Roberts told us when he was here, about respecting precedent and all that. And now that we have Justice O'Connor's verdict on this provision, which came a year after you wrote your opinion on this, you're not going to mess with it, and women don't need to worry that you're going to take us back to the 19th century. And I'd like to believe that. But I can't. And the reason I can't is that you already did mess with the precedents set by this court, and by Justice O'Connor specifically.
When you wrote your dissent in Casey, that was a year after Hodgson. And of course you cited Hodgson in your opinion, so obviously you read it carefully. And as you'll recall, Hodgson concerned a Minnesota law that required a minor to notify two parents, not just one, if she was planning to get an abortion. So, even if she told the mom, the mom would have to tell the dad, or the girl would have to tell the dad. The mom wasn't enough. And Justice O'Connor concurred with all but two parts of the main opinion by Justice Stevens, which held that the central part of this law was unconstitutional. And the part she concurred with says this:
In the ideal family setting, of course, notice to either parent would normally constitute notice to both. A statute requiring two-parent notification would not further any state interest in those instances. In many families, however, the parent notified by the child would not notify the other parent. In those cases, the State has no legitimate interest in questioning one parent's judgment that notice to the other parent would not assist the minor or in presuming that the parent who has assumed parental duties is incompetent to make decisions regarding the health and welfare of the child.
And in a footnote, they add: "What the State may not do is legislate on the generalized assumptions that a parent in an intact family will not act in his or her child's best interests and will fail to involve the other parent in the child's upbringing when that involvement is appropriate."
So that's what Hodgson says. The state has no legitimate interest in second-guessing the mom about whether to tell the dad. The mom's decision is good enough, because she's not a kid, she's an adult. And you know what the funny thing is, Judge? Your colleagues on the appeals court, the ones you disagreed with in Casey, took their logic and a lot of their language straight out of that part of Hodgson. They figured, if the Supreme Court says you can't second-guess a woman about her daughter's abortion, you can't second-guess her about her own abortion, either.
But not you, Judge. You didn't go along with what Justice O'Connor said, even when your colleagues flagged it in neon orange for you. You looked the other way. You went on a cherry-picking expedition through her opinions, taking just the parts you wanted and ignoring the parts you didn't, to the point where she had to step in a year later and set you straight.
And then, having bent over backward to interpret a woman's abortion right as narrowly as possible, you bent as far as you could the other way to give men the widest possible right to interfere. Do you mind if I read from one more paragraph of your opinion? Here's what it says: "The Supreme Court has held that a man has a fundamental interest in preserving his ability to father a child." Next sentence: "The Court's opinions also seem to establish that a husband who is willing to participate in raising a child has a fundamental interest in the child's welfare." Then you conclude: "It follows that a husband has a 'legitimate' interest in the welfare of a fetus he has conceived with his wife." And you use that to justify the spousal notification law.
Now, Judge, you and I both know that the cases you cited with regard to previous Supreme Court holdings, one was about sterilizing felons, and the other was about establishing the paternity of an already-born child. How you get from there to giving a man a state-guaranteed say in a woman's abortion decision—well, I don't know what to call it, but it sure as hell isn't judicial restraint. Why does the man get all the breaks in your legal reasoning, Judge? Why does only the woman get treated like a child?
I see the chairman motioning for me to wrap this up, so I'll end with a question. Actually, I'll let Justice O'Connor ask the question. Here's what she wrote 13 years ago, replying to your opinion in Casey:
If a husband's interest in the potential life of the child outweighs a wife's liberty, the State could require a married woman to notify her husband before she uses a post-fertilization contraceptive. Perhaps next in line would be a statute requiring pregnant married women to notify their husbands before engaging in conduct causing risks to the fetus. After all, if the husband's interest in the fetus' safety is a sufficient predicate for state regulation, the State could reasonably conclude that pregnant wives should notify their husbands before drinking alcohol or smoking. Perhaps married women should notify their husbands before using contraceptives or before undergoing any type of surgery that may have complications affecting the husband's interest in his wife's reproductive organs.
What do you think, Judge? Is she right? If we put you on this court—if we give you her seat—would you strike down any of those laws she's talking about? Or is it open season on pregnant women?
Can You Fear Me Now?
The cell phone goes from annoying to evil.
By Bryan Curtis
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2006, at 3:45 PM ET
Note: At this point, slate decided to refer the reader to a downloadable mp3 audioversion as well as the link to the podcast - which of course can be listened to on most newer model cell phones - you will see the irony soon. Read on:
In your right hand, you hold the source of all the evil in the world. A few days ago, it was the source of some medium-sized evil—a stray ring in a movie theater or a mournful text message to an ex-girlfriend after midnight. But things have changed with your cell phone. It is no longer just a nuisance. It is death incarnate.
In the recent months, cell phones have become newly terrifying. Our once-mundane cellular-inspired fears—of brain cancer, of terrorists using them to detonate remote devices—have been replaced by more gruesome visions. Horror maestros from Stephen King to Takashi Miike have taken our ambivalent post-9/11 feelings about cell phones (they played a crucial role in nearly staving off a terrorist attack, but they were also the source of incredibly painful goodbyes) and reworked them into a vehicle for evil—ghosts, plagues, and rampaging psychos. The cell phone, in their hands, is not a tool of empowerment but another instrument of terror. Humanity's going to hell, and you don't dare call your mother.
Stephen King's Cell, which sits at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, is the bloodiest encapsulation of this worldview. A pulse sent out over cell phones by someone—Islamic terrorists? disgruntled hackers?—turns cell-toting humans into predators who bite one another's necks and club one another's children. Soon, the zombified masses are roaming the streets by day and pausing to "recharge" by night—lying side-by-side in moonlit stadiums, like a thousand Nokias resting in their cradles. It's up to a crusty band of outsiders—read: Luddites who cling to land lines—to battle their way out of the cities and regroup in wireless-free zones up north. "What's the market penetration?" one of them asks, surely the first time those words have been uttered in a Stephen King novel. So despicably evil is the cell phone that the survivors rarely speak its name—they indicate it with a sad gesture, a thumb at the ear and a pinky held at the mouth.
Cell-phone terror rules the cinema, too. In When a Stranger Calls, a remake of a 1979 horror movie that opened on top of the box office last weekend, a teenage girl is forced into indentured babysitting for going "over plan" by 800 minutes. While looking after two children in a giant house, she's terrorized by a cell-phone-wielding maniac—Hollywood's favorite villain, it seems, since similar psychos appeared in Hostel (2005) and the Scream trilogy before that.
The apogee of mobile-phone horror is Takashi Miike's One Missed Call, a 2003 Japanese film released in the United States last year. In it, Japanese teenagers robotically swap numbers and text messages the way their horror-movie predecessors used to trade sexual favors. One by one, their phones emit an unfamiliar ring tone indicating that they've received a message. The message, dated a few days in the future, is their own voice—a recording of their desperate last moments on earth.
To be sure, the cell phone is merely the latest piece of demonic hardware. It follows the evil computer (2001: A Space Odyssey) and the evil car (King's own Christine), to name just two. And its scariness springs from some of the same sources—it's a pedestrian object hiding in plain sight, and humanity is perhaps too reliant on it for its own good. But because of the eerie way it mixes the public and private, the cell phone, perhaps more than anything to come before it, seems like an ideal instrument for horror.
After all, we already hate cell phones. We hate the reception, hate other users, and hate our billing plans, and it comes as no surprise when the above are revealed to be the work of a demonic force from the beyond. But what really bugs us is that cell phones clumsily merge the public and private spheres—what sociologist Hans Geser has called a "transspatial version of particularistic communalism," and what the rest of us call rudeness. In Cell, King takes the usual complaint about cell phones to a new level. Before the phone plague, King depicts a woman ordering a sundae from a Mister Softee ice cream truck while absent-mindedly babbling into her phone. It was an "act which would have once been considered almost insufferably rude," he writes, and as the woman becomes infected and tries to take a bite out of the ice-cream man, it seems like only a slight loss of civility. Likewise, King's zombified hordes resemble the cell-phone users plodding down urban sidewalks, each grunting to his own tune and oblivious to the world around him.
Moreover, as King notes, the cell phone is the only truly populist menace. For all the attention lavished on the dark corners of the Internet, the Web remains a fairly rarefied domain. Cell phones reach across race, class, and gender—they're an equal-opportunity device. If cell phones make bourgeois life all the more livable, they also enable drug dealers and prostitutes who used to rely on pay phones and beepers. One of the delights of Cell is watching professional women in power suits join ranks with the criminal class, dopey teenagers, construction workers, and the elderly to create a roiling, multilayered zombie class—as King puts it, "the Tower of Babel all over again … and on nothing but electronic cobwebs."
On the level of plotting, cell phones can make a horror story more difficult to conceive. Andrew Klavan, who is writing the American remake of One Missed Call, says, "If I had to pick two things that have changed the world of genre writing, one would be the fall of the Berlin Wall, which eliminated a whole genre of fiction. And the other would be cell phones. The question everybody asks about crime stories is, 'Why don't they just call they police?' And now, with cell phones, you have to come up with a pretty good explanation."
But on the flip side, cell phones have dragged horror into the light. The old idea of fear was being trapped in a dark house alone. The new fear is of interconnectedness, of being perilously joined to the rest of humanity. In Arthur C. Clarke's 1964 story "Dial F for Frankenstein," the world's land lines all ring at the same moment, signaling that the phone system had gained consciousness and was rising up to enslave humanity. "For homo sapiens, the telephone bell had tolled," Clarke wrote, and these days, market penetration being what it is, Armageddon is more likely to announce itself with a custom ring tone. The final gruesome twist of One Missed Call is that every time a teen dies, the demon spirit selects a fresh victim from his "contacts" list. It's enough to make you rethink your weekend nights. You seem nice, baby, but do you have to program me into your phone? Can't we do it like the old days and use a cocktail napkin?
I will admit to being 3/4 through The Cell and I have to say, the terror/horror is real, unbelievably tapped by Stephen King are all of our fears and annoyances with cell phones (from cancer due to signals near the brain to phone etiquette). Amazing.
Balls in the Air
Where does the expression "balls to the wall" come from?
By Jesse Sheidlower
Posted Friday, Feb. 10, 2006, at 6:12 PM ET
Somewhat disappointingly, it has nothing to do with hammers, nails, and a particularly gruesome way of treating an enemy. The expression comes from the world of military aviation. In many planes, control sticks are topped with a ball-shaped grip. One such control is the throttle—to get maximum power you push it all the way forward, to the front of the cockpit, or firewall (so-called because it prevents an engine fire from reaching the rest of the plane). Another control is the joystick—pushing it forward sends a plane into a dive. So, literally pushing the balls to the (fire)wall would put a plane into a maximum-speed dive, and figuratively going balls to the wall is doing something all-out, with maximum effort. The phrase is essentially the aeronautical equivalent of the automotive "pedal to the metal."
The expression is first found in military-aviation sources that date from the Vietnam War, and it was recorded in the slang of U.S. Air Force Academy cadets in 1969. Although no evidence from the period has come to light, Korean War veterans have also reliably claimed to have used the expression in the 1950s. An earlier parallel is balls-out, in the same sense, which is found in military-aviation sources that date from World War II. (The phrase was also painted on the nose of at least one fighter plane.) In both cases it's likely that the possibility of an anatomical interpretation has helped the expressions gain wider use.
In other news:
Olympians are abstaining from sex to boost their performance, despite evidence that they should have sex instead. Triathletes, skaters, swimmers, boxers, ice dancers, and others avoid nookie before big contests; one says he abstained for 233 days. The Canadian swim team required an abstinence pledge; Pittsburgh Steelers coaches order players not to stay with wives or girlfriends the night before games and enforce this with room checks. Rationales: conserving strength, energy, focus, or your edge. But studies refute all these benefits and suggest sex can actually help by steadying you, increasing your tolerance for pain, and boosting your testosterone levels, which is so performance-enhancing it would be illegal if you did it with dope. Cynical theory: Abstinence rules are a fraud used by coaches to make sure their athletes get enough sleep.
The face-transplant patient showed her face at a press conference. The good: 1) She can talk. 2) She can eat normal food, which used to be impossible. 3) She can drink from a cup. 4) She's regaining sensation. 5) She can "show emotions through my face," sort of. 6) You can hardly see her scar from a distance. 7) She can go out now without drawing stares from everyone—unless you recognize her. The bad: 1) Her face hardly moves. 2) Her voice is slurred, since her lips do nothing. 3) You can see her teeth all the time. The unknown: 1) She might not regain much facial mobility. 2) Her body tried to reject the face once and might do so again. The worst: 1) Here's how she discovered her face was gone: "When I woke up, I tried to light a cigarette and didn't understand why it wouldn't stay between my lips. That's when I saw the pool of blood and the dog beside it." 2) She's still smoking.
Cops are busting minors for "internal possession" of alcohol. The old rule required police to find a can or bottle on you, but under new laws in some states, booze on your breath, wobbly walking, and/or a .02 blood alcohol level is proof enough. Critics' complaints: 1) How can you assert proof of possession when you can't see the thing allegedly possessed? 2) How can you hold someone responsible for intoxication unrelated to a criminal act, especially since intoxication, unlike drinking, is a state, not an act?
Eating less fat won't reduce your risk of cancer or heart disease, according to a huge study. Also, low-fat diets don't reduce weight, and high-carbohydrate diets don't increase it. This is the latest study to debunk conventional diet wisdom; previous studies debunked theories that fiber and vitamins helped avoid cancer. Excuses/interpretations: 1) The key is to cut saturated fat, not all fat. 2) The key is to eat fruits and vegetables. 3) The key is to eat fewer calories. 4) The key is exercise, not diet. 5) Maybe you'll get the benefits if you eat even less fat than people ate in this study. 6) You should still eat less fat, because maybe it helps you in some other way. 7) You "experts" don't know squat, so stop telling us what to eat. 8) Give it up; it's all controlled by genes.
Promiscuous French kissing nearly quadruples your risk of spinal meningitis, at least if you're a teenager. The disease is "potentially life-threatening." The good news: A vaccine can block one version of the illness (but not others). Reactions: 1) Happy Valentine's Day! 2) Let's see—genital contact is unsafe; kissing is unsafe; how about holding hands? Would that be too much to ask? 3) Pity the (formerly lucky) teens who French kiss multiple partners.
Polygamous inbreeders are pumping out children so retarded they need constant care. Ninety percent of the 8,000 members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which occupies two towns on the Arizona-Utah border, are reportedly related to at least one of two founding families. Most members carry a recessive gene for fumarase deficiency. Relations among these relations have produced at least 20 kids with the full-blown disease; doctors expect many more as the inbreeding, which began with the community's founding 76 years ago, continues. Community's view: We marry our kin because we're the chosen people. Outsiders' view: We draw the line when you ruin kids and dump their lifetime medical costs on taxpayers.
FrankenFido
Our creepiest genetic invention, the dog.
By William Saletan
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2005, at 12:35 AM ET
Have you heard the latest news? We've decoded the DNA of dogs. Here's how the media-approved version of the story goes: We're showing our love for "man's best friend" by discovering and treating the genetic causes of his ailments. In return, we'll learn to treat the same ailments in ourselves.
It's a heartwarming story, but it's a fraud. The reason we targeted the dog genome for decoding is that it's useful for genetic research. The reason it's useful for genetic research is that dogs are neatly divided into breeds, each of which is plagued by specific diseases. And the reason dogs are divided into diseased breeds is that we made them that way. Dogs are the world's longest self-serving, ecologically reckless genetic experiment, perpetrated by the world's first genetically engineering species: us.
Dogs were just a loose category of wolves until around 15,000 years ago, when our ancestors tamed and began to manage them. We fed them, bred them, and spread them from continent to continent. While other wolf descendants died out, dogs grew into a new species. We invented the dog.
We didn't pick just any wolves for this project. We picked the ones that could help us and get along with us. Dogs are dumber than monkeys and other mammals in many ways, but they excel at one thing: interpreting human behavior. Three years ago, scientists tested this talent in wolves, adult dogs, puppies raised in households, and puppies raised in kennels. The wolves couldn't read humans well, but the puppies could—even the puppies raised in kennels. Through selection, we've hardwired human compatibility into dogs. We've made a species in our image.
But that wasn't enough. We had specific needs. We bred hunting dogs, herding dogs, sled dogs, and guard dogs. (We also tried a few unauthorized uses.) We turned reproductive separation and inbreeding into a science, multiplying and dividing the species into more than 400 breeds. The American Kennel Club sorts them into the Sporting Group, Working Group, Herding Group, Hound Group (whose ancestors were "used for hunting"), Terrier Group (whose ancestors "were bred to hunt and kill vermin"), and Toy Group. "The diminutive size and winsome expressions of Toy dogs illustrate the main function of this Group: to embody sheer delight," says the club's Web site. Every dog has his duty.
Each need, each breed, called for special traits. We bred collies for vigilance, Rottweilers for aggression, retrievers for obedience. In a span of decades, we bred ferocity into Dobermans and then, with equal deliberateness, bred it out. We treated dogs like guns. We designed and bought them for protection, then complained when they hurt us. When cities banned pit bulls, we bought Rottweilers. It was as easy as replacing an illegal assault weapon with a legal one.
Not all our designs were utilitarian. We made some breeds just for fun. Some, like the Pharaoh Hound, were thought to be ancient because they looked like dogs drawn on Egyptian tombs. But last year, when we checked their DNA, we found no evidence they were older than modern breeds. Apparently, breeders crafted them by mating dogs that looked like the drawings. Life imitated art.
In the course of engineering dogs to look, feel, and act as we wanted, we ruined millions of them. We gave them legs so short they couldn't run, noses so flat they couldn't breathe, tempers so hostile they couldn't function in society. Even our best intentions backfired. Nature invented sexual reproduction to diversify gene pools and dilute bad variants. By forcing dogs into incest (which we ban among humans, in part for biological reasons), we defied nature. We concentrated each bad gene in a breed, magnifying its damage: epilepsy for springer spaniels, diabetes for Samoyeds, bone cancer for Rottweilers. That's why the dog genome is so nifty: We can find disease genes just by comparing one breed's DNA to another's.
Well, too bad for the dogs. But three cheers for us and our experiment. "The dog genome is a wonderful playground for geneticists," exults the New York Times. "A treasure trove," says the San Francisco Chronicle. "A convenient laboratory," agrees Reuters.
Man's best friend, indeed.
Right to Wife
Why does Judge Alito treat women like girls?
By William Saletan
Posted Thursday, Nov. 3, 2005, at 7:55 AM ET
Judge Alito, it's a pleasure to have you before our committee this morning. You're obviously an accomplished jurist, and my colleagues on the other side of the aisle speak very highly of you. I really have only one question for you, and it's my hope that you'll be able to put my mind, and the public's mind, at ease about it. What I'd like to know is, why do you think it's constitutional to treat a pregnant woman like a child?
I'm referring, of course, to your dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey 14 years ago. As you know, that case involved a Pennsylvania statute that required women to notify their husbands before having abortions, on pain of criminal sanctions. You voted to uphold the statute.
First of all, Judge, I notice that in your concluding footnote to that case, you mentioned that the plaintiffs had asked your court to hold the statute unconstitutional because it "violates the rights to marital and informational privacy and equal protection." You wrote that you wouldn't address those arguments because your colleagues had relied on a different argument, the right to abortion. Since you rejected the abortion argument and didn't bother addressing the other arguments, I guess we can infer that they wouldn't have changed your vote. So, you don't think privacy or equality entitles a woman, constitutionally, to make the decision without consulting her husband.
Now, about the abortion argument. The trial record in Casey, as you recall, included testimony that mandatory spousal notification might inhibit some women from having abortions because they'd be afraid to tell their husbands for fear of physical abuse or other kinds of retaliation. You concluded that this inhibition effect, to the extent it was substantiated in the record, did not rise to the level of an "undue burden" as defined by Justice O'Connor and was therefore not severe enough to make the statute unconstitutional. And to prove that this fear and inhibition didn't meet the undue burden standard, you cited two previous Supreme Court decisions: Hodgson v. Minnesota and H.L. v. Matheson. With regard to Hodgson, you wrote,
Justice O'Connor found that no undue burden was imposed by a law requiring notice to both parents or judicial authorization before a minor could obtain an abortion. Justice O'Connor reached this conclusion despite statistics adduced by Justice Marshall to show that mandatory parental notice may inhibit a significant percentage of minors from obtaining abortions … and despite the district court's finding, noted in Justice Marshall's dissent, that the judicial bypass option "so daunted" some minors that they felt compelled to carry to term.
Then you went on to say that Justice O'Connor didn't think the statute in Matheson presented an undue burden, even though Justice Marshall, in that case, wrote that a girl who's required to tell her parents about an abortion "may confront physical or emotional abuse, withdrawal of financial support or actual obstruction of the abortion decision."
Now, in your opinion in Casey, right after that quote from Justice Marshall, you write this: "These harms are almost identical to those that the majority in this case attributes to Section 3209." Section 3209 is Pennsylvania's spousal-notice provision. Then you conclude, "Justice O'Connor's opinions disclose that the practical effect of a law will not amount to an undue burden unless the effect is greater than the burden imposed on minors seeking abortions in Hodgson or Matheson." And you uphold the spousal notice law because its burden doesn't exceed the burdens in those other cases.
Now, here's my question, Judge. Do you really think an undue burden for a grown woman is the same as an undue burden for a teenager? Do you think a woman deserves no more deference than a girl?
That seems to be the gist of your opinion here. Let me quote from your explanation—well, actually, this is the entirety of your explanation for what you call the rational basis of the spousal notice provision:
The Pennsylvania legislature could have rationally believed that some married women are initially inclined to obtain an abortion without their husbands' knowledge because of perceived problems—such as economic constraints, future plans, or the husbands' previously expressed opposition—that may be obviated by discussion prior to the abortion. In addition, the legislature could have reasonably concluded that Section 3209 would lead to such discussion and thereby properly further a husband's interests in the fetus in a sufficient percentage of the affected cases to justify enactment of this measure.
Now, I'm seeing two arguments there. One is that the woman has some kind of misperception about her marriage or her situation, and her husband can set her straight. And the other argument is that the husband has such a profound interest in keeping the fetus alive—and his wife has such a small interest in controlling what happens to her body—that the government can force her to consult him even if she's so afraid of him, or so certain she can't have this baby, that she won't talk to him unless we threaten her with criminal charges. And you implied that Justice O'Connor, the justice you're planning to replace on this court, would agree with you.
In point of fact, you were wrong about that, weren't you, Judge? I mean, we have the actual answer to that question, because Justice O'Connor, along with Justices Kennedy and Souter, wrote the Supreme Court's controlling opinion in Casey a year after you issued your dissent. And she pretty flatly rebuked you, didn't she? She says the spousal notice provision "is an undue burden, and therefore invalid." Couldn't be any plainer. And in the very next sentence, she addresses those parental notification cases you cited, and here's what she says:
Those enactments, and our judgment that they are constitutional, are based on the quite reasonable assumption that minors will benefit from consultation with their parents and that children will often not realize that their parents have their best interests at heart. We cannot adopt a parallel assumption about adult women.
And here she is a bit later, talking specifically about the provision you voted to uphold:
The husband's interest in the life of the child his wife is carrying does not permit the State to empower him with this troubling degree of authority over his wife. … A husband has no enforceable right to require a wife to advise him before she exercises her personal choices. … A State may not give to a man the kind of dominion over his wife that parents exercise over their children.
That's kind of a slap there, isn't it, Judge? All that stuff you wrote about the woman not being sufficiently informed to make the decision without her husband's help—not being competent, evidently, to decide whether consulting him was a good idea—Justice O'Connor pretty much whacked that one out of the park, didn't she? And the same for your point about the husband's interest in the fetus—"Does not permit the State to empower him with this troubling degree of authority," she says. That's pretty clear, isn't it?
Now, Judge, I'm sure you're going to tell me the same thing Chief Justice Roberts told us when he was here, about respecting precedent and all that. And now that we have Justice O'Connor's verdict on this provision, which came a year after you wrote your opinion on this, you're not going to mess with it, and women don't need to worry that you're going to take us back to the 19th century. And I'd like to believe that. But I can't. And the reason I can't is that you already did mess with the precedents set by this court, and by Justice O'Connor specifically.
When you wrote your dissent in Casey, that was a year after Hodgson. And of course you cited Hodgson in your opinion, so obviously you read it carefully. And as you'll recall, Hodgson concerned a Minnesota law that required a minor to notify two parents, not just one, if she was planning to get an abortion. So, even if she told the mom, the mom would have to tell the dad, or the girl would have to tell the dad. The mom wasn't enough. And Justice O'Connor concurred with all but two parts of the main opinion by Justice Stevens, which held that the central part of this law was unconstitutional. And the part she concurred with says this:
In the ideal family setting, of course, notice to either parent would normally constitute notice to both. A statute requiring two-parent notification would not further any state interest in those instances. In many families, however, the parent notified by the child would not notify the other parent. In those cases, the State has no legitimate interest in questioning one parent's judgment that notice to the other parent would not assist the minor or in presuming that the parent who has assumed parental duties is incompetent to make decisions regarding the health and welfare of the child.
And in a footnote, they add: "What the State may not do is legislate on the generalized assumptions that a parent in an intact family will not act in his or her child's best interests and will fail to involve the other parent in the child's upbringing when that involvement is appropriate."
So that's what Hodgson says. The state has no legitimate interest in second-guessing the mom about whether to tell the dad. The mom's decision is good enough, because she's not a kid, she's an adult. And you know what the funny thing is, Judge? Your colleagues on the appeals court, the ones you disagreed with in Casey, took their logic and a lot of their language straight out of that part of Hodgson. They figured, if the Supreme Court says you can't second-guess a woman about her daughter's abortion, you can't second-guess her about her own abortion, either.
But not you, Judge. You didn't go along with what Justice O'Connor said, even when your colleagues flagged it in neon orange for you. You looked the other way. You went on a cherry-picking expedition through her opinions, taking just the parts you wanted and ignoring the parts you didn't, to the point where she had to step in a year later and set you straight.
And then, having bent over backward to interpret a woman's abortion right as narrowly as possible, you bent as far as you could the other way to give men the widest possible right to interfere. Do you mind if I read from one more paragraph of your opinion? Here's what it says: "The Supreme Court has held that a man has a fundamental interest in preserving his ability to father a child." Next sentence: "The Court's opinions also seem to establish that a husband who is willing to participate in raising a child has a fundamental interest in the child's welfare." Then you conclude: "It follows that a husband has a 'legitimate' interest in the welfare of a fetus he has conceived with his wife." And you use that to justify the spousal notification law.
Now, Judge, you and I both know that the cases you cited with regard to previous Supreme Court holdings, one was about sterilizing felons, and the other was about establishing the paternity of an already-born child. How you get from there to giving a man a state-guaranteed say in a woman's abortion decision—well, I don't know what to call it, but it sure as hell isn't judicial restraint. Why does the man get all the breaks in your legal reasoning, Judge? Why does only the woman get treated like a child?
I see the chairman motioning for me to wrap this up, so I'll end with a question. Actually, I'll let Justice O'Connor ask the question. Here's what she wrote 13 years ago, replying to your opinion in Casey:
If a husband's interest in the potential life of the child outweighs a wife's liberty, the State could require a married woman to notify her husband before she uses a post-fertilization contraceptive. Perhaps next in line would be a statute requiring pregnant married women to notify their husbands before engaging in conduct causing risks to the fetus. After all, if the husband's interest in the fetus' safety is a sufficient predicate for state regulation, the State could reasonably conclude that pregnant wives should notify their husbands before drinking alcohol or smoking. Perhaps married women should notify their husbands before using contraceptives or before undergoing any type of surgery that may have complications affecting the husband's interest in his wife's reproductive organs.
What do you think, Judge? Is she right? If we put you on this court—if we give you her seat—would you strike down any of those laws she's talking about? Or is it open season on pregnant women?
Can You Fear Me Now?
The cell phone goes from annoying to evil.
By Bryan Curtis
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2006, at 3:45 PM ET
Note: At this point, slate decided to refer the reader to a downloadable mp3 audioversion as well as the link to the podcast - which of course can be listened to on most newer model cell phones - you will see the irony soon. Read on:
In your right hand, you hold the source of all the evil in the world. A few days ago, it was the source of some medium-sized evil—a stray ring in a movie theater or a mournful text message to an ex-girlfriend after midnight. But things have changed with your cell phone. It is no longer just a nuisance. It is death incarnate.
In the recent months, cell phones have become newly terrifying. Our once-mundane cellular-inspired fears—of brain cancer, of terrorists using them to detonate remote devices—have been replaced by more gruesome visions. Horror maestros from Stephen King to Takashi Miike have taken our ambivalent post-9/11 feelings about cell phones (they played a crucial role in nearly staving off a terrorist attack, but they were also the source of incredibly painful goodbyes) and reworked them into a vehicle for evil—ghosts, plagues, and rampaging psychos. The cell phone, in their hands, is not a tool of empowerment but another instrument of terror. Humanity's going to hell, and you don't dare call your mother.
Stephen King's Cell, which sits at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, is the bloodiest encapsulation of this worldview. A pulse sent out over cell phones by someone—Islamic terrorists? disgruntled hackers?—turns cell-toting humans into predators who bite one another's necks and club one another's children. Soon, the zombified masses are roaming the streets by day and pausing to "recharge" by night—lying side-by-side in moonlit stadiums, like a thousand Nokias resting in their cradles. It's up to a crusty band of outsiders—read: Luddites who cling to land lines—to battle their way out of the cities and regroup in wireless-free zones up north. "What's the market penetration?" one of them asks, surely the first time those words have been uttered in a Stephen King novel. So despicably evil is the cell phone that the survivors rarely speak its name—they indicate it with a sad gesture, a thumb at the ear and a pinky held at the mouth.
Cell-phone terror rules the cinema, too. In When a Stranger Calls, a remake of a 1979 horror movie that opened on top of the box office last weekend, a teenage girl is forced into indentured babysitting for going "over plan" by 800 minutes. While looking after two children in a giant house, she's terrorized by a cell-phone-wielding maniac—Hollywood's favorite villain, it seems, since similar psychos appeared in Hostel (2005) and the Scream trilogy before that.
The apogee of mobile-phone horror is Takashi Miike's One Missed Call, a 2003 Japanese film released in the United States last year. In it, Japanese teenagers robotically swap numbers and text messages the way their horror-movie predecessors used to trade sexual favors. One by one, their phones emit an unfamiliar ring tone indicating that they've received a message. The message, dated a few days in the future, is their own voice—a recording of their desperate last moments on earth.
To be sure, the cell phone is merely the latest piece of demonic hardware. It follows the evil computer (2001: A Space Odyssey) and the evil car (King's own Christine), to name just two. And its scariness springs from some of the same sources—it's a pedestrian object hiding in plain sight, and humanity is perhaps too reliant on it for its own good. But because of the eerie way it mixes the public and private, the cell phone, perhaps more than anything to come before it, seems like an ideal instrument for horror.
After all, we already hate cell phones. We hate the reception, hate other users, and hate our billing plans, and it comes as no surprise when the above are revealed to be the work of a demonic force from the beyond. But what really bugs us is that cell phones clumsily merge the public and private spheres—what sociologist Hans Geser has called a "transspatial version of particularistic communalism," and what the rest of us call rudeness. In Cell, King takes the usual complaint about cell phones to a new level. Before the phone plague, King depicts a woman ordering a sundae from a Mister Softee ice cream truck while absent-mindedly babbling into her phone. It was an "act which would have once been considered almost insufferably rude," he writes, and as the woman becomes infected and tries to take a bite out of the ice-cream man, it seems like only a slight loss of civility. Likewise, King's zombified hordes resemble the cell-phone users plodding down urban sidewalks, each grunting to his own tune and oblivious to the world around him.
Moreover, as King notes, the cell phone is the only truly populist menace. For all the attention lavished on the dark corners of the Internet, the Web remains a fairly rarefied domain. Cell phones reach across race, class, and gender—they're an equal-opportunity device. If cell phones make bourgeois life all the more livable, they also enable drug dealers and prostitutes who used to rely on pay phones and beepers. One of the delights of Cell is watching professional women in power suits join ranks with the criminal class, dopey teenagers, construction workers, and the elderly to create a roiling, multilayered zombie class—as King puts it, "the Tower of Babel all over again … and on nothing but electronic cobwebs."
On the level of plotting, cell phones can make a horror story more difficult to conceive. Andrew Klavan, who is writing the American remake of One Missed Call, says, "If I had to pick two things that have changed the world of genre writing, one would be the fall of the Berlin Wall, which eliminated a whole genre of fiction. And the other would be cell phones. The question everybody asks about crime stories is, 'Why don't they just call they police?' And now, with cell phones, you have to come up with a pretty good explanation."
But on the flip side, cell phones have dragged horror into the light. The old idea of fear was being trapped in a dark house alone. The new fear is of interconnectedness, of being perilously joined to the rest of humanity. In Arthur C. Clarke's 1964 story "Dial F for Frankenstein," the world's land lines all ring at the same moment, signaling that the phone system had gained consciousness and was rising up to enslave humanity. "For homo sapiens, the telephone bell had tolled," Clarke wrote, and these days, market penetration being what it is, Armageddon is more likely to announce itself with a custom ring tone. The final gruesome twist of One Missed Call is that every time a teen dies, the demon spirit selects a fresh victim from his "contacts" list. It's enough to make you rethink your weekend nights. You seem nice, baby, but do you have to program me into your phone? Can't we do it like the old days and use a cocktail napkin?
I will admit to being 3/4 through The Cell and I have to say, the terror/horror is real, unbelievably tapped by Stephen King are all of our fears and annoyances with cell phones (from cancer due to signals near the brain to phone etiquette). Amazing.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Huh.
Date: 2006-02-12 01:12 pm (UTC)And here I thought everybody knew that.
How far back does the term go? Good question, but the plural "balls" would suggest two engines (one throttle lever for each engine). Twin-engine fighters didn't really become common until after Korea, and even then not really truly until roughly Vietnam. "Ball to the wall" just doesn't have the same ring.
I suppose next they'll entertain us with the origin of "Sierra Hotel" as an expression of exuberance.