OPINIONS OF ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES, A MINOR GREEK GODDESS. She can be reached at: ECHIDNE-OF-THE-SNAKES.COM

Friday, November 30, 2007

Some Friday Kitty-Game Fun 



Courtesy of Kenosha Kid, you can get addicted to a new game, this one. The idea, as far as I can figure it out, is to stop the cat from leaving the field, and the way to do that is to click on the light green dots to make them into dark green ones. The dark green ones work like a fence, or at least the kitty can't leap onto those.

Have fun, and a good weekend, too.

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The Dangers of Asbestos 



You may have observed the removal of old asbestos from buildings, presumably from far away, unless you were one of the removers clad in those space suits the workers wear for protection because asbestos is a known health hazard. But you may be unaware that asbestos may exist in new products, too, even in some toys meant for children:

The CSI Fingerprint Examination Kit, two brands of children's play clay, powdered cleanser, roof sealers, duct tapes, window glazing, spackling paste and small appliances were among the products in which asbestos was found by at least two of three labs hired by the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization.

The group, which was created in 2004 by asbestos victims and their families, spent more than $165,000 to have government-certified laboratories examine hundreds of consumer products over 18 months to determine whether asbestos was present.

It is unusual for a group of volunteers, many of whom have asbestos-caused diseases, to fund research that impacts public health.

"We had to. No one else was doing it," said Linda Reinstein, the group's co-founder and executive director. "This is information that consumers and Congress must have because asbestos is lethal and we naively believe that the government is protecting us, when it's not."

The product that is of greatest concerns to some public health experts is the fingerprint kit, which is a huge seller, according to sales personnel interviewed by the Seattle P-I.

The asbestos in the fingerprint kit was found in the powders the kit contains. These are very likely to be inhaled while playing with the kit.

I'm not sure how reliable private laboratory tests are, but it's of clear concern to find that the government is not testing for asbestos.
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Via Rants from the Rookery.

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Bias in Texas 



This story is odd:

The state's director of science curriculum has resigned after being accused of creating the appearance of bias against teaching intelligent design.

Chris Comer, who has been the Texas Education Agency's director of science curriculum for more than nine years, offered her resignation this month.

In documents obtained Wednesday through the Texas Public Information Act, agency officials said they recommended firing Comer for repeated acts of misconduct and insubordination. But Comer said she thinks political concerns about the teaching of creationism in schools were behind what she describes as a forced resignation.

Agency officials declined to comment, saying it was a personnel issue.

Comer was put on 30 days paid administrative leave shortly after she forwarded an e-mail in late October announcing a presentation being given by Barbara Forrest, author of "Inside Creationism's Trojan Horse," a book that says creationist politics are behind the movement to get intelligent design theory taught in public schools. Forrest was also a key witness in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case concerning the introduction of intelligent design in a Pennsylvania school district. Comer sent the e-mail to several individuals and a few online communities, saying, "FYI."

Agency officials cited the e-mail in a memo recommending her termination. They said forwarding the e-mail not only violated a directive for her not to communicate in writing or otherwise with anyone outside the agency regarding an upcoming science curriculum review, "it directly conflicts with her responsibilities as the Director of Science."

The memo adds, "Ms. Comer's e-mail implies endorsement of the speaker and implies that TEA endorses the speaker's position on a subject on which the agency must remain neutral."

Why should the TEA remain neutral in this matter? I guess it should also be neutral about whether the earth is flat or not?

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Very Bad 



Added even later: The situation appears to have been solved without anyone getting hurt.


ThinkProgress reports that a man who appears to have a bomb strapped to his body is holding Clinton Campaign volunteers as hostage in New Hampshire.

Added later: The news now report that at least two hostages have been released. It is not clear whether any are still being held.

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Friday Nature and Critter Blogging 



First, some lovely snakes, courtesy of swampcracker. Notice the curiosity of the orange snake. It's thinking of making tools.





The racer snake can see far:





Then a glimpse at life under the surface, by Darryl Pearce. Very mystical and fascinating.





Finally, and naturally, some Pippin-cat by FeraLiberal. NOBODY sees as far as Pippin:




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Thursday, November 29, 2007

What Annoys Me Today 



Mostly because nothing seems to light my writing fire today, I have dawdled over various parts of my daily chores, such as checking my e-mail. The ads I have to go through first tell me what is going on in "Entertainment" and "News of the Day" and I decided to look at what it is that should entertain me.

It's news about the private lives of celebrities. Many of these are about babies being born to some celebrity or another, and all the headlines are of the form where "x" welcomes "baby girl/boy/multiples". Wouldn't it be more entertaining to read that "x" was furious and wanted to cancel the baby order? Or is there a special welcome ritual that I've missed about the arrival of babies?

Yes, I know that what I wrote above is curmudgeonly, and that it's difficult to think of an interesting way to say that the new parents are delighted to finally hold the baby. The annoyance I feel is much more severe when the news are about how someone reacts to horrible events. You know, the kind of thing where someone is asked how they feel about having their whole family killed in a fire or lost in an earthquake. It seems wrong to even ask such question, and the answers have very little news value. Of course the survivor is devastated. To ask her or him to expand on that feeling is voyeurism of the nastiest kind.

Then there is this story about a man who killed his ex-wife and his children. The story is written in an odd way, almost as if family violence is some sort of a virus that just happens:

The couple, who divorced in 2005, had a history of domestic violence, police said.

The family lived in Frederick County for about five years, with Brockdorff moving out in 2005 and Pumphrey leaving this year, neighbors said.

Brockdorff was a self-employed electrician who had coached T-ball, and Pumphrey was a flight attendant, said Mullen, who lives two houses away. The three Brockdorff children were close friends with Mullen's.

The couple's relationship was stormy, and police were often called to their large home to help settle their disputes, Mullen said.

In fall 2005, Pumphrey asked Brockdorff to move out, and he moved to nearby Urbana. But he continued to visit Pumphrey and harass her, Mullen said. Pumphrey got a restraining order and even suspected that her phone had been tapped.

"She was very scared," Mullen said. "She wanted to protect her kids and herself."

Perhaps the ex-wife was also violent, but the story gives no evidence of that. Instead, it is the "couple" who somehow "has a history" of domestic violence. And all this in a story which begins by telling how the ex-husband killed the rest of the family. I can't imagine similar writing applied to other kinds of murders.

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Holiday Gift Ideas 



These are some ideas which arrived in my mail box. First, you can help to fund Equal Access Fund, which provides funds for women who can't afford an abortion. Second, you can help to fund Women's eNews, a worthy website reporting on news of interest to women around the world and one of the first Internet sites dedicating on them. If you want to send them a check, make it out to The Fund for the City of New York/Women's eNews, and mail it to:


Women's eNews
135 West 29th Street, Suite 1005
New York, NY 10001

I will add more suggestions as I receive them. Happy holidays! (The beginning trumpet call in the war against Christmas, naturally.)
...
And more ideas from Viva La Feminista.


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On The Republican Debate 



I watched some parts of it but was unable to watch it all. Let's just put it this way: It was a bit of a spectacle, and I'm not at all sure what scope there might be for bipartisanship under the current circumstances.

The interesting question for me is to figure out whom the money boys want as the candidate. It looks like it might not be Rudy, given the timing of this story, but Romney has that Mormon thing working against him. Huckabee is the new darling of the media. They always like a smiling, godly guy who hates women, I guess. - Of course, all this is speculation based on nothing but my own sarcastic self.

What did you think of the debate? And of the wonderful questions posed in it?

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Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Sex Tourism Reversal 



Reuters reports about older white women joining Kenya's sex tourism. It's always useful to remember to take stories like that with a grain of salt, because they might be part of the business which makes up faux trends with no real statistical evidence to back them up. But supposing that it indeed is true that older white women travel to Kenya in order to have paid sex with young Kenyan men, what should a feminist say about it?

That would probably depend on the feminist. My first step in analyzing stories like this is to do a gender-reversal. If you do that all the article tells us is the old and nasty story about colonial oppression and prostitution or about the power of wealthier individuals to buy sex from poorer individuals who have few other alternatives. Perhaps the advantage of the actual story is that these other aspects become much clearer when the entitlement aspect of being an older white man has been removed. Older white women are usually not regarded as entitled to sex, after all.

My second step was to think how I would feel about the article if the older women went to, say, Florida, for their sex tourism and if the younger men working in the industry were of the same race and with other alternatives to escorting as a way of making a living. Would the arrangement then be just fine? After all, it is mostly viewed as just fine when it is older white men who do this by paying for mistresses or casual sex. I'm not sure.

My final thoughts had to do with wondering about how all this would be explained by the misogynistic section of evolutionary psychologists. Women aren't supposed to do this kind of stuff, and certainly not older women.

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Pat Buchanan's Nightmares 



Unlike the rest of us, Buchanan tends to write books about his own private nightmares. They always have the same monsters: white women who don't breed enough and brown people who will come and take over the Murka Pat is so proud of. His newest book is all about the same old racism and sexism:

MSNBC political analyst Pat Buchanan appeared on the November 26 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes to discuss his new book, Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, And Greed Are Tearing America Apart (Thomas Dunne Books, November 2007), in which he writes that America is "on a path to national suicide" and later asks: "How is America committing suicide?" answering: "Every way a nation can." He proceeds to claim that "[t]he American majority is not reproducing itself. ... Forty-five million of its young have been destroyed in the womb since Roe v. Wade, as Asian, African, and Latin American children come to inherit the estate the lost generation of American children never got to see."

What Buchanan is saying that white, non-Hispanic Americans are not breeding enough and that this is the reason why Mexicans will take over the country. If all those abortions had not happened we could have solved the need for cheap labor in agriculture and the hospitality industry by using our own people!

Buchanan's arguments really do seem to come from his private nightmares, except for his assumption that the United States of the past was a happy mixing pot where everybody was boiled until they looked quite nicely European. He fails to apply social science to his fears, too. For instance, more educated people always have fewer children and the average children per family drop pretty fast once an immigrant population becomes mainstreamed in the United States.

But what he never fails to do is to blame white women for not having more children to keep Pat's nightmares at bay. This is especially weird considering the fact that Pat personally has done nothing to help those birth rate numbers he so deplores.

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Scientists Talk Back on Abstinence Education 



It does not work, by the way, and throwing money at it is just a way of giving pork to some religious groups. A group of scientists has written a letter about the uselessness of abstinence education to Nancy Pelosi, and you can read it here.

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Tuesday, November 27, 2007

The Golden Compass: Anti-Religious Propaganda! 



*Warning: The link contains spoilers.*


I was waiting for the Catholic League President Bill Donohue to comment on the movie, based on the first book in Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials, and Donohue didn't disappoint.

He took the anti-religion bait and swam with it, all the way to the end of the reel:

The author of the book on which the new film The Golden Compass is based has hit back at critics who accuse him of peddling "candy-coated atheism".

Philip Pullman dismissed as "absolute rubbish" accusations by the US-based Catholic League that the film promotes atheism and denigrates Christianity.

"I am a story teller," he said. " If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon."

The Golden Compass - which stars Nicole Kidman - premiers in London on Tuesday.

In Donohue's world anyone who depicts anything negative about religion is peddling atheism. Only perfectly candy-coated descriptions of Christianity are allowed.

The whole thing is really silly, because Pullman's trilogy can also be read as a retelling of the creation tale from the Bible and in that sense it is very religious indeed.

Go and see the movie, just to annoy our Bill.

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A Silly Game For You 



To balance the sad post below. You can go to this site and find out which presidential candidate is closest to your values. Not sure that any such short list of questions really works, but who knows, you might find something new about yourself.

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Bad News From Iraq 



The women are not faring well in all the upheaval. I was opposed to the Iraq invasion for many reasons, and especially for the reasons of avoiding unnecessary blood-letting, but the fate of the Iraqi women always weighed heavily on my mind. I believed that the most organized part of the society, that of religious fundamentalists, would take over, and I feared what would happen to the women who are not content with the rules of that type of religion.

The situation does not look good. In the south of Iraq:

In Basra, Iraq, religious extremists are waging a violent campaign against women who do not dress or behave according to their interpretation of Islam and doctors who provide medical services to women.

"They kill women, leave a piece of paper on her or dress her in indecent clothes so as to justify their horrible crimes," said Basra police chief Maj. Gen. Abdul Jalil Khalaf. Militants murdered 42 women between July and September, the BBC reported Nov. 15.

The same piece mentions violence against male gynecologists, in an attempt to make them stop practicing. The snag in that is that there are not enough women gynecologists. Thus, if the militants have their way, most women in Iraq will get no gynecological care. Sound familiar? This is the sort of thing the Taliban did in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, in the north of Iraq the Kurdish women aren't doing that well, either:

Ninety-seven women were burnt to death and 27 others killed in the three Kurdish provinces during the past four months, the human rights minister in the Iraqi Kurdistan region revealed.




"I cannot say that violence against women has lowered," Yusuf Aziz Muhammad told reporters after taking part in a conference held in Arbil on Sunday to discuss means to stop violence against women.
The statements coincide with the international day to eliminate violence against women, November 25.
"Surveys conducted in Arbil (the capital of the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan region) showed that there were 60 cases of women burning in Arbil, 21 in Duhuk and 16 in Sulaimaniya. There were also 10 cases of women killing in Arbil, 11 in Duhuk and six in Sulaimaniya," Muhammad said.
The Kurdish official, citing the figures of 2005, noted that there were 59 cases of women killing in the region, which rose to 118 in 2006.
"Cases of women burning themselves in Sulaimaniya during 2006 were 64 and in Duhuk 185," said the minister.
Women proved involved in honor-related crimes are forced to burn themselves and sometimes they are set ablaze by their male relatives.

That article notes one of the reasons for all this violence: contempt towards women and their role in the family and society. You can twist yourself into a pretzel trying to reconcile that contempt with the simultaneous push in Basra to make women act according to the most limited roles possible. But misogyny has never been bothered by its own illogicality.

And what of the response from the West to news like these? Some fear that even talking about them foments war against Iran or some other suitable country, despite the obvious futility of war as a weapon for democratizing a country. If anything, things have gotten worse for Iraqi women since the U.S. invasion, and I don't quite see how it would help women in any of the countries where women are not much valued if they or their family members were first killed by U.S. bombs.

Others turn suddenly all relative in their ethical judgments when otherwise they would not do so, and point out that we shouldn't judge what other cultures do. I wonder if they would have the same reaction should we be reading about the burning of children or if the corpses in Basra all belonged to members of a religious minority.

No, it is something about the victims being women that causes the "look elsewhere" syndrome. Because deep down, somewhere, many of us still believe that the women belong to their husbands, fathers, families and their societies, to treat as those parties see fit.

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Monday, November 26, 2007

Is This Funny? 



Shakes points out that rape is now a laughing matter, and presents this example of the genre of humor where violence is funny (she also provides a transcript of it):





Did you find yourself laughing when the three defenders of the environment killed a man and gang-raped a woman? I'd guess that you did not if either murder or rape has ever touched upon your own life. But what about those who are lucky enough not to have the memory of that pain?

I didn't find the skits funny, but then I'm a prude as you all know. Instead, the choices made me try to figure out what it is exactly that the creators of these jokes wanted to accomplish. Is the idea to make environmental protection look like a manly thing to do? Something tough guys might consider, inbetween rape and pillage? Or are they arguing that spoiling the environment is worse than gang-rape or murder?

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Deep Thought For The Day 



The reason all those corporate answering services are automated is to make sure that any complaint you have never reaches an actual living ear. That way the firm doesn't have to fix anything.

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On The Housing Bubble 



Last night the top Google advertisement on one blog was this:

No Money Down Home Loans
$300,000 Loan Amount Minimum Instant Approval - No Credit Check

Interesting that these kinds of ads are still being used, given the state of the housing market. Note also that any ad specifically pointing out that there will be no credit check would get a much larger than average number of responses from those who have bad credit, and people who have bad credit are often going to continue having bad credit. That "no money down" part is also very suspicious. Taken together, the ad promises mortgages for people who really cannot afford mortgages.

There is a sense in which the housing markets in the last few years (pretty much the Bush reign) have acted as if the equivalent of gravity in the physical world no longer works: No, you don't have to save money for a fancy house. No, we will not look into your past credit history. Yes, indeed, you can get something for nothing.

But of course you can't get something for nothing, or certainly not on the scale that the housing bubble suggests. What is it that they used in the place of all those old rules about mortgages? The one new theory or myth seems to have been the idea that the prices of housing will keep on rising and rising and rising.

If that myth is true it makes sense to take a loan which is front-loaded with nothing but interest. You get to deduct the interest against your taxes, you get to live in the house, and if the value of houses rises you gather equity from just that. When finally the day arrives with monthly payments for not just the interest, that day when your monthly payments will double, say, well, your house has appreciated in value and you can either sell it and make some money or you can refinance it based on its new and better value. Neat, is it not?

Except of course in the case when housing prices are falling. In that case you are in deep trouble. And that is the scenario that is now unfolding. What is especially bitter about that scenario is that the very reason WHY the prices of houses have stopped rising is the vast number of bad mortgages, taken by people on the hope that prices would keep on rising. A sort of a suicide, if you like.

So, yes, the outlook is not rosy in the housing markets. But the meaning of all this is even more grave and the debacle might hit all of us, whether we ever gambled with houses or not. The reason has to do with the role the wealth in the form of houses has taken in the United States. One article quoted an expert who stated that Americans have used their houses as ATM machines, as sources of money for things quite unrelated to housing. That may be a little too rude, but it is indeed true that the wealth in the form of housing has been fueling the U.S. economy for the last eight years.

People spend more when they have more wealth, and when the value of their houses increased they felt that they had more wealth to spend. Now that the value of their houses is not increasing and may well be decreasing, they will spend less. Less spending by consumers means fewer orders for firms. That means more unemployment, and the vicious cycle starts turning: Unemployed people will not consume that much, unemployed people will lose their houses....

So what happened to allow this all? The government didn't disallow it, for one thing. Then the financial markets invented a new tool: that of mincing up all the poor mortgages and then tossing them into the general mortgage salad for the purposes of reselling. That way nobody could tell exactly how many bad mortgages they had just acquired! In short, the general investments in the housing markets were not protected from the bad investments. And, as I mentioned, the government didn't declare this new tool illegal.

The latter reminds me a lot of the 1929 stock market crash. The new tool then in play was leveraging. It worked beautifully when the market was going up and it crashed every bit as spectacularly when the market was going down.

I hope that we have all learned enough since 1929 to contain the current housing market crisis before it gets worse.

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Trent Lott Leaves Abruptly 



The Republican Senator from Mississippi and the Senate's Number 2 Republican, has just announced his resignation from the Senate, effective before the end of the year. He has given the reason as "other opportunities."

Very odd...

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Sunday, November 25, 2007

What The Fashionable Klansman Will Be Wearing Next Spring Posted by olvlzl 

If you missed the go-round between Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee on illegal immigrants earlier this month, you missed some fun. Huckabee, while the governor of Arkansas floated a proposal to give some kind of tuition break to the children of illegal immigrants in his state. Panicking that he might have spent mightily and lose to Huck Thin in Iowa Romney attacked him on this issue only to have Huckabee say, "I guess Mitt Romney would rather keep people out of college so they can keep working on his lawn," . Seems Mitt had hired a lawn care company that depended on cheap, illegal immigrant laborers for twelve years. Fred Thompson got in a few kicks in on Huckabee too. You’d imagine that the effort must have winded the laziest candidate in the race. There is also talk about Huckabee turning over state owned space in Little Rock for use by the Mexican consulate.

Illegal immigration is the code phrase for a well prepared strategy the Republicans are relying on in next year’s election, anti-Latino bigotry. Conservatives, unable to run on their actual platform, which would disadvantage the large majority of middle-class and working class people for the advantage of the oligarches, have always reverted to bigotry, their most trusted tool. Bigotry has won them election after election. CNN’s Lou Dobbs and others, well, really the entire cabloid-hate talk media, have been laying the ground, whipping up anti-Latino mania to the point where it is actually going to have a real impact on the election. Republicans are practicing with it against each other before using it against Democrats in the general election. On Russert’s program this morning Mary Matalin was fantasizing that anti-Latino bigotry would drive black voters into the arms of the Republicans, a fantasy so wacky that has the smell of being Oked by some consultant or other before that hack mouthed it.

The other reliable tool of Republicans, Biblical fundamentalism, is also being kept handy. Huckabee’s success in the Iowa polls is primary based on the pseudo-christian vote. The “Values Voters” and other pseudo-religious Republican fronts SHOULD have a problem with the anti-alien plank which is certain to be a part of the Republican platform. That is they would if liberals had the wit to have read the Bible. For example, in her brilliant review of The God Delusion, Marilynne Robinson made this potentially useful point in response to the false assertion that The Law as laid down in Leviticus - one of the favorite books with cherry pickers on both sides of the God Wars - was meant to only apply to Jews.

... the verse quoted here, Leviticus 19:18, does indeed begin, "You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people," language that allows a narrow interpretation of the commandment. But Leviticus 19:33—34 says "When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. . . . You shall love the alien as yourself." In light of these verses, it is wrong by Dawkins's own standards to argue that the ethos of the law does not imply moral consideration for others. (It would be interesting to see the response to a proposal to display this Mosaic law in our courthouses.)

My bold

What would the “Values Voters” answer be if it was repeatedly and relentlessly pointed out that this “law” was as much part of the bible as the ones allegedly opposed to gay people? Would it have an impact? Would it shame them? I don’t know but anything is worth trying at this late date. Perhaps it won’t work politically next year, since the groundwork of anti-Latino bigotry has been so well laid by hate-talk media. But Democratic strategists should always be on the look out for what the corporate media is preparing for use by Republican candidates and they should attack early and continually, pointing out that it is morally repugnant. It is only by a wall of resistance that hate campaigns can be fought. When you have the entire commercial media against you, you have to use every weapon available. If Lou Dobbs had been condemned for his promotion of bigotry over the past several years one of the potentially most potent tools of division and conquest by the party of the privileged it might not work as well as it probably will.

Ok, maybe the picture of Matalin was over the top. But ain't it the truth?
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Saturday, November 24, 2007

Sick As A Dog 

Will post tomorrow.

olvlzl

P.S. No, I'm not eating grass.
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Saturday Bad Poetry Hour 



Jobless

I keep my ironed business face
in the old yellow travel case
under the stairs.

I lost the key.

My mirror stares
back at me
dressed in morning nudity.

----

In Memory

The woman has been killed.
Her eyes do not see.
Her body has been tilled.
It feeds a rattle tree.

And merrily we dance
around the rattle tree.
And when we get a chance
we tell her she is free.

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This one is not about Hillary Clinton, by the way.

Hilary

I met her in the swimming pool.
I cannot stand the crowd.
But Hilary was different
and seemed to say so, loud.

Her skin was silvery and cool,
her swimming like a dream.
Her crawling style was ancient
but made the waters stream.

Her eyes were deep and green as sea.
I never saw them blink.
Yes, Hilary was different
but how, I could not think.

Until at last it came to me
and I saw what I had missed.
These facts made it evident
that Hilary was a fish.

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These Are Some of My Least Favorite Things 



1. A list of stuff from TPM Muckraker about the way information has been withheld or removed during the Bush Administration. The list doesn't really cover the cases where information was altered.

2. The "administrative mistake" which stopped cheap contraception from being available to college students also stopped it being available at 400 community health centers serving the poor. It's bad enough about the students, but to do this to poor women is really evil.

3. The fraud and waste in the funding of the Iraq occupation. Reading just a few articles on where the money has actually gone reveals a group of American contractors bathing in money, asking for more money and throwing the excess money away, without having very much to show for any of the output the money was supposed to have bought.

This is a real scandal and deserves much more attention, especially from the conservatives who used to be the party of the fiscally conservative government. Note that very few of those jobs were allocated through any sort of competitive bidding to begin with. It almost sounds like Government Gone Wild.

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Friday, November 23, 2007

Democrats: The New Party of the Rich 



This is a new conservative meme, making its way around the right blogosphere. It is based on a Heritage Foundation (rrrright-wing) study, which the Washington Times summarized as follows:

Democrats like to define themselves as the party of poor and middle-income Americans, but a new study says they now represent the majority of the nation's wealthiest congressional districts.

In a state-by-state, district-by-district comparison of wealth concentrations based on Internal Revenue Service income data, Michael Franc, vice president of government relations at the Heritage Foundation, found that the majority of the nation's wealthiest congressional jurisdictions were represented by Democrats.

He also found that more than half of the wealthiest households were concentrated in the 18 states where Democrats hold both Senate seats.

"If you take the wealthiest one-third of the 435 congressional districts, we found that the Democrats represent about 58 percent of those jurisdictions," Mr. Franc said.

A key measure of each district's wealth was the number of single-filer taxpayers earning more than $100,000 a year and married couples filing jointly who earn more than $200,000 annually, he said.

But in a broader measurement, the study also showed that of the 167 House districts where the median annual income was higher than the national median of $48,201, a slight majority, 84 districts, were represented by Democrats. Median means that half of all income earners make more than that level and half make less.

Mr. Franc's study also showed that contrary to the Democrats' tendency to define Republicans as the party of the rich, "the vast majority of unabashed conservative House members hail from profoundly middle-income districts."

It sounds very convincing, does it not? There's only one problem: The study doesn't actually say that it is the rich who vote Democratic and the poor or the middle-class who vote Republican.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand what is wrong with the Times arguments is to imagine a slightly different study, one relating the percentage of blacks in a state to whether the state, on average, tends to vote Democratic or Republican. I would not be at all surprised to find in such a study that the states with the highest black populations also tend to elect Republicans to the Congress. Now, does this mean that the Republican Party is the new party of the minorities? Of course not.

And the same argument applies here: The rich are more likely to vote Republican, and especially so in states with lower average incomes. In states with higher average incomes the tendency of the rich to vote Republican is less pronounced.

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Friday Cats 






These are hj's Aino and Iippa, Korat cats all sated and sleepy.

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Oops! Sorry, We Didn't Mean It. Could You Come Back, Please? 



I wrote about the Circuit City policy earlier this year, the policy of letting more experienced workers go, just to save money on the wages. That policy was based on the workers doing nothing wrong at all, just being "too expensive."

Well, Circuit City has learned that there is a reason why more experienced workers get paid more, and they are now asking them to come back. Please. Pretty please:

In March, Circuit City let go more than 3,000 workers and replaced them with lower-paid staff, a move criticized by analysts who said the loss of the more-experienced employees hurt sales of items such as extended warranties.

Circuit City's "execution remains a significant concern," Sanford Bernstein analyst said in a research note on Wednesday.

Cimino said Circuit City's changes include the creation of a supervisor position for stores and the elimination of shelf- stocking duties for sales associates to give them more time with customers.

The moves have "improved the associate morale in the stores," Cimino said. "We're getting feedback from our customers that they are having a better experience in the stores."

Compare this with what Circuit City did last March:

The electronics retailer, facing larger competitors and falling sales, said Wednesday that it would lay off about 3,400 store workers. The laid-off workers, about 8 percent of the company's total work force, would get a severance package and a chance to reapply for their former jobs, at lower pay, after a 10-week delay, the company said.

No wonder that morale went down after that move and that reversing it would be a morale improvement.

Why is it so hard to understand that a sales associate who actually knows the product is an asset to the firm?

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Thursday, November 22, 2007

Happy Thanksgiving 3! 



I want to give thanks to visual arts. They are one of the deep mysteries for me because what they give is not easily explained using just intellect or aesthetics or in fact any arguments at all. Some works of art are like a fist into the stomach, unyielding in their demand to look, to see, to understand something which always just escapes understanding. Others are like the scent of vanilla or cinnamon or like the scent of Solomon's Seal: the more you try to inhale the scent the less you smell it, but when you give up and stop trying there it is - suddenly - and gone as quickly, leaving behind only something which matters but why?

Trying to analyze art is for me a fascinating and fun game but it never gets to the reasons for that basic reaction, a physical one, which forces me to pay attention to something. It's not that the analyses don't matter, they do. But they cannot unravel the mystery completely and totally, and they can never make the explanation for that initial stunned moment something that one can just file away as an intellectual fact.

I have many favorites among the visual artists, but today I'd like to mention Leonora Carrington. She is not well known but her work gives me that inexplicable initial thump. Or perhaps something subtler in her case. Anyway, this is one example of her paintings: Adelita Flees





She is a surrealist as you can see, but what kind of a surrealist? What is surreal in her world view? What is the painting really saying? It speaks to a nonverbal part of me, sadly. Also happily, of course.
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Link to the Guardian article by Darryl Pearce.
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Happy Thanksgiving 2! 



I wanted to put up this short story about sexual desire but it's not on the computer and I can't find the notebook in the mess that is supposed to be my libraries. Instead, you are going to get another short story about root canal work. Well, it's a short story but the events described in it actually happened to me. I know it is very unsuitable for today. But then it is unsuitable for every day.

A Dental Appointment

Sara is late. She is running for the train. The driver sees her running and takes off exactly one second before she reaches the still open door. Sara swears silently. She can still make it, she hopes. The coin exchange machine is malfunctioning again. She starts turning her pockets and bag over in search for coins. The next train should come within ten minutes. Her appointment for a root canal isn't for another forty-five minutes. Not that she is looking forward to it.

Once she has the coins she sits down on the bench and looks at the pigeons perching on the roof of the deserted station building or flying through the empty shell of its second floor. The station house is a ruin, of some long-gone civilization, and the pigeons are the new power that has taken it over. Lucky birds, they have no teeth.

A woman and a man cross the tracks and join Sara and another woman already there at the train stop. The new arrivals look Middle Eastern, probably a mother and a son. He looks affluent, Americanized, in his forties. She doesn't look Americanized. Her scarf is on crooked and she wears no bra. She has missing teeth in the front.

Sara practises deep breathing. Her stomach rebels against the prospect of a dental visit. The couple seem to know the other woman on the bench. The mother doesn't speak any English. She wants to compare how dark her hair is to the other woman's grey curls.

The train arrives. Sara finds a single seat in the back and continues deep breathing and relaxation. She has a fobia about drills. The trio from the stop seat themselves across from her. The man has brilliantly white teeth. Breathe gently, breathe deeply.

He talks with the American woman over his mother's head. "Do you know how many children my mother has had? Sixteen! And do you know how many survived? Eight!"

The train takes off from the station and slowly rolls through the suburban landscape. Backyards and trees go by. Birds without teeth. One neat fence has graffiti which Sara can't read. She can never read any graffiti, and it is all in the same handwriting. She imagines a jet-setting graffiti artist, flying from one country to another, scrawling graffiti everywhere. Most likely someone with perfect teeth.

The train stops and takes off again. The houses look more expensive now, and less of them is visible from the tracks. There are proper woods now, green. Sara tries to relax in the green.

"Don't you think that women belong in the home?" asks the Middle Eastern man of his neighbor. Sara can't hear her answer. A group of schoolgirls enter the train, laughing and chattering. Sara hopes that their voices would drown out the man but they move on.

Now the landscape is citified. Poor backyards with clotheslines and derelict cars, more graffiti. Then highrises. Soon the train would go underground. Then she'd be nearly there. Breathe in, breathe out.

"My mother never liked girls", says the man. "Why do you think she doesn't care for girls?" There are no free seats, no standing room anywhere. Sara starts to sing quietly to keep his voice out. Her stomach has clutched into a tight fist. It won't relax. It won't let go.

The train dives into darkness. The color inside changes to greyish cold. Everybody suddenly looks tired and old and in need of dusting.

Sara counts the remaining stops. Three. She is afraid that she'll need to find a restroom soon. The train slows in preparation for a stop. Large advertisements flash by. Do you need to lose weight? A woman in bikinis lying in the sun. Two happy people buying insurance. No graffiti. Nothing about root canals or the dislike of little girls. They take off again.

Sara has forgotten to sing, so she can't avoid hearing the man. "What is wrong with selling your daughters if you don't want them?" She has to get up. She has to leave right now. On the next station. It means having to run three more blocks. She gets off. She runs three more blocks. She is late for her dental appointment.


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Happy Thanksgiving! 



This song is wonderful.

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Wednesday, November 21, 2007

A Taser Video 



By Digby, who also provides the background for it. Warning: Possibly upsetting to watch.




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Spotting Patterns 



Texas and Taliban. The post by a male undergraduate urging women - those hussies - to get back into flowing and elegant (and constricting) dresses to better reflect their innate passivity and modesty has something in common with the fervent kind of Talibanism of the Muslim extremes. Consider this quote from the student's sermon:

The androgynous masculinization of the modern woman, through the donning of pants, suits, uncovered shoulders and unveiled hair, has in a sense led to the slow whorification of ladyhood. In discarding feminine dress, women seem to have symbolically discarded femininity and modesty (the virtues of women) in favor of sexual virility, promiscuity and immodesty (the vices of men).

The bolds are mine. I think Osama bin Laden would nod his head while reading those words. Isn't it weird?

Other patterns crop up in some of my recent posts, too. For instance, the idea that women are often seen as at least partially responsible for their own sexual victimization, even when there are no real grounds for that. I think this has a lot to do with our unstated assumptions about what is normal and who determines what normal behavior might be.

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Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia III 



Remember the 200 lashes and six months in prison a gang-rape victim in Saudi Arabia was given for talking to the media about the case? Her initial punishment was 90 lashes for being in contact with a man not her relative, but the extra lashes and those six months were added because her lawyer talked to the media. The lawyer had his license revoked for that same act.

What all this means is that the gang-raped woman is now totally without legal representation. The human rights organizations are outraged:

The case has sparked outrage among human rights groups.

"Barring the lawyer from representing the victim in court is almost equivalent to the rape crime itself," said Fawzeyah al-Oyouni, founding member of the newly formed Saudi Association for the Defense of Women's Rights.

"This is not just about the girl, it's about every woman in Saudi Arabia," she said. "We're fearing for our lives and the lives of our sisters and our daughters and every Saudi woman out there. We're afraid of going out in the streets."

Human Rights Watch said it has called on Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah "to immediely void the verdict and drop all charges against the rape victim and to order the court to end its harassment of her lawyer."

Even John Edwards is outraged. From an e-mail:

Chapel Hill, North Carolina – Today, Senator John Edwards released the following statement;

"Today's news that a Saudi Arabian court has chosen to punish the victim of a gang rape is an appalling breach of the most fundamental human rights. I am outraged that President Bush has refused to condemn the sentence. We need a president who will reengage with the world and restore our moral authority - only then will we be able to lead other nations in protecting the basic rights and human dignity of every person on this planet."

How about it, President Bush? You could tell your pals to go a little easier on their womenfolk.

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Show Us Yer Boobs! 



The New York Times tells us about what some football fans use for kicks when their team isn't playing very well:

At halftime of the Jets' home game against the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday, several hundred men lined one of Giants Stadium's two pedestrian ramps at Gate D. Three deep in some areas, they whistled and jumped up and down. Then they began an obscenity-laced chant, demanding that the few women in the gathering expose their breasts.

When one woman appeared to be on the verge of obliging, the hooting and hollering intensified. But then she walked away, and plastic beer bottles and spit went flying. Boos swept through the crowd of unsatisfied men.

In karate this would be called a gauntlet (though of course that gauntlet involved physical attacks by everyone you pass). The women must run a gauntlet. Not only that, but they are unpaid entertainment for the men, not professional strippers or employees of the stadium. Imagine the feelings of any woman who comes across this scene unexpectedly. She's treated as...what? I have no kind description of what the asshole men are doing there.

And what happens when a woman actually responds by flashing her breasts at this horde of salivating imbeciles? This:

Denisse Rivera, a 23-year-old from the Bronx, was on a first date Sunday. When she arrived at the crowd at Gate D, several men pointed at her, signaling men at all levels to chant in her direction. After a brief moment of hesitation, she flashed them. Then she took a bow.

"I don't care," Rivera said when told that video clips of previous incidents, taken on cellphones, ended up online. "I love my body and I like what I have, so let everybody share it."

Two security guards soon approached Rivera. The guards warned her about indecent exposure laws, she said, and let her go.

There you go. It's the woman who is breaking the law, apparently not all those menacing men hooting, hollering and throwing things.

And no, the security can't cope with this at all, though they do have time to warn the women involved. What are they supposed to do, one man asks? Arrest everyone who starts humming?

Much easier not to bother, of course. And in any case, everybody likes a little of Girls Gone Wild, even if the girls aren't actually volunteering for it.



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Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Give Thanks VI 



And I promise that this will be the last one of the series. So let us give thanks for feminine virtues, as described by one male undergraduate:

What's not sexy is feminism (not to be confused with femininity), which is directly responsible for the disappearance of our beloved dresses and the adoption of pants by the "new woman." Like all fashions, pants are symbolic of something - in this case masculinity - through their allowance of physical activity. Dresses, the antithesis of pants, symbolize femininity through grace and elegance. Men find elegance in women to be attractive, and dresses are a physical manifestation of femininity. The wearing of pants by women represents the masculinization of the fairer sex, which is not at all attractive.

In advocating the wearing of dresses, I must distinguish between the flowing elegant dresses of tradition and the more degenerate and immodest dresses of our present culture. The miniskirt, a dress of sorts that doesn't extend below the knees, is both lacking in modesty and elegance. Elegance is essential to femininity, and the lack thereof implies a sort of masculinization. Modesty is essential to feminine virtue, and the lack thereof implies a state of whorification. Immodest, inelegant dresses constitute a degeneration and androgynization of true dresses.

There ya go. And yes, indeed, it is Thanksgiving 2007, not Thanksgiving 1937.

Also give thanks to whoever taught this boy to use dualistic thinking: Either women are modest, in a long dress or they are whores. Too bad that he never developed this idea any further:

Like all fashions, pants are symbolic of something - in this case masculinity - through their allowance of physical activity.

Therefore, it follows that being paralyzed in a bed would be the greatest epitome of femininity? If allowance of physical activity is only for men, that is.

I'm still hoping that Mr. Ryan Haecker is a joke. I'm willing to give thanks to the great spaghetti monster or to the Pope (in his dress) or to almost anyone if that should prove to be true. Though if this is a joke it is not well-told.

May the last words go to Mr. Haecker:

If all fashions are symbolic, dresses in particular symbolize womanhood by more fully embodying the ideal of a true lady, the objective understanding of what men find attractive in the fairer sex: passivity, domesticity, childrearing, coital love, piety and fertility. These defining aspects of womanhood are immutable.

Give thanks, my feminist friend, that you don't have to marry him.
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Via Pam's House Blend.

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Give Thanks V 



Aren't you happy that this man does not yet speak for the majority of Americans, and with any luck never will?

Only strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities can forestall these terrible scenarios. This would not require a "declaration of war," an antiquated concept that has not been employed since World War II and rarely before. We would send no troops, conquer no land. Rather, we would act in pre-emptive self-defense.

At stake are supreme issues of national safety. The president alone, as Alexander Hamilton said, is positioned to operate with "decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch." Of course, Congress can block presidential action, but in this case, most members will be satisfied to stand clear and let the president do what must be done.

Give thanks that we still live in the world before the nuking of Iran.

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Give Thanks IV 



Give thanks for the messengers of bad news who are attacked for merely being the messengers. Give thanks for the majority of the world which hears the bad news and is willing to act on them:

The world's scientists have done their job. Now it's time for world leaders, starting with President Bush, to do theirs. That is the urgent message at the core of the latest — and the most powerful — report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 2,500 scientists who collectively constitute the world's most authoritative voice on global warming.

Released in Spain over the weekend, the report leaves no doubt that man-made emissions from the burning of fossil fuels (and, to a lesser extent, deforestation) have been responsible for the steady rise in atmospheric temperatures.

If these emissions are not brought under control, the report predicts, the consequences could be disastrous: further melting at the poles, sea levels rising high enough to submerge island nations, the elimination of one-quarter or more of the world's species, widespread famine in places like Africa, more violent hurricanes.

And it warns that time is running out. To avoid the worst of these disasters, it says, the world must stabilize emissions of greenhouse gases by 2015, begin to reduce them shortly thereafter and largely free itself of carbon-emitting technologies by midcentury.

Then give thanks to whoever decided to have the two-term limit on American presidencies.

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Give Thanks III 



Give thanks if you are on the waiting list for a private jet but manage to re-equip a commercial one in time for your Thanksgiving vacation. Give thanks for your new Patek Philippe that cost you $900,000. Give thanks for the economic situation which, astonishingly, is very good for the super-rich:

The quest for things exorbitantly exotic has reached a fever pitch of late. For one thing, more people than ever can afford to join in the pursuit. "This is the richest year ever in human history," said Steve Forbes, chief executive of Forbes, whose recent Forbes 400 list consisted entirely of billionaires for the second year since its inception. The past year has seen the number of billionaires grow 19%, to nearly 1,000, according to the company. In the past 10 years, the number of financial millionaires has more than doubled.

Half the new members on the Forbes 400 list come from hedge funds and private equity, and they form a fiscal fraternity that is not only wealthier but also younger, more diverse and more numerous than ever. While managing and making billions, the economy's latest whiz kids are shaking up the financial world and, quite often, the planet's spending habits along with it. "Never before have so many Americans gotten so wealthy so quickly. And never before have the wealthy spent so much on lifestyle and consumer goods," says Robert Frank, author of Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich. "So what do you do to stand out? The challenge for today's rich is to set themselves apart from the merely affluent. You want things no one else can afford or experience. The challenge is to always stay ahead." And while the recent stock-market turbulence may stall the tide, it is unlikely to stem it. "You can't get rich off financial markets and not be exposed if they fall," Frank says. "The next year or two, we might have a slight decline in numbers of millionaires as well as a decline in the amount of their wealth. But long term, I'm bullish on wealth. The rich are going to get richer, and more important, they are going to get more numerous."


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Give Thanks II 



Give thanks if you are not in Iraq and if you don't have a loved one over there. Give thanks if you do have a loved one over there and she or he is well. Give thanks if your loved one came back all broken but alive, yes, still alive! Give thanks that our government is saving money by taking away some of the signing bonuses of those wounded in action, perhaps because they can't complete the period of time they signed up for:

The U.S. Military is demanding that thousands of wounded service personnel give back signing bonuses because they are unable to serve out their commitments.

To get people to sign up, the military gives enlistment bonuses up to $30,000 in some cases.

Now men and women who have lost arms, legs, eyesight, hearing and can no longer serve are being ordered to pay some of that money back.

One of them is Jordan Fox, a young soldier from the South Hills.

He finds solace in the hundreds of boxes he loads onto a truck in Carnegie. In each box is a care package that will be sent to a man or woman serving in Iraq. It was in his name Operation Pittsburgh Pride was started.

Fox was seriously injured when a roadside bomb blew up his vehicle. He was knocked unconscious. His back was injured and lost all vision in his right eye.

A few months later Fox was sent home. His injuries prohibited him from fulfilling three months of his commitment. A few days ago, he received a letter from the military demanding nearly $3,000 of his signing bonus back.

Give thanks.
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Link via Carpetbagger Report.

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Give Thanks I 



Bob Herbert tells us how the housing market bubble burst all over one disabled woman in her sixties:

Like vultures, the mortgage lenders began circling the single-family house with the tiny front lawn on Merrill Avenue.

They knew that the woman who owned the house was old and sick and that her two aging daughters were struggling with illness and poverty as well. That was all to the good as far as the lenders were concerned. The predator's mission is to home in on the vulnerable.

"The people that wanted to put through the loan called me about a hundred times," said Rosa Dailey, who is 65 and going blind and needs an oxygen tank at times to help her breathe. "I kept telling them no, because I didn't think we could afford it. But they kept saying how it was to our advantage. So I finally said: 'All right, let's see what we can do.' "

...

That was the beginning of a tragic spiral, with one unaffordable loan following another. As Ms. Dailey put it: "I feel like they led me down a dark alley."

Ms. Dailey told me her story in the freezing living room of the house on Merrill Avenue, which no longer has a working furnace and is growing shabbier by the day. It's all she has left. Her mother and her older sister are dead now. Her only income is about $1,300 a month from Social Security — less than the monthly note on the house, which is in foreclosure proceedings.

One aspect of the so-called mortgage crisis that hasn't been adequately explored is the extent to which predatory lenders have committed fraud against vulnerable homeowners. They have pushed overpriced loans and outlandish fees on hapless victims who didn't understand — and could not possibly have met — the terms of the contracts they signed.

I guess we could all say thanks for not being Ms. Dailey, at least yet. Many people probably did take badly thought-out loans because of greed or gullibility. But the case of Ms. Dailey is unlikely to be a unique one. It's still not uncommon for ordinary people to view bankers or lenders as professionals, as people in a trusted role, as people who will tell you, with a heavy and serious tone of voice, if you really can't afford that mortgage you set your heart on. This is how mortgage lenders have been regarded for quite a long time. And my guess is that Ms. Dailey believed the lenders. If they said that she could afford the loan and that it would make her payments smaller, well, they must be right, given that they know all those technical terms and wear three-piece suits and so on.

It's almost as if your physician suddenly turned on you and started feeding you drugs you don't really need or urging you to have unnecessary operations. Such physicians do exist but they are rare, because the legal framework and training is geared towards making physicians behave in a different manner, that of a trusted professional. When did this change about bankers and mortgage lenders?

Ms. Dailey is going to have corn flakes and canned vegetables for Thanksgiving, while sitting in her cold house.

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May Colvin 



I was reading an old flea market book of poetry the other night and came upon this old ballad

MAY COLVIN

False Sir John a-wooing came
To a maid of beauty fair;
May Colvin was this lady's name,
Her father's only heir.

He woo'd her but, he woo'd her ben,
He woo'd her in the ha';
Until he got the lady's consent
To mount and ride awa'.

"Go fetch me some of your father's gold,
And some of your mother's fee,
And I'll carry you into the north land,
And there I'll marry thee."

She's gane to her father's coffers
Where all his money lay,
And she's taken the red, and she's left the white,
And so lightly she's tripp'd away.

She's gane to her father's stable
Where all the steeds did stand,
And she's taken the best, and she's left the warst
That was in her father's land.

She's mounted on a milk-white steed,
And he on a dapple-grey,
And on they rade to a lonesome part,
A rock beside the sea.

"Loup off the steed," says false Sir John,
"Your bridal bed you see;
Seven ladies I have drown'd here,
And the eighth one you shall be.

"Cast off, cast off your silks so fine
And lay them on a stone,
For they are too fine and costly
To rot in the salt sea foam.

"Cast off, cast off your silken stays,
For and your broider'd shoon,
For they are too fine and costly
To rot in the salt sea foam.

"Cast off, cast off your Holland smock
That's border'd with the lawn,
For it is too fine and costly
To rot in the salt sea foam."

"O turn about, thou false Sir John,
And look to the leaf o' the tree;
For it never became a gentleman
A naked woman to see."

He turn'd himself straight round about
To look to the leaf o' the tree;
She's twined her arms about his waist
And thrown him into the sea.


"O hold a grip o' me, May Colvin,
For fear that I should drown;
I'll take you home to your father's gates
And safe I'll set you down."

"No help, no help, thou false Sir John,
No help, no pity thee!
For you lie not in a caulder bed
Than you thought to lay me."

She mounted on her milk-white steed,
And led the dapple-grey,
And she rode till she reach'd her father's gates,
At the breakin' o' the day.

Up then spake the pretty parrot,
"May Colvin, where have you been?
What has become o' false Sir John
That went with you yestreen?" –

"O hold your tongue, my pretty parrot!
Nor tell no tales o' me;
Your cage shall be made o' the beaten gold
And the spokes o' ivorie."

Up then spake her father dear,
In the bed-chamber where he lay:
"What ails the pretty parrot,
That prattles so long ere day?" –

"There came a cat to my cage, master,
I thought 't would have worried me,
And I was calling to May Colvin
To take the cat from me."

It's quite an old ballad and reminds me of the Bluebeard fairy tale. But this heroine is resourceful and clever and carries out her own rescue. Interesting.

A daylily has been named after May Colvin, too.




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Monday, November 19, 2007

The Little Drummer Boys 






These are the hawks, always eager to have a little bit more war. The problem with their eagerness is that going to war in, say, Pakistan (the newest possible target) while also staying in Iraq requires some sort of cloning of the military and the Bush administration is dead-set against cloning. Or it requires hiring mercenaries and we know how well that works.

In short, the U.S. does indeed have the largest stock of WMDs and nuclear bombs and the like, and the largest military budget of any country on earth (in fact, several times larger than the next largest such budget), but the U.S. does not have millions and millions of spare soldiers. Any attempt to extend some sort of warfare to several countries would fail unless it was carried out by distance bombing only. I wish the little drummer boys would make it clear that they are talking about turning countries into glass-covered parking lots, because that's what the only realistic strategy to winning such wars would entail.

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Who Does The Laundry? 



An interesting interview with two American women who write on mothers and work.




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Today's Post on Economics (Less Filling And Tastes Great) 



One of the effects of globalization or international competition in general is well known: Certain domestic industries suffer because they are no longer competitive and workers in them will be laid off. What should those workers do next?

The traditional economics answer is retraining. You go back to school, get new skills in something your country still can compete in, you then get a new career and all will be fine.

The shorthand of this pretty much states that there will be those immediate losses of jobs and earnings but in the longer-run everything will be just dandy. A comment at Eschaton threads the other day points out that this shorthand story is a fairy tale. Here is the comment by jen:

Yup. And the rest of us who make well under that amount are suffering what I like to call "regressive wages." Meaning, your career gets tied up with a big red bow and shipped overseas, leaving you to deal with unemployment or underemployment for a year or two or three. Then you spend your savings to go back to school and start over in a new career. Upon starting over you can't make any better than a shitty entry level salary despite two decades of work experience. Meanwhile the nest egg is gone and you're up to your eyeballs in debt again, because even though your wages have taken a nose dive, the cost of living has continued to increase.

You're forty-something now and have no idea where your child's college money is going to come from, let alone retirement savings. And then, as if you haven't been kicked in the balls hard enough, you find out your new career is likely to experience an "explosion" in offshoring by the end of 2008.

The point jen makes is an important one: Changing careers is not a costless operation but an incredibly costly one, and the post doesn't quantify the costs of mental suffering at all.

In general economic arguments tend to downplay the costs to people from moving or from changing careers or from other adjustments the market deems necessary. Moving, for instance, is seen as an easy way to adjust to your firm juggling its operations, and it may well be better than being laid off. But moving means losing all the support structures your family may have developed, pulling the children out of the schools in which they have made their friends and possibly also causing your spouse to lose a job he or she likes and needs. Moving is expensive.

And so is job retraining caused by globalization. These costs should be kept in mind when discussing the advantages of global markets.

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A Bitch-Hunt 



Maureen Dowd is ready for one:

The debate dominatrix knows how to rattle Obambi.

Mistress Hillary started disciplining her fellow senator last winter, after he began exploring a presidential bid. When he winked at her, took her elbow and tried to say hello on the Senate floor, she did not melt, as many women do. She brushed him off, a move meant to remind him that he was an upstart who should not get in the way of her turn in the Oval Office.

He was so shook up, he called a friend to say: You would not believe what just happened with Hillary.

She has continued to flick the whip in debates. She usually ignores Obama and John Edwards backstage, preferring to chat with the so-called second-tier candidates. And she often looks so unapproachable while they're setting up on stage that Obama seems hesitant to be the first to say hi.

And what have we learned from these beginning paragraphs of yet another entry in the "id" diaries of one Maureen Dowd? That a woman in power is a dominatrix? How very feminist. Or that Hillary Clinton, specifically, is a dominatrix? What is the evidence Dowd provides on this? That she is cold towards Barack Obama. This, my friends, is how a woman becomes a dominatrix.

What else might we learn from these few paragraphs? Might there possibly be an innuendo here about race, too? I'm not sure about that. But Maureen Dowd sure hates Hillary Clinton and thinks that it's important for her readers to know that, including the reasons for her hatred which appear something to do with sado-masochistic sex and Dowd's insistence of interpreting a powerful woman in politics in such terms. Dowd also wants to tell us that she knows the inner motivations of Hillary Clinton ("a move meant to remind him that he was an upstart").

It's pretty sickening. Politics is not really who gets to tie whom to the bedposts with those velvety ties, Maureen. It's about which people get bombed in the future, about the Constitution, about unemployment, health care, education and all those other incredibly non-sexy matters.

Sigh. I'm preaching to an empty room while all the fashionable pundits sharpen their pencils to scribble down intimate details about the Clinton's marriage and about Hillary being a dominatrix in a leather harness and about the Democratic men all being bottoms. If you are not convinced by Dowd's series of "I Hate Hillary" columns, Andrew Sullivan has joined in the bitch-hunt, too:

Here's a more paranoid explanation: at some point in this campaign, if you believe the Washington rumor mill, there may well be some Clinton bimbo eruption stories, i.e. Bill's post-presidential extracurricular activities will come under discussion again. This Novak flap therefore may be a dummy-run for the various responses if such alleged doodoo eventually hits the campaign fan. The story would be relevant again not so much because of Bill but because of Hillary. She is now the candidate and would be forced to respond to such allegations if they became in any way legit.

"She is now the candidate and would be forced to respond to such allegations if they became in any way legit." Oh my. Hillary Clinton is both a dominatrix whipping the Democratic girly-men into submission AND the person responsible for any possible future affairs Bill Clinton might have. Either way, she is defined by sexuality, not by the politics she proposes. And that is what makes these unsavory messes my business, a feminist business.

So stop it, already. Criticize her policies or her expertise or other relevant matters.

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Sunday, November 18, 2007

Sunday Night Truth or Dare Posted by olvlzl. 

Maybe it's the queasy stomach, maybe it's the insomnia or the SAD or writer's block but I'm feeling reckless tonight, so I'll tell you one of my deepest, darkest, most scandalous secrets.

I learned to read and speak Esperanto a couple of years back. And even worse than that, I think it's a fine idea and I don't care if it makes me disreputable. After a few months of studying Teach Yourself Esperanto I could speak it better than I can French, which I studied all through high school and college. And the books I've read are pretty good, especially the poetry.

There. Isn't that scandalous? Now it's your turn.
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What Do You Know? Reading Something New About Thanksgiving. Posted by olvlzl. 

I almost passed by Eve LaPlante's article about Thanksgiving, which looked like it would be a rehash of nonsense about the Pilgrim Fathers and associated New England Yankee propaganda but that would have been a mistake. Oh, it is all about the Pilgrim-Puritan tradition of "public days". However, at the heart is interesting information about one of LaPlante's ancestors, Judge Samuel Sewall, of witch hunt infamy. In addition to leaving a full description of an early 18th century thanksgiving menu (yech!), LaPlante gives details about how he came to see the error of his witch persecution and became a better person for it.

In January 1697, for example, the Massachusetts government called a public day so the community could repent and beg God's forgiveness for the disaster of the Salem witch hunt, in which a Colonial court had executed 20 innocent women and men. One of my ancestors, Judge Samuel Sewall, was one of nine judges who had presided over the 1692 witchcraft trials. On Jan. 14, 1697, during the fast-day service at Boston's Third Church, now Old South, 44-year-old Judge Sewall stood up from his bench and bowed his head as his minister read aloud Sewall's public statement of acceptance of "the blame and shame" for the witch hunt. Sewall donned a coarse penitential hair shirt on that fast day and wore it, according to family lore, for the rest of his life, as a constant, painful reminder of his sin.

During the long period of repentance that followed, Judge Sewall tried to improve not only himself but also his society. He became an unlikely spokesman for the advancement of civil rights and individual liberties. In the summer of 1697, not long after the fast day, he published an essay, "Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica," that portrayed America - and Native Americans - as virtuous and godly. In 1700, when one in five families in Boston owned African or Native American slaves, Sewall composed and published the first abolitionist statement in America, "The Selling of Joseph," which argued that slavery was immoral. His 1725 essay, "Talitha Cumi," or "Damsel, Arise," stated the "right of women" and women's fundamental equality to men.

Having had the traditional myths of ye olde Pilgrim fathers force fed in my youth- largely created by ye olde Yankee historians and used as "nativist" propaganda- I'd never gone into the aftermath of the anti-witch mania and so didn't know about the repentance. Holding a grudge against the Puritans, I'd assumed that anti-slavery efforts began with John Woolman, the Quaker saint. And I'm ashamed to say that I knew little about feminism before Anthony. It's good to be upended once in a while, forced to question basic assumptions and customs of thinking. Apparently Sewall found that to be true.

I have a hard time imagining Scalia or Roberts or Alito repenting their corrupt actions in public or reforming themselves into something other than henchmen of the powerful establishment. Thomas, as his recent book proves, is never going to be any better than the pathetic, self-motivated, limpet to the powerful that he has always been. Ronald Reagan liked to make fun of the Puritan tradition for all the wrong reasons. He saw the discouragement of self indulgence as their major failure. The refusal to self-indulgence is one of the primary sins of our establishment today, usually expressed in some pop-psychological terms of inhibition and hang-ups. Fun is good but it isn't the greatest good. The real sins of the Puritans weren't the ones cited most often today, they were injustice, inequality, sexism and bigotry, hypocrisy and vainglory. The sins of the Puritans are exactly the virtues of today's conservatives.
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Saturday, November 17, 2007

Let’s Try It Again. Force Diane Feinstein To Promise Not to Run Against A Democratic Nominee. Posted by olvlzl. 

Diane Feinstein has been treading the path worn by Joe Lieberman and others who have used the support of Democrats and then stabbed us in the back, repeatedly supporting Republicans. It’s certainly within the realm of possibility that she will go the whole route and jump parties in order to forestall a challenge to her re-election by a popular Republican. With her record she isn’t shoring up her support from Democratic activists.

Any Democrat in California who is reading this and who gets the chance should get her on record saying she will honor the choice of the Democratic voters of her state, should they decide that she doesn’t represent them again. She should have to say, in absolute terms, that she will not run against a Democrat who wins the nomination, that she will not support the candidate of any other party or who runs as an independent against the Democratic nominee and that she will not leave the Democratic Party if she is elected as the nominee of the Democrats of her state.

All politicians who have won election as Democrats or who ask for the nomination of the Democrats in their state should have to make this promise. If they won’t then Democrats will know what their plans are and they should vote accordingly. Any member of the Democratic Party has the right to press the issue, they do not need the permission of anyone in the hierarchy of the party. The nomination doesn’t belong to anyone, it belongs to the Democratic voters, not the office holders.

Just think what might have happened if Joe Lieberman had been forced to make that declaration before Ned Lamont won the nomination of Democrats in Connecticut. Connecticut might not have a Republican senator today.
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A Fischer of Swine. Posted by olvlzl. 

In his novella, Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party, Graham Greene looked at the extent to which people will degrade themselves to get a reward and what happens when someone won’t degrade themselves. The return of Don Imus and the flood of announcements from those who hope to benefit from publicly handing him their integrity and respectability for publicity and book sales brings Dr. Fischer and his guests to mind. While Greene probably intended his book as a picture of capitalism it also does as a mirror of the American media.

Greene’s story is narrated by Alfred Jones, Dr. Fischer’s son-in-law, married to Anna, his estranged daughter. Dr. Fischer, being very wealthy, holds ritual dinner parties in which the rich and famous allow him to humiliate and degrade them in exchange for valuable prizes he uses as bait. He considers this research. Anna, who wants nothing to do with her father, refuses to accept the invitation to a party which comes unexpectedly after she married Jones. She calls those who go to the parties her father’s “toads”, obviously short for “toadies”. Her husband, interested in meeting his father-in-law, does go but won’t play along and after putting up with a lot of abuse about his having lost a hand in the war. Having stood up to the abuse, he isn’t asked back until after the death of his wife in a ski accident. Dr. Fischer announces what will be his final dinner party in or on New Years, giving Jones an invitation which he accepts. This time the victims have to take a Christmas cracker from a bucket, they are told that inside all but one of them is a large check but inside that one cracker is a small bomb. If it wasn’t such a good story I’d be tempted to ruin it by telling you how Jones keeps his integrity.

Rory O’Connor has a catalog of Don Imus’ “toads” and the excuses they are giving for going back to the racist ritual where they exchange their honor for a lot less. James Carville, Bob Kerrey, Bill Richardson, Clarence Page, Tim Russert... Imus might taunt them, especially if they happen to be black, but he saves his worst venom for members of other minorities. Unlike Dr. Fischer, no one pretends it’s research and no bravery is required of his stooges. As we can see with Imus, himself, there is no permanent price to be paid for promoting bigotry, sexism, racism, homophobia, if you’re profitable enough.

Dr. Fischer made his fortune by inventing a perfumed toothpaste which one assumes was good at covering bad breath. Imus’ guests should stock up on hygiene products. After his racist, sexist attacks on the basketball players, there’s no more denying what Imus made his fortune on and what they are finally proving themselves to be. They’ll need lots to cover the stench.
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Don’t Worry, Be Happy. Posted by olvlzl. 

Or: If You Could See Them Through My Eyes.
Maybe you heard it, the cosy interview that Scott Simon did with Hanna Rosin and a graduate of Patrick Henry College this morning contained a very fine example of a particularly important tactic of dishonest reporting. The kid, whose name I didn’t write down, is apparently an aspiring film maker, which is fine with me. I’d rather have him doing that than working in the Justice Department. Scott Simon, who seldom passes up an opportunity for sucking up to the Republican establishment, asked Hanna Rosin if there was any difference between a far-right-wing, fundamentalist christian* making a movie advocating a position and Robert Redford making a movie advocating a position. Rosin, answering like a true WaPo, New Republic hack, said that there wasn’t any difference between Robert Redford making a movie advocating his POV and an adherent of the Patrick Henry College** mind-set making an advocacy movie.

Concentrating on the form instead of the content and it's predictable results is a favorite tactic of hack media. By pretending that the content of the two points of view are equivalent you can save yourself mentioning some career hindering reality. There is all the world of difference between advocating civil rights for gay people, women having control of their bodies, economic equality, etc. and trying to “take back the country” in order to deny civil rights and to impose a rigid, anti-freedom agenda on the unwilling. Rosin and Simon pretend to not be able to see the difference but anyone with a brain and the slightest hint of intellectual honesty would see that the two are entirely different. The effects of Robert Redford’s ideas becoming law and the country living under the ideas expressed in the Patrick Henry College’s required “affirmations” would be quite real in a way the form alone doesn’t reveal. And both of these hacks know it.

It has been my experience that when you make this point the next part of the discussion most often goes to questions of legal equity, of the law not making a distinction between the two POVs. Ideally, that is how THE LAW should treat people but since when were journalists or anyone else, for that matter, restricted in their personal judgements of peoples’ ideas? And, it’s also my experience that this phony even-handedness is applied quite unevenly. The dishonesty of a lot of the media in the United States stems from its assertion that the left is supposed to not make those kinds of distinctions but it is a rule that has never been applied to the right.

Hanna Rosin and Scott Simon seemed to be concerned with whether the product of Patrick Henry College believes that Jews go to hell. I, somehow, had the feeling that neither Rosin or Simon was really worried about going to hell, I suspect most people aren’t. But the matter of who is going to hell isn’t something that is in the hands of the “spearheads” of Patrick Henry College and unless you are on your deathbed it’s not a matter of imminent danger. The rights of women, gay people, etc. ARE decidedly in the hands of these christian zealots, whose representation in the Bush junta is rather enormous considering the size of the student population. They are making policy here and now. Pretending that they are cute, cuddly, friendly and harmless might be good for a hack journalist betting on the continued political and economic power of the very far right, but it’s hardly reporting the facts.

* I have read the gospels, I fail to see the teachings of Jesus in the program of the fundamentalists who pretend to base their activities on his words. I will not capitalize the word for them.

** For those who aren’t aware of the place, for once I’d recommend Wiki as the place to begin finding out about the place. Hanna Rosin might not find it disturbing, I suspect most of the people who read this will. I’ve got a feeling that Patrick Henry, a vehement critic of the church and its establishment would protest in the strongest possible way if he knew his name had been given to a place so at odds with his ideas.
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Friday, November 16, 2007

Friday Critter Blogging 









These are by Richard. The buffalo was snapped in the wild but the reclining lynx was taken in a zoo. Is that enough of a kitty for you?

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Feminism 101: Lab Work 



Idaho legislators are very concerned about the problems of Idaho families. They set up a Task Force to look into possible remedies and came up with some:

Lawmakers look for ways to keep moms at home to strengthen families
Task force blames breakdown of traditional family for social ills
Rep. Steven Thayn and his wife, Sherry, raised eight children on their family farm. She stayed home, and they home-schooled several of their children before eventually sending them to local schools.

Thayn said more two-parent homes and fewer working mothers could be both a social and economic boon. The Emmett Republican sees the breakdown of the traditional family structure as the root of societal ills such as drug abuse, crime and domestic violence.

That's why, as chairman of the Idaho House of Representatives' Family Task Force, he and others are considering controversial solutions such as repealing no-fault divorce laws and finding ways to encourage mothers to stay home with their children.

"In one of the articles I read, quite a large percentage of mothers really do want to spend more time at home, and if that's the case, what can we do to help them?" Thayn said.

This whole article is perfect for showing how to do feminist lab work on all sorts of idiotic statements. Note, first that this Family Task Force seems to base its recommendations on Mr. Theyn's personal beliefs and life experiences. Well, they also listened to speakers who associated increased crime and drug use to single-parent families (and probably did this by not taking into account the income levels of those families). But how they came up with the idea that mothers should stay at home is not at all clear, and the idea that a traditional family would have less domestic violence is just plain rubbish.

Second, note that the proposals the Task Force created are both very detailed: repealing no-fault divorces, and extremely vague: finding ways to encourage mothers to stay at home. Why are those encouraging ways left so fuzzy? Probably because Theyn isn't actually planning to help mothers to stay at home in any concrete fashion requiring money.

Will all mothers paid the salaries they forfeit? Will all of them get health insurance for themselves and their children? Will their retirement funds be taken care of? When their children are viewed as acceptably mature, will their retraining costs for the labor market be covered? And when the re-enter the labor market, will their fair treatment and promotion chances be guaranteed?

I suspect not. And this is an important feminist point: The problems this Task Force sees with Idaho families are to be fixed by the mothers, essentially for free. Even a non-feminist reader of the proposals might spot the difficulty in expecting women to stop working when their families depend on that money. But a feminist interpretation gives the woman some rights over and above those of the eternally self-sacrificing mother. It also casts light on all the different costs that the mothers are supposed to bear (in silent submission, I guess).

Third, the odd combination of recommendations: removing no-fault divorce and encouraging mothers to stay at home, have more things in common than just their origin in Mr. Theyn's dreams about the mythological 1950's families. They both serve to lock a woman into an abusive marriage by directly affecting her chances to leave it behind and by making her less able to earn her living in alternative ways.

Fourth, the proposals are utterly and totally based on the view that the best possible family is one where the mother stays at home with the children. Other family arrangements are ignored. There is nothing about "one parent" staying at home. Nope, it's the women who are to stay at home. And the justification given for this extreme focus on mothers? This:

"In one of the articles I read, quite a large percentage of mothers really do want to spend more time at home, and if that's the case, what can we do to help them?" Thayn said.

Note that several recent studies also tell us that quite a large percentage of fathers really want to spend more time at home, too, but Thayn doesn't seem to want to help them achieve this desire. Thus, it isn't families that the Task Force wants to help. Instead, it wants to make women (and men) conform to certain types of families only.

Oh, and what might some of the more concrete ways of "encouraging" mothers to stay at home be? The linked article suggests a few: Making childcare and early childhood education harder to find!

Now that will learn those darned women to stay at home.

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Bridge Playing 






Remember the furor that the Dixie Chicks caused by their anti-Bush statement? Something similar has happened in the more staid world of professional bridge:

In the genteel world of bridge, disputes are usually handled quietly and rarely involve issues of national policy. But in a fight reminiscent of the brouhaha over an anti-Bush statement by Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks in 2003, a team of women who represented the United States at the world bridge championships in Shanghai last month is facing sanctions, including a yearlong ban from competition, for a spur-of-the-moment protest.

At issue is a crudely lettered sign, scribbled on the back of a menu, that was held up at an awards dinner and read, "We did not vote for Bush."

By e-mail, angry bridge players have accused the women of "treason" and "sedition."

"This isn't a free-speech issue," said Jan Martel, president of the United States Bridge Federation, the nonprofit group that selects teams for international tournaments. "There isn't any question that private organizations can control the speech of people who represent them."

Not so, said Danny Kleinman, a professional bridge player, teacher and columnist. "If the U.S.B.F. wants to impose conditions of membership that involve curtailment of free speech, then it cannot claim to represent our country in international competition," he said by e-mail.

Treason and sedition? My, my how incivil the language gets these days. And what is the punishment for this act of sedition? It's pretty steep, actually, and not what I'd imagine a democratic country would assign someone who merely criticizes the government:

Three players— Hansa Narasimhan, JoAnna Stansby and Jill Meyers — have expressed regret that the action offended some people. The federation has proposed a settlement to Ms. Greenberg and the three other players, Jill Levin, Irina Levitina and Ms. Rosenberg, who have not made any mollifying statements.

It calls for a one-year suspension from federation events, including the World Bridge Olympiad next year in Beijing; a one-year probation after that suspension; 200 hours of community service "that furthers the interests of organized bridge"; and an apology drafted by the federation's lawyer.

It would also require them to write a statement telling "who broached the idea of displaying the sign, when the idea was adopted, etc."

Alan Falk, a lawyer for the federation, wrote the four team members on Nov. 6, "I am instructed to press for greater sanction against anyone who rejects this compromise offer."

At least one of the players makes her living by playing bridge, so the punishment would make her lose all income for one year.

It could well be that the federation has the legal right to do all this. But I think it is not going to do any good for the U.S. reputation as a beacon of liberty.
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Via Southern Beale.

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Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia II 



A woman who was gang-raped will also get a prison sentence and 200 lashes:

An appeal court in Saudi Arabia has doubled the number of lashes and added a jail sentence as punishment for a woman who was gang-raped.

The victim was initially punished for violating laws on segregation of the sexes - she was in an unrelated man's car at the time of the attack.

When she appealed, the judges said she had been attempting to use the media to influence them.

The attackers' sentences - originally of up to five years - were doubled.

Extra penalties

According to the Arab News newspaper, the 19-year-old woman, who is from Saudi Arabia's Shia minority, was gang-raped 14 times in an attack in the eastern province a year-and-a-half ago.

...

The Arab News quoted an official as saying the judges had decided to punish the girl for trying to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media.

The victim's lawyer was suspended from the case, has had his licence to work confiscated, and faces a disciplinary session.

What does 200 lashes do to you? Can you die from it?

Then the required statement: No, this does not mean that the U.S. should invade Iran or even Saudi Arabia. (I so wish politicians would stop exploiting feminist causes when it benefits them and dropping them the minute they don't, by the way.)

But it is still very wrong.

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Thursday, November 15, 2007

Balance at Newsweek 






Via ThinkProgress, we learn that Newsweek has hired a conservative blogger to balance the DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas as a liberal blogger. Guess who that conservative blogger is? Karl Rove.

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Waiting for that Cuppa, and Waiting.... 



Tim Harford at Slate discusses a new study addressing the question whether coffee shops discriminate against women:

I'm a real cappuccino lover myself, but many of my female colleagues don't seem to go for the stuff. I'd never thought too much about it until recently. I suppose I carelessly assumed that men and women have different tastes, probably as a result of different social influences. Now I know better: My female colleagues don't go to coffee shops because they're shabbily treated when they get there.

That's the conclusion of American economist Caitlin Knowles Myers. She, with her students as research assistants, staked out eight coffee shops (PDF) in the Boston area and watched how long it took men and women to be served. Her conclusion: Men get their coffee 20 seconds earlier than do women. (There is also evidence that blacks wait longer than whites, the young wait longer than the old, and the ugly wait longer than the beautiful. But these effects are statistically not as persuasive.)

Perhaps, says the skeptic, this is because women order froufrou drinks? Up to a point. The researchers found that men are more likely to order simpler drinks. Yet comparing fancy-drink-ordering men with fancy-drink-ordering women, the longer wait for women remained.

It is also hard to attribute the following finding to a female preference for wet-skinny-soy-macchiato with low-carb marshmallows: The delays facing women were larger when the coffee shop staff was all-male and almost vanished when the servers were all-female.

I haven't looked at the study itself yet, because I wanted to address something else in Harford's piece, this:

This is an intriguing piece of research because coffee shops appear to be a competitive business, and one thing we economists think we know about discrimination is that competition should tend to erode it.

The idea comes from an article published 50 years ago by economist and Nobel laureate Gary Becker. The reasoning is simple enough: A business that deliberately offers shoddy service or uncompetitive prices to some customers, or that turns down smart minority applicants in favor of less-qualified white male applicants, is throwing money away. If it is a government bureaucracy or a powerful monopolist, that's a loathsome but sustainable choice. But racist or sexist businesses with many competitors are likely to be shut down by the bankruptcy courts long before the human rights lawyers get to them.

Becker's theory is powerful, and there is evidence to back it up. Economists Sandra Black and Elizabeth Brainerd found that the surge in international trade, which has increased competitive pressures in many markets, has reduced the ability of firms to discriminate against women.

It's worth pointing out that Becker's seminal (ovular?) work looked at three types of discrimination, all aimed at the workers in the firm, not at its consumers: discrimination by the owners of firms, discrimination by other worker groups (e.g. whites against black colleagues or men against women) and discrimination by the firm's customers against one type of workers (who might be directly serving them, say).

It's in the context of the owners discriminating against workers that Becker draws the conclusions Harford mentions. The conclusions in the other submodels are less clear-cut. Note, also, that Becker's model has no uncertainty and lack of information. In reality, women at coffee shops may not know that they are being served more slowly, and you can't react to something you are not aware of.

The current study is therefore not an obvious application of Becker's reasoning. It looks at a different type of discrimination, one possibly by workers towards customers, and it's not clear whether the female customers think (or know) that they are served more slowly or not. If they are unaware of this the firm has no real incentive to fix any problems.

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Broder on Hillary Clinton 



I hope all women who look at all like Hillary Clinton wear those orange caps for it is indeed the hunting season right now. First that nice little word "bitch" was released into the political debate by a questioner at a McCain event. Then David Broder, the pundit of the pundits, chips in with some carefully nonsexist dilemmas that Hillary Clinton's candidacy presents, framed within discussion about Bill Clinton's role in his wife's campaign:

The former president's intervention -- volunteered during a campaign appearance on her behalf in South Carolina -- raised the second, and largely unspoken, issue identified by my friend from the Clinton administration: the two-headed campaign and the prospect of a dual presidency.

In his view, which I share, this is a prospect that will test the tolerance of the American people far more severely than the possibility of the first female president -- or, for that matter, the first black president.

As my friend says, "there is nothing in American constitutional or political theory to account for the role of a former president, still energetic and active and full of ideas, occupying the White House with the current president."

Of course this very dilemma is a direct consequence of the tradition of having only (at least apparently) heterosexual men be presidents of the United States. Thus, the quandary Broder argues the Clintons present is not separate from the American tradition of barring women from positions of public power.

Broder really cannot swallow the idea of an ex-president as the First Lady. Bill might steer the country from the back seat, you know! What does this do to the American system of government? How are we going to preserve our myths of the First Spouse as a powerful image of utter supportiveness but of zero real-world significance? What could Bill Clinton possibly do that wouldn't either make him the mastermind of the universe or a silly henpecked husband in an apron, breaking champaign bottles against the sides of new destroyers, all named Vagina Dentata?

If I were an observer from another planet I'd find this all most hilarious. Alas, I'm stuck here on earth, and that makes me wonder just how much the various pundits in the media who hate the Clintons would be willing to sacrifice not to have to write about them anymore. A war or two abroad? A Supreme Court full of little cloned Scalias? Perhaps.

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A Nun, A Maid, What's the Difference? 



Perhaps none at all:

Nuns know they are signing up for a hard life when they take their vows, stretching from dawn prayers to gruelling missionary work, but three nuns working in a community near Rome decided they had been pushed too far when the local bishop demanded they double up as personal cleaners for two ageing priests.

The nuns, supported by their mother superior back at their order in Lucca, refused to interrupt their good works with local youngsters to pick up mops and start cleaning.

After digging in their heels they were fired for their disobedience by the bishop, Marcello Semeraro, according to La Stampa newspaper.

Would the bishop have asked the same of younger priests had there been aging nuns around to care for?

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Just Curious 



Is it the researchers of evolution who seem to be almost totally interested in only one topic: women's bodies and how women walk or don't walk and which types of women men might want to mate with? Or is it the popularizers who do this?

I'm not a zoologist, but the focus on women's properties suggests that these researchers think men are the sex which does the choosing. Yet in most of the evolutionary psychology literature I've read the argument is that prehistoric women did the picking. Or is it whatever is most convenient?

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Wednesday, November 14, 2007

They Forgot To Dance 



That's my explanation why Georgia's Governor Sonny Perdue's rain prayer meeting failed to work. Everybody knows that you've got to dance, too. In a circle, while bending back and forth from the waist. That is what makes the rain fall.

Must hand it to Sonny, though. If the prayer had been successful think how much the government could have saved on water provision. Just pray whenever things get too dry.

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Meanwhile, in Colorado 



An anti-choice group is collecting signatures for a ballot measure that would define a fertilized egg as a person:

If approved by voters, the measure would give fertilized eggs the state constitutional protections of inalienable rights, justice and due process.

"Proponents of this initiative have publicly stated that the goal is to make all abortion illegal — but nothing in the language of the initiative or its title even mentions abortion," Kathryn Wittneben of NARAL Pro-Choice Colorado said in a statement. "If that's not misleading, I don't know what is."

Wittneben and others said the measure would have would hamper in-vitro fertilization and stem cell research and would effectively ban birth control.

Proponents of the measure disagree.

"It doesn't outlaw abortion, it doesn't regulate birth control," said Kristi Burton, 20, of Colorado for Equal Rights. "It's just a constitutional principle. We're laying a foundation that every life deserves protection.

We should look to Nicaragua for information about what such measures can do. For instance, they can kill women with ectopic pregnancies because the fertilized egg, doomed to die in any case, is still alive outside the uterus proper, and that life is more important than the life of the pregnant woman.

I can imagine all sorts of terrible dilemmas this measure could create. For instance, how do we KNOW if there is a microscopic American inside a woman? What if she hides the presence of one in order to get rid of it? We should probably test all fertile women every month to be sure that no microscopic Americans are flushed down the toilet.

And do pregnant women count as two persons if this measure is passed? Do they have to pay for two at theaters and at movies? Do they get double rations in the military? What about a pregnant woman who watches an R-rated movie? Should we punish her for exposing the microscopic American to filth?

It would be a very odd world to live in, especially if you happen to be a woman. On the other hand, if the quote is correct and this ballot measure wouldn't ban contraception or abortion, why bother with it? Microscopic Americans would still be denied life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness by being prevented from birth. The real kind of birth, I mean. The kind that takes place nine months after fertilization.
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Link via this Kos diary.

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Eliot Spitzer and Licenses for Illegal Immigrants 



New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has relinquished the proposal to give drivers' licenses to illegal immigrants. The proposal and the reactions to it are an interesting study in the way politics work. The reactions were pretty much that illegals shouldn't be rewarded and that doing so will encourage terrorists to drive in New York state. Or something with the same meaning but without my writer's exaggerations.

I haven't read very many answers to the question what illegal immigrants already in New York state will do about driving without licenses. My guess is that they will drive without them. They might even drive without any driver training, perhaps even when they can't drive very well at all. I'm not sure if that will make the state on the whole safer.

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Woe is Maureen Dowd 



If you are pressed for time and can't possibly read all Evolutionary Psychology junk science on gender in detail, you can just read the latest Maureen Dowd column. She is summarizing them all for you and accepting their message without a single tiny question in her pretty head. Odd, that. And especially odd given the logical conclusion I'd draw from her column which is that there is no hope for women such as Dowd to find partners. No hope whatsoever, unless she packs in her job at the New York Times and takes up something more suitable, something less cerebral, something more suited for male ego propping.

A snippet:

Hillary Clinton, who is trying to crash through the Oval glass ceiling, may hope that we're evolving into a kingdom of queen bees and their male slaves. But stories have been popping up that suggest that evolution is moving forward in a circuitous route, with lots of speed bumps.

Perhaps smart women can take hope — as long as they're built like Marilyn Monroe. Scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Pittsburgh have released a zany study on the zaftig, positing that men are drawn to hourglass figures not only because they look alluring, but because hips plumped up by omega-3 fatty acids could mean smarter women bearing smarter kids.

Yet Alex Williams recently reported in The Times that the new income superiority of many young women in big cities is causing them to encounter "forms of hostility they weren't prepared to meet," leaving them "trying to figure out how to balance pride in their accomplishments against their perceived need to bolster the egos of the men they date."

It is such an odd column in many ways. On one level it's all about the impossibility of a woman ever being happy if she is smart and earns too much. On another level it's all about what horrible creatures men are, but women can't do anything but go along with that. Well, those that try to do something different, such as Hillary Clinton, obviously want to be queen bees and to make men into slaves.

What can one say about this all? That Dowd probably dug rather selectively in the available studies to find those which support her own odd powerless melancholy? That perhaps she should have asked some scientists not linked to the studies for some criticisms? That she confuses cultural influences and evolution and appears to use the term "evolution" for all sorts of things which are not evolution at all?

I have never quite been able to figure out what the audience is that Dowd writes to. Sometimes I think she writes to herself. A lot of her arguments appear to center on her own experiences. If I wrote a similar column on my own experiences in the dating scene I'd argue that my smartness always served me very well, and I'd probably dig in the available studies for those which support that opinion. Note how very different that story would be. Yet it's Dowd's story the New York Times chooses to give us, not mine.
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Added later: To give you an example of the kinds of studies which Dowd could have cited: There are some which show that more educated women have happier marriages and fewer divorces.

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You People Are Really Nuts 



Remember the Hillary Clinton tipping debacle? The waitress it was all about, Anita Esterday, said this to the New York Times when asked for more and more stuff:

"You people are really nuts," she said. "There's kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now—there's better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn't get a tip."

I was planning to put that statement up as the Deep Thought of The Decade but forgot, because I was watching Chris Matthews tell us how Clinton's "people" are trying to intimidate CNN host Wolf Blitzer about the debates. Even though Blitzer denied that accusation! Now isn't that fun and relevant for understanding the candidates, too.

It is mostly Hillary Clinton who is the object of the really weird stuff that some pundits write these days. Maureen Dowd wrote two columns on her perfidies, one after the other, and she is supposed to be one of the liberals in the New York Times stable. Andrew Sullivan told us how horrible writing will be if the Clinton's get back into the White House. Indeed, many of the arguments I hear against Hillary Clinton have to do with how unpleasant her presidency would make the job of a pundit.

That's a fair argument, among pundits. But it doesn't say very much about her impact on the rest of the country. For instance, would she attack all sorts of small Muslim countries or not? Would she pour the rest of the Constitution down the toilet and flush afterwards?

It's hard to know whether the dirt-digging on Hillary Clinton is to do with her gender or with the Clintons who evidently were greatly hated among the press corps. But in either case I think we all have gotten the message already. Please stop with the silly Hillary-bashing. Bash her on the issues, sure. And no, that Chris Matthews has issues with her does not legitimize those as real issues.

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Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Value For Money? 



It is difficult to estimate the total costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan military operations, but the newest figure is $1.6 trillion. This figure does not attempt to price the suffering caused by the wars nor does it include the costs that fall to parties other than the United States.

A trillion is an astonishing amount of money. And what is it that we are all buying with 1.6 units of trillions? Peace for all time? End of terrorism? A vibrant and democratic Iraq at least? Or two more theocratic Muslim states, after some more blood-letting? Do we at least get an unending stream of oil now?

The answer to that last question might depend on what we mean by a stream of oil. It's available, at a price:

Oil prices have surged since the start of the war, from about $37 a barrel to well over $90 a barrel in recent weeks, the report said. "Consistent disruptions from the war have affected oil prices," although the Iraq war is not responsible for all of the increase in oil prices, the report said.


According to George Bush, this country cannot afford to pay Social Security to its elderly, cannot afford to pay health insurance to children who are poor, cannot afford to fix up the environment. Cannot afford. We are broke. But this country can afford to pay trillions for poorly planned wars abroad. Or at least can afford the loans from China to pay for those wars. Or can it? Those chickens seem to be coming home to roost, too.

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Fluffy Tarantulas 






The Salon has a critical piece on Mike Huckabee. He seems to be the new media sweetheart among the presidential candidates, other than the always straight-shooting McCain. The piece refers to the Wayne DuMond scandal:

If I could resurrect one batch of files, it would be those reflecting the advice of his staff that he not pursue his desire to free convicted rapist Wayne DuMond. By "advice," I mean I think some of them all but pleaded with Huckabee not to do it.

Though DuMond's prior record included a conviction for assault and his alleged involvement in a slaying and one other rape, by the start of Huckabee's governorship DuMond had become a national figure thanks to Republican efforts to depict him as a victim of the Bill Clinton machine. The rape victim was a distant relative of Clinton's.

Huckabee, perhaps persuaded by DuMond's supposed conversion to Christianity, announced his intention to commute DuMond's sentence without talking to the victim. Outraged, she stepped forward to protest publicly. The backlash was swift and powerful. Huckabee backed away from commuting DuMond's sentence, but in a private meeting lobbied the state Parole Board to release him. Huckabee said, in writing, that he supported DuMond's release. DuMond moved to Missouri in 2000, where he molested and killed one woman and was suspected of doing the same to another, but died in prison before he could be charged in the second case.

I have read about this earlier, with a suggestion that the victim's family relationship to Bill Clinton had an effect on the urge to free DuMond. If that is true the other murdered women must weigh heavily on the consciences of some politicians.

Whatever the truth about all that might be, I find it astonishing how being a social conservative is somehow seen as almost the same as being a cuddly and furry pet. Like a tarantula, perhaps, at least from the angle of those whom the social conservative would like to put back into their proper places. So we can read reams about McCain, the straight-shooter, but very little about McCain, the anti-choicer. Because social conservative issues are irrelevant for most of the political writers, I think. They're on the other side of the fence. It is not their freedoms which will be curtailed, not their human value which will be doubted.

This is perhaps also why Glenn Greenwald thinks that Ron Paul is getting a bad deal among the liberals. After all, the guy wants to honor the constitution and to get the U.S. out of Iraq. That he also otherwise resembles the Taliban in his social values is not that important for Glenn, it seems. There are certain tradeoffs one can contemplate when called Glenn rather than Glenda, I guess. Though I'm not sure what Ron Paul might have in stock for gays, so it could be that Greenwald is serious about the tradeoffs involving his own life.

All this is somehow linked to that idea of politics as all about hard stuff: money and bombs and jostling elbows. In that definition it is mostly men who are into politics and nobody much cares about those fluffy labels such as "social conservative." It's other people that fluffiness would suffocate, and it's not really politics but special interests. Or so I have been told by some liberals on the net.

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A Le Carre Novel Plot? 



Not sure what to think about this story.

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Monday, November 12, 2007

Today's Brain Exercise 



This is a fun one to figure out.

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Today's Paradox 



Abstinence programs do not work. Hence the Congress wants to spend more money on abstinence programs than George Bush even asked for. Five days ago:

A spending bill before Congress for the Department of Health and Human Services would provide $141 million in assistance for community-based, abstinence-only sex education programs, $4 million more than what President Bush had requested.

Yes, the Democrats supported it, too. It's nice money to hand out to religious organizations who then can use that money to help the Republicans in the next elections.

Oh, I almost forgot. These programs prohibit any mention of condoms and such.

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Today's Odd Screed 



It's a few days old. Still a mighty screed, and by Andrew Sullivan, one of the conservative bloggers at the Atlantic Monthly. It is about the horrors that await us all if Hillary Clinton gets elected. Instead of the last eight years, the fat and peaceful Bush ones, we get the lean and mean Clinton eight years again. The horrors! Wars and economic collapses are much, much better than cocksucking in the Oval Office, or the ensuing wingnut mental collapse:

Barack Obama put it gently, with respect to Bill Clinton's increasing role in trying to ensure that he gets his wife (and himself) back into the White House:

"My understanding is President Clinton's not on the ballot."

The problem is: he is and he isn't. His wife wants to use him as a weapon in the campaign, but still insist that it is she who is running, and not him. She wants to appeal to a return to his policies, but still insists that she does not represent a third term for the 42d president. She wants him on her resume until it's not convenient. Then she pretends to be a feminist. She wants to include in her "experience" her attempt to get everybody's healthcare under her beatifically benign control in the early 1990s. But in turn he insists that her failure to achieve anything - because of her reflexive secrecy, paranoia and over-reach - was actually his fault, not hers. She wants credit for being a feminist, while still running in part on her husband's record - both claiming credit for the good parts and disowning the bad parts. They will keep playing this game - arguing every which way, passing the buck from one to the other, never accepting responsibility, for as long as it gets them past the latest news cycle.

Ok. Let's just elect a Republican who will start a few more wars, who will get rid of the Social Security and Medicare, who will get rid of all Civil Rights legislation and who will turn those pesky 5-4 decisions in the Supreme Court into resounding 9-0 ones for Vaterland and against the little people. At least we don't have to fret over the Clintons, and if we are really lucky we will die in those wars and will have to fret over nothing.

That was my mini-screed back.

Later in the same post Sullivan notes that:

I am told by my Clinton-friendly readers that I am obsessed with this matter, seized with hatred, a mouthpiece for Republican talking points, a woman-hater, etc etc. Fine. Whatever. Have your say.

Hmm. Wasn't Sullivan the guy who in the 1990s wrote a long piece about how women are biologically constrained never to be able to rise to the level of men? I somehow happen to remember that piece. Odd how certain things stick to my goddessy mind.

And wasn't Sullivan the guy who argued for something called "gender patriotism"? Meaning that men should sort of side with men and against women? Now, these statements don't necessarily make him into a woman-hater. But they make his use of feminism a little wobbly as a weapon.

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On The Hillary Clinton Tipping Controversy 



You can read all about it here. I have sometimes wondered why so many Americans believe that the way politicians tip or treat their family members or pets is helpful for deciding whom to vote for. Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, you know. It is quite possible for a person you'd never want to have a beer with to be an ok politician. In reverse, I know lots of people who are fun to drink with and great with children or dogs or cats, but I would not sleep a wink if one of them was running this country.

I am not arguing that there is no useful information to be gleaned from the sort of private anecdotes the press seems to love, but their value is considerably less than learning what the politician actually plans to do. Mostly that's what they will try to do, too, at least after ignoring the usual campaign promises which all of them give.

Sometimes I think that we are supposed to view the politicians as prospective suitors and to choose on that basis. Or on the basis of our lizard brains, which might tell some voters that no woman shall ever again tower over them (mommy!) or that no black man should run this country.

In any case, I'm fed up with silly political stories about the presidential candidates. I'd like to hear the detailed policies of the Republican lot. It almost seems as if they have no detailed policies.

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How Low Prices Sometimes Work 



Remember those Aqua Dots containing a dangerous chemical? Why would such a chemical be included in a toy? The answer is simple: The dangerous chemical is a lot cheaper than the safe one the toys should have contained:

The toys were supposed to use 1,5-pentanediol, a nontoxic compound found in glue, but instead contained the harmful 1,4-butanediol, which is widely used in cleaners and plastics.

...

It's not clear why 1,4-butanediol was substituted. However, there is a significant difference in price between the two chemicals. The Chinese online trading platform ChemNet China lists the price of 1,4 butanediol at between about $1,350-$2,800 per metric ton, while the price for 1,5-pentanediol is about $9,700 per metric ton.

Note that unless you get caught you get the same price whichever you use. And getting caught is not that easy in China, where subcontracting has become an art form.

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Sunday, November 11, 2007

The Media Will Pretend They Haven’t Seen This All Before If We Let Them. 

This is a worrying article for Armistice Day, contractors in Iraq are being pressured to come up with “evidence” implicating Iran.

Micah Brose, a privately contracted interrogator working for American forces in Iraq, near the Iranian border, told The Observer that information on Iran is 'gold'. The claim comes after Washington imposed sanctions on Iran last month, citing both its nuclear ambitions and its Revolutionary Guards' alleged support of Shia insurgents in Iraq. Last week the US military freed nine Iranians held in Iraq, including two it had accused of links to the Revolutionary Guards' Qods Force.

Brose, 30, who extracts information from detainees in Iraq, said: 'They push a lot for us to establish a link with Iran. They have pre-categories for us to go through, and by the sheer volume of categories there's clearly a lot more for Iran than there is for other stuff. Of all the recent requests I've had, I'd say 60 to 70 per cent are about Iran.

'It feels a lot like, if you get something and Iran's not involved, it's a let down.' He added: 'I've had people say to me, "They're really pushing the Iran thing. It's like, shit, you know." '

Brose said that reports about Washington's increasingly hawkish stance towards Tehran, including possible military action, chimed with his experience. 'My impression is they're just trying to get every little bit of ammunition possible. If we get something here it fits the overall picture. The engine needs impetus and they're looking for us to find the fuel - a particular type of fuel.

Afghanistan is an unusual Bush war, the two which the Bush family has waged in Iraq are more typical. Bush (pére) had lies about babies taken out of incubators, Bush (fils) had “Curve ball” and the rest of the lies told to sell the current disaster. The media can be counted on to, once again, pretend that the Cheney Bush regimes' lies tab is clear as they report the stenography they’ve taken from Cheney’s henchmen. A war mongering media can make it politically impossible to avoid war by selling one with lies, they’ve been showing it since 1845. They’ve done it in almost every war fought by the United States except the Civil War and World War II and Afghanistan.

You might also want to read this long list of Condi Rice's incompetence. She is, to date, the most incompetent National Security Adviser by any objective measure and is well on her way to being in the running as the most incompetent Secretary of State, though the competition is a bit stronger for that position. The world can not stand another American administration as bad as this one. America can't retain its position in the world if it carries on like this.
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Help Sought Posted by olvlzl 

The computer crashed on Friday. I won't go into details except to say that this is the second time I've learned the lesson that you WILL wish you had made those backups you were supposed to. It's also clear that you don't put things back the way they were, not even when the technician assures you your computer will be exactly as you got it from the factory.

Some questions:

Can you make a copy of the set up programs that take my slow connection an hour to download from the web? Do you just save the set up program to a disc?

What is the best way to back up your programs these days? I haven't thought about it since the days zip drives were prohibitively expensive.

Anyone have any experience with Mac Minis?

Is there an environmentally safe way to dispose of antiquated computer stuff?
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When The Stakes Are This Big One Mistake Per Person Is The Maximum Allowable Limit Posted by olvlzl. 

Remember last year when we were hoping that Democratic voters in Connecticut would not make the mistake of electing a Republican to the Senate? Joe Lieberman? Remember the Democratic operatives and even some Senators who thought that description was over the top? The proof is in the pudding head. Read this account of the speech the “Independent Democrat” gave last week.

Thursday, Joe gave a morning talk at The Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, and Friday, I read it in an advanced state of stupefaction. Here was a United States Senator talking, and talking ... and talking, and sealing his diagnostic fate with every word. He had come with a dagger in his teeth, but proved only the need for a needle in the arm.

His target? Democrats. Pretty much all Democrats -- the base, the candidates, the blogospheric backgrounders and any peripheral hangers on. That in itself, God knows, is no sign of insanity, since no one excels at self-loathing like Democrats themselves. But it was the foils that Joe chose to make Democrats look ridiculous that boomeranged throughout, paradoxically making the latter's case and utterly destroying the pixilated prosecutor.

There was far too much in Joe's unhinged torrent to cover in detail here, but a few droplets should suffice for your reasoned consideration.

"Since retaking Congress in November 2006," Joe began, "the top foreign policy priority of the Democratic Party has not been to expand the size of our military for the war on terror or to strengthen our democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East or to prevail in Afghanistan. It has been to pull our troops out of Iraq, to abandon the democratically-elected [sic] government there, and to hand a defeat to President Bush."

Joe Lieberman would be just another talk show flake if Al Gore hadn’t listened to the idiots telling him that running him for VP would be a good way to distance himself from Bill Clinton. He was a talking head precisely due to his demonstrated disloyalty to Democrats. He was operating as a Republican shill even while he was posing as a Democrat in the Senate. His role in the aftermath of the vote in 2000 was notable for its helpfulness for the Bush Crime Family in their theft of the election. He has gone from being a Republican enabler to being one of their most trusted tools. Since his failure to get the nomination for President in 2004 and his failure to get the Democratic nomination in his last Senate bid, Joe Lieberman has been on a campaign to destroy the Democratic majority and will almost certainly do his best to elect a Republican as President.

Al Gore knows who those idiots are, the people in his campaign know who they are, we can only suspect who they are. There needs to be a rule for Democrats, people who make mistakes as big as promoting Joe Lieberman get one, and only one disaster. Someone who makes a mistake as big as promoting Joe Lieberman should never, ever be allowed to work on an important Democratic campaign again.

The pundits and insiders think that they are not expendable but at the level of national and state politics, they are not only expendable, they should serve only on continuing and proven merit. And in politics merit is judged only on winning elections and making laws. It is so important that only the best should be allowed to serve us. No one who advised Al Gore to select Joe Lieberman and no one who encouraged Democratic voters to support him for the Senate last year have any credibility left.
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Freeze Frame: Before You Watch Nova This Week Posted by olvlzl. 

Earlier this year there was a blog row over the issue of how scientists and educators should frame the topic of evolution to better make the case for science. As always, it was the great struggle for evolution. Following it from outside, not being a scientist, it was discouraging to see some rather bright people making some pretty childish and irrational proclamations about their position.

One of the most foolish was the insistence on bringing the great war against religious faith into the matter. The problem isn’t religion, it’s scriptural fundamentalism. To insist on attacking all religious people indiscriminately, even those who are prominent biologists who not only support evolution but in cases such as Francis Collins have bolstered its case through their work, is pure idiocy. For those who have some ability to compare numbers, the large majority of Americans, indeed of humanity, believe in some form of religion. How to you expect to win politically if you insist on needlessly antagonizing the majority? It’s not only idiocy, it’s a strategy that has been given the test of time and it has failed it rather spectacularly. More people reject evolution today than before Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris began their war against faith. That rejection has helped create political conditions that have put a Supreme Court in place which has been demolishing the wall of separation between church and state. It is beyond question that the votes of biblical fundamentalists have made that possible and that their leaders aren’t the idiots they are often portrayed to be. They know how to take any statement made by the likes of Dawkins* and to use it to their political advantage. You see, in politics it’s often not necessary to have scientific evidence to win. This is a lesson too advanced for some of the most brilliant minds of anti-religion to fathom, apparently.

Another idiocy was the childish insistence on other brilliant minds that they weren’t going to use language that the ignorant masses could understand. The worst cases seemed to be insisting on their right to be arrogant. Again, these brilliant minds, and they don’t mind telling you how much more brilliant than you they are, don’t seem to understand that adults who can’t understand the language you are using won’t learn a long vocabulary list and master your entire subject to understand you. It is politically necessary for the teaching of evolution that an effective voting plurality at least not reject it. While understanding is very important, not offending that potential plurality is absolutely vital to political success. And it is political success, putting people into office who will appoint judges supportive of a secular government that is the goal in this struggle.

This isn’t difficult to understand, you would think. What is it about this problem that is so difficult for these brilliant minds to understand? No, they aren’t blinded by science. But pride makes fools of us all.

NB: Since every week brings news of the ever greater destruction of the biosphere, extinction of species, the peril that global warming holds for the survival of many if not all of us, the topic of evolution isn’t the most pressing problem for us to be dealing with at this time. The preservation of species, the actual, living, part of the world is at stake. Evolution, while extremely important, is only the abstract description of how species arise. It is important primarily in how it can be used to serve the preservation and extension of life, it isn’t as important as life itself. And politics are the primary tool through which that preservation can be accomplished. The political success of the left is certainly at least as important as the teaching of evolution without creationism in public schools** . And it is obvious now that teaching science is dependent on the left succeeding politically. If Republicans win the next presidential election you can depend on creationism being taught in the public schools WITH the Supreme Courts' blessing.

* Richard Dawkins has been thanked by some of the leaders of creationism for making their job so much easier. Somehow, I don’t think that Dawkins' response, calling William Dembski a “loser”, is an adequate response. And I’m afraid the United States Supreme Court will soon prove him wrong. Science may have won the court case in Dover PA, but it is always short sighted to depend on the courts. Courts are, in turn, dependent for their make up on the politicians who are elected and their election depends on the votes of The People. The understanding and support of The People is the only secure guarantee of political success.

** Considering the condition of America’s public schools, students will be lucky if they learn anything about biology. I wonder how many Americans who took biology in high school completely absent any pseudo-scientific creationist nonsense could tell you the primary parts of a cell, what DNA is or the difference between a genus and a species. My guess is it would be fewer than ten percent. Evolution certainly won’t be accepted by people who don’t have an even more basic understanding of biology and chemistry. Not except as an act of faith competing with other faiths.
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Saturday, November 10, 2007

So Easy, A Caveman Could Tell You Where This One Is Going Posted by olvlzl 

So, the latest thinking is that it was Neanderthal womens’ involvement in blood sports that was the reason their species became extinct. And the assumption was that Homo Sapiens women stayed home, sewed skins, cooked and took care of the babies.

But a recent study introduces another explanation: Stone Age feminism. Among Neanderthals, hunting big beasts was women's work as well as men's, so it's a safe bet that female hunters got stomped, gored, and worse with appalling frequency. And a high casualty rate among fertile women - the vital "reproductive core" of a tiny population - could well have meant demographic disaster for a species already struggling to survive among monster bears, yellow-fanged hyenas, and cunning Homo sapien newcomers.

The Brooks boys and their distaff auxiliary will say this tells us why social policy should discourage women from having careers* and that discrimination is embedded in our genes. To not discriminate on the basis of gender will insure our demise as a species. Just watch. I wonder when was the last time Betsy Hart was in danger of being mauled by a yellow-fanged hyena.

Oh, the temptation to bring that thought farther. In law.

* As has been pointed out, it’s only prosperous women who are encouraged to stay home. Poor women who can’t afford childcare, oddly, are the ones required to work jobs that don’t pay a living wage or have benefits while impossibly taking care of their children, paying for daycare. It’s seldom possible.

The logical conclusion is that conservatives are hoping that the underclass will thus become extinct through this modern form of social Darwinism. But not until after they have performed their role in driving down wages in general and feeding the prison industry its raw materials. And don’t think for a second that I don’t believe this kind of cold blooded thinking isn’t encouraged in our stinking oligarchy. It’s not only encouraged, it’s rewarded handsomely.
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Friday, November 09, 2007

On My Blogiversary 






If you go to the archives and read my very first post on this blog you can see how much "Echidne of the snakes" has changed. It has a life of its own now, and most of that is because of you, my dear and smart and kind commenters and readers. So thank you, million times.

I love the blog. True, it is very hard work for me and there will be a time, in not-so-distant future, when I have to stop for money reasons. But despite all that I think I have spent the last four years the right way. No one little blog can do very much, but lots of little blogs together can do a lot! And there will not be "lots" of those blogs if the individual bloggers give up. So I haven't, so far.

And all the friends I have gained during these years! Even those who later disappeared. I worry about them and hope that they are having full and satisfying lives. I have learned much from the comments on the blog, and they fill me with admiration most of the time.

I hope that this blog can be a home away from home, a place where ideas can pop up, be tossed back and forth and, if they are any good, perhaps some of those baby ideas ultimately enter the wider political conversations. Even if they don't the silence has been broken. That is very important.

Hugs to all of you. May you never lack bread to eat and someone to love.
----
Now returning to your regularly scheduled broadcasts.

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Friday Puppy Blogging 










This puppy is Onni, Tintti's dog, on his first day at his new home.

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The Mysterious Polls 



We get new political polls almost every day, and almost every day what they show is ignored by the powers that be. This may not be wrong, given your political philosophy, but it is still very mysterious.

Consider the fact that polls show George Bush now being regarded as very unfavorably by more than half of the people surveyed. Consider the fact that his approval ratings have hovered around 30% (and have dipped into the twenties recently). This has very little impact on anything that is happening in the political arena. The people really do not matter, if polls are seen as statements from the people.

What is it about the polls which suddenly make them so impotent? I remember a time, not that long ago, when the polls were regarded as always correct, because they supported the current administration's policies. Now that this has changed we hear that polls are not to be trusted.

They depend on the exact form of questioning. For instance, if you ask whether the U.S. should get out of Iraq to stop the slaughtering of our military in an unwinnable war - well - you are going to get a lot of agreement with that. But if you ask whether the U.S. should stay and get the important job of winning the war on terror done in Iraq, then lots of people will agree with that one, too.

And this is true, of course. But the creators of the polls know this and they could easily create neutral questions which would then be kept the same poll after poll, to measure changes in opinions over time.

I also hear the argument that people don't really mean what they say in polls. Sure, they can say that the U.S. should get out of Iraq and that the Democrats in Congress should do all they can to achieve this. But then they also say that the Democrats shouldn't hold back on war funding, because this endangers the military. It also happens to be the most concrete policy the Democrats have to try to force an end to the occupation. Taken together, these two majority opinions make it impossible for the Democrats to act. So why not add a question which links the defunding of the military to the ending of the occupation and asks about that?

I think the real reason why polls are suddenly regarded so suspiciously is that they show very different results between the Republicans on the one hand and the Democrats and the Independents on the other hand. The Republicans like George Bush, want military resolutions in Iraq and like the idea of bombing Iran. The other two groups, not so much. That they constitute the majority today just might be the reason why polls are suddenly ignored.

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Angry Kooks 



ThinkProgress reports on Karl Rove's opinions about political blogs:

According to Rove, bloggers are "nutty," "vitriolic," and "kooks." The Washington Times reported on his remarks:

"The Web has given angry and vitriolic people more of a voice in public discourse," said Mr. Rove, who served as one of President Bush's top strategists until he resigned this past summer, and is a noted technology nut.

"People in the past who have been on the nutty fringe of political life, who were more or less voiceless, have now been given an inexpensive and easily accessible soapbox, a blog," Mr. Rove said during a speech about politics and the Web at the Willard InterContinental, a hotel just blocks from his former place of employment.

"I'm a fan of many blogs. I visit them frequently and I learn a lot from them," Mr. Rove said. "But there also blogs written by angry kooks."

And there are also governments run by angry kooks. Imagine that!

I would think it an honor to be viewed as an angry kook by Karl Rove, actually. But I probably don't quite qualify, given that I'm a goddess, too. Heh.

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Thursday, November 08, 2007

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ECHIDNE 





Mustang Bobby reminded me that it's my blogoversary today. His blog was born on the same day. We are four years old today.

Chocolate cake will be served today, with nectar. Then you can vote for the blog here. Or you can send me a nice property on the Mediterranean or a year's blogging wages. Of course you won't and you will feel all itchy with guilt over it tonight. But that, too, will pass.

I intended to write a deeply meaningful post for the anniversary of the blog but I thought it was later this month. Gah.

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Today's Video 



It's from Brave New Films and about the way Fox News is concerned with "decency" in the society while exploiting female nudity and sexual titillation in ways which are not just inappropriate but disgusting. Though note that the video doesn't point out it's not men's bodies that are being exploited here. We should drop the euphemisms when we talk about these issues.




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10Questions.com 



The New York Times Opinion page links to this site, where people can ask presidential candidates questions and then vote those questions up and down. I have not thought about this idea at all. Just put it out there for your consideration. An e-mail I got says that John Edwards will answer the questions. Perhaps other candidates do, too?

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Going Once, Going Twice... 



Lots of houses and condominiums are being repossessed these days. Atrios links to an interesting article on how the current situation relates to the changes in bankruptcy laws that the Congress approved only a short time ago:

Washington Mutual Inc. got what it wanted in 2005: A revised bankruptcy code that no longer lets people walk away from credit card bills.

The largest U.S. savings and loan didn't count on a housing recession. The new bankruptcy laws are helping drive foreclosures to a record as homeowners default on mortgages and struggle to pay credit card debts that might have been wiped out under the old code, said Jay Westbrook, a professor of business law at the University of Texas Law School in Austin and a former adviser to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

``Be careful what you wish for,'' Westbrook said. ``They wanted to make sure that people kept paying their credit cards, and what they're getting is more foreclosures.''

Washington Mutual, Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc. spent $25 million in 2004 and 2005 lobbying for a legislative agenda that included changes in bankruptcy laws to protect credit card profits, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan Washington group that tracks political donations.

The banks are still paying for that decision. The surge in foreclosures has cut the value of securities backed by mortgages and led to more than $40 billion of writedowns for U.S. financial institutions. It also reached to the top echelons of the financial services industry.

You may remember that the changed bankruptcy law still allowed for tidy little loopholes for the wealthy. But those were not enough. Karma can be a bitch.

All these political stories can be told on several levels. Take the bankruptcy story as an example. On one level the story was all about careless, shiftless and greedy Americans spending, spending, spending. Not saving. And then crying and whining when the day of payments came. Except that the old bankruptcy laws just allowed them to say they were sorry and start again with a blank slate. Now, this was wrong. Hence the new laws which reward those who work hard and put money away for the rainy day.

A different version of that story talks about stressed and overworked Americans, daily being bombarded with the messages to buy, buy and buy. When they finally do buy, say, a house, something awful happens to them: a divorce, a serious illness a criminal business partner. Bankruptcy follows, and under the new laws they are done for. The end. No second chances here. But the rich don't have to lose their second houses in the same circumstances in certain states.

A third story about the same law has to do with the credit card companies. They didn't like the loss of revenues those bankruptcies caused. And they put money into some serious lobbying to get the laws changed. Success!

The third story actually explains how various politicians voted the best. But all those stories are true on some levels. People do overspend, the advertisers urge them to do so and the financial industries have a stake in that overspending.

What is done less often is a clear tying-together of these disparate stories. The article I link to is a nice example of how it could be done.

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Women Buying Cars 



The post below provoked a thread with lots of comments about the way car dealers relate to female buyers. You might be interested to learn that a study was once done on this by using the audit method. This method pairs male and female actors (or people who are trained to act) who are given the same lines to say and the same information to express. These actors are then sent out separately in various random orders (and not necessarily on same days) to, say, car dealerships, to see whether they get the same treatment, on average.

The point of the audit study is to control for all other reasons which might explain why women tend to get worse deals on cars than simply their sex and how the dealers react to it. The study showed a considerable difference in the dealers' willingness to go down in price. Women did not get as low offers as men who acted the same did.

This study dates from the 1990s but I doubt anything has changed in this respect.

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How To Talk To Women 



I was reading OpenLeft the other day and came across something that struck a bell in a post which discussed the playing of the gender card:

When I was young, around 12 or so, I called a car dealership, and, having a high voice at the time, I sounded to the salesman like a woman. I'll never forget just how condescending he became after I said 'hello'. It was 'dear this' and 'dear that', and I think he even spoke slower so I could understand his fancy car talk.

It could be that the salesman realized he was talking to a child. But perhaps not. I've had that same experience many, many, many times. Otherwise quite normal (usually older) men suddenly losing their ability to speak rapidly or to use long words. This happens simultaneously with a certain change of tone, into a syrupy octave, if such exists, spiced with a certain amount of benevolent condescension. It really is almost exactly the way someone might talk to a child, though even children don't really appreciate that attitude.

Now, I don't think these experiences are as frequent as they used to be (though there are a few neighbors...), or perhaps I'm no longer young enough for that specific kind of condescending treatment. Or perhaps there are fewer older men left who think that there is a certain way to talk to a lady. But I could be wrong about that. What is your experience?

And what was that funny voice all about? I don't get it.

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Aqua Dots Swimming In My Eyes 






Although these are children's toys, not the kinds of dots I sometimes see after reading too many inane political articles (including my own, let me hasten to add). These Aqua Dots are not good for little children:

About 4.2 million Chinese-made Aqua Dots toys were recalled for possibly containing a "date rape" drug, U.S. safety officials said on Wednesday after earlier announcing another batch of toy recalls for unacceptably high levels of lead.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) said the Aqua Dots craft toys include a chemical, 1,4 butanediol, on their beads which, if swallowed, can turn toxic and cause unconsciousness, respiratory depression, or seizures.

I have written about the safety risks of imported foods before, and in particular with the problems of Chinese quality and safety controls which mostly don't exist. The Chinese manufacturers compete in price only, and if adulterating something allows a fraction of a cent savings per million items produced, it is worth it. As long as you don't get caught, naturally. But the probabilities of getting caught in the United States were for a long time period quite minor, because the fashionable politicians wanted to dismantle all that cumbersome bureaucratic machinery which used to check foodstuff for safety.

You might argue that markets will ultimately punish manufacturers who produce dangerous products, and in many cases they do. But do we really want to wait for the markets to work that way? I'm not sure, given the hundreds of people who died in Panama because of taking poisonous cough medicine made in China and given all those pet deaths here in the United States.

For better or for worse, China is now the country which makes most of our junk, and it is going to be made as cheaply as possible. Something to think about when debating global free trade and its benefits.

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Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Meanwhile, in Nicaragua, II 



Another woman has been allowed to die because of an ectopic pregnancy (a pregnancy which can never result in the fetus surviving):

Two weeks after Olga Reyes danced at her wedding, her bloated and disfigured body was laid to rest in an open coffin - the victim, her husband and some experts say, of Nicaragua's new no-exceptions ban on abortion.

Reyes, a 22-year-old law student, suffered an ectopic pregnancy. The fetus develops outside the uterus, cannot survive and causes bleeding that endangers the mother. But doctors seemed afraid to treat her because of the anti-abortion law, said husband Agustin Perez. By the time they took action, it was too late.

She went to a health center, was referred to a maternity hospital two hours away, and was then told to go back home for the night. With an ectopic pregnancy!

Read the whole article. Various authorities argue that physicians should act quickly and decisively in the cases of an ectopic pregnancy because there is no possibility of the fetus surviving. At the same time physicians are not actually told this, but fear that they will go to prison if they interfere. As one physician said:

"Many are thinking that instead of taking the risk, it is better to let a woman die," said Dr. Leonel Arguello, president of the Nicaraguan Society of General Medicine.

Indeed. Because the life of the fetus is of value. The life of the woman? Not so much.

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The Gifts Of Recessions 



Robert Samuelson writes about them in today's Washington Post. Recessions, those times when the standard of living goes down and people lose their jobs and food is suddenly not that plentiful, are not that bad, really, because recessions have all sorts of hidden virtues:

Of course, no one likes the usual side effects of a recession: higher unemployment, weaker profits, more stress. Still, popular rhetoric exaggerates the damage. By and large, recessions are problems, not tragedies. Since World War II, there have been 10 of them, or one about every six years. On average, they've lasted 10 months (indeed, a common definition of a recession is at least two quarters of declining output). Disregarding two severe recessions -- those of 1973-75 and 1981-82 -- peak monthly unemployment has averaged 7.1 percent.

Recessions also have often-overlooked benefits. They dampen inflation. In weak markets, companies can't easily raise prices or workers' wages. Similarly, recessions punish reckless financial speculation and poor corporate investments. Bad bets don't pay off. These disciplining effects contribute to the economy's long-term strength, but it seems coldhearted to say so because the initial impact is hurtful.

Today, a U.S. recession might also reverse the upward spiral of oil prices and trigger a faster -- and healthier -- drop in home prices. As economist Berner notes, the slow decline in prices prolongs the housing slump, because it induces "would-be buyers [to] wait for more attractive deals." By making homes more affordable, a quick and sharp price drop might revive housing more rapidly.

Samuelson then gives gentle advice to the government not to try to meddle with this health-creating god of recessions. The bitter pill and all that.

On a purely technical level Samuelson has a point. The business cycle has booms and it has recessions, and the recessions are needed to fix the problems of the booms. All this assuming that nobody tries to regulate the booms or the recessions, assuming that the business cycles are some sort of an unavoidable beast with its own rules and morals.

But governments have always tried to influence those cycles. Even George Bush's government has tried to influence them. Now, it is well known that if the government acts too late it might deepen the business fluctuations rather than dampen them. But is Samuelson really suggesting that the government should do nothing?

The problem with these types of articles is something very similar to those psychological pieces I once read which argued that the way we make someone else's death or suffering meaningful is by the message WE learn from it. It's pretty easy for someone earning a nice and stable salary to discuss the negative aspects of recessions as a welcome economic correction. And note that the piece has no discussion about the distributive effects of recessions, nothing about who it is who suffers in them and who it is who does not suffer in them. It is just assumed that the bad people get punished and the good people get encouraged.

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Today's Cartoon 



Go here.

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Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Another Thing 



Something I have thought about a lot recently is the difficulty of getting anything into the media that isn't simplified to a dualistic argument between the two extremes. I don't like that, because I believe, with some justification, that the world, the universe and its meaning are all quite complex matters. Trying to find a simple solution is usually a waste of time.

But that attitude is scorned as too nuanced, too whiny and so on. And also, of course, as too complicated. One is supposed to say something clear and rigid, and if one does not, then one is called a fence-sitter or something nastier. But seeing the nuances is not a bad thing at all. It could sometimes be that very ability which allows us to correct a terrible problem. And seeing nuances does not mean the kind of "he-said-she-said" vacuity that much of the media discussion on politics has become.

Why so much on something that might sound like hair-splitting? Perhaps because of the book reviews I just finished. I don't think the kind of books I'd like to write would ever be published. A book has to have a simple main thesis and all the evidence must be arranged to support that main thesis. Then someone else writes a different book, equally simplistic, but with different evidence, and THEN we are supposed to have a debate about the issues. This is boring and inefficient, I think, but it's also not quite reflective of reality. It's also quite likely to leave people believing that one of the two simplistic theses is the correct one.

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Today's Nice Story 



The video at this link is really charming.
----
Hat tip to Prior Aelbert.
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The Terror Dream. A Book Review 



Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream. Fear And Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. has a poorly picked title. Yes, the book is about fear and fantasy in the U.S. where "9/11 changed everything", but it is not about all the fear and fantasy that was changed or that stayed the same. It is, quite specifically, about the way our views of gender were pushed and pulled after the massacres and about the way the massacres were retold so as to fit them into an old national myth: the one about the courageous men defending the innocent virgins and pregnant mothers.

And Faludi has a point, you know. I started following the events she described fairly early and read many of the sources she uses, but I never quite "realized" (in the deeper sense of really seeing it) something she states in the opening chapter of the book: The vast majority of the 9/11 dead were men, roughly three quarters. Only eight children died, all of them on the planes. Yet the public coverage of the disaster focused on the female victims and on the dead children. Later, of course, the appropriate victims were found among the widows and children of the men who died.

Faludi's second point about the way the 9/11 butchery was altered in our imagination is linked to this one. It has to do with the way an attack against the most powerful business interests (Twin Towers) and military interests (the Pentagon) was reinterpreted into an attack against the American homeland. Even the term "homeland" was selected for the new government branch, meant to protect us all. What is weird about this is that bin Laden explicitly wanted his attacks to destroy the business and military hearts of the country. Well, not weird, because protecting the American homes is a lot more appealing, of course.

The rest of Faludi's thesis is that the events of 9/11 caused strong pressure on women to act more like damsels in distress, more like pure mothers, preferably pregnant, more in all those ways worthy for a brave man to defend. At the same time, the media gave us brave men to admire: firemen who charged into the Twin Towers just to die with those there was no way of actually saving, policemen who were the First Defense against future terrorism attacks and cowboy presidents in manly flight suits. In short, the traditional sex roles reared their less-than-pretty heads, with the eager support of many in the media and most of the right-wing media.

Now we know what men are good for, went the argument. Yes, I remember those stories. I remember thinking that I have always known what men are good for and wondering who it was who felt so insecure about that to require this whole approach to be resuscitated. And I remember trying to understand why the valuation of men seemed to require the devaluation of women. For the heroes to do their stuff someone must clap and cheer, I guess, for the hero to rescue the damsel-in-distress the damsel must just sit their and be distressed. So it goes.

But I also remember thinking that nobody seemed to notice the gender of the attackers. We wouldn't have needed the bravery and the sacrifice of the firemen if the terrormen had not committed mass murder first. It's quite dangerous to start that particular strand of thoughts so I stopped there.

It is interesting to read a book which treats the recent past as history, because our own memories of the events are still fresh. This is one of the reasons Faludi's book has been reviewed fairly critically by many. The usual argument is that her thesis about the events forcing women back into their kitchens, barefoot and pregnant, failed, because Hillary Clinton is running to be the president, because there are still lots of women with paid jobs out there and because right-wing pundits have always been telling women to return to their homefires, to rock that cradle with that hand which then rules the world. In short, the anti-feminist messages have always been there and they still aren't working.

Well, I disagree with these wholesale criticisms. I participated in that trip through time, you know, and I read voraciously from about 2002 onwards on all the issues Faludi mentions. There indeed was a renewed emphasis on the cult of the male hero and a renewed emphasis of the need for women to return home. The op-ed pages were suddenly almost totally masculine and the few women who still had access to the foghorn were overwhelmingly conservative and anti-feminist. When I pointed out this in a private conversation with someone I was told that war is a man's business.

The "lifestyle" pages (intended for women's consumption) sprouted several made-up trends about women wanting to quit working or about women wanting to have lots of babies or about women worrying and not wanting to be away from their families. These are made-up trends because no such trends actually appeared. At the same time, there were few stories about women wanting to defend the Homeland or wanting to enter the political debate about how to win the war against terrorism. Surely some women, somewhere, wanted to do exactly that?

So yes, Faludi is right when she describes the pressures of that time on women. Where I think she went slightly wrong is in the focus on the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In fact, all the anti-feminist trends she discusses started in the 1990s, with the stories about the era being post-feminist (which means that we no longer need to worry about equality for women), with the theories about women wishing to just nest or "cocoon", and with the whole reduced pressure on the importance of seeing more women in public positions of power, including in positions of writing about terrorism. The so-called "third wave" of feminists took their eyes off that ball and focused their work on other areas, perhaps thinking that old gains are there to stay. But what I saw was a retreat on many of the issues that supposedly had already been settled to the benefit of women.

The massacres of 9/11 provided a pretext for the anti-feminist message to be accelerated, true. But the message didn't suddenly pop into existence right there and then. The preparatory work had been in the making for a long time, and anyone who had listened to Rush Limbaugh was ready for the next stage.

But of course not everyone listens to Rush Limbaugh all the anti-feminist ladies of the right. This is another problem with the way Faludi's thesis is written and/or received: It is true that all this was in the air during the time when smoke still whirled over New York City, but most people did not read all those conservative newspapers and web sites. Most people only got small doses of the anti-feminist stew Faludi serves us. Her discussion pulls together everything about the culture of that era which tried to steer women back to traditional gender roles, but most of us didn't get as much of the propaganda in our daily lives.

I think this is the reason why some reviewers think that Faludi is exaggerating her message. But something else is going on in reviews like this one:

These efforts on Ms. Faludi's part to use the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as an occasion to recycle arguments similar to those she made a decade and a half ago in her best-selling book "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women" (1991) feel forced, unpersuasive and often utterly baffling.

To begin with, the reader wants to ask: What disappearance of female voices? What "bugle call" to "return to Betty Crocker domesticity?" Since 9/11, Hillary Rodham Clinton has become the leading Democratic contender in the race for the White House, with a good chance of becoming the first female president in history; Katie Couric was named anchor of the CBS Evening News; and women like Lara Logan of CBS and Martha Raddatz of ABC have been reporting from the frontlines of the war in Iraq.

Note that the thesis in this review is that Faludi's thesis is wrong because the public space isn't totally masculine. That is not a valid reading. It could well be that there would be many more women in public roles had the "Betty Crocker domesticity" calls not been heard, say. It could well be that the attempt to change gender roles right after 9/11 did exist but failed, because women on the whole didn't accept those suggestions. It could even be that the entry of the liberal and progressive blogs and especially feminist blogs into the political debate has changed the discussion from what it seems to be on some of those conservative sites. And it could simply be that the window for the anti-feminist attempts after 9/11 has closed.

There is something odd about many of the reviews of the book I have read, and the only way I can define that oddness is by suggesting that it doesn't seem necessary to actually study feminism to bash it.

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Monday, November 05, 2007

Monday Mutterings 



I read two seriously political books in the last five days, not something I'd advice for its mental health benefits. The review on Naomi Klein's book is below. The review on Susan Faludi's book will probably happen tomorrow. I think I will review also the reviews of her book, because it's a fun meta-game and because the reviews themselves are an important aspect of the culture in which we live.

The grapevine tells us that Rosie O'Donnell

is in serious discussions to return to television atop a new soapbox: a prime-time show on the cable news channel MSNBC, according to executives on both sides of the negotiations who have been briefed directly.

Under one scenario, Ms. O'Donnell would be given the 9 p.m. slot each weeknight on MSNBC, where she would go head-to-head with two heavyweights of cable talk: "Larry King Live" on CNN and "Hannity & Colmes" on Fox News. Her show would replace "Live with Dan Abrams," a relatively low-rated program that only recently replaced "Scarborough Country," which was also little-watched.

Interesting, if true. I've wondered why the networks don't add more liberal coverage given the success of Keith Olbermann's show.

The Ms. Magazine's 35th anniversary issue is out. It's well worth reading. In general, if you can afford it you should support feminist press. The conservatives have the Scaife Foundation and its ilk to keep the struggling Washington Times, say, in business, but the progressives and liberals appear to think that the "free markets" will take care of the survival of the opinion magazines. This is an odd reversal and worth pointing out. The conservatives subsidize their press, whereas we don't seem to be so keen to do that.

In any case, the latest issue of the Ms. Magazine has interesting stuff about comparing how much women's lives have changed in the last three decades and about the victories won as well as the struggles still waiting to be won.

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The Shock Doctrine. A Book Review 






Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is a book worth reading. Indeed, it is an important book. And a well-researched book, a book filled with facts and anecdotes and evidence. For all those reasons it is also a demanding book for the reader, but it is worth the effort.

Klein's thesis looks initially very simple: She argues that disasters are the new frontier for capitalists, the next emerging market in which to make a killing. Just consider Blackwater, Haliburton and other similar firms, now the main arm of the U.S. government in disaster management. When things go badly wrong, who do you turn to? The traditional answer was that your community would help you and that your government would be there for you. But why let such a lucrative market as disasters stay in the public domain? The market is a dreamy one for capitalists: desperate people will pay almost anything to get relief.

So why has this lucrative market not been tapped earlier? Klein doesn't address this directly but the reason for its current flourishing is that the U.S. government and the International Monetary Fund both love privatizing, and these international organizations give the disaster industry a helping hand, wads of money and permanent access to the highest levels of governmental decision-making in the so-called free world. As Klein puts it in the book, the old saw about "the revolving door" between the government regulators and the industries they regulate (which refers to the practice of the regulators often coming from the industry they are supposed to regulate and/or being later hired by the very same industry) has now become "an archway": a permanently open communication between the government and the private firms. Indeed, in some very obvious ways the "military-industrial complex" has become more openly "industrial", and the ideas of outsourcing the most central government tasks to private firms is now commonplace. We now have private soldiers (in Iraq only, so far), private police and private firefighters, all of course protecting those who pay their fees and not who just happen to pay taxes.

I mentioned that Klein's thesis only looks simple. This is because her book doesn't only address the straightforward case of disaster capitalism as described above, but also presents a much wider and even more worrisome form of the same in terms of the triple shocks of first some natural or human-made disaster, then a conservative economic takeover and then (or simultaneously) the enforcement of all this by the shock of a police state, including torture. She applies this triple-shock model to countries ranging from Chile and Argentina in the 1970s via Russia in the 1990s to Iraq today.

The basic story she tells is a simple one. First some natural catastrophe strikes a country, or its political system collapses or its currency is rumored to be in trouble or a powerful country invades it. The initial reaction of the country's inhabitants is shock, numbness and a great desire to get rid of the immediate problem. This, according to the economists among the disaster capitalists, is the time to strike with conservative economic reforms, because the bitter pill can be forced down more easily in such a situation. People are desperate. If the reforms cause opposition the third shock can be administered: imprisonment and torture of the opposition, a few carefully staged open executions, mutilated bodies left in ditches.

Klein over-applies her theory. For example, the Falklands War was not the kind of shock that is needed to make the United Kingdom into a country of people numb with shock, ready to accept Mrs. Thatcher's conservative reforms. But the theory is interesting, especially in its focus on the economic part of the story, and the role of the conservative economic models as the new right-wing religion. These models have been adopted by the International Monetary Fund and by the current U.S. government. That they are theoretical models, based on several assumptions not likely to be satisfied in reality is ignored. Their treatment among the adherents is as religious truths or scientific truths, and anyone refusing to marvel over the models is viewed as misguided or even perhaps evil.

The book's strength for me is in bringing this to the forefront of the discussion, in making sense of the "military-industrial" complex and in pointing out that millions of people may have died or suffered because of unproven demand-and-supply graphs once drawn on blackboards at the University of Chicago and similar places.

And what are these religious models? Their basic message is to privatize everything, to remove all price and wage controls, to let the market have a ball and to cut back on all social spending. Then open all doors for international capital to flow into the country (and of course to flow out of the country, every bit as easily), and, presto, you will see a booming economy created overnight!

It is true that lots of people will suffer horribly at first. The elderly, for example. Think about the Russian miracle: Klein tells us how Jeffrey Sachs was sent over to administer the bitter medicine of free-market capitalism to the Russians. The outcome was a market in which the prices of basic food items were no longer subsidized and pensions were not allowed to rise. What do you think this did to the elderly who were trying to live on their meager pensions and now could no longer afford bread?

Then there were all those suicides in Russia, all that drinking, all that violence. But now Russia has quite a few billionaires! See what you can do when you work hard and the markets reward you? It's true that the average life expectancy of Russians has dropped and that they no longer dare to have many children, but there are areas of Moscow which look like Hollywood? People have private body guards! You can buy anything in Moscow if you have the money!

Yes, I'm foaming at the mouth about Russia, because the story of what took place there and the story of the refusal of the West to help the country are sad ones and mostly a result of pure human arrogance, greed and stupidity. The Russians took Sachs' advice to privatize all their main industries, enormously lucrative ones. They were auctioned off to a few well-connected individuals at prices so low that it's hard not to feel the prices meant as another spit in the faces of Russian people. For example,

Forty percent of an oil company the size to France's Total was sold for $88 million. (Total's sales in 2006 were $193 billion.) Norilsk Nickel, which produced a fifth of the world's nickel, was sold for $170 million - even though its profits alone soon reached $1.5 billion annually. The massive oil company Yukos, which controls more oil than Kuwait, was sold for $309 million; it now earns more than $3 billion in revenue a year. Fifty-one percent of the oil giant Sidanko went for $130 million; just two years later that stake would be valued on the international market at $2.8 billion. A huge weapons factory sold for $3 million, the price of a vacation home in Aspen.

And how were these purchases financed? Essentially through a scam which made the taxpayers pay for them.

There is no other way of describing what took place in Russia than as a crime. Scavengers ripping apart the dead body of the Soviet Union.

Now, the free-market priests of the West didn't exactly condone this "Maffia capitalism" that the Russian markets produced. But they believed that all this would ultimately end up benefiting the Russian people, through that old stand-by of conservative economic thought: The trickle-down phenomenon.

Indeed, all the Chicago School reforms in countries ranging from Chile to China have as their real justification the assertion that opening up the markets to all and sundry and removing most all consumer and worker protections will ultimately benefit the ordinary people, even if only after a painful adjustment period. Is this what the wider type of disaster capitalism has achieved?

The proof of this pudding is in the eating, and here I wish that Klein had given us more evidence. She tantalizingly hints that the countries which were the victims of the triple-shock treatment now have a larger underclass, and that the outcome of the conservative market reforms is always to create a small and exceedingly wealthy elite while pushing more and more people below the poverty line. This certainly seems to be happening in some of the countries she described, but following the cause-and-effect networks is made harder by the fact that many of the early objects of the economic shock-and-awe later changed their policies and retreated from the extreme privatization path. I would love to learn more about the long-run effects of the free-market shock treatments. Do they kill off the middle classes? I suspect they do.

Klein's book has enough material for several book reviews. I have not touched on the parts of the book which most readers probably find the best part: Her discussion of the Iraq debacle and the incredible corruption, greed and incompetence the U.S. government's contractors there have demonstrated. Neither have I mentioned the New Orleans debacle, the Baghdad on our own shores. I learned a lot from those chapters even though I have followed the media as carefully as I could, and much of what I have learned is depressing.

Still, the book ends with a chapter of hope, by pointing out that the shock therapy stops working once people are in on the plot, that one can get used to being shocked in these way and actually come out of the experience less willing to be numbed again in the future.

And what did I not like about the book? I believe that Klein stretches her thesis too far. Not everything in the world necessarily falls under one simple explanation. She also has the tendency of a true advocate to paint her own people in flattering tones and the adversaries as ugly as she can. She is not alone in this, of course. Almost every political book I have read does the same, from both sides of the aisle. That's what sells, I guess. But it is annoying, because reality is always fuzzy and complicated and we should have the courage to argue that something matters and is relevant even if its role is not quite so overpowering or its explanatory power so simple as we would like.

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Weblog Awards 



I'm a finalist, it seems, in the category of small blogs. My thanks to those who nominated this blog. It's getting to wear big-girl pants, yanno. Nearly four years old...

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Sunday, November 04, 2007

Sunday Night Emily Dickinson Blogging 

Two seasonal poems.

I.

Ribbons of the Year --
Multitude Brocade --
Worn to Nature's Party once

Then, as flung aside
As a faded Bead
Or a Wrinkled Pearl
Who shall charge the Vanity
Of the Maker's Girl?

II.

The name—of it—is “Autumn”—
The hue—of it—is Blood—
An Artery—upon the Hill—
A Vein—along the Road—

Great Globules—in the Alleys—
And Oh, the Shower of Stain—
When Winds—upset the Basin—
And spill the Scarlet Rain—

It sprinkles Bonnets—far below—
It gathers ruddy Pools—
Then—eddies like a Rose—away—
Upon Vermilion Wheels—
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But Hillary Laughs Funny and John Edwards Has Good Hair Posted by olvlzl 

How much have you heard about, or do you expect to hear about Fred Thompson spending a good part of this year traveling in a jet provided by a friend, close adviser, contributor and convicted drug dealer, as a part of his presidential campaign?

Thompson selected the businessman, Philip Martin, to raise seed money for his White House bid. Martin is one of four campaign co-chairmen and the head of a group called the "first day founders." Campaign aides jokingly began to refer to Martin, who has been friends with Thompson since the early 1990s, as the head of "Thompson's Airforce."

Thompson's frequent flights aboard Martin's twin-engine Cessna 560 Citation have saved him more than $100,000, because until the law changed in September, campaign-finance rules allowed presidential candidates to reimburse private jet owners for just a fraction of the true cost of flights.

They’ll probably say it wasn’t campaign travel because he hadn’t declared yet. The FEC might have to pretend that he wasn’t campaigning and that legal charade will be the excuse used by the Republican media shills to ignore his associations with a convicted drug dealer, we, friends, are free to look at the reality of the situation.

What is that part of the reality?

Martin entered a plea of guilty to the sale of 11 pounds of marijuana in 1979; the court withheld judgment pending completion of his probation. He was charged in 1983 with violating his probation and with multiple counts of felony bookmaking, cocaine trafficking and conspiracy. He pleaded no contest to the cocaine-trafficking and conspiracy charges, which stemmed from a plan to sell $30,000 worth of the drug, and was continued on probation.

Thompson's campaign said the candidate was not aware of the multiple criminal cases, for which Martin served no jail time. All are described in public court records.

Hands up anyone who isn’t shocked that someone who would end up a right-wing businessman supporting Fred Thompson didn’t serve jail time for crimes that would have sent a poor kid up the river for many years?

And speaking of “many years”, extra points to anyone who can spot the non sequitur in this part of the story.

Karen Hanretty, Thompson's deputy communications director, said yesterday that "Senator Thompson was unaware of the information until this afternoon. Phil Martin has been a friend of the senator since the mid-1990s and remains so today." Thompson communications director Todd Harris added that Martin was not subjected to the campaign's standard vetting process because "he's a longtime friend."

"There's not a campaign in the world that has the ability to research every one of its supporters going back more than 20 years," Harris said.

Getting back to the title of this post, just as you can be certain the Republican media shills will. There is mention of Hillary Clinton having to return money raised by Norman Hsu two sentences on, as if that was relevant to the story.

It’s a safe bet that if this does become something the media can’t ignore, they will bring up Hsu along with Charlie Trie and any other past contributors to Democrats with shady pasts and vaguely Asian sounding names.

Buzz Flash, where I found the link to this story, pointed out that this is the kind of story often leaked by political rivals. Those are all Republicans at this point.
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Genuine Imitation Posted by olvlzl. 

The Zenph re-creation of “The Goldberg Variations of ‘55" raise some interesting issues in music and art. Having touched on the issue of re-creation before it seemed as if I should write about them.

Like most classical musicians I have the greatest respect for J. S. Bach. His music matches unsurpassed greatness with a truly miraculous volume. Few composers approach his music in quality or quantity. Having played and taught some of Bach’s pieces for decades, it is music that doesn’t wear out with repeated exposure, changing ideas and emotions. Unlike many, I’m not so much a fan of Glenn Gould’s piano playing, though his early recordings of Bach were some of his best work. He was an amazing musician in many ways, even a genius. He was a very interesting and ambitious composer of tape music. The Idea of North alone would have given him that distinction but I’ve never liked his recording of other peoples’ music. Still, there are many beautiful things in his recording of the Variations and his 1955 recording is much better than the one made shortly before his too early death. Having heard both the original on LP and the new recreation using very up to date computer analysis and Yamaha reproduction technology with a very fine and very well engineered piano, I have to say the results are impressive.

Like almost everyone, I never heard Gould play live. He gave up public performance in favor of record very early. I haven’t heard a public “performance” of the Zenph recreation either, so any comparison will be between the issued recording and the reproduced recording. This gets to the issue of reproductions of performances, an additional wrinkle to the digital vs. vinyl pseudo-controversy so beloved of lazy public radio producers.

It is a question of definition. What constitutes a performance? Glenn Gould wrote well and at length, though not always coherently, about the issue of live performance and the increasingly accurate recording of them. For him the issue of corrective and preferential editing of recorded performances gave recordings the edge. I suspect that the convenience for himself and the ability it provided him to have a performance career while maintaining his favored urban hermit way of life was his real motive. He predicted the demise of live performance, though that doesn’t seem to have come about yet. But is a recording the “same thing”, even if it could fool every last person with very good ears? I don’t know the answer to that except to say that you could only compare one hearing of the recording to one live performance. Repeatedly listening to the recording would make the comparison ever more tenuous.

In his Russell Sherman’s wonderful book, “Piano Pieces”*, written around the same time he was recording the complete Beethoven Sonatas, he said that a set of 32 different performances of one of the sonatas would give insights into Beethoven that a recording of the 32 Sonatas wouldn’t**. He emphasizes the essential, living aspect of the kind of music that transcends any one performance of it, something that can’t be analyzed, systematized or defined but only experienced. This is what is lost in the recording of any one performance after a recorded performance acquires familiarity.

So, we get back to recordings, some by great pianists of the past, many of whom we have exactly one recording of any one work to hear. Are they worth listening to? Of course they are. There are great musical experiences in even the oldest, fuzziest and scratchiest recordings made in the wax-cylinder days. I’m waiting to hear the Zenph recreations of Busoni’s recordings and have heard the recreation of Cortot’s*** on the radio. The Art Tatum recordings I heard over the radio didn’t impress me as much, maybe they would if I heard them more than once.

* This is the best book I’ve ever read about playing the piano and one of the best I’ve ever read about music of any kind. I would recommend it to anyone interested in music.

If the comparison of recording technologies is invidious, comparing pianists is bound to be worse, but I can’t help pointing out that Russell Sherman is a far more original and brilliant pianist than Gould was, far more respectful of composers’ intentions and the essential quality of music being a real, live experience and far more open to other musicians’ ideas. I would recommend his recordings and live performances to anyone.

** The composer Kenneth Gaburo said that Beethoven’s 32 Sonatas are such individual creations that instead of concentrating on the superficial formal similarities they share that they should be considered sui generis. In the most basic way this is true of all music and most true of great music.

*** It’s interesting that Zenph seems to be concentrating on pianists who always flirted with eccentricity, perhaps pathology, even as they exhibited genius. I would like to hear what they do with the very few recordings left by composer-pianists like Debussy, Ravel, perhaps even that old recording of Brahms. The wonderful recordings of Charles Ives, though, should never be touched by this technology. Those are perfectly transcendent in themselves. I’m still not giving up the “originals” of any of them, though.
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Saturday, November 03, 2007

When Giving Up Is Not An Option But Giving Out Is A Real Danger Posted by olvlzl 

“To write on social justice, one must have a certain degree of sensitivity, passion and empathy to even be motivated in the first place,” Kamen says. “But then if the person is too sensitive, of course, he or she can get bogged down by the darkness of their subject matter.”

Silja J.A. Talvi’s review of “Finding Iris Chang: Friendship, Ambition, and the Loss of an Extraordinary Mind “ By Paula Kamen investigates something that is a serious problem for the left. How do we constantly deal with the depression and discouragement that comes as a natural result of our political position? Identification with the pain of other people is one of the primary motivations of people on the left, much more so than those on the right. Conservatives do feel for other people, those they are close to and those they share something with, but the concerns of conservatives stop much closer to home than those of leftists. Their policies and even assumptions of what is worth trying display that fact in every way. I’ve seen nothing in history or during my life that would lead me to conclude that this isn’t true and I’m not really interested in arguing it.

How should we deal with this fact, that the depression that can come with repeated discouragement is a constant danger for leftists? The essential work of making progress requires constantly dealing with witnessing, investigating and sometimes experiencing first hand horrible injustices and pain. Giving up is not an option, it’s necessary to find ways to keep on even as it takes a toll on us. I’ve tired meditation to some success, though I’m told it isn’t for the seriously depressed. While doing something politically active does, to some extent, help with depression, sometimes you have to do other things as well. Despite what abstract ideals might insist on, avoiding what has all the signs of being a hopeless cause is necessary to both preserve our mental health but also in producing real results that make life better.

How do you deal with this kind of depression?
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Rudolph Giuliani, Poster Boy For Successful Government Financed Healthcare Posted by olvlzl. 

Unless we want to wake up on a morning in February, 2009 to find that the Republican President is, indeed, continuing the assault on the Bill of Rights, the destitute, yet another country, and plundering the world in general, it’s time to begin attacking Republicans on all fronts. Democrats haven’t provided us with nearly as much as we hoped for, though anyone looking at the thin majority that nominally put them in charge of the House and Senate and expected the sun and the moon don’t understand politics. Certainly not Democratic politics in the United States. I could go on and repeat the fact that Democrats, even those “in power” have to struggle against the Republicans, their corporate sponsors, the Republican media - virtually all of audible media and that with moving pictures - etc. But why do that when this can be devoted to attacking the Republican front-runner, Rudolph “just let me illegally hold on to power a little bit longer” Giuliani.

Giuliani is pandering to the Republican right by lying about his own cancer, his health insurance when he had it and health care provided by national health insurance in England and elsewhere.

In a radio ad airing in New Hampshire, Giuliani says: "I had prostate cancer five, six years ago. My chance of surviving prostate cancer, and thank God I was cured of it, in the United States - 82 percent. My chances of surviving prostate cancer in England - only 44 percent, under socialized medicine."

He is a one-man Harry and Louise campaign. This article by Joe Conason and others point out during the period he was being treated for prostate cancer, Giuliani WAS COVERED BY GOVERMENT HEALTH PLANS!

The Giuliani ad's problems go well beyond a pair of phony numbers. Among the blogging wonks scrutinizing the relevant health data is Ezra Klein, who asked a separate but penetrating question: "Wouldn't it be interesting to find out if the gold-standard care Giuliani got during his prostate cancer came while he was on government-provided health insurance?"

As Klein surmised, Giuliani was serving as mayor and participating in a city of New York health plan when his doctor informed him that his prostate biopsy had come up positive. The coverage he enjoyed -- which resembles the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan -- permits all city employees, from trash haulers and subway clerks up to the mayor himself, to select from a variety of insurance providers, and it is not much different from the reform proposals adopted by his nemesis Hillary Clinton.

In the spring of 2000, when Giuliani learned that he had cancer and abruptly dropped out of the Senate race against Sen. Clinton, he was enrolled as a member of GHI, one of the two gigantic HMO groups that provide care for most city workers (the other is known as HIP). He underwent surgery and radiation at Mount Sinai Hospital, a prestigious institution that participates in the GHI plan, which means that his costs were largely underwritten by city taxpayers.

This, my fellow progressives, is the one big lie that every single Republican office holder practices every single day of their lives. THEY already have national health care or state health care or health care provided by their local government. Unless they hold a seat in a local government too small to provide them with government provided health care. And if they don’t now have it, chances are they aspire to a higher office that does have it. It would be good to find out how many of those running for the presidency either have had or now have health insurance paid for or administered by some branch of the government. Every politician who has enjoyed that kind of insurance and who runs against government provided health insurance has to have it put in their face at every opportunity. Giuliani isn’t just being a hypocrite, he’s also a liar, lying about the basic nature of the figures he uses to make his claims.

Instead of attacking the only alternative to waking up still under Republican rule on that morning in February, the Democrats, we should be attacking the Republicans. They, to a man, are basing their campaigns on attacking Hillary Clinton, often with transparently sexist implications. That should be a clue that if we concentrate on the Democratic front runners, we are following their campaign plans.
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Friday, November 02, 2007

A Guest Post On The ManKind Project 



ManKind Project

While leafing through the classifieds in a progressive monthly magazine, I came upon an ad for an organization that purported to encourage men to "seek the warrior within" in a community of men.

The ad sounded warm and fuzzy . It sounded like a good thing—men finding a deeper part to themselves. Even the name, The ManKind Project, had an emphasis on Kind. As I read, the word "initiation" leaped out. Initiation? Images of Fraternities encouraging wannabees to drink three shots of whiskey and then a shot of drain cleaner (true story) came to mind…my curiosity was piqued.

So, I Googled The ManKind Project (MKP for short). Page after page of chapters all throughout the U.S. popped up, and I clicked on the main page of the organization. It had pictures of the officers of the organization, but no names, no phone numbers, no contact information. This was odd.

As I studied the webpages of the MKP, I learned that their main project was to encourage men away from their mothers' feminine energy and towards their own masculine energy. This was done through weekend initiations, called Large Group Awareness Training Weekends. What the heck did that mean? Information for the weekend facilitators of these NWTA events gave the following information on the initiations: they were to be kept secret:


Secret Male Ritual

Empowering Intent: To hold sacred and honor what we have shared as
men. New Brothers choose to hold the secrets of our work to empower
the men who will follow.

Energy Embodied: Cherish this work and invite the same from these
new brothers.

1. Read or memorize verbatim "Secret Male Ritual" definitions below:


Commit: To give in charge or trust; deliver for safekeeping; to bind
as by a promise; to pledge; to entrust.

Promise: An oral or written agreement to do or not do something.

Trust: a firm belief in the honesty, integrity, or reliability of
another person.

Confidential: Told in confidence, imparted in secret, entrusted with
private or secret matters.

Secret: Kept from public knowledge or from the knowledge of certain
persons.

2. Present briefly in discussion style:
For years, generations, thousands of years, men's initiations have
always been secret.
All of the processes we do are secret.
It doesn't work to share it with others.

Especially women, they wouldn't understand men's ritual.

If you want a man friend to share this, don't tell him what happens
here for obvious reasons. Share what happened for you, but not the
processes or exercises.

Give examples: "We had some discussions, played some games, but more
important I learned some stuff about my feelings about my
dad.....etc."

Do not flaunt the secrecy. Don't use the word "secret". Share the
fruit, but keep the tree in secret.

Secrecy can be a good thing, but insisting on secrecy on this level should make us worried. Predators use the power of secrets with little kids -- because it works -- think of all the sexually abused Catholic children who were silent for years. Could it be that the same principles are at work here? From the wife of a former MKP member, posted at a cult education forum:

This is one way MKP starts creating emotional abuse in heterosexual relationships, and is one way that MKP starts creating a "separation" of husband and wife.

Another post at a cult education forum tells us how much these weekends are scripted for the facilitators:


Quote:
Empowering Intent: Initiates surrender some more of the
security of their outside world.
Begin stripping initiates of personal items.

Energy Embodied: Direct and matter-of fact.
Materials:
___ Zip lock bags
___ 3x5 cards
___ Marker
Preparation: Make a list of contraband items (see #1 below) in
black marker.
Post list on wall where it can be easily seen by initiates.
1. Memorize and state clearly to each initiate as he steps
forward, "Put all jewelry, keys, money, electrical devices,
sacred objects, tobacco, weapons, drugs, time pieces, and food
in this bag."

Note: Some centers have the man put all medications,
prescription and over the counter, in a separate baggie. This
bag gets another 3x5 card with the man's number in red.
Note: Some centers treat tobacco as a medicine and put it in
this second bag too.
Hand him the bag(s).
2. If initiate says anything, repeat #1.
3. Write initiate's number on 3x5" card ? put in bag ? seal
bag. Hand bag to initiate. He will carry bag into contraband
room.
4. Say "Stand over there" and point to the spot or "See that
man" point to an escort.
Note: sacred objects has been added to cover wedding rings,
crosses, medicine pouches, etc.

Why would one take away someone's wedding ring? To perhaps remove any reference to the vows to cleave unto one another and forsake all others?

What about removing timepieces? One way to disorient someone is to remove all reference to time. A man who attended one of these weekends stated that the participants were forced to sit in a darkened room for hours. They couldn't see the sun or moon, so they had no reference to the time of day. They had their timepieces removed at this point and were disoriented and thrown off-balance.

The participants were fed only oranges and granola for the first 24 hours—pretty much a starvation diet—and then they were fed a feast. This sounds like another disorienting technique.

More from the manual for the weekend:

Quote: Contraband

Empowering Intention: Taking initiate away from worldly
attachments by removing his personal stuff.
Initiates feel the descent.

Energy Embodied: Clear and direct, like a blank mirror.

Materials:
___ Paper bags
___ Markers
___ 3x5 cards
___ Pens


Note: Besides separating men from identity items this process
also increases physical safety by removing any weapons and
drugs from easy access.
1. Positions: One man ("table man") dumps stuff if needed and
alternates with hard questions. Second man ("pat down man")
takes notes on accountability issues of attitude and
contraband, and does the pat down when table man calls for it.
Third man ("side man") observes initiates for issues and
pushes verbally. The three position usually rotate after each
initiate. Escort stays close to initiate.
2. Commands:
"Put your stuff on this table."
"Open it."
"Take everything out."
"Hurry up."

Note: Dump the stuff for the man only as a last resort. Give
him a chance to dump it himself. Dump it for him only if he is
too slow. Do not invade unnecessarily.
3. What to confiscate:
Anything he will not need; any reading material, all
toiletries except his tooth brush and toothpaste. Take
virtually everything except his clothing and bedding.

Note: If medicines look vital (prescription medications) ask
him
"Do you need this?" and if he says yes don't confiscate it. If
he says no or hesitates confiscate it and say: "Will you ask
staff if you need this."
When he says yes put it in his bag.

At this point, the initiate has been disoriented and made to feel intimidated by these aggressive strangers. Can you feel the empowerment?

The facilitators' manual continues:

Quote:

Anything on Table # 2 list: If we find a piece of this
contraband ask a series of closed ended questions requiring
yes/no answers. This requires the initiate to acknowledge the
obvious.
Open example:
"Is this a (name of item)?" Yes or No
"Were you told to leave (type of contraband) at the other
table?" Yes or No
"Did you follow instruction?" Yes or No
Example with specific details:
"Is this banana/knife/radio?" Yes or No
"Is this food/weapon/electrical device?" Yes or No
"Were you told to leave food/weapons/electrical devices at the
other table?" Yes or No
"Did you follow the instructions?" No or No
If he answers "I forgot I had it." he has not answered the
question. Restate it "Yes or no, is this food?" This process
lets a man call himself of his failure to follow directions
and be accountable for his actions.
This also sets him up for the Accountability process.
(Don't expect him to be too happy about it, though.)

Again, the intiate is questioned in an aggressive manner by strangers whom he has been led to believe are there to help him find deeper meaning to life. The process just might break down a man's sense of self-worth and his ability to make decisions on his own.

More on the intimidation of the weekend:

5. The Pat Down: Table leader says; "For your safety and ours
we are going to pat you down. Do you understand?"
When initiate acknowledges with a "yes" or a positive nod tell
him; "Put you hands on the table and take a step back."
Pat down man says; "I'm going to touch you now." and proceeds
to pat him down.
If something is found acknowledge it with him, "What is
this?". When he names it, put it in the bag.

Note: The pat-down is partially an intimidation process and a
highly practical because we do not want to risk any weapons
coming into the training.
6. Notes: Make careful notes of serious confiscated items and
men with extremely resistant attitudes for accountability team
and future reference.
7. Bags: Put each man's plastic bag and all other confiscated
items in numbered paper bag and make sure bags get to Bagman
later.

Note that the instructions acknowledge that the process is meant to intimidate these men.

The MKP orchestrates even the car rides into the MKP weekend. One poster noted that MKP told him who he was going to ride with. The man who rides with someone won't have a ride home. The man who is the designated driver will feel obligated to stay because others are depending on him.

And what happens during the initiation weekend, from the point of view of men who have undergone the initiation? One poster writes about it on a support site:


Initiates are to "summon up the Warrior energy...summon up a Shadow, that which you repress, hide, deny...Embrace your shadow and draw its energy...Everything that was forbidden and repressed is now brought to light. "

...

Virtually all conversation with new initiates is carefully scripted down to what seems like the last detail.

There are seemingly endless check lists that leaders use to ask for "registration, tuition forms, confidential questionnaires, money" and "special arrangements."

....

All this can be seen as a kind of group therapy experience, but without the proper professional oversight through licensed counselors or psychologists, which is an often stated problem that makes LGATs potentially unsafe.

Exercise after exercise is very detailed and rehearsed. Nothing appears spontaneous, no matter what the initiates may think.

Ultimately the process may intentionally be designed to "snap you right out of that other world in a flash...Nothing makes sense here...only to feel."

Recently Houston Press published a very critical view of the events that the initiates underwent, too:

On an isolated 11-acre compound down a winding, country dirt road 110 miles north of Houston, Scinto watched as the leader of the men's group instructed him and nearly 40 other strangers in the room. Put one foot on the carpet. Make sure to keep that foot on the carpet at all times. The leader then began grilling them about who makes them mad.

"They provoked the men into a rage," wrote Scinto in a letter to the Madison County Sheriff's Office. "They were telling 1 man fuck you, you are ­worthless.'"

Scinto felt nauseous and told a staff member he needed to leave.

When Scinto had arrived the day before, men dressed in dark clothes, faces painted black, stripped him and his fellow initiates of their keys, wallets, cell phones and watches. Now, wanting to go home, Scinto demanded his keys and his wallet back. Not that keys would help at this point anyway. After all, he didn't have his truck with him; Scinto had been driven up Interstate 45 from Houston, through the rural town of Madisonville and over to the training compound located on the grassy ranchlands of North Zulch. All the men were carpooled because they were told there was not enough space for everyone to park.

Outside and away from the other men now, the group leader sat next to Scinto.

"He told me that if I left," wrote Scinto, "I would be causing harm to the other participants. I told him that I did not care. I told him to get my stuff so that I could leave. He said that if I left they would kill...(I was) convinced that if I ran they would catch me. At this point I feared for my life."

Scinto could see no other avenue but to stay. He committed suicide a few weeks after his experience and his parents are suing the ManKind Project for wrongful death.


The ManKind Project asks men to write out detailed information about their personal lives, including their vulnerabilities, or things they have done that they are ashamed of. This is supposed to be about healing the past but it could also produce information to the leaders of MKP. Such information could stop men from speaking about any abuse they might believe they experienced.

The ManKind Project also has spinoffs: Women Within International and a secretive group called Boys to Men--where adult men "mentor" young boys. The parents are kept in the dark about what happens on those weekends. The boys are instructed not to tell their parents about the weekend.

Compare the techniques of the MKP initiation weekends to brainwashing. Dr. Philip Zimbardo, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, has this to say about the latter technique:

...according to Zimbardo, and the expert manipulator leaves people "unaware of [the manipulator's] influence" (Cunningham, 1984). In order to influence or brainwash people, the following methods work best: isolate them in new surroundings apart from old friends or reference-points, provide them with instant acceptance from a seemingly loving group, keep them away from competing or critical ideas, provide an authority figure that everyone seems to acknowledge as having some special skill or awareness, provide a philosophy that seems logical and appears to answer all or the most important questions in life, structure all or most activities so that there is little time for privacy or independent action or thought, provide a sense of "us" versus "them," promise instant or imminent solutions to deep or long-term problems, and employ covert or disguised hypnotic techniques. Motivation is an important issue. A subject's motivation can range from loneliness and mild depression to being at a point of transition in life; from searching for spirituality, altruistic relationships or deeper meaning to impatience with or resistance to "conventional" religious or psychotherapeutic routes of discovery (Clark, Langone, Schecter, & Daly, 1981; Cunningham, 1984; Schwartz & Kaslow, 1982).

Organizations such as ManKind Project that hide under the cover of being "nonprofit", and that try to intimidate attendees from speaking about their experience (unless, of course, they say it's a positive experience), deserve much closer scrutiny and federal/local oversight. A person can easily be broadsided by the promise of the triple play of spirituality, friendship, and empowerment, and as we all know, those who would use their power over another in those situations can lead to tragic results. Jim Jones' poison kool-aid is just one of them.
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NOTE: The quotes concerning the facilitators' manual can be found here.

By Boogie Check

Many, many thanks to "Ginah", who helped greatly.
boogie_check@yahoo.com

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Today's Hope Story And Some Friday Critters 









The good story is by Shakespeare's Sister. Also check out Phila's Friday Hope Blogging, preferably every week. He works very hard to put it together and hope is an essential part of a nutritionally healthy diet. (It's not up for this week right now, but you can read last week's post if you haven't yet.)

Pippin, the cat in the picture, broke her tail, but she is on the mend. I have always wanted a tail. It would be great for carrying groceries, for tickling people in sneaky ways and for strangling people who annoy you.
----
Pictures by FeraLiberal.

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The Other Side of the Republican Macho Posturing 



This piece on the BuzzFlash GOP hypocrite of the week made me think about the media coverage of politicians who get caught trying to commit sexual crimes such as preying on underage children or who get caught in embarrassing sexual situations, embarrassing given their political stances. I have not done a proper study of these phenomena, but it sure looks like the vast majority of such politicians are Republican ones and a sizeable number of them belong to the Christian fundamentalist wing of the party. Now, it could be that newspapers only report it when the politician is a conservative and not when the politician is a liberal. But I doubt that.

On the other hand, with the exception of some lefty blogs I have not seen much analysis of why it seems that so many of those apprehended are Republicans and especially Republicans of the pro-family type who publicly believe in red-meat-heterosexuality, the dominance of men and so on. In a way this is the soft underbelly of the conservative gender wars, the side hidden from view, behind those tall and fatherly conservative figures who will take care of us against the evil terrorists. It is also not a pleasant topic to explore.

But I think it might be worth exploring. From a psychological point of view, at least.

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More On Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters 



Or a reminder that they don't, despite a recent interview with Satoshi Kanazawa, one of the writers of Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire — Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do. I have written about this before. Kanazawa's study is flawed and cannot be used to argue that point, and the quick check professor Mark Gelman did on the People Magazine's Beautiful People and their children found the ratio of boy and girl babies to be of the usual type.

Why am I harping about this book so much? Because I think that it is wrong to give bad science a pass in the public, to assume that it is good science because its author says so.

Read the whole interview. Note that Kanazawa's theory about the male midlife crisis is based on exactly zero evidence. It's just speculation. I could speculate on it, too, you know.

But the weirdest part of the whole interview must surely be this:

DC: Evolutionary psychology portrays us as having impulses that took form long ago, in a very pre-modern context (say, 10,000 years ago), and now these impulses are sometimes rather ill-adapted to our contemporary world. For example, in a food-scarce environment, we became programmed to eat whenever we can; now, with food abounding in many parts of the world, this impulse creates the conditions for an obesity epidemic. Given that our world will likely continue changing at a rapid pace, are we doomed to have our impulses constantly playing catch up with our environment, and does that potentially doom us as a species?

SK: In fact, we're not playing catch up; we're stuck. For any evolutionary change to take place, the environment has to remain more or less constant for many generations, so that evolution can select the traits that are adaptive and eliminate those that are not. When the environment undergoes rapid change within the space of a generation or two, as it has been for the last couple of millennia, if not more, then evolution can't happen because nature can't determine which traits to select and which to eliminate. So they remain at a standstill. Our brain (and the rest of our body) are essentially frozen in time — stuck in the Stone Age.

There you have it. The reason why Kanazawa writes with a stone tablet and a hammer.

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Catch-22 For Women In Management And How To Solve It. 



Lisa Belkin's recent NYT column summarizes a lot of new evidence on that old dilemma: How to be a successful woman manager. The new evidence is as gloomy as the old evidence. It's ultimately what is between your legs which determines how people react to you at work:

Catalyst's research is often an exploration of why, 30 years after women entered the work force in large numbers, the default mental image of a leader is still male. Most recent is the report titled "Damned if You Do, Doomed if You Don't," which surveyed 1,231 senior executives from the United States and Europe. It found that women who act in ways that are consistent with gender stereotypes — defined as focusing "on work relationships" and expressing "concern for other people's perspectives" — are considered less competent. But if they act in ways that are seen as more "male" — like "act assertively, focus on work task, display ambition" — they are seen as "too tough" and "unfeminine."

Women can't win.

In 2006, Catalyst looked at stereotypes across cultures (surveying 935 alumni of the International Institute for Management Development in Switzerland) and found that while the view of an ideal leader varied from place to place — in some regions the ideal leader was a team builder, in others the most valued skill was problem-solving. But whatever was most valued, women were seen as lacking it.

It's useful to remember that differential assessments of male and female managers don't mean that all women are rated lower than all men or that there aren't women who are viewed as fantastic managers by almost everyone. Still, these research results are depressing, because they suggest that the differential assessments are caused by that old-fashioned sexism, only slightly covered up with something else to hide it.

Belkin points out that the problem she discusses isn't really something the female managers can solve by just trying harder or taking the correct acting lessons. The problem is one for the corporate culture, even the wider culture out there. Indeed, Catalyst's next project is to advise corporations on how to avoid the stereotype bias.

That's very nice, but I doubt it will make much difference. What will, however, make a difference in the long run is to have more and more women in management. Virginia Valian (in Why So Slow) notes that evaluations of female and male employees in a particular job category tend to use a gendered basis unless the relative numbers of men and women in the job are fairly even. It's not necessary to have exactly as many women as men for this to work. Even something like at least 30% of women in a particular job category changes the rating base to a non-gendered one.

In a sense, the problem Belkin describes is a circular one. If women are viewed as incompetent outsiders in management it is because there are too few women in that occupation. Having more female managers would solve this problem. But if women are viewed as incompetent outsiders in management, how are we going to get more women in the field?

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Giuliani The Anglophobe 



Universal health insurance is a socialist plot. And it doesn't even work! So says Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani:

Mr Giuliani launched a radio advertising campaign saying that the proposals from Democrats such as Hilary Clinton smacked of European-style socialism that would lower standards in the US.

"I had prostate cancer five, six years ago," the former New York mayor said. "My chance of surviving prostate cancer – and, thank God, I was cured of it – in the United States? 82 per cent. My chance of surviving prostate cancer in England? Only 44 per cent under socialised medicine."

Eek! Hillarycare is going to kill us all! Better leave it all to the health insurance industry.

Well, not quite so fast. There are a couple of small problems with Giuliani's argument if it is supposed to show the superiority of the American system. The Office of National Statistics in the U.K. gives a very different number from that offered by Giuliani: a five-year survival rate of 74.4%. (Note that those five years are calculated from the time of first diagnosis of the disease. If the first diagnosis is earlier in the U.S. the five-year survival rate will be higher here, too, even if early diagnosis makes no difference in the treatment of the disease.)

Why the discrepancy? According to Giuliani's spokeswoman:

Mr Giuliani's campaign did not give an immediate response. But a spokeswoman has previously insisted that he would continue to repeat the statistic and run the advertisement. She said the 44 per cent figure came from an article in a "highly respected intellectual journal" published by the right-wing Manhattan Institute, which he had read because "he is an intellectually engaged human being".

Mmm. Intellectually engaged human beings read only journals written by those who have an axe to grind?

And what is the actual evidence?

Doctors in the two countries have different philosophies for treating the disease, with the US putting more emphasis on early diagnosis and surgery. An analysis of mortality rates suggests that about 25 out of 100,000 men are dying from prostate cancer each year in both Britain and the US.

This doesn't necessarily mean that the two countries are performing equally well in the treatment of prostate cancer, though it could mean just that, too. But neither does it support Giuliani's flawed campaign soundbite.
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Added: Paul Krugman takes the media to task for not pointing out Giuliani's use of untruths.

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Thursday, November 01, 2007

On Book Reviews 



Planning to do some of those. I recently received Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Also Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream. Fear And Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. And Aidan Delgado's The Sutras of Abu Ghraib. Notes From A Conscientious Objector in Iraq.

Which of those would you like to discuss first? That determines which I read first.

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On Red Meat, Alcohol and Deli Cuts 



Several articles have come out telling people not to eat much red meat or any smoked meats and to go easy on the booze. That's the way to avoid cancers of various sorts. Add to that the recommendation that you should be as lean as possible without being underweight (and how do we know where that point is?), and the stage is set for another go-around of the Great Health Discussion, having to do with behavior, morals and will-power, and the whole question of how to live forever. Note also that one of the linked articles begins by stating:

Many kinds of cancer could be prevented with simple lifestyle choices, says a comprehensive new report, which recommends keeping a lean body weight, limiting red meat consumption and ditching processed foods like bacon, hot dogs and luncheon meats except for the odd special occasion.

Simple? Anyone who has studied lifestyle changes knows that the process is anything but simple. It's painful, difficult and often fails.

Let me immediately state that I'm all for studies like the ones that were condensed in these recommendations. Information is power and it is excellent that we can all learn which foods and beverages are best for us. But I find that whenever one of these studies comes out the first reaction is an odd mixture of fear and moralizing. I'm old enough to remember the recommendations that nobody should eat salt and no more than one egg a week. Those recommendations are no longer offered to the general population, and that serves as a good reminder to take all and any recommendations with a certain grain of salt.

For we will indeed not live forever. This doesn't mean that cutting down on read meat consumption or drinking wouldn't be a good idea. It most likely is. What it does mean is that future studies could refine those initial findings or alter them. Here is why:

The studies reviewed in this most recent summary are not done in laboratories. They are done out there, in reality, where people who eat red meat might also eat a diet in general higher in fats and lower in vegetables, say. Whether the increased cancer risk studies find is linked to red meat itself or something else that is correlated with red meat consumption (such as the examples I gave) is not always clear. Doing observation studies of the sort these are is expensive and time-consuming as it is, and trying to control for every single possible cause of cancer is impossible.

Note also that these studies are not telling us that all people who eat smoked meats and drink a lot will die of cancer young or that all people who eschew those comestibles will live to a ripe old age. People die of many different causes, for one thing, and the cancer risks these studies measure are not what first comes to mind when you read the articles (that "first" appears to be a general fear reaction and the determination to avoid all red meats from now on or to ignore studies like these because they are too apocalyptic).

To give you an example of what studies of this type might find, let's make up some numbers. Suppose that we find that people who eat a diet rich in red meats get colorectal cancer at the rate of 66 cases per 100,000. Suppose, also that we find the same rate to be 60 cases per 100,000 among those who don't eat red meats at all. This is an increased risk of 10% in the chances of getting the cancer, assuming that the prevalence rates can be applied to a particular individual. Thus, the recommendation to avoid red meats might reduce that person's odds of colorectal cancer by 10%.

I made up those numbers, but the actual risk numbers for many types of cancers are not that different, and this is important to remember. To keep things in proportion.

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Inner-Resting Liberries 



Two words which I dislike, for no deep reason at all. To use "inner-resting" for "interesting" and "liberries" for "libraries" gives me those "fingernails-against-blackboard" shivers. But otherwise I have no special words which I hate, in any language. There are some which are cumbersome to say, true. Try "keskuksiksi", which means "into the centers". But hate or even slight aversion? No.

Hence I found a story on Broadsheet about the general dislike of the word "moist" odd:

Moist. Does it get your panties in a twist? Inspire a cornucopia of unpleasant feelings? Give you goose pimples? Does my very line of questioning strike you as repugnant?

As someone who has long enjoyed torturing my brother by describing chocolate cakes as deliciously moist and fudgy (another one of his retch-inducing words), I never considered that lexical disgust might divide along gender lines. I'd always imagined that it was an individual idiosyncrasy -- the full manifestation of my brother's highly developed disgust response. But according to the word-spotters at Language Log, not only is there a widespread aversion to the word "moist" (and a host of other nontaboo words like panties, cornucopia and goose pimples), but word aversion seems to be more prevalent among women.

The post goes on to quote Language Log on this topic, and though the discussion there suggests that women are more likely to dislike the word "moist" than men I should warn you that none of the anecdotes presented actually proves that hypothesis. We probably need a real study on that vile word if we want to understand the phenomenon better. Of course money is first needed for many more important studies so we will most likely never know what's going on with moist. Hoist on your own moist petard? Did that upset you?

Amanda at Pandagon speculates about some possible reasons why "moist" would provoke a more negative reaction from women than from men. I'm not sure if we are ready to go there yet, but it's certainly interesting (inner-resting) that "panties" are so often mentioned in the same context. No, not sneakily hinting at female sexual readiness signs here. A more likely candidate is menstruation, actually.

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One Law For The Rich. One Law For The Poor. 



And whatever law it would like for Blackwater. It is incredible, it is.

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Ron Paul. Still Crazy After All These Years. 



While driving to New York City the other day, I noticed Ron Paul stickers and posters in numbers surprisingly high for the blue states I was crossing. The same phenomenon is visible in the comments threads of many liberal blogs: otherwise fairly sane lefties are suddenly keen on this far-right Republican extremist, running for the president of the United States. And now Time Magazine has written a story about Paul's appeal to the American left (though also to the libertarians). What is going on?

Opposition to the Iraq war. Here, finally, is a candidate who doesn't like the war and wants the U.S. out as soon as possible. This appears sufficient for many liberals.

But the man is crazy, and we should not forget that. Orcinus has a good post summarizing his views on various domestic issues, his desire to return to the Gold Standard in monetary policy, his determination to abolish the United Nations and his racism. Phenry summarizes his voting patterns on various issues. Paul is about as extreme a wingnut as they come, and though he spouts of freedom for all he doesn't mean freedom for women. He is opposed to reproductive choice. Well, he is pretty much opposed to the government, including federal income taxes and any foreign interactions. Someone with those values would not function well in the aftermaths of future Katrinas, for example. And of course any Republican president would turn the Supreme Court into a multi-decade enforcer of the values of the extreme political right. And did I mention that he is a racist?

Despite Paul's sudden popularity in odd places he is not polling very well in the Republican primary. He is a fringe candidate, and I, for one, would like to keep him on the fringe.

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