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OPINIONS OF ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES, A MINOR GREEK GODDESS. She can be reached at: ECHIDNE-OF-THE-SNAKES.COM
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Why Does Amnesty International Hate America?
George Bush finds Amnesty International's recent report absurd:
It sounds like someone trying to translate something political to a class of five-year olds, doesn't it? But only two years ago Donald Rumsfeld thought highly of the Amnesty International's reports on Iraq:
It's all about expediency, of course, but it would be fun to ask the administration why Amnesty International nails it when it comes to Iraq but is totally absurd when it comes to Guantanamo Bay. Soon Amnesty International will be called part of the international terrorist network, I suppose. Unless it digs up something useful in Iran. |
Deep Throat
The Watergate source whose identity has so far not been widely known:
I don't really like the handle and I have no idea if Felt's claim is true. It probably is. I only want someone to do the same thing for us today. Say, concerning the 2004 elections. ---- Via Attaturk on Eschaton. |
Today's Action Alert
Today's Action comes from NOW: ************************************************************* The National Organization for Women proudly salutes the introduction of the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2005. Introduced in the House on Thursday, May 26, this is the first legislation to explicitly include transgender individuals in civil rights law. The bill is designed to help protect against bias crimes based on gender identity, sexual orientation, gender and disability and also adds gender and gender identity to the Hate Crimes Statistics Act. *** The chief sponsors of the House bill are Representatives John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, Barney Frank, D-Mass., Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., Christopher Shays, R-Conn., and Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis. NOW applauds this bipartisan effort as a further step toward eradicating injustice in our society. *** "This legislation will have a huge legal and educational impact as we work together to stop the attacks in our society against the LGBT community," Vives said. "We will be working with our champions in the Senate and expect them to introduce a similar bill with equally broad inclusion for gender identity. With the passage of this legislation, we can take down these and other barriers of discrimination and achieve our goal of full inclusion—for all people—in our society." **************************************************** Write to your representative and urge her or him to vote for this legislation. Thanks for taking today's action. |
Why Women Won't Compete
According to the great expert, John Tierney, of the once-respectable New York Times:
Yes, I was expecting the evo-psychos to rear their ugly heads any time soon after the last Tierney column on women. Note how far into the quote you have to read before you come to the these little words:
It's a theory, my friends, and one that we cannot prove or disprove, really. There are no archeological remains that could help us here, no paleoanthological findings, nothing. Your guess is as good as mine. Or probably better, given that I'm just an amateur and not a hi-faluting evolutionary psychologist. But let me just point out that the traditional way of looking at the sexual selection in this genre assumes that the competition is over when a sperm has been deposited. It completely skips the nine months that follow and the years that take before the fertilized egg has become an equally fertile human adult. The assumption is that none of this long time period involves any competition whatsoever, at least not by the women. But that's all it is: an assumption. And an assumption that makes women look like they don't compete. Besides, the arguments presented above are circular. The men that women might have had quick flings with must have "presumably" been with men who have good genes and such men must have been good Scrabble players or something. Maybe the women had their little flings with guys who had big soulful eyes and who were good at listening when you moaned and complained about the thug you were usually saddled with? Maybe these guys had gentle fingers and nimble tongues and knew a better way of cooking mammoth? Who knows what the prehistoric women thought. Note also how Tierney discounts the idea that we might have inculcated anti-competitive values in women by the way girls are traditionally brought up (by likening discrimination to a simple leveling of the playing field), and he doesn't even question the assumption that all Scrabble players had the same opportunities to dedicate time and money to this one hobby. Tierney could have looked at competitions of other types, too, such as the pie-baking ones or the ones for the best roses or whatever, and I bet that he would have found very little support for his theory. I'm a believer in evolution in general because I can see the evidence for it. When it comes to evolutionary psychology I'm a lot more cynical, and the main reason is the near-total absence of clear evidence for the most misogynistic arguments possible. It seems to me that most evo-psychos attempt to explain the status quo as impossible to change and in that sense they all have wingnut (caveman?) axes to hone. Never mind that the society has changed drastically over centuries, evo-psychos always stress its unchanging nature. The wingnuts have two major approaches to the "Woman Question". One is the use of fundamentalist religion to subjugate women. The other one is pseudoscience* of various types, from Freudianism to this crap. Be forewarned. ---- *By pseudoscience I mean theories which look scientific but which don't lend themselves to proper scientific testing. |
Unfair Advantages in Sports
Amanda at Pandagon has an interesting post on the question whether women have unfair advantages in some sports such as certain kinds of car racing:
Amanda notes that Gordon modified his comments later on. But the interesting dilemma remains: Should we equalize people by weight to make sports fairer? Or by upper body strength? Or by innate speed? Nope, let's not go there, I bet I hear you mutter. Though we already do this in many sports such as boxing, wrestling and weight lifting where weight determines the class one competes in, we tend not to do this where the unfair advantage favors those who have traditionally done well in the sport, and that is mostly men. The Danica Patrick case is interesting because it's the opposite of this usual case and in some ways a test case for spotting possible sexism. I would think that jockeys are also worried about the influx of women into their sport as weight is important for jockeys and women are, on average, lighter. After sparring against partners twice as heavy as I am I tend to favor the idea of weight categories. It was fun to beat someone that big but my back didn't agree in the long run. It would have been completely adequate to wipe the floor with guys my size... Mostly just kidding. |
Monday, May 30, 2005
Garden Blogging, Part II
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For Memorial Day
Two poems, one from WWI, one from WWII, with very different messages. First Wilfred Owen:
And for a very different view, the poem written by John Gillespie Maggee who was killed in action at the age of 19 while serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force. He wrote this poem some days before his death:
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Sunday, May 29, 2005
David Brooks on the Class Struggle
According to David Brooks, if Karl Marx came back from the realm of the dead he'd yell and scream about the American class struggle, not that David Brooks believes in a class struggle (he believes in the OT god). But in any case, Marx would point out that it's the educated elite that holds the power in the U.S. now, the educated elite which has destroyed the concept of family (read: patriarchal family) and it's the educated elite which runs this country now. And, ta-ram-pam-pam! This educated elite consists of us latte-sipping-ivory-tower liberals! Yes, even though the wingnuts are in power everywhere you look, the real power is held by people like Echidne of the snakes! So Brooks is right: there is a problem with class mobility in this country. And then he's horribly wrong: class is about money, not about the lefty values by some of those who are educated. He even admits as much in his column:
It's the moneyed class that does this, David, not the educated class, though the two overlap. Check what you say yourself in this quote: the families of the students entering Harvard are wealthy, on average. The wealth was there first, David. Brooks is trying to make a right-wing populist case here: Let's get rid of the educated liberals and the system will be fairer! Indeed, he appears to advocate getting rid of education as a way to make the system fairer. History doesn't support David in this assertion, and in any case the educated liberals are not in power right now. The wingnuts are, David, and you're their poster child for being educated and wingnut. |
Bad Uses of Statistics
John Tierney gives us examples to ponder over in his latest NYT column (the one that should be Katha Pollitt's if there was any justice on this earth). The column is about how peaceful the world really is today, compared to past centuries:
Can you spot the statistical mistakes here? There are at least two: first, it's incorrect to calculate the probability of dying in a war by including in the base all the people who lived in areas with no wars, and that's what Tierney's two percent figure uses. He then compares this to the findings from one archeological dig from one place. There's no way of knowing how representative that dig is of the general time and place. The second one is the whole last paragraph which compares oranges to sausages in so many ways that I'm exhausted in just trying to list them. So I won't. Tierney's column is correct in one sense, though. The world has become safer for many individuals over time, and one of the main reasons for that is something Tierney doesn't mention: the effect liberal and progressive ideas have had on social justice, education and opportunities for all. |
Emily Dickinson
On the question what we should know and how the media should tell it? Tell all the Truth but tell it slant - Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm delight The Truth's superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind - |
Saturday, May 28, 2005
On Fear
I had one of those nights when all my troubles seemed to suddenly rear up and loom enormous in the horizon. There are so many of them that I can't squeeze through into the rest of my life. This happens when I have overdozed on news of a certain kind, in this case the stories about the coming avian flu pandemic. Several blogs had reader comments on the bird flu and the chance that it might hit home (wherever home might be), and what was most noticeable about some of the comments was the fear people feel and the need to know what to do. What to do? Should we stock medications, food, water? Should we avoid all other breathing creatures? Should we die now so that we won't have to go through this fear again? Terrorism threats have the same effect on us. The effect is to make us panic and to act in unwise ways, such as cornering the market on duct tape. All this is understandable and human; we need to feel some amount of control over our destinies and perfect passivity doesn't feel like control. Yet the things that we could do are either ineffective or unethical, on the whole. Some of those things make us look greedy and uncaring and even vicious; hoarding antibiotics when others need them now would be one of those. But I can still understand all this, this human mess of fear and the desire to overcome it. Most of these types of fear are illogical in the probability sense. You, my dear reader, are more likely to die because you didn't use a seat belt or because you smoked or drank or ate the wrong things than in the hands of a terrorist or in the grips of the avian flu. But these other kinds of killers get us one by one, almost invisibly, and besides, we are used to being killed by them. Avian flu or SARS or terrorists are new threats, unknown threats and it is this that frightens us as much as their suddenness. But mainly, I believe, we fear them because they make us feel so passive, so "out-of-control". Hence the out-of-control reactions. Fear of flying has similar roots. Who cares if cars are less safe than planes; at least in a car you feel in control, even if you're doing backseat driving. Now combine the fear of flying with the fear of terrorism and a smidgen of avian flu fear and what do you get? I don't really even want to think about that one. None of this aims to belittle the importance of preparing for a possible bird flu pandemic. It would be criminal not to prepare for it, but the job belongs to the health care systems of the affected countries, not to individuals who have been given no official advice. Still, we will never beat all the diseases that nature throws into our face and we will not get out of here alive. In one sense we are indeed totally at the mercy of external events, totally passive, flotsam and jetsam being tossed here and there by the sinister forces of nature. But nature gives us all the good things, too, and if we are careful and clever (and lucky) we can surf her waves without getting caught in the first big one. At a minimum, we can focus on worrying about those things which we can affect rather than tearing our minds apart with all those what-ifs. So that's what I did last night, worried about the things I can affect, and stayed wide awake until dawn. I have to work a little bit more on the ending to this story. |
In Memoriam
Friday, May 27, 2005
Friday Embroidery Blogging
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Billmon's Take On Laura Bush's Visit
It's a good one. He builds up a story by using nothing but snippets from various newspaper stories and one quote from his own archives, this one:
That's it, the plan in a wingnutshell, and the reason why I don't get very excited when Laura Bush gives speeches on women's rights in the Middle East. She's probably quite sincere, but she has no power to make any of these things real. And at home women's rights count only as a device for getting the wingnut masses really outraged. To fight against those rights. What's worse, linking women's rights with the rest of the empire's agenda is bad news for women in the Middle East. Even suggesting that equality might be a good thing will make you look like a pro-Bush colonizer. Feminism is now just another arm of the American Empire, and the date when women in those countries will have equal rights has thereby been postponed by a few millennia. Or so I think. |
Ahnuld and the Pothole
California governor Arnold Schwartzenegger has been filling potholes as part of his campaign to improve transportation in his state. Too bad that the pothole he filled had been dug up beforehand so that there would be one to fill:
Well, that's how it's done in the movies, so it's not Arnold's fault, really. Though there is the question whether taxpayers have to pay for the digging of the pothole as well as its filling. The governor's communication director argues that this event is not paid from the state funds, but
That last sentence is so good it deserves to be repeated:
Heh. |
Oh Why, Oh Why, O....
Did I ever leave Ohio? Not that I've ever lived in Ohio, but it sounds like a fun place. First all the trouble with organizing and monitoring an election and now this coin collection fiasco. It seems that Ohio's Bureau of Workers' Compensation has invested in rare coins as a way to hedge its investments in stocks and bonds. Sadly, though not perhaps inexplicably, some of the coins have gone a-missing, about ten million dollars worth. And the culprit appears to be:
I know that this is all old news and has been widely discussed in the lefty blogosphere. But the sum of ten million dollars is new and makes even a goddess perk up her ears. I have an excellent collection of U.S. quarters, the new ones. Could I interest some other state government in it, what do you think? If not that, then what about genuine goddess toenail clippings? |
Thursday, May 26, 2005
Women in the Military - Take Three and Wrap
For the time being, anyway. Those who don't want women anywhere near the frontlines lost this one, mostly because we don't have enought cannon fodder to begin with:
But, as the article I quote notes, we still have the "don't ask, don't tell" inanity operating. |
Lethargy
Can you help me with this: Are the politics really boring right now, slow and sloppy like cold oat meal porridge? Or is it me who needs to take a break from all the ranting and raving? I keep cruising the net and looking in all the usual places and get no rise whatsoever in my body temperature. That rise is necessary fuel for writing about the issues. It could be just the weather. Being rained on nonstop for a week does something to the very bones which is not pleasant. And to the bricks in my front porch. I had someone come soliciting yesterday and when I opened the door Hank snuck through between my legs, in order to slobber the solicitor with dog kisses. But the solicitor, being deathly scared of dogs, leapt backwards and landed on the bottom steps of my front stairs. Which promptly gave way. Now I have a big pile of rain-sodden bricks where there used to be some neat steps. I should go out and put some big warning signs up but I'm too lethargic for even that. A possible lawsuit when the next solicitor trips and falls would at least spice up my life a bit. The last and most frightening explanation for my political lethargy is that I have just gotten so used to the deaths in Iraq and the outrages in the U.S. Congress that I need a stronger and stronger fix to get going. Please tell me it ain't so. |
Weird
This is weird:
And by weird I mean the behavior of Judge Bradford. Just imagine this: replace "Wiccan" with "fundamentalist Christian" and see how the whole thing would read. Sounds like another activist judge to me. |
It's That Time Again!
The time to notice, with great astonishment, how few women there are as opinion columnists in major newspapers, including the New York Times. When the astonishment has abated a little, it's time to ponder the possible reasons for this drought of female voices and to conclude that the reasons they are unfathomable. And then it's time to gently point out that maybe there just aren't enough good female writers (though there's no glass ceiling against them any longer, no, and though evo-psychos argue that women are better at writing than men). Then, finally, it's time to set the topic aside until it's needed again because of low readership figures at some near future date. That sounds bitter, doesn't it? Well, I've only been a blogger for eighteen months or so, and during this time I've gone through four waves of this crap. Hence the bitterness. Also because Mr. Tierney was hired by the Times and he's no great writer. Neither is Bobo Brooks. But there are some truly great female political writers out there: Katha Pollitt, Molly Ivins, Barbara Ehrenreich, yet none of them are deemed good enough for the Times. My explanation for the lack of women's voices in the media is that those who have the power to decide on these things regard being a woman similar to being a bespectacled libertarian from SE Maine. In other words, "women" are seen as a specific subgroup of possible voices, on par with minor political groupings. One of those "women" is then plenty for the New York Times, or any other self-respecting major media outlet. But in reality women are the majority, of course, and doing what these guys are doing is just plain silly. It's tokenism. It's equally silly to hire women as interpreters of the great womandom, and that's the other way this game is being played: A woman is hired to write, but only on what women think, or to interpret this weird feminine species for the rest of us normal beings. In both variations of the game, women lose; in the first because how many bespectacled libertarians from SE Maine do you really want to read, and in the second because a few interpreters of the tribe is plenty. So I'm bitter. In a just system it would be me pontificating on the opinion pages of the Times. Or at least it wouldn't be Bobo and Tierney. |
Today's Action Alert
Someone at Atrios suggested that we let the editor at the Washington Post know what we think of today's editorial: ************************** 'American Gulag' Thursday, May 26, 2005; Page A26 IT'S ALWAYS SAD when a solid, trustworthy institution loses its bearings and joins in the partisan fracas that nowadays passes for political discourse. It's particularly sad when the institution is Amnesty International, which for more than 40 years has been a tough, single-minded defender of political prisoners around the world and a scourge of left- and right-wing dictators alike. True, Amnesty continues to keep track of the world's political prisoners, as it has always done, and its reports remain a vital source of human rights information. But lately the organization has tended to save its most vitriolic condemnations not for the world's dictators but for the United States. That vitriol reached a new level this week when, at a news conference held to mark the publication of Amnesty's annual report, the organization's secretary general, Irene Khan, called the U.S. detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the "gulag of our times." In her written introduction to the report, Ms. Khan also mentioned only two countries at length: Sudan and the United States, the "unrivalled political, military and economic hyper-power," which "thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights." Like Amnesty, we, too, have written extensively about U.S. prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay, in Afghanistan and in Iraq. We have done so not only because the phenomenon is disturbing in its own right but also because it gives undemocratic regimes around the world an excuse to justify their own use of torture and indefinite detention and because it damages the U.S. government's ability to promote human rights. But we draw the line at the use of the word "gulag" or at the implication that the United States has somehow become the modern equivalent of Stalin's Soviet Union. Guantanamo Bay is an ad hoc creation, designed to contain captured enemy combatants in wartime. Abuses there -- including new evidence of desecrating the Koran -- have been investigated and discussed by the FBI, the press and, to a still limited extent, the military. The Soviet gulag, by contrast, was a massive forced labor complex consisting of thousands of concentration camps and hundreds of exile villages through which more than 20 million people passed during Stalin's lifetime and whose existence was not acknowledged until after his death. Its modern equivalent is not Guantanamo Bay, but the prisons of Cuba, where Amnesty itself says a new generation of prisoners of conscience reside; or the labor camps of North Korea, which were set up on Stalinist lines; or China's laogai , the true size of which isn't even known; or, until recently, the prisons of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Worrying about the use of a word may seem like mere semantics, but it is not. Turning a report on prisoner detention into another excuse for Bush-bashing or America-bashing undermines Amnesty's legitimate criticisms of U.S. policies and weakens the force of its investigations of prison systems in closed societies. It also gives the administration another excuse to dismiss valid objections to its policies as "hysterical." ********************************* Write and tell the Post that they're 100% wrong. Editorial Policy Letters must be exclusive to The Washington Post, and must include the writer's home address and home and business telephone numbers. (Letters via regular mail should also be signed.) Because of space limitations, those published are subject to abridgment. Although we are unable to acknowledge those letters we cannot publish, we appreciate the interest and value the views of those who take the time to send us their comments. Letters Via E-Mail Send e-mail letters to letters@washpost.com. Do not send attachments; they will not be read. Regular Mail Letters should sent to: Letters to the Editor The Washington Post 1150 15th Street Northwest Washington, DC 20071 |
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Priscilla Owen
The Owen confirmation is part of the whole filibuster deal. Too bad, as Owen surely is an extraordinarily wingnutty judge:
Owen is going to sit on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, which is already a most wingnutty court. So in some ways Owen can't wreak as much havoc as she'd like to. She's simply adding her conservative stamp to many others there. But she's being placed with a view towards a future Supreme Court nomination, I fear. And so are the two other wingnut judges that are being given an up-and-down vote. I've been looking very hard for examples of a nominee which would be extraordinary enough to allow filibustering if these three are just garden variety wingnuts. Attila the Hun? Nah. |
More on Embryo Adoptions
I recently wrote on this blog that the U.S. government gives out grant money to organizations who are willing to do community awareness on embryo adoption, i.e., the implantation of extra embryos from fertility clinics. The pro-life movement has a problem with the whole fertility clinic phenomenom. On the one hand, here are these firms doing exactly what the pro-lifers want: creating babies. On the other hand, the process of creating these babies leaves many leftover embryos. Because the pro-life movement defines life as beginning when the sperm and the ovum meet (or, as one male writer on the topic describes it, when the sperm "pierces" the ovum) the leftover embryos constitute pre-born children to the pro-lifers, though pre-born children which happen to be frozen. One organization offering embryo adoptions, Nightlight Christian Adoptions, actually calls them snowflakes. The organization's website has this advertisement:
The website is an odd mixture pro-life statements and others which come across as describing the embryos as building material for future babies. I'm disturbed by this. Are all these embryos pre-born babies as this part says:
Or are they really seen as just embryos as this parts suggests:
This sounds like moral relativism and is not in accordance with proper pro-life sentiments. Embryos should be shipped in units of one, to guarantee maximum chance of life for each embryo. Anything short of this is disrespectful towards the pre-born babies. The costs of these embryo adoptions are borne by the adopting families and come to about seven thousand dollars and up. A 2001 article in the National Review Online about the Snowflakes Program I describe here has a fetching headline:
The statistics given in the article suggest, though, that less than one in ten of these frozen little Americans were successfully converted into the kinds of Americans the pro-lifers don't care about: post-born ones. The hope offered is only partial, it seems. |
Blackwell's Madrasa
The writer Jeff Horwitz went to school to learn how to make campuses havens for wingnuts and then wrote an article about it for the Salon. What's interesting about the school he chose is that it's the same one Jeff Gannon went to in order to learn how to get a White House press pass without having any journalistic training or experience. The school, called the Leadership Institute, is run by Morton Blackwell, better known as the wingnut who made those Purple Heart Band-Aids that conservatives then used to mock John Kerry. Blackwell is not a kind and gentle soul, and his latest project is to make sure young Americans leave college more conservative than they enter it. And what does Blackwell's school teach the young activists? Here is an example:
Blackwell also gives the students some deeper advice:
Thus, the campus is taken back into wingnuttia, book by book, computer by computer, building by building, right? Well, what really matters in all this is money. The conservative organizations are top-down and shower the students they find with enormous resources. The liberal/progressive organizations are bottom-up and give the students very little help. If this will not change campuses may indeed be added to the realm of wingnuttia. Are you reading, Democratic party? |
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
More on the Filibuster Compromise
Dwight Meredith on the Wampum picks out the crucial question in determining whether the deal is any good for the Democrats: Who is the least extreme nominee for whom a filibuster has been determined to be justified? And we don't know the answer to this, which means that we don't really know what the deal means until we see what happens with the next three nominees. |
Today's Action Alert
Today's Action comes from NRDC. ************************* The House version of the Defense Authorization bill could include language exempting the Defense Department from key environmental statutes. Urge your representative to vote against these dangerous and unnecessary exemptions. Here's a sample letter: Dear Representative: I urge you to vote to reject the Department of Defense's request for exemptions from public health and environmental laws. Specifically, please do not exempt the Pentagon from the Clean Air Act, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) or the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) during consideration of the Defense Authorization bill. The president already has the authority to waive these laws for national security reasons. But the Defense Department has yet to request any waiver, and has made no case to Congress for blanket waivers that could endanger public health. In the end, our military families who live in and around bases would suffer the most. Local communities also would be adversely affected as they are left to foot the bill for cleanup or deal with permanent blight. Again, I urge you to protect America's military families and other communities and uphold our environmental laws. Please vote "No" on language that would exempt the Pentagon from these important public health statues. Sincerely, ************************************ Thanks for taking today's action. |
Echidne's Advice Column
I took a vacation yesterday from blogging by going down into the dark cave I call my basement and spending some time there with my inner washerwoman and a mountain of laundry. Then I shoveled all last winter's doghair and snake scales into one big pile and threw it over my neighbor's fence. There! Life is now so much sweeter as well as containing more clothes. Vacations from politics are also a must. Else one starts growling at the other shoppers in the supermarket or begins to hoard weaponry in the back of the station wagon. Most people in the three-dimensional space we call reality are pretty nice, and not at all interested in politics. It's easy to forget these truths when one spends as much time in wingnuttia as I do. For these reasons, my unsolicited advice today is to make sure that you visit apolitical life once in a while. Doing laundry isn't a bad idea, either. |
Monday, May 23, 2005
The Filibuster Deal
A deal was produced tonight and we were deprived of the fun of watching an all-out attack by the wingnuts. You can read about the deal at Kos. He also has some interesting responses to the deal, including one from Dr. Dobson, the "you-have-a-friend-in-wingnuts" guy. The burning question is whether this deal is a good thing for the Democrats, and the answer is whatever you believe. The wingnuts are not happy with it but this doesn't necessarily mean that our side somehow won. The wingnuts have not been happy with anything since the Inquisition was disbanded. But their anger is a sign that things could have gone even worse for the Democrats. On the other hand, one could argue that the Democrats caved in, once again, and that this is not what the country needs. On balance, I believe that it could have been worse, but I'm no more optimistic about the future than I was this morning. |
More Polling News
Bush is still doing very poorly, in fact, he might win the lowest ratings of any president ever if he goes on the same way. Only 33% of those questioned in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll like his Social Security proposal, and only 40% think that he's doing a good job domestically. Slightly over one half of all the respondents approve Bush's war on terrorism, probably because there has been no recent attack on the U.S. ground. It's fair to say that this presidency is not liked. Neither is this Congress, not the Republicans or the Democrats in it, but this is fairly encouraging:
The more I hear on these issues the less I understand the 2004 election results. Unless voters decided that self-flagellation is what this country needs next. Alternative explanations are wrapped in heavy tinfoil in my basement. |
My Farewell Letter to the Wingnut Right
Well, it isn't mine, and it isn't to the wingnut right. It's by a Men's Rights Activist called Keith Thompson, and he's saying goodbye to us simpering liberals. In a newspaper, just to make sure that we see what we are losing. Keith's lament is very touching. It brought my muse Erecto out and he (drunk as usual) wanted to write a farewell letter, too. So here the two are: side by side. Or some snippets of them; to print all of the moaning and crying would be too boring for you, my dear readers. Keith:
Erecto:
Keith:
Erecto:
Keith:
Erecto:
You get the idea? Maybe Keith's lament is more polished, but then Erecto was drunk and it took me only about thirty minutes to type mine in. I bet Keith had months of agony before he finished penning his. Now I'm going to lean back and wait for the book offers to flood my e-mail addy. |
Sunday, May 22, 2005
Some Graduate
This item is a few days old but it's still worth noticing:
(Bolds mine.) If it doesn't show it's ok. Another traditional value? ---- Via frogthefirst of Between the Lakes. |
A Fun Science Site
This one is a nice place to spend some time looking at stuff. If you, too, happen to sit at home while it's raining outside. --- Via Sanna Emilin |
Saturday, May 21, 2005
Echidne's Saturday Sermon
Not really. More of a rant on sermons, probably, caused by this article in the New York Times about how the evangelical Christians are planning to take the Ivy League back to Christ from its current "pre-Christian" state. What struck me most about this article was the focus on the idea that Jesus wants his followers to be wealthy and successful in earthy goods:
It's annoying. I know that human beings have always rewritten religion to go with what they wish to do anyway (whether it is slaughtering their opponents or making money or having lots of sex), but the Bible is one of the holy books which is pretty clear on the incompatibility of wealth and faith. Remember the eye of the needle and whatever was meant to go through it (some sources say a camel, some say a rope, but both are equally unlikely to make it)? And all the times that Jesus told rich men to give up their wealth? And how those who own two shirts or tunics should give one up? Are these literalist believers, I wonder, and if so, how do they reconcile all this re-interpreting with literalism? The idea that Christ wants you to be rich seems to be very popular these days. Many of the new megachurches thrive on this idea, and no wonder, as it makes religion rather painless. But isn't religion supposed to be something more than a way to whitewash your own greed? Something more than the chance to feel superior to all those heathens who Are Not Like Us? Isn't religion supposed to stretch our thinking and our limits in deeper ways than by suggesting that it would be a good thing to have more money? The idea that God marks out the saved ones on earth by making them successful is not new, of course. Calvinism endorses this, for example. But Jesus did not. Read what He actually said if you don't believe me. |
My Usual Saturday Yada Yada...
Check out the American Street for more political blogging by yours truly, as well as others much more interesting. Or go out and have a good time. As long as you always come back here... |
Embryo Adoption Public Awareness Grants
I kid you not. Money is available for organizations (not individuals) who are prepared to educate the public about adopting embryos:
Sigh. I would think that there are lots of already existing children who need help from this government. ---- Props to Bassett. |
Combined Dog and Garden Blogging
Saturday Garden Blogging
I shouldn't blog on gardens on a political blog. But notice the little title on the top? This blog is about my opinions, and today I have opinions on the garden. On roots, specifically, and in the metaphoric sense. When I bought the Snakepit Inc. its environs were pretty bare. There was grass, tamped down with weedkillers, and a derelict doghouse. There was also a pile of construction rubble, and from this rubble shot up one solitary leaf, daffodil-like. I dug the plant up and fed it for a few years and now I have dark purple irises smelling of cinnamon all over the place. All from that solitary leaf. I'm not sure what type these irises are. They are evergreen which narrows the possibilities down a lot, but then most evergreen irises shouldn't thrive in my climate. Because I don't know what to call these irises I think of them as my Ancestor Irises. Something that the spirits of the house gave me. They also gave me peonies. Peonies are famous for living long lives, and there was one in my back yard, hidden by that derelict doghouse. It's one of those old-fashioned types which smell of hand-cream, and I have made it multiply over the years. But even the peony did nothing for quite a few years after its rescue. I fed it and I fed it and nothing happened. Until suddenly one spring the air outside smelled of hand-cream and all you could see for yards were those incredibly sexy, blowsy peony flowers. The moral of the story, if there needs to be one: Sometimes grassroots take time to grow before they erupt in a wonderful rebellion of color, scent and, dare we hope, sanity? |


