On The F-Word

It's a lot more pleasant to be a goddess than a feminist. Even on the Olympos. I recently attended a cocktail party there and in the course of the usual chitchat mentioned to some obscure monster that I was a feminist. He latched on to me the way his kind do:"And when did you become a hairy-legged manhater? Why do you want to kill babies?" I mumbled something about him having confused me with some other goddess and, clutching my nectar glass to my chest, made a beeline to the other side of the room. Weak, you think? Well, yes, but there is only one properly divine answer to such accusations, and I had already eaten that day.

The dictionary definitions of feminism mention nothing about feminazism or misandry or even a desire to abort every single fetus ever created. They talk about boring stuff such as the belief that women and men are of equal worth and should be offered the same opportunities for a meaningful life. I'm the boring type of a feminist, but these days it's largely only the dictionaries which take me at face value. In most other contexts, mentioning that you are a feminist elicits a response that was probably very familiar to medieval leprosy sufferers: avoidance, loathing, fear and anger. Maybe every feminist should carry a little bell to warn the honest, God-fearing people that something nastier than communism is just around the corner?

The story how the meaning of feminism metamorphosed into something so frightening would be very interesting to tell, though of course its exact plot would depend on the teller. I myself see the mainstream media in countries like the United States one of the culprits; they think that it's much more fun to write about bra-burning or reverse discrimination than about why there are hardly any women in public positions of power or why most of this world's poor and illiterate are female. The conservative media pundits are especially to blame: they have offered women, and especially feminists, as the answer to almost every problem this country has faced in the last three decades: divorce, latchkey children, juvenile crime, boys' problems at schools, rising male depression rates, even serious threats to our national security: all these have been laid at the feet of the feminist. Heady stuff, isn't it? Makes one wonder how feminists achieved this all with minimal resources, hardly any access to mainstream media and tremendous resistance from such powerful groups as the Christian right-wing.

After roughly thirty years of this kind of slamming, it would not be surprising if feminism as a movement was suffering from some breathing problems. This should be a cause for joy amongst the anti-feminists, but it seems that they are never satisfied. Take Rush Limbaugh: he may have done more than any other living person in labeling all women who believe in equality as feminazis, and he has spent priceless hours of bitter commentary on the futility of feminist goals. Yet now he suddenly wants the movement resuscitated and active! When Justin Timberlake ripped off Janet Jackson's breast shield at this year's Super Bowl's half-time show, Rush raged:

...the feminist movement has totally lost every inch of ground that they got and are back to square one. Women are portrayed as victims. They cannot be secure and powerful on their own any longer. ...In the old days, the feminists would have been howling at this, they would have said that is simulated assault, and you're going to have all these young people thinking that's okay. Girls are going to be okay to have it happen to them.

Makes your head spin, doesn't it? Rush is like a little child who took a toy apart in anger and now stomps his foot because it refuses to work.

Though of course feminists ' howled' at this. They are just invisible to the mainstream media (and certainly to the right-wing media), unless what they do can be translated into something negative and juicy. This invisibility is nowhere more evident than in Nicholas Kristof's writings in New York Times. Katha Pollitt points out his apparently near-total ignorance of the international work that feminists do:

Kristof profiled Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in Ethiopia and wondered why "most feminist organizations in the West have never shown interest in these women." Perhaps, he wrote, "the issue doesn't galvanize women's groups because fistulas relate to a traditional child-bearing role." Right, we all know that feminists only care about aborting babies, not delivering them safely. The Times got a lot of letters (and published some, including one from me) pointing out that feminists, in fact, were behind numerous efforts to combat fistula and other maternity-related health problems in Africa, including the work of the UNFPA, praised by Kristof, whose funding was eliminated by the White House to please its right-wing Christian base.

This was last spring. Then more recently, in a series about the international sex slave trade, Kristof concluded:

Senator Paul Wellstone helped direct the fight against trafficking, but since his death, leadership on the issue has passed overwhelmingly into Republican hands. Likewise, most mainstream women's groups, like the National Organization for Women and the Feminist Majority Foundation, have been shamefully lackadaisical about an issue that should be near the top of any feminist agenda.

I like 'shamefully lackadaisical': it conveys Kristof's moral outrage after spending days, weeks and months looking in vain for some sign of feminist activity in this field. Except he didn't spend any time on it at all. He didn't even bother to learn that NOW is a national women's organization, not one aimed at international problems, or that the FMF has spent most of the last decade and its funds fighting to get some publicity and relief to the horrendous treatment of women under the Taliban. He didn't learn what I did by a simple act of googling: that there are lots of feminist organizations fighting the international trafficking of sex slaves. It would have spoiled his argument, I guess.

Why these sudden demands for more feminist activity from pundits as different as Limbaugh and Kristof? I can think of several conspiracy theories here, but the most likely is that the sport of feminist-bashing has just taken a new form. When 'feminazi' can be used as a matter-of-fact description of Hillary Clinton in a New York Times book review, the old baiting game has clearly grown uninteresting. Something new is in the making, some novel epiteths to be used on feminists, some delicious distortions of feminist ideas. Cocktail parties won't get boring any time soon. Especially as I plan to diet before the next one.

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You should read the Katha Pollitt article I link to in the text. It's excellent. So is the discussion of Kristof in ms. musings. And thanks for ms. Lauren for the link to Rush Limbaugh's views.

If He Had Been Born a Girl...

This site tells what might have happened to George W. Bush if he had been born female. You can compare the two career paths and draw your conclusions... Ok, now that I've said all that, I must admit that it's also fun.

Click here.

I nearly forgot: Keep the sound down if you're not in a private space...

The New Cappuccino Bar

- This is my pro-environment lament.



Cafe latte. Hold the caffeine. Wait in line. Sit at a postmodern table, take out your high-tech substitute of a newspaper and bury your nose in it. Time flies. Time is money. Money flies. The cups clink, the machines hiss, money changes hands. Nothing here has a simple name. Tall means small, grande a little bigger. The fire in the fireplace is a simulation. The clientele is also a simulation, all young, all affluent, all postmodern, with sharp edges and fuzzy middles. The bathrooms are clean and contain no reminders about the need to wash afterwards.

This place used to be an abandoned lot. Not a beautiful meadow, but a rough patch of ground where weeds battled for survival. In late summer it looked like a dead field. Every day an old man would come with an even older dog and slowly, majestically, the pair would part the reedy stems of the brown grasses to enter the field. Then she, the dowager queen of all dogs, would lower herself, arthritically, majestically, to rain over the parched soil; a goddess of grass being worshipped in an ancient ritual in her honor. Every day.

Now the rituals are different. The lot is sealed with asphalt, the space decorated with yellow lines, arrows and mystical signs worshipping a different god, a god of computers, sunglasses, cash registers and ears pierced seven times. The awkward weeds are gone. In their place stand rows of boxwoods, all perfect spheres.

It is possible to come here without seeing a single weed, a single poor face, a single wrinkled face. The whole world is available here if the world is sanitized, straightened out, converted into electronic impulses. It is possible, here, to pretend that death never comes, that food is born pristine, that life is clear and good. The whole lot is paved with asphalt, anything and everything can be removed from the cappuccino grande and it still remains cappuccino grande. The god of this place is the god of logic and cool goodness, god of clean bathrooms and everlasting life.

The old man is probably dead by now. The old dog certainly is. She has gone away to where old dogs go. The weeds are dead under the asphalt. The new rituals are winning: The lot is full of shining cars, their metal wings momentarily at rest. The tables under the plastic umbrellas are crowded with people who have good skin, expensive watches, silver-colored toenails. No-one uses the door marked "Exit" to enter. The new god is strong.

But at night doubts arise. The moon casts a different light. The parking lot is empty, the outside tables deserted. In the shadows the yellow lines seem to waver, the paving seems to crack, as if pushed from below. And, sometimes, fleetingly, one can see a furry paw, a phosphorescent eye, a glimpse of a slow, majestic movement of something sinking, lowering. Does the new god turn his head when he hears the night rain fall?

The Single Girl's Guide to Sex Presidential Elections

Are you planning to vote in the 2004 presidential elections? Sometimes reading opinions about the likely outcomes throws me into the deep pit of liberal angst and despair: the world is indeed against us and what's more, it's populated by pod-people. Here's one commentator's pessimistic take on the future:

Unlike any other presidential election in our lifetime, a right-wing dominated Republican Party will go into the 2004 election with a majority in the House and Senate. Moreover, they will, most likely, keep those majorities, especially since they have assiduously been gerrymandering Congressional districts (in places like Pennsylvania and Texas) to guarantee their control in the House. In addition, it's also likely that Republicans may pick up some seats in the Senate, especially from Southern states where Democrats like Hollings, Edwards, and Graham have relinquished their incumbency. To neglect this historically significant moment of Republican congressional majorities is to blind oneself, either out of moral myopia, political obtuseness, or sectarian stupidity.

I'm not quite so pessimistic as I sense some grumblings deep below the ground, and these might rise up to the grassroots at any moment. But neither am I convinced that we will win at the end. Life is not The Lord of the Ring: Part III. But there are things that ordinary liberals and other non-conservatives, compassionate or not, can do, nay, even must do. And one of those is to vote in the oncoming elections. I plan to do so, and I'm not even a registered voter, so what's your excuse?

The idea here is to use shaming to make every right-thinking lefty rise up and press the buttons on election day. And yes, I know all about the Diebold controversy, but we can't even complain about that if we didn't participate in the farce first. So vote, boys and girls!

And if you are a single woman, it's your special responsibility to go out to vote this year. Why? Because you belong to a crucial group, a group that just might win us the presidential election. Here's why:

FORGET THE ANGRY white men of 1994, the soccer moms of 1998 or the NASCAR dads of 2002. This year, Democrats believe that single women -- one- fifth of the nation's population and 42 percent of all registered women voters -- are the demographic-swing group that could decide a close election, oust President Bush and alter the political landscape in Congress.
Who are these unmarried women? They are never-married working women, divorced working mothers raising kids alone and widows who are worried about their economic security.
Last December, Celinda Lake and Stan Greenberg, two well-known Democratic pollsters, released the results of a survey that Democrats are taking to heart. "Unmarried women represent millions more voters with very clear concerns about the economy, health care and education," said Lake.
To this, Greenberg added, "If unmarried women voted at the same rate as married women, they would have a decisive impact on this (2004) election and could be the most important agents of change in modern politics."

So how did they use this power in the 2000 elections? Here's the sad news:

The problem is that single women just don't exercise their electoral power. In the 2000 presidential election, 68 percent of married women went to the voting booth but only 52 percent of single women cast a vote.
That means that 6 million single women failed to vote in an election that hinged on a little more than half a million votes nationally and a few hundred votes in Florida.

Single women are more likely to vote Democrat than Republican, when they vote, so it's imperative to get them all interested in voting. The Democratic party is supposedly beginning an outreach program for this demographic group, but more needs to be done. Shaming by blogs is one small step in the process. I'd also like to see childcare at the voting day for all single mom voters to use, and maybe some transportation help for those impoverished widows the quote mentioned. But most importantly, I'd like to hear the Democratic primary candidates explain loudly and clearly what the Bush administration has done so far to make single women's lives harder, and how the Democrats are going to correct all these problems. Come to think of it, they haven't said that much about these important issues. Maybe I've been trying to shame the wrong people here?

A Quiz About the Weird and Wonderful World of Politics and the Media:

1. The most exciting adventure of the last twelve months was

a) The Lord of the Ring: Part III
b) The Iraq war
c) President Bush's surprise Thanksgiving visit to Iraq
d) Howard Dean's Meteoric Rise and Fall

2. The most dramatic recent television event was

a) The baring of Janet's Jackson mammary gland
b) The nonbaring of the MoveOn's "Child's Pay" ad
c) The president's State of the Union address
d) The Iraq war

3. The worst thing about the Janet Jackson's breast scandal was

a) That she bared her breast while children might be watching
b) That Justin Timberlane bared her breast while children might be watching
c) That it was no longer possible to tell the ads from the halftime programs
d) That people who paid for soft porn in the Lingerie Bowl got less of it than those who
didnt' pay anything

4. John Kerry is more beholden to special interests than George W. Bush, because

a) the Bush-Cheney campaing video mailed to six million people declares Kerry "an unprincipled politician brought to you by special interests"
b) Kerry has collected 640,000 dollars from special interest donations since 1989, more than any other senator, while Bush collected 960,000 dollars from lobbyists last year alone
c)left-wing lobbyists represent special interests but right-wing lobbyists represent the American People
d) All of the above

5. "Ordinary people are competing against one another in impossible situations in order that a very few can win monetary rewards." This is a description of

a) A Reality TV show called "The Survivor"
b) The American labor market
c) The Iraq war
d) All of the above.
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Correct Answers: You decide. I worked hard enough to make up the questions.

Your Brain Usage Profile

This is a ruthless steal from Ms. Lauren's blog. You can find out how you use your brain here.
Should you be interested, here's my summary of results:

John, you exhibit an even balance between left- and right- hemisphere dominance and a slight preference for visual over auditory processing. With a score this balanced, it is likely that you would have slightly different results each time you complete this self-assessment quiz.

As well as a different name, probably...

More Greek Lyrics

To celebrate love, or perhaps to commiserate with those unhappy in love. And a few unrelated ones, to get us ready for Monday.

On Love:

Here I lie mournful with desire,
feeble in the bitterness of the pain gods inflicted upon me,
stuck through the bones with love.
If it only were my fortune just to touch Neoboule's hand.
Such is the passion for love that has twisted its way beneath
my heartstrings.
and closed deep mist across my eyes
stealing the soft heart from inside my body...Archilochus of Paros

The love god with his golden curls
puts a bright ball into my hand,
shows a girl in her fancy shoes,
and suggests that I take her.

Not that girl - she's the other kind,
one from Lesbos. Disdainfully,
nose turned up at my silver hair,
she makes eyes at the ladies.Anacreon of Theos

Like the very god in my sights is he who
sits where he can look in your eyes, who listens
close to you, to hear the soft voice, its sweetness
murmur in love and
laughter, all for him. But it breaks my spirit;
underneath my breast all the heart is shaken.
Let me only glance where you are, the voice dies,
I can say nothing,

but my lips are stricken to silence, underneath
my skin the tenuous flame suffuses;
nothing shows in front of my eyes, my ears are muted in thunder.

And the sweat breaks running upon me, fever
shakes my body, paler I turn than grass is;
I can feel that I have been changed, I feel that
death has come near me.Sappho of Mytilene

Had enough of love, for the time being?

The God of Wealth, who's altogether blind, never
came walking in my door and told me:"Hipponax,
I'm giving you three hundred silver mna pieces,
and much beside." Not he. He's far too mean-hearted.Hipponax of Ephesos

The fox knows many tricks, the hedgehog only one.
One good one.Archilochus of Paros

Source: Greek Lyrics, translated by Richmond Lattimore.

Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day to all!

"...and Eros, the fairest of the deathless gods;
he unstrings the limbs and subdues both mind
and sensible thought in the breasts of all gods and all men."
(Hesiod, Theogony, 120-2)

And in the breasts of all goddesses and all women. So beware!

Some Interesting Posts

On Alas, A Blog, Ampersand has an excellent post on the rape culture, and there is a long discussion about it in the comments section. (I, especially, shine luminously there.) Check it out.

And Trish Wilson talks about the case of a father's right activist, Lowell Jaks, who kidnapped his son Alec. The case is very worrying, for reasons that Trish spells out carefully.

The March of the Morons

That's us, by the way. Well, us, if you are an angry liberal as I am. According to Emmett Tyrrell we are morons. He defines us as follows:

"This year as we watched Dr. Howard Dean gain the role of frontrunner, the veins in his neck bursting, his face an angry gnarl of sneers and grimaces, it became obvious that the dynamic new force in the Democratic primary was the moron vote. That is to say the angry, stupid, political neurotic who has proceeded into middle age convinced that the world is against him-her.

These indignant morons saw Dr. Howard Dean tear off his suit coat, roll up his sleeves and approach the microphone as though he were about to chew on it, and they beheld Deliverance -- Deliverance from all the woe and perfidy that has held them back, given them lower-back pain, caused the seat of their pants to split the night they attended the professional wrestling match and brought George W. Bush to the throne."

I might be angry and neurotic, but I'm not stupid (thank goddess for that), and the world is indeed against me. How about you? The seat of my pants has never split (I don't wear pants, snakes don't), and professional wrestling matches are where Republicans congregate. Maybe Emmett was borrowing ideas from his personal history? But I do like his idea that we are morons.

It shows that Emmett as a proper right-winger hasn't stopped trying to reach his hand across the ideological chasm, hasn't stopped trying to debate politics in an adult and mature fashion, hasn't started raging and ranting like us angry liberals do. It's still "You moron, me Tarzan. WHACK, POPPLE AND CRACK!"

Ann Coulter is another polite right-winger. Here's what she says about us liberals: we are jock-sniffers:

"Cleland is making the rounds on talk TV, basking in the affection of liberals who have suddenly become jock-sniffers for war veterans..."

Dear Ann, always ready for a nice, civilized discussion on politics. But she thinks that we are morons, too

"That Bush skipped out on his National Guard service is one of liberals' many nondisprovable beliefs, like global warming"

She was talking about how we liberals don't understand that evidence has conclusively proved that George W. Bush's service with the Guard was honorable, and how we don't understand that former Senator Max Cleland isn't really a war hero, despite his having lost three limbs in Vietnam, because he lost them by picking up a hand grenade which could have equally easily happened to him in the Texas Guard. Well, I doubt that, unless the Guard had a habit of scattering hand grenades about the place, and even then only some members of the Guard might have been easy-going enough to pick them up out of pure curiosity.

It was George W. Bush's Guard service that got Tyrrell waxing poetical about morons, too:

"Now Sen. John Pierre Kerry is the frontrunner, and he has developed a fine ploy for corralling the moron vote. He and McAuliffe have stirred up this controversy about how frequently the president attended National Guard meetings three decades ago. And they have transformed their entire party into the most heroic congeries of patriots and GI Joes ever seen on earth. The morons are entranced."

Don't you think that being 'entranced' is the only way to be in this instance? The whole thing is a fascinating mystery: Where in the world was George W. Bush?

There is a smell of desperation in these paltry attempts to make us angry liberals into jock-sniffers and morons, just because we have finally run out of patience. I like such smells just fine, though, (those of desperation, not of jock straps) and I think that we should own the term 'morons'.

Onwards and upwards, you teeming masses of morons! More morons and more moral leaders!
------------------
I got the link to Tyrrell's column from a post in Make Me A Commentator . Thanks, Bryant, for introducing me to this fascinating thinker.

On Buttocks

I've had a deeply philosophical day, and I'm going to share with you my conclusions and the process I used in coming to them. It started with the lovely springlike sunshine in the morning, which drew me out to sunbathe on a mountain cliff. Now, mountain cliffs are made of hard materials called rock. Yet I was perfectly comfortable there, hundreds of miles away from Green Mamba and his revolutionary movement GROEN (Get Rid Of Echidne Now!). And the reason was the two divine cushions on which I sat; all my own. Buttocks.

What a wonderful invention they are, the buttocks. Where would we be without them? What would we talk about in their stead? And how would we sit? Clearly, we couldn't.

Sheep don't sit around very much, but even among the sheep buttocks can take on exceptional beauty. This is called callipygia. Geneticists have found that a specific gene mutation causes some sheep to develop pronounced buttocks full of muscle rather than fat. I predict a future species of sheep that sit around blogging on the internet.

Human buttocks are every bit as wonderful. They are even scientifically defined:

the two rounded prominences on the human torso that are posterior to the hips and formed by the gluteal muscles and underlying structures.

or more simply:

n : the fleshy part of the human body that you sit on

But human buttocks are not just for something to sit on. They are a myriad of other things: a source of sexual attraction (though some like them big, others small), a way of telling someone to work harder ("get off your butt"), a way of showing contempt (you reveal them) and a handy shorthand for describing lots of other people (a pain in the butt). They even have meaning in dreams:

Dreaming of your buttocks, represents your instincts and urges. It may also indicate feelings of insecurity and reveals your struggles with some situation. Dreaming that your buttocks are misshaped, suggests undeveloped or wounded aspects of your psyche

No wonder that humans worry about the shapeliness of those twin mounds: if they are not shapely, neither is their psyche. Your buttocks can even foretell your future, believe me or not:

Ulf Buck, 39, is a German clairvoyant who claims a person's backside has lines that allow him to predict anything from financial fortune and family life to health and happiness.
Buck said the lines on a person's buttocks are similar to those found on the palm of the hand. He said that he has trained his fingers to acquire the skill of reading buttocks.

Hmm. Maybe something to consider if you want to make a career change? I can almost see it: A revolutionary method for predicting worker performance before hiring. If you do run with this idea, remember to give Ulf and me some credit.

Human buttocks are clearly quite wonderful. But how exactly did they evolve? I have spent the rest of the day in solving this crucial question, and I didn't get anywhere until I put two separate concepts together: what I have learned about the callipygous sheep and the excellent scientific method of evolutionary psychologists. The sheep taught me this:

Geneticists, on the other hand, study the sheep in the hope of understanding the strange way in which large bottoms are passed down through the generations.
Sheep are only callipygous if their father is; mutant mothers do not pass the trait on. And two big-bottomed sheep will have snake-hipped offspring. How the two mutants cancel each other out is still a mystery.

Maybe humans inherit big buttocks from their fathers, too? But why did this gene (if it exists in humans) survive? Here's where the scientific evolutionary psychology comes to my aid. The rules are something like this: Figure out how something that appears today might have once been useful, then explain its prevalence by the fact that it was once useful. It's a neat method, as lots of time is being saved by not having to go out to gather evidence or set up laboratory experiments, and it has the additional advantage (to me, at least) that nobody can prove my theory wrong. So here's my theory entitled "How Buttocks Came to Be".

A long time ago and far away lived a tribe of humans. Some of them were slender as a reed, and where we have buttocks they only had a small tight knot. Others had very large buttocks dragging behind them on the ground as they walked. Yet others were just right, not too slim and not too fat. Like we are.

Once a year the tribe would gather together for a mating ceremony in which all the men would fight each other for the right to inseminate all the females. (The females, as is common in evolutionary psychology in general, are going to be ignored from now on.) The mating ceremony took three days: On the first day all men would sit in a circle until they couldn't take it anymore. All those no longer sitting at sunset were discontinued. On the second day all remaining men would run around in a circle, nonstop, until the sun set. The fastest runner at this time would be declared the winner of the insemination ceremonies. The third day was spent on insemination.

Well, dear reader, you can guess what happened. None of the stick-figurelike knot guys could sit on the ground all day. They developed terrible sitting sores and despite firm determination and great stamina eventually had to admit defeat and get up just to get the blood moving again.

The really big-butted guys had a wonderful time with the first day's tournament. They could have easily sat for another week. But the next day they had to run and run, and as they ran their buttocks dragged behind, hit rocks and sticks and just hurt. Then they started bleeding. Besides, it's hard to run fast with something like that. However, valiant they were, these men, too, were disqualified. Only the fastest of the just-right guys got to pass his genes on.

And that's how buttocks came to be.

What do you think? It needs a bit of work before publication, of course, a few footnotes here and there, but the gist of the story is there.

I also have in mind a second article about the possibility that, as the sheep taught me, snake-hips might be the next stage in human development. Remember:

And two big-bottomed sheep will have snake-hipped offspring. How the two mutants cancel each other out is still a mystery.

This seems perfectly logical to me as a goddess of snakes. The problem is how to keep Green Mamba from reading it and getting even worse ideas about his own importance in the evolutionary tree.

Ashcroft on Warpath

Remember the decision to ban the so-called partial birth abortion? Remember that several physicians and organizations challenged the constitutionality of the ban? The government has now tried to subpoena the medical records of one of these physicians, Dr. Channing Hammond.

The ruling is the first in a series of subpoenas by the U.S. Justice Department seeking the medical records of patients from seven physicians and at least five hospitals, Crain's sister publication Modern Healthcare has learned. Besides Northwestern, Mr. Ashcroft is seeking patient records from University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers in Ann Arbor; Hahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia, owned by Tenet Healthcare Corp.; Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center and Weill Cornell Medical Center of New York Presbyterian Hospital both of which are part of the New York-Presbyterian Healthcare System; and an unidentified San Francisco-area hospital.

The court didn't like this interference with the patients' privacy:

In a 16-page decision, U.S. Chief District Judge Charles Kocoras denied the government's request to obtain patient medical records from Northwestern, citing the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and Illinois' medical privacy law.

but did speculate about the reasons for the government's subpoenas:

In his decision, Judge Kocoras said the records "appear to have been sought for the purpose of testing the assertions in Dr. Hammond's declarations. At best, the government is seeking possible impeachment material."

This was discussed on TAPPED, but the topic deserves repetition. It seems to me that Dr. Hammond's patients have nothing to do with his challenge, and their medical records should not be interfered with. But then I'm not a lawyer, just a very minor goddess.

O'Reilly Skeptical!

Bill O'Reilly is the scourge of liberals in the U.S., or at least he'd like to think of himself as one. His talk show is of the Limbaugh-type, except that O'Reilly usually doesn't just yell at the cameras but also at some poor sod sitting next to him as the token liberal. He's very popular though. It's easy to see when one learns that

O'Reilly poses nightly as an outraged common man speaking out against the corruption of the liberal elites who run the country from Hollywood and Washington. "We're the only show from a working-class point of view," he once told the Washington Post (12/13/00). "I understand working-class Americans. I'm as lower-middle-class as they come."
Despite assailing Hollywood liberals and Hillary Clinton night after night -- he reportedly has an image of Hillary Clinton's face on his office doormat (Washington Post, 12/13/00) -- O'Reilly is forced to maintain simultaneously that his views aren't conservative at all. He frequently proclaims his independence from all partisan agendas, as he wrote in his book: "See, I don't want to fit any of those labels, because I believe that the truth doesn't have labels." On his show, he often angrily denies accusations of a conservative bent.

But he does indeed have a conservative bent as politics is concerned. He has always rooted for G.W. Bush, and that's why it's so surprising what just happened: O'Reilly declared himself skeptical about whether Saddam Hussein actually had had weapons of mass destruction!

Conservative television news anchor Bill O'Reilly said on Tuesday he was now skeptical about the Bush administration and apologized to viewers for supporting prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
The anchor of his own show on Fox News said he was sorry he gave the U.S. government the benefit of the doubt that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's weapons program poised an imminent threat, the main reason cited for going to war.
"I was wrong. I am not pleased about it at all and I think all Americans should be concerned about this," O'Reilly said in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America."

Well, wonders never cease would be one possible reaction. Another one might be something about recovering the lost spine at the nick of the time. Yet another one might be something along the lines of rats skittering off when the ship is sinking. Take your pick.

"What do you want me to do, go over and kiss the camera?" asked O'Reilly, who had promised rival ABC last year he would publicly apologize if weapons were not found.

How about kissing my divine tail?

Which Greek Goddess or God Are You?

Take this test. Then write them a complaining e-mail letter. I am supposedly Nemesis! No-one could confuse the two of us: I'm a nice, sunny goddess with many interests, whereas she is....well, obsessive.

Bush On Television

Did you watch him? Peggy Noonan did. She used to write speeches for Ronald Reagan, and she thinks that George gives great speeches. But interviews? This is what Peggy said (link via Atrios):

You can find the transcript of the Bush-Russert interview all over the Web. It reads better than it played. But six million people saw it, and many millions more will see pieces of it, and they will not be the pieces in which Mr. Bush looks good.
The president seemed tired, unsure and often bumbling. His answers were repetitive, and when he tried to clarify them he tended to make them worse. He did not seem prepared. He seemed in some way disconnected from the event. When he was thrown the semisoftball question on his National Guard experience--he's been thrown this question for 10 years now--he spoke in a way that seemed detached. "It's politics." Well yes, we know that. Tell us more.

And Peggy likes him! So what did those commentators see who might not like Bush as much to begin with? Here's an editorial from the New York Times, the grandmother of the nasty liberal media:

Yesterday, in an interview with NBC's Tim Russert, after a week in which it became obvious to most Americans that the justifications for the war were based on flawed intelligence, Mr. Bush offered his reflections, and they were far from reassuring. The only clarity in the president's vision appears to be his own perfect sense of self-justification.
...
The president was doing far more yesterday than rolling out the administration's spin for the next campaign. He was demonstrating how he is likely to think if confronted with a similar crisis in the future. The fuzziness and inconsistency of his comments suggest he is still relying on his own moral absolutism, that in a dangerous world the critical thing is to act decisively, and worry about connecting the dots later. Mr. Bush said repeatedly that he went to the United Nations seeking a diplomatic alternative to war. In fact, the United States rejected all diplomatic alternatives at the time, severely damaging relations with some of its most important and loyal allies. "I believe it is essential that when we see a threat, we deal with those threats before they become imminent," he said. "It's too late if they become imminent."

Ouch. I'm eagerly awaiting the debates in the presidential race. Peggy, on the other hand, wants Bush to focus on giving pre-prepared speeches only, because he's more of a philosopher than a nasty politician...

On the Ethics of Rabbits and Foxes

"Go for the jugular" my granny used to tell me. I wish. What she and my other relatives really told me was to be nice and fair. What they didn't tell me was that I'd meet many people who are neither nice nor fair, and that in these meetings I'd end up an eternal loser. This is something to consider in the current debates over the role of ethics in the society. In fact, an ethical upbringing may handicap a child just about as much as it would a rabbit who is going to live with the foxes.

The human foxes are naturally all for niceness education. I suspect that they hide among the ones who complain about the manners of today's youth in the opinion columns of newspapers, design Sunday school curricula and write ethical guides for little children. This activity would be commendable if it made everybody nice. But it doesn't. There is a special technical term for those of us who were taken in by it: 'a wuss', for the world is run by the foxes and what they have for dinner is rabbit stew.

So what is a nice rabbit to do? Funnily enough, most nice people don't want to stop being nice altogether. In any case, they don't have to. It is OK to be nice to little children, helpless animals and other wusses. It is NOT OK to be nice to the human foxes. They need their butts kicked. That's why rabbits have strong hind legs.

We rabbits need a new kind of ethical education which makes us less nice without making us any less ethical. Those who want to introduce ever stricter ethics should seek out the foxes and work on them. That way they might actually do some good.

Grown-up rabbits will find it very hard to reach a state of only partial niceness. It takes years of hard therapy and several courses in martial arts, tough talk and the like. But it's worth it. Though I am still a recovering wuss I have already noticed how much more fun slightly nasty people have. Besides, wusses need heroes and heroines, supernatural protectors against the human foxes, and the only route to this is through self-improvement (or, perhaps in this case, its opposite). How does a career as a Superrabbit sound to you?

The Pigeons Have Come Home to Roost

My Saturday news commentary:

First, recent polls show that the popularity of our fearless leader is down.

"President Bush's January decline in public opinion started soon after a top adviser on the search for weapons of mass destruction said he did not believe Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons, a tracking poll suggests.
David Kay made his initial comments about doubting the weapons existed soon after the administration announced Jan. 23 that Kay was being replaced as the top U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq.
Bush's job approval rating dropped 10 points from Jan. 25 through Jan. 31, according to the National Annenberg Election Survey. The tracking poll takes a nightly sample and rolls together two or three nights' findings at a time to produce periodic reports.
Support for the war in Iraq also dipped in that period, from a majority saying the situation in Iraq was worth going to war over, 53 percent, to 46 percent during the last few days of January saying it was worth going to war and 49 percent saying it was not. "

This is interesting though not that important. Not important, because there's still plenty of time before the elections for the administration to take care of this little problem. Interesting because I thought that everybody knew that there was no evidence of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, just as there was no evidence of a connection between the terrorist attacks against the U.S. and Iraq. To be quite honest, I thought that those people who backed the war, any war, did so largely to get their desire for revenge satisfied. Gods and goddesses often used to do such things, and I assumed humans had taken up the same custom.

The drop in the polls is not the only piece of bad news for the administration. The U.S. allies are also getting a bit jittery about the way the dollar has been allowed to plunge in the international markets:

The Bush administration tried Saturday to reassure America's major economic allies worried about the sinking dollar and the exploding U.S. budget and trade deficits.
In the face of stinging criticism from other rich countries, the administration defended its hands-off approach to the dollar's sharp slide, which has pushed the greenback in recent weeks to record lows against the euro, the common currency of 12 European nations, and to three-year lows against the Japanese yen.

The low value of the dollar is great news for the U.S. export industries which have suffered from unemployment in the recent past. It's not happy news for the importers, of course, and it's deplorable news for some of the foreign allies:

Europeans complained, however, that their companies were being forced to bear the brunt of the dollar's plummet because Japan, China and other Asian countries were intervening massively in currency markets to stem the dollar's fall against their currencies.

That way the Asian countries can still continue their cheap imports to the U.S., they are happy, we are happy, and the Europeans are grumpy. But who cares about old moldy Europe anyway?

Maybe Rumsfeld does, believe it or not. At least he gave an impassioned speech in Europe, to defend the Iraq war. Some tidbits from it:

""I know in my heart and my brain that America ain't what's wrong with the world," Rumsfeld told a German questioner after his speech.
"To the extent that that concept is promoted, as it is," Rumsfeld said, "only time will deal with that."
Rumsfeld asserted that the war showed other "rogue regimes" what could happen if they should refuse to come clean about disarming. He did not mention that inspectors have failed to find banned weapons in Iraq, a principal reason the Bush administration gave for invading last March. "

Doesn't he look cute when he gets 'impassioned'?* This is why Donald thinks that the Iraq war and occupation are worthy things to have accomplished:

"Rumsfeld said there was more at stake in Iraq than just banned weapons. He asserted that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have liberated 50 million oppressed people."

Um, Donald, that should be roughly 20 million oppressed people. The women in Afghanistan may be slightly better off than they were, but their future looks very uncertain, and the women in Iraq are not going to be liberated any time soon.
-----------------------------------------------
*I always wanted to mirror this sexism to see how it works. I think Rumsfeld can take it.

The Knife Wielding Feminists

Relax. These are in the kitchen, or writing in a new blog about food. The list of contributors is awe-inspiring in gastronomical lore and feminist commentary, and flea of One Good Thing named the blog (she slaughters pumpkins, so be forewarned). You can go to the blog and get Elayne's secret chicken recipe, too.

All this makes me very unhappy. Kitchens hate me. I tried to take up cooking as a hobby, to while away the centuries, but I was never any good at it. When I peel a potato, I end up with a long lovely curl of the peel and no potato insides. Most raw food is daunting; how does one get inside it? And how does one chop without ending a few fingers short? And why are so many things humans eat reminiscent of gooey slime: egg yolks, tomato pulp, brains?

Now that I've awakened your appetite, go and check out the Knife Wielding Feminists.

The Sacredness of Marriage

George W. Bush, in hinting his willingness to back a constitutional amendment which would define marriage in the U.S. as a 'union between a man and a woman', called marriage sacred. Webster's Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (and boy, does it weigh on my lap!) gives the following definitions of 'sacred':

1. devoted or dedicated to a deity or to some religious purpose; consecrated.
2. entitled to veneration or religious respect by association with divinity or divine things; holy.
3. pertaining to or connected with religion.
4. reverently dedicated to some person, purpose, or object.
5. regarded with reverence.
6. secured against violation, infringement etc., as by reverence or sense of right.
7. properly immune from violence, interference etc., as a person or office.

What a handy little word 'sacred' is! It's possible to convey quite different messages in one word; it's even possible to convey all of them at the same time. And note that if you type quickly like goddesses do, 'sacred' so very easily becomes 'scared'. Marriage as a 'scared' institution? Probably.

The first four definitions of 'sacred' in my list are about religious associations, and as this is the majority of the definitions presented, I'm going to wager that Bush sees the marriage as a religiously based institution. If the separation of church and state is still in the constitutional books as well, the sacredness of marriage would seem to be a very bad reason for supporting a heterosexual monogamous legal interpretation of it. There might be other, better reasons, perhaps, but those are not the ones Bush is engaging in creating this new wedge issue for the election year.

So let's see what the religious connections of marriage might be in the president's own religious tradition, Protestant Christianity. (My source for this very rapid survey is Marilyn Yalom's A History of the Wife, an entertaining book, but also relatively well researched. Still, remember that this is kitchen-table theorizing, not an academic thesis, and my discussion will not be complete.)

The Bible is a problematic source for the interpretation of marriage as sacred. Though quotes can be found to support this view, the Bible is also rife with stories about the acceptability of incest, about men with hundreds of wives, and the New Testament, in particular, sets celibacy above the married state:

"The unmarried man cares for the Lord's business; his aim is to please the Lord. But the married man cares for worldly things; his aim is to please his wife, and he has a divided mind...The married woman cares for worldly things; her aim is to please her husband."(I Corinthians 7:32-34)

The early Christians were pretty much opposed to marrying, and deplored its necessity for the sake of procreation. This didn't change until the Middle Ages when the Catholic Church in Europe gradually took over the jurisdiction over marriage. Marriage was declared a sacrament (a ceremony through which one obtained God's grace) in the Council of Trent in 1563. As far as I know, it is still so regarded in the Catholic Church. But this didn't mean that marriage was regarded as 'sacred' in the sense of being revered. Celibacy was still the highest state humans could reach. Saint Jerome, for example, stated:

"Let married women take their pride in coming next after virgins."

Ok. But what about the Protestants? G.W. Bush is not a Catholic, he is a Methodist. This is what Yalom writes about Martin Luther's views on marriage:

[In 1520], in his "Prelude on the Babylonian Captivity of the Church" Luther argues that marriage is not a sacrament - a religious ceremony of sacred significance. He and like-minded reformers reduced the seven Catholic sacraments to three; only baptism, penance and the Eucharist remained, since they were mentioned in the Bible and considered necessary for salvation. But this did not mean that marriage was to be any less significant in the life of a Christian. On the basis of Scripture - always his ultimate test on the matters of faith - Luther recommended it to everyone, both priest and layman."

Everyone? Luther recommended marriage to everyone. Think about that in the current context.

Well, in any case, by the second quarter of the sixteenth century the nonsacramental nature of marriage had become a common Protestant doctrine. I don't think George has a leg to stand on here, if 'sacred' is defined as 'sacramental'.

But maybe he was using 'sacred' in the last three senses of Webster's definition: as 'regarded with reverence', 'secured against violation' and 'properly immune from interference'? Marriage is under assault, after all, from all sorts of unsuitable people who want to get married, too. In fact, I think that if marriage truly is 'sacred' in this sense, then we all should do our utmost to keep it that way. Nobody I have ever met is pure enough to get married. The sacredness of marriage requires a constitutional amendment that bans people from getting married at all. Only this way will the institution of marriage remain what it was intended to be: holy.

Rara Avis, Part IV (George Will)

George Will is another conservative columnist. I'm fixated on them, it seems. He caught my beady eye with his recent innovative column which argues that seriousness in American politics requires the weeding out of all feminization. This was in short order followed by another column explaining that Democrats are that way because they like to live off the government, whereas Republicans are all brave individualists. Given that he lives in a country which has one of the lowest percentages of female participation in politics among the developed world, and in which the Republican-voting states show a net gain from government transfers while the Democrat-voting states are net payers-in, George is clearly another rare bird who flies in skies unrelated to this mundane planet. Something worth a little study.

This is what I found in my Will-watching. George has been a major conservative voice in the media since 1973, and he is currently syndicated in over 450 newspapers. He appears regularly in the Washington Post, the Newsweek and on ABC's This Week.He is respected as an antidote to all those braying, hyperbolic, conservative voices. He is seen as serious, soft-spoken and intelligent, an 'honest broker of ideas', a sort of 'affirmative action case' for the brainy in the Republican party, a token boy for those who'd like some evidence with their weekly vitriol.

Everything is relative in the media, of course. Will may indeed come across as a careful researcher when Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter are used as a basis for comparisons. But his efforts would not always qualify for a passing-grade student essay in a sophomore course on politics, sociology or economics. Here's an example of some of the problems in the way Will uses his sources. It is based on one of his 2002 columns called "Feminism Hijacked". This might be a book review of Christine Stolba's Lying in a Room of One's Own: How Women's Studies Textbooks Miseducate Students, if Will actually reviewed the book instead of giving us an extremely condensed, approving summary of it.

Let's pretend that we are to grade Will's essay. The first thing to raise an alarm flag is the way he begins:

"Christine Stolba, a history PhD and senior fellow at the indispensable Independent Women's Forum (IWF), recently steeled herself for the ordeal of reading a lot of meretricious rubbish. The result is her report, "Lying in a Room of One's Own: How Women's Studies Textbooks Miseducate Students." It is published by the IWF, a voice for women unlike those who have hijacked feminism."

Notice that no evidence is offered for the 'indispensability' of the Independent Women's Forum, a girl's auxiliary of the extreme right wing. I, for one, could easily dispense with them. And if the IWF is a voice for women unlike those who have hijacked feminism, then I'm a voice for George Walker Bush.

Still, Will is writing an opinion column, so his partiality may be understandable. Opinion columnists, unlike news reporters, don't have to pretend to be objective, as we all know. But what about his superior use of evidence? The only evidence this column uses is Stolba's book. There is no attempt to verify her claims by using independent information. This wouldn't be good news for my hypothetical sophomore student with a similarly structured paper submitted for an academic grade.

The poor student would get another demerit from the way Will quotes from the textbooks Stolba criticizes:

"What Stolba calls the "women-under-siege" theme -- what one of the textbooks calls the "matrix of domination" -- is impervious to evidence. As one book insists: "The overall effect of the twentieth century on women was neither liberation nor gender equality as much as it was change in the nature and meaning of their fragmentation."

What are these 'one books'? Don't they have titles and authors? No, I'm afraid that Will the student would have to rewrite his essay.

To title the column "Hijacking Feminism" and to end it with the statement "How feminism has fallen" is a tiny bit overgeneralizing, as the body of the column talks about one person's views on several textbooks used in women's studies courses. There's a big leap from women's study textbooks to feminism and an even bigger leap from Christine Stolba's opinions of the same to the current state of the feminist movement.

I haven't read Stolba's book and I have never taken a single women's studies course, so I can't judge the veracity of her arguments. But I would suggest to Will the student that he might also consider how university level courses routinely assign many different readings, some describing one extreme set of beliefs and others describing the other extreme. The point about a university education is, after all, to learn critical thinking. I could probably make up lists of wildly deranged quotes from the readings in all sorts of university courses, and by a stint of careful writing make them all seem like something out of the worst conservative's or progressive's nightmare. In fact, I could do the same with the contents of this blog. And I would, if someone paid me the sorts of fees George Will routinely collects.

Not all these fees are for the honest brokerage of ideas in his well-researched, intellectual columns. Recent revelations suggest that Will may have unusual ideas about journalistic ethics. One fee he collected was $25,000 per day of consultations in the informal international board of advisers of Hollinger International, a newspaper company owned by the media baron Conrad Black. Nothing wrong with this. But then he wrote a column which described a speech Black made in favorable terms. When asked if his monetary relationship with Hollinger International should have been revealed to his readers, George replied that he saw no reason to do so and that:

""My business is my business," he said. "Got it?""

I got it. The rules are not only different for Republicans and Democrats, something to be expected in a conservative opinion writer, but also for George Will and everybody else. In fact, George has a long history of practising according to his very own journalistic ethics:

"During the 1980 campaign, he drew fire when it was learned he'd secretly coached Republican candidate Ronald Reagan for a debate with President Jimmy Carter using a debate briefing book stolen from the Carter campaign. Immediately following the debate, Will appeared on Nightline (10/28/80) to praise Reagan's "thoroughbred performance," never disclosing his role in rehearsing that performance (New York Times, 7/9/83)."

"During the 1996 campaign, Will caught some criticism for commenting on the presidential race while his second wife, Mari Maseng Will, was a senior staffer for the Dole presidential campaign. Defending a Dole speech on ABC News (1/28/96), Will, according to Washingtonian (3/96), "failed to mention.… that his wife not only counseled Dole to give the speech but also helped write it." Similarly, a Will column criticizing Clinton for proposing tariffs on Japanese luxury cars (5/19/95) included no mention that Maseng Will's public relations firm had received almost $200,000 from the Japanese Automobile Manufacturers Association. When asked, Will defiantly dismissed any need for disclosure, declaring (Washington Post, 5/23/95), "I was for free trade long before I met my wife.""

Maybe honest brokers of ideas don't need disclosure? Maybe historians who do good research don't need to quote alternative sources? Maybe I'm far too hard on George just because I don't like his opinions? Who knows. But in doing the research for this essay, I did find something about George Will that has long been overlooked: his warm-heartedness. To see what I mean, carefully read the following quote:

"Will suffered another ethical lapse in the 2000 campaign when he met with George W. Bush just before the Republican candidate was to appear on ABC's This Week. Later, in a column (Washington Post, 3/4/01), Will admitted that he'd met with Bush to preview questions, not wanting to "ambush him with unfamiliar material." In the meeting, Will provided Bush with a 3-by-5 card containing a crucial question he would later ask the candidate on the air."

Set aside, for the time being, the question whether Will was ethically justified in helping the other George out. Now, isn't it really quite sweet how he came to the aid of a candidate who was probably quaking in his boots with stage fright? George Will, the concerned human being! Now that's what I call a rara avis!
-----------------------------------------

This post is a part of a (possibly unending) series. The earlier ones are:
Rara Avis, Part I (Wendy McElroy), Part II (Rush Limbaugh) and Part III (Laura Schlessinger)

The Key to Internet Fame

Now I know! To become a celebrated, widely-googled bloggist, all you have to do is to mention certain words relating to male and female anatomy. Let me see...

Would these work, too: "Thepenismightierthanthesword"?
"Twoabreastisthewaytomarch"?

Probably not. Well, I've had my fifteen minutes' worth in any case.

The Breast

Instead of writing about all the important, serious and upsetting news in this world, I am going to write about The Breast. It belongs to Janet Jackson, though similar versions are widely known to exist elsewhere. They are part of the female anatomy, and the ultimate reason why humans belong to the group mammals.

The Breast was revealed during the halftime show of this year's Superbowl, the final match in the American football season. Two performers, Janet Jackson and Justing Timberlake, were singing a duet:

"...with Timberlake singing, "Rock Your Body," and the lines he sang at the moment of truth were: "I'm gonna have you naked by the end of this song."
With that, Timberlake reached across Jackson's leather gladiator outfit and pulled off the covering to her right breast, which was partially obscured by a sun-shaped, metal nipple decoration.
The network quickly cut away from the shot, and did not mention the exposure on the air."

Was this intended, a choreographed part of the act, or just an unfortunate wardrobe mistake ? Surely the answer to this question matters. The Breast does not belong to the American public; it belongs to Janet Jackson, and if she was stripped without her consent in front of millions of viewers she's likely to feel a little bit outraged. On the other hand, maybe she was in on the stunt. I cannot tell, not having been present myself.

What I can tell is that everybody feels very apologetic about this revelation. Some examples:

""CBS deeply regrets the incident," spokeswoman LeslieAnne Wade said."

"MTV, CBS' corporate cousin in Viacom, issued a contrite statement in which it also apologized, saying the incident was "unrehearsed, unplanned, completely unintentional and was inconsistent with assurances we had about the content of the performance." "

"Timberlake said he did not intend to expose Jackson's breast.
"I am sorry that anyone was offended by the wardrobe malfunction during the halftime performance of the Super Bowl," Timberlake said in a statement. "It was not intentional and is regrettable."

Lots of apologies, none of them directed at Janet Jackson. So either she was in on the stunt or everybody involved suffers from the idea that the dangers in baring The Breast are all to do with its sudden and devastating impact on the viewers, not on the woman whose body part it happens to be. Even if the whole thing was preplanned, an appearance of sincerity in the apologies would have required that at least one of them be directed to the woman who was most affected by this exposure.

It's something very powerful, The Breast. Even breastfeeding in public raises deep primal fears in some people. The Superbowl is marketed as a family-oriented show, and revealing a naked breast to children is an indecency (well, except, of course, when they are small enough to be still breast-fed). Hence the outrage, the planned FCC investigation into this event, and all the apologies. Except to Janet Jackson, of course.

If totally preplanned, the way in which Jackson's breast was revealed and her reaction to it convey an additional message: It's ok to disrobe women in public as long as they pretend to be shocked by it. "No" means "yes" and so on. Not the development most feminists would like to see in the honesty of communication about sex between men and women. But then the Superbowl halftime isn't exactly the earthly paradise of gender equality.
------
Postscript: The incident seems to have been 'sort of planned but sort of not'. And Jackson apologized, too. But this was an unfortunate choice of words from Michael Powell, the head of the FCC:

"Powell told CNN he was not convinced the incident was an accident.
"Clearly somebody had knowledge of it. Clearly it was something that was planned by someone," he said. "She probably got what she was looking for." "

Verrry unfortunate, I'd say.

Something Fun for Sunday

These are sayings of Swedish children. Daniel gave me their source: Gamla tanter lägger inte ägg([old] Aunties don't lay eggs) by Mark Levengood and Unni Lindell. Read also the ones that Daniel added in the comments.

On Human Bodies

1. The most important part of us is the toes. They are used for steering.(Mattias, 6)
2. The bodies of ghosts are not made of flesh. They are made of sheet material. (Olav, 5)
3. The nose is actually a muscle for breathing, but it can also be used to transport snot.(Emil, 6)
4. If you walk in the woods and your brains fall out, you won't be able to find your way home
because you can't think clearly. (Marten, 4)
5. If we had no bones we would be reptiles, and shoe stores wouldn't sell very much.(Mikael,6)
6. The brains are for keeping the hair attached. (Nina, 5)
7. People have many sorts of skins. The foreskin is in the front, the backskin is in the back.
(Therese, 6)
8. If you have no nerves you work better and run more errands. (Harald, 7)
9. My mom is awfully pretty; she has such long tits. (Mia, 4)
10. The stomach is very important. If we didn't have it, food would run down our legs. (Lars, 6)

On Animals

1. The cows which are the friskiest and shake their udders the most make youghurt.(Allan, 5)
2. The body of animals usually lies behind the head and the paws hang on the underside. (Ketja, 6)
3. The name of the dog's mother is dog and the name of the dog's father is dog and the children's name is puppy and the dog's name is dog. (Allan, 5)
4. Mother's name is hen and father's name is male, the children are lambs and the grandchildren are eggs. (Stefan, 6).

On Religions

1. When God died, he was allowed into heaven like all the others. So there he stayed. (Erik, 5)
2. Jesus was first a pupa, then a bug, then he grew wings and became a god. (Kate, 6)
3. Only the soul dies. The body continues living. (Elisabeth, 7)
4. When you die you get an eternal life. This means that when you die once, you can't die again ever, even if you die one more time. (Elena, 9)
5. When it is twelve o'clock, everybody turns towards Mecca and chews on the fringes of the
carpet. (Raymond, 7)

On Grandparents

1. Grandma was in great-grandma's belly, mom was in grandma's belly and I was in mom's
belly. But I have nothing in my belly except meatballs. (Helene, 6)
2. A grandma is an auntie who used to be a mother when she was a child. (Caroline, 6)
3. A grandma is the one out of which the whole family came. So it is no wonder that her skin
is a little loose. (Kristina, 7)
4. Grandpa lies under a tombstone. We pat him on the stone and once we dug some onions
into the ground so that he'd have something to bite. (Siri, 5)
5. A mother-in-law is a grandmother who is not the mother of the person in question.(Hannele, 6)
6. A mother-in-law is what you get for marrying a stranger. (Pal, 7)

Curiouser and Curiouser

Did you know that 8,279 voters in the New Hampshire Republican primaries wrote a Democrat's name on their ballots? In fact,

U.S. Senator John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, who won the Democratic primary, came in second to Bush in the Republican contest, winning 3,009 votes. Kerry name was written in on almost 5 percent of all GOP ballots.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if this presaged the beginning of a new era of sanity in New Hampshire and, cross your fingers, even in the rest of the country? Probably not. But it's always good to dream.

Blog Touring

Here's a short travel guide to the Liberal Coalition blogs and a few others:

First, both Steve Gilliard and Stradiotto are feeling poorly. Best wishes for speedy recovery. You are needed back.

Second, the Democratic primaries are the hot topic as might be expected. Corrente has a good analysis of the treatment the 'cool' media of television gives to Dean's 'hot' candidacy, Respectful of Otters reminds us that Dean is just acting like physicians do, Trish Wilson discusses the Diane Sawyer interview of the Deans and also doubts whether the two parties are any different at all for the majority of voters. Chris Brown reminds us that Dean still has the most delegates, and Bark Bark Woof Woof considers the desirability of a continuing Dean campaign.

Dean is not the only candidate people write about. The Clonecone blog looks at Lieberman's position in the race and wonders if anybody wants him there, and dohiy mir tells us why he doesn't want to vote for Kerry.

Choices for everybody, right? And if you like something more general on the primaries, Amy at blogAmy gives a good assessment of several of the candidates. If this is too serious, go and play the game with the Democratic debate points at And Then...

Third, looking at the policies of president Bush is ever popular. MercuryX23 notes that people in Iraq don't much matter to the administration, while upyernoz at Rubber Hose writes about what does matter in Iraq for the president: the proper timing of shifting power for maximal election benefits at home. Edwardpig urges people to vote against Bush and praises the administration whistleblowers, and Invisible Library tells us why librarians and reading suffer under the current administration. Gotham City13 interprets the Bush interview in Poland for us ordinary folks. The Fulcrum is astonished that a journalist actually pressed Condi Rice for an answer on an important question, though she refused, and Collective Sigh thinks that Cheney will be dumped.

Fourth, humor is also to be had on the LC blogs, or at least good discussions of it. Speedkill watched Dennis Miller's inaugural show on CNBC and it wasn't funny, and Pen-Elayne has a good discussion on why something is funny and why it's not.

Finally, Rook has a wonderful rant! Also, don't miss the interesting discussion on manliness at Alas, A Blog.

The Manly Art of Politics

From one extreme end of the political spectrum (George Will in the Washington Post) to the other (Richard Goldstein in the Nation) the pundits and talking heads seem to agree: Politics Is A Manly Man's Game. Neither writer finds this particularly disconcerting, probably because they are both men. It's nice to have a game all for yourself and to point out that it's because you are better at it.

The only problem with this is, of course, that politics is not a parlour-game, but supposedly the manner in which we take care of our shared concerns. Or is that just propaganda to be fed to the not-so-manly men and all women?

Be as it may, these otherwise completely different political writers are now unanimous in their demands for macho or butch politicians, men bristling with body hair, anger and competitiveness. George Will quotes a writer called Carnes Lord who argues that leadership

"... presupposes some element of "such traditionally manly qualities as competitiveness, aggression or, for that matter, the ability to command.""

There you have it. Woman can't lead because they don't have the manly qualities of competitiveness, aggression or, for that matter, the ability to command. Well, except for the tiny fact that Will provides no evidence of the absence of these qualities in women, and except for the tiny fact that anybody who grew up a girl knows all about womanly competitiveness, aggression and even the ability to lead.

"Can a Democrat be an alpha male?" asks Richard Goldstein in his rambling Nation article. Goldstein sees the popularity of the Republican party among white men as caused by a successful campaign to interpret political issues in symbolic terms as a battle between the white men and everybody else; a war waged to either maintain their supremacy in the society or to end it. And the Republicans are on the side of the white dude, whereas the Democrats are against him. That's why, according to Goldstein, only 22% of white men identify as Democrats.

George Will goes even further:

"New Hampshire confirmed what Iowa intimated. Democrats who are serious about the candidates' electability understand that seriousness requires a retreat from the feminization of politics.

That explains Democrats' short-lived flirtation with Wesley Clark, the empty uniform who, were a Democrat now president, probably would be on the right flank of Republicans running this year. And the Democrats' movement away from feminization explains John Kerry's brisk forward march, with a military cadence.

Kerry's "patrician aloofness" may be manly reticence. But he has embraced today's confessional ethos by making autobiography serve as political philosophy and reducing his narrative to a war story. Riding his Harley, gunning for Iowa pheasants and playing hockey in New Hampshire have expressed his campaign's subtext: manliness."

A retreat from the feminization of politics is what we need now according to Will? Hmmm. What's the number of women in the U.S. Congress again? How many female American presidents can you list? How many are running for the job of the next president? How much feminization of politics would be acceptable to Will? One percent? Or even less?

Goldstein doesn't pretend that politics has somehow suddenly been feminized, but he does have other odd ideas. For one, he thinks that the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center Towers has a clear symbolic significance as an attack on traditional masculinity (never mind that the attackers also were men, never mind that women also died in this atrocity, never mind that this utterly trivializes the real human suffering that took place), and that this attack reinforces our desire for a strong Daddy to lead and protect us. And presumably the new phallic symbol that will be erected in the place of the destroyed Towers.

Because Will is a conservative, he's quite comfortable with a plan to masculinize politics even further. Because Goldstein is not, he adds the obligatory nod to us non-macho readers at the end of his article:

"We may resent the fact that Americans regard the penis and its symbolic projections as synonymous with strength. But the psychic reality cannot be denied. At this moment, most voters are looking for a leader who reassures them with a manly presentation. The trick is to be the man women admire, blacks find credible and white guys bond with. It's a hard job, but someone's got to do it or Bush will ride the backlash to the White House - with a real mandate this time."

And what is the backlash that will take Bush back to the White House? It's not obvious from Goldstein's article, unless he means the need to protect our phallic symbols. I wonder if this bit is from an older article, written about 2000. Never mind, in comparison to Will's feverish ramblings (do read them if you doubt me) Goldstein comes across clear as water. Sort of.

Now, as I have no penis handy myself, I do resent the 'fact' that Americans regard the penis as synonymous with strength. Maybe I should strike Will and Goldstein down with my divine feminine pinky, just to remind them not to make simplistic stereotyping generalizations at the expense of real critical thought. Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Elizabeth the First of England, Catharine the Great of Russia and many other woman leaders in history show that strength is not only a manly characteristic. Women can be competitive, aggressive and ruthless, and men can be cooperative, kind and merciful. Human beings have access to all sorts personality traits, and to assume that they are solely determined by what might be found between the legs is preposterous and insulting. And not only insulting to women, as may have been the intention of these articles, but also to men and especially white men whom Goldstein at least regards as immature teenagers permanently worried about the next erection and its size and unable to differentiate their own human worth from such considerations.

Does This Work?

The next post below this one is intended to reveal my soft side, the subtle feminine touches of appreciating beauty in a snowflake and the admiration one feels when ones long scaly snaketail whips up lovely filigrees in the freshly-fallen snow. I hope it works to balance my public image. It better work, for my future plans for posts are a bit fangy.

An Introduction to Winter

On a winter night when it's snowing, go out, turn your head up and stick out your tongue. Taste the snowflakes melting on your tongue. If there's already enough snow on the ground, lie down on your back and look at the sky. Are there stars? Northern lights? Then move your straight legs and arms up and down as far as they go. Get up carefully, and admire your artwork. You have just created a buttangel! You could make a whole row of these, a chorus to sing the ode to winter. If you are a man, you could also write them a song to sing in the snow.

Next, make a snow lantern if the snow balls easily in your hands. Make nine snowballs and set them in a tight circle on the ground. Place another seven snowballs above the first eleven, slightly inwards and inbetween the first balls. Continue with five and then three. Slip a lighted candle or tealight down through the whole that remains, and cap the whole with one perfect snowball. You could have a row of snowlights leading to your door, inviting the spirits of winter in, or just partyguests if you prefer.

Find a piece of corrugated cardboard and a hill where children go sledding. If you are shy, wait until they have gone to bed. Sit on your cardboard and slide down the hill. Don't forget to scream. Then try it on your back, head first.

Go home and make a SnowBush. The principle is the same as in making snowmen. Use pebbles for eyes, nostrils and teeth. Use larger stones to pelt the SnowBush down.

On a clear winter morning, take a walk. Look at the architecture of nature, its spare, elegant bones, the beauty of the bodies of trees, the contrasting plushness of winter animals and birds. Notice the colors that hide in what first seems starkly black and white: the silvers and faint burgundies, the pinks and icy blues, the colored shadows of tree trunks and boulders, and then the sudden thrill of the blood-red berries on bare branches.

Then go back to your warm home, anticipating a hot cup of chocolate or a glass of cider with a cinnamon stick, and the warmth that will slowly seep back into your fingers and cheeks while your eyes will retain the shine and brightness of winter.

The Jobless Recovery Is Just Fine!

So says an editorial in the Washington Post, a central player in the great liberal media conspiracy. Such editorials are a goddess-send to us weary bloggers, even when they are anonymous as this one is. And no, I didn't write it just to have something to laugh at, but I almost wish I had.

The editorial tells us to look at the bright side of the jobless recovery. It points out that the current unemployment is largely structural rather than cyclical (i.e., based on a mismatch with the changed needs of the economy and the existing skills and education of the workers rather than on a drop in aggregate demand caused by recessions). It then interprets this as joyous news:

"But the bigger question is whether jobless recoveries are a bad thing. They are, after all, the flip side of good news. There is less cyclical unemployment these days, so recessions are milder; fewer jobs are being created now because fewer jobs were destroyed during the downturn. Moreover, a jobless recovery means, by definition, that each worker is producing more. Higher productivity, in turn, is the best promise possible of higher wages and employment in the future."

The first two sentences in this quote are equivalent to saying that it would be a good thing if cancer was a larger percentage of all illnesses and if the relative percentage of influenza sufferers decreased correspondingly. We could then avoid getting the flu every winter, because we would all be dead from cancer or barely surviving chemotherapy. Whatever will the so-called liberal media say next?

Well, the editorial says next that it's great how each worker still working in a jobless recovery is producing more, or rather, working harder. Then it makes a subtle shift to a different reality, and continues by stating that:

"Higher productivity, in turn, is the best promise possible of higher wages and employment in the future."

That each worker might be producing more does NOT necessarily mean that worker productivity per hour of work is up. People may simply be working much longer hours just to keep their jobs. And no, dear Anonymous, higher worker productivity does NOT mean that earnings will automatically rise. There's a large number of workers out there who'd like a stab at any job, many of them in places like India and China, and this reserve will keep wages low. Besides, employers have market power in many labor markets, and they can use this power to keep wages and employment lower. Workers, on the other hand, have very little power, what with us having gotten rid of the evil trade unions.

Read the whole thing tonight instead of the cartoons page in your local newspaper. It's worth it.

Poetry For Today

The New Hampshire primaries have taken the limelight away from George W. Bush. I want to give some of it back to him. Here it goes:

This following poem is composed entirely of actual quotes from George W. Bush. It was compiled and arranged by Washington Post writer Richard Thompson.

Make the Pie Higher

I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It's a world of madmen
And uncertainty
And potential mental losses.

Rarely is the question asked
Is our children learning?
Will the highways of the internet
Become more few?
How many hands have I shaked?

They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.
I know that the human being and the fish
Can coexist.

Families is where our nation finds hope
Where our wings take dream.
Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher!
Make the pie higher!

Malpractice Awards - The Cause of High Health Care Costs?

You may be forgiven for believing so if you listened to president Bush speak on Monday in Arkansas. He blamed the malpractice system for high medical care costs. One of his main arguments was this:

""Hear me out on this: (unnecessary lawsuits) drive docs to prescribe drugs and procedures that may not be necessary, just to avoid lawsuits. That's called the defensive practice of medicine.""

And all this defensive yet unnecessary medicine costs more, thus causing the health care expenses to rise. Or so says the president.

What to do about this? The Republicans and the American Medical Association, AMA (sort of like a trade union for physicians) favor caps on malpractice awards, or at least the part of the awards that goes to compensate the victim for pain and suffering. Bush also seems to believe that there are too many:

""junk" lawsuits [that] cost taxpayers because they drive the federal government's health care costs up by $28 billion a year."."

Does this mean that we should reduce the patients' ability to sue their providers and limit the total awards to some smaller sum than is currently possible? In other words, should we get rid of 'frivolous' law suits and 'excessive' awards? And would this then reduce the costs of health care?

To answer these questions, it's good to know why we have a system of medical malpractice suits in the first place. Its major goals are to compensate the victims of medical malpractice and to discourage doctors, hospitals and other medical providers from committing acts of malpractice; malpractice beind defined as acts of omission (not doing the correct thing) and acts of commission (doing the incorrect thing). If we make suing doctors and hospitals harder, and if we reduce the awards going to the victims, we'll cut back on the probability that the victim will be adequately compensated and we'll increase the probability that a negligent doctor or hospital will get away with this negligence altogether. What other safety precautions would the president apply to protect the victims and to deter future malpractice? I see none in the proposals.

Oh, but we are told that many of the current malpractice suits are frivolous. Maybe then it would be acceptable to cut back a little on the patients' rights and the providers' restraints? Maybe. But consider the results from a study carried out by the Harvard School of Public Health in the 1990s: The researchers retrospectively studied the actual medical records of hospital patients in New York state during the mid-1980's, and found out that medical malpractice had taken place in one admission out of each one hundred. Only a tenth of those affected by malpractice had actually sued their practitioners, and less than one half of this tenth won their cases. In summary, only five per cent of those with a good case had actually been awarded malpractice compensation.

Now, it's possible that many patients also sue without proper cause, given that roughly 40% of all doctors will be sued at least once during their lifetimes. Some suits are indeed frivolous, and some frivolous suits get awards because of the inherent randomness of the legal process. It would be nice to reduce these suits while retaining and even encouraging the rights of those with a real grievance to sue. The trick is how to do this.

What about the large court awards for medical malpractice? The average award size has grown over the years, that's true. President Bush sees the cause for this in the greedy trial lawyers who take cases on contingency basis (client pays nothing if the suit is unsuccessul, then a certain percentage of the total award for successful cases): the bigger the award, the more the lawyers get paid.

"Lawyers walk away with up to 40 percent - 40 percent! - of every settlement and verdict," Bush said."

The legal system is indeed a pretty inefficient way of compensating the victims. The problem is that the Bush alternative would not only reduce some of these inefficiencies but also reduce the patients' ability to seek compensation. As an example, if contingency suits are banned, poor patients will find it very hard to procure legal help, as they need to be able to pay whether the suit is successful or not.

The president may have spoken against trial lawyers for political reasons, but he was silent about other reasons for the high malpractice awards for reason of ignorance, most likely. The awards are not high simply because lawyers are seeking maximal payments for themselves. They are also high because doctors and hospitals carry insurance against malpractice awards, and the juries know that the money they allow to the victims is not coming from the pockets of the individual provider standing in the dock, but from anonymous, big and wealthy insurance companies. No need to cry for the lost educational opportunities of the poor doctor's children, or to fear that a small local hospital will shut down due to the financial problems of paying the award.

The whole existence of medical malpractice insurance is an anomaly. Insurance is supposed to protect us against unforeseen random events outside our influence. Surely malpractice is none of those things. Strictly speaking, malpractice insurance makes no economic sense. Its existence protects doctors, hospitals and other medical providers, true, but we don't in general sell people insurance against their own mistakes or crimes.

One unintended consequence of the malpractice insurance system is the protection it offers to the true 'rotten eggs' in the medical professions. Only a small number of doctors, for example, is responsible for most large awards; yet all doctors help them out by subsidizing them through malpractice insurance. This is not good for the goal of discouraging providers from committing further malpractice, and it makes nonnegligent doctors and hospitals take the side of those who actually should not be allowed to practice any longer. Something that should have been seen as a fault-based approach to compensating the victims and punishing the offenders has now been transformed into a general business problem for all doctors and hospitals.

So yes, the system does need urgent reforms. Whether the ones president Bush is backing are in fact the right ones is highly debatable. I believe that we are at risk of throwing away the baby (compensating victims and deterring further malpractice) while keeping the bathwater (high health care costs).

And what about the bathwater? According to the president, we would save lots of money if physicians no longer had to practise defensive medicine. Actually, studies have shown that whatever is said by the politicians, doctors don't practise that defensively to begin with. This makes sense as most malpractice studies are not about something the doctor didn't do (omission), but about something the doctor may have done wrong (commission). Doing more things on top of something that's wrong isn't going to reduce the likelihood that a provider will be sued. Given the absence of evidence on any current costs of defensive medicine, we can't assume that the health care costs would be lowered by changes in the malpractice awards system.

Reducing the size of the payments could decrease the doctors' insurance payments, of course. It's a totally different question whether doctors would pass these savings to their patients or not.

On Shopping

I have a sin to confess: I don't like shopping. No, I don't just not-like it; I HATE IT! Have hated it for years.

I wish I were a man. Men are not given the commandment to "shop until you drop", men are not held to blame when the economy collapses due to "loss in consumer confidence" (read: due to women buying less). Nonshopping men are not regarded as evolutionary failures. Rather, men have the much more pleasant duty to make up bad jokes about shopaholic women. I wish I were a man.

But the fact is that I am a woman who hates shopping. We never have any food in the house. We have a house we have long since outgrown. I wear my clothes until they fall into shreds, when my long-suffering husband goes out and buys me some new ones in varying, approximately correct sizes. And still I will not repent or reform. Not even when our president told us that the war against terrorism depended on my shopping.

Oh, but I tried! I tried. But I never got past the first step in my twelve-step program: admitting that I hate shopping. Medications failed to work; having the prescriptions filled would have meant going out to buy them. My Freudian therapist thought that I suffered from insufficient consumption envy, my cognitive one urged me to rethink shopping until I realized I had a previously unrecognized phobia concerning internet sales sites. At last I could no longer face the thought of shopping for a new therapist.

This can't go on. I am falling apart under the pressure. My husband, loving and supportive all through this unending ordeal, is developing ulcers from the unnatural, unmanly position he has been forced to take as the main consumer in the family. My friends seldom visit us anymore, and when they do I hear them whispering to each other, pointing out the absence of bunny-decorated kitchen towels, dried flower arrangements, food.

I have a recurring nightmare: There is a knock on the door, presaging the entry of the stern agents from the Consumer Interest Association. Gigabites of their computers are filled by my case: the Public Enemy Number One, a woman denying her proper womanly role, a consumer abstaining from consumption, a citizen refusing to participate in this most sacred sphere of our shared capitalistic concerns. I wake up screaming:"What are you going to do with me?"

What they might do with me doesn't bear thinking about. Oh, don't doubt for one moment that I wouldn't accept whatever fate it might be; I know that it is people like me who are slowly destroying the country our founding fathers made so great. If they ever come for me I shall go without resistance.

But in the meantime I still hate shopping.