Freedom from Religion

Freedom of religion is a fine thing. Freedom from other people's religion would be equally wonderful, but I don't know any country in this world that constitutionally guarantees this important right. Even the Christians who were eaten by the lions in the Roman amphitheater would agree with me on this one. So would anyone who has had a Jehova's witness tell her that she is a whore because all women are (this happened to me) or a Christian children's book seller tell him that his children are going to hell if he won't dole out some cash for the books (this happened to a friend of mine), or anyone who works with one of those religious missionaries, always trying to convert anything that moves (this happens to everybody).

More importantly, many if not most world religions have unfriendly words to say on the topic of women, and fundamentalists who take the two-thousand old writings as literal divine truth can really make women's lives horrible, whether these women belong to the same religion or not. We all know what went on in Afghanistan, and there's probably a plan for a 'kinder, gentler' Taliban somewhere in John Ashcroft's private papers. He'll get to it some time in the next four years if he's not stopped. His right to be a Pentecostal is guaranteed in this country, but my right not to be treated like his religion believes women should be treated is not. A big problem.

Here, my dear reader, you might wonder why I'm worried about all this, given that I'm a goddess myself, and can easily smite anyone who irritates me. The answer is that I'm a Fair and Righteous Goddess, and I do not like injustice. Besides, I'm half a woman and half a snake, and you can guess what Ashcroft would think of this. So I want to stop him.

I'd also like to stop all the other religious fanatics who want to wage war and kill people through vile and despicable acts of terrorism and state terrorism. Most real people are inbetween these terrible armies, and it's these real people that largely get killed in this religious war. Because of someone else's religion or someone else's interpretation of religion. What would Jesus say about this? God? Allah? Unfortunately, the ancient texts contain whatever you're looking for in them, having been compiled over periods of some hundreds of years by people with varying political opinions. We need a revelation, desperately. If none of the Big Guys speak up soon, I need to organize something that might look like a real revelation.

In the meantime, I worry. See what president Bush just contributed towards the idea of a holy war:

Yet Bush, by embracing Sharon's own unilateralism, was in effect throwing sand in Muslim faces worldwide. Other than the invasion of Iraq, there's hardly anything Bush could have done to muster even greater support for the worldwide jihad.

What is Bush thinking? There are clues in statements from his press conference. "Now is the time, and Iraq is the place, in which the enemies of the civilized world are testing the will of the civilized world. We must not waver," the president said. Later, he added, "I also have this belief, strong belief, that freedom is not this country's gift to the world. Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom."
Bush came pretty close to proclaiming the fight against radical Islam the divine mission of the United States. He may not have meant that, but you can rest assured that is just how much of the Islamic world will view his comments, especially in light of his actions the next day on behalf of Israel. You can also bet it will be read that way by the American religious right, which sees in defending Israel a way to bring about Armageddon and the second coming of Christ.
We can't know Bush's motives, but it's not difficult to read the effects, and they risk being catastrophic. There are pragmatic reasons why some of what Bush gave Israel Tuesday will be part of a final agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. But it should have come about through negotiations. The way Bush has chosen to do it is essentially saying, again, to radical Islam, "Bring it on."

Reassuring? Not really, unless you belong to one of the two armies who claim to fight for God. If you don't, you better start lobbying for the right of freedom from religion. Other people's religion, that is.

On Gardening

Gardening is one of those things that old ladies with needlepoint bags are supposed to do. Old ladies with needlepoint bags are very wise: gardening is a wonderful activity. I spent an hour outside today, enjoying the spring sunshine and the lovely new baby greens on the trees. It's very good for the soul (if such a thing exists), and if you grab a spade and a rake, it's also very good for the love handles.

You can commune with nature, as they say, or wonder about the deep philosophical questions of life (Why do I feel like eating the shiny and plump worms that appear from the earth as I shovel? Is old dog poop that has gone white and light still good to dig near the peony roots? Could the problems in Iraq be solved by giving every terrorist and soldier a nice little plot to dig in?) And being so close to nature gives a renewed interest in all sorts of botanical and zoological questions: Why do the squirrels replant my tulips every year into one tiny circle, with the tallest ones on the edges? Why are most of the really interesting plants poisonous (mandrake root, foxgloves, lilies of the valley)? What makes dogs want to lie down on the most fragile tips of lilies? Did I really once see an enormous black-and-yellow striped worm appear from the ground after rain, or was this a nightmare caused by excess red wine and cheese feasting the previous night?

I'm planning a Garden of Hate this year. It's going to have a path covered with sharp gravel (shoes are to be left at the gate). Color will come from bright orange marigolds, form from yew trees tortured into the shape of bloated elephants, and scent from skunk cabbages. The path will end at a viewing seat in full sun, made from unplaned rough wood set insecurely on wobbly stones and surrounded by giant Scottish thistles.

I already have the Mars and Venus gardens, you know, one for men and one for women. The Mars garden has stuffed mooseheads suspended from manly trees with narely a leaf and a waterfall made out of beer cans. The planting is mainly of arums (click here if you want to know why). The Venus garden is all pink and frilly without a single straight line, and each flower bed is in the form of a teddy bear. Nobody likes these gardens, which was a great disappointment for me as the books about men being from Mars and women from Venus were so popular. What people like is my sex garden, but I'm not going to write about that one.

Even if you don't have a garden, you should go out and commune with nature once and a while. It reminds us about an important fact of life: it is this earth that our life depends on.


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PS: This is for Daniel: You can build a miniature railway track outside and plant it with tiny plants that look like trees and shrubs from a distance! There's even a nursery that specializes in providing them.

Deep Thought for the Day

If the Rapture comes before November 2004, may I have the White House?

Grading Time

It's final examinations time for a lot of students, and I think that we should have examinations for the politicians and the media, too. An article on president Bush's policy towards Afghanistan and Iraq in the late fall and early winter of 2001 states this:

Following an important meeting on Iraq war planning in late 2001, President Bush told the public that the discussions were about Afghanistan. He made no mention afterward about Iraq even though that was the real focus of the session at his ranch.
"I'm right now focused on the military operations in Afghanistan," Bush told reporters after talks on Dec. 28, 2001, with top aides and generals.
A "war update" was the White House description of the news conference Bush held with Gen. Tommy Franks, who was in charge of the Afghan war as head of U.S. Central Command.
Details of the meeting's focus on Iraq have since emerged in a recent speech by Franks, who now is retired, and in a new book by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.

Now, many of us knew this, of course. It was impossible not to see that the Iraq war plans had been hatched years before the government's initial propaganda campaign on them. But I at least didn't know that Bush was fibbing about what was going on to his employers; and make no mistake about it: the voters are the employers here. What would you do to an employee who isn't working on the project he says he's working on? Or a student who's not answering the question the examination has set? What grade should Bush get here?

And what about the media, the watchdogs of democracy? Do they still deserve that name, or should they be renamed something more suitable, say, the guarddogs of the government. It doesn't matter that we don't have to rely on one state-run information channel when all the different channels that we do have act as if they've been employed to uncritically report on the government's views.

Consider this commentary on the recent press conference president Bush gave:

But no one followed up on Bush's admission that even if he had known Saddam didn't have WMD stockpiles, he still would have pushed the Iraq War! And no one had the courage to challenge the President on his intimidation tactic in response to the first question, which was about the Vietnam comparison. Bush said, "That analogy sends the wrong message to our troops, and sends the wrong message to the enemy." Instead of pointing out how chilling Bush's statement was, the reporters focused on the personal. Five times, they asked him variations of the question: Was he going to apologize, or take responsibility, for any mistakes he might have made? Once would have been enough. This should not have been a personal morality play. It should have been about the fundamental policies of the U.S. government, which right now are jeopardizing the lives of U.S. troops, and, in a profound way, the lives of Americans everywhere. Bush has given only three prime-time news conferences in his Presidency, and reporters lost one of their few opportunities to hold him accountable.

What grade should the journalists get? How well are they informing us about the goings-on in the government? Is democracy kept transparent and safe by the media? Or are all the media outlets nowadays as 'fair and balanced' as the famous Faux News Channel?

I'm angry, as you may have noticed. We demand that ordinary workers work hard and act ethically, we demand that students work hard and don't cheat, but what do we demand of those who really have the power to influence things?Whatever we might demand, what we get is mostly bread and circus. Remember last time that was a governmental policy, in ancient Rome, and what happened next?

A Test to Take - Haven't Had One for Some Time

This is a pretty interesting one, too. It will tell you where you fall within a two-dimensional graph of left-right and authoritarian-libertarian ideas. You can also find out what famous person (read: famous man or Margaret Thatcher) you most resemble. I'm a lot like Gandhi. Again. Well, I look a lot better.

Here's the link.

Thanks are due to lucia in the comments-thread of Alas, a Blog.

The Little Blog That Could?

Blogs are wonderful things to have, but sometimes I wonder what they're good for. Like today. It's a beautiful day, and here I'm sitting in the darkness, with just one drowsy snake around my throat, typing away. I should be outside, causing mischief if nothing else. Instead, I'm talking to emptiness, hoping that something exists out there and will hear and even answer back one day. It's a little bit like spirituality, don't you think? Do you exist? Do I exist? Does it matter if we don't?

Some blogs are gigantic business enterprises, run by a proper Organizational Structure. Some blogs have Experts, and several interesting bloggers. But most blogs are these little amateur affairs: a solitary lunatic typing, typing away, hoping to catch some other eccentric person somewhere. Is there life on earth?

So what are blogs for? Other than providing an outlet for all those extraneous thoughts that don't neatly fit into the daily lives of most of us? I'm not sure. Are the blogs taking over important tasks from the mainstream media by providing alternative sources of news and their interpretations? Definitely, and that's probably all positive, especially if you believe in some free competition in the world of ideas. But most blogs aren't trying to take over the newsdesks of New York Times or similar media sources. Most blogs are just voices in the wilderness, attempts to connect to something or someone, or perhaps just a way to hear your own voice echoing back.

My blog is a very little blog, run by one minor goddess, and in that it shares a sisterhood/brotherhood with the majority of blogs. It's not a nice purebred political blogsite with plenty of venom and outrage (though I do my best), and neither is it really a very good feminist blog. I'm too much of a mongrel for keeping my writing clean enough for any one purpose, and I think that many of us bloggers are like that: neither one thing nor the other. But this makes it hard to define blogs or to put them into tidy boxes, and it also makes for difficulties in competitions for honors such as "The Best New Political Blog of the Year".

Though of course everything has politics in it, and politics has all sorts of other things in it. Maybe this is what the little blogs can do? To point out when our love of taxonomies is not at all helpful, to widen the lens a bit in our views of this world? The little blogs certainly help in letting us hear more voices, and often these are voices which are silenced in the mainstream media. Goddesses, for example.

I'm going out now to listen to some nice Blues. Now, Blues are very political. If you read about the history of this branch of music you get quite a good education on the race relationships of the 20th century USA, as well as an interesting example of the way some women performers were made invisible later on. Writing about this clearly would fall under politics and feminism, but it also would fall under the category 'human activity', and that's the category that the little blogs are really good at.

Enjoy the weekend!

Sean P. O'Malley and the Winds of Change in the Catholic Church

He is the new archbishop of the Catholics in Boston. He was picked for the job after all the sexual molestation trouble the church had had. He's the Clean-up Man, and he has started cleaning. What he is vacuuming away are individualism, materialism and the culture of death. Culture of death is Catholic-speak for being pro-choice.

He also doesn't like the baby boomer generation, those born between 1946 and 1966. Maybe they will be sucked up next into the church's big dustbag? This is what he said about this lost generation:

"The most educated and affluent group in US history," he said, "are heirs to Woodstock, the drug culture, the sexual revolution, feminism, the breakdown of authority, and divorce. Typically, they are religious illiterates, but they are interested. Not big on dogmas. My karma ran over my dogma could be their motto."(Bolds mine.)

Feminism is listed together with all sorts interesting things, drug culture and the breakdown of authority and divorce. The archbishop thinks that equality of the sexes is a bad thing, I gather. And a whole generation of 'the most educated' Americans are religious illiterates. But he didn't say a single word about the sexual abuse of minors.

Elsewhere, rumors are rife that the Vatican is going to limit the use of altar girls. Too many girls want to serve, and not enough boys. To correct this gender imbalance, quotas are going to be put on the girls. See, the church IS interested in gender equity, after all, though of course it has its own ideas of what equity should look like. I wonder what the Virgin would do? Hmmm.

Is this a wind of change blowing? Or the same old northwind that has spread out the churchmen's dresses for centuries?

Friday Canine Blogging

Hail, all fellow canines!
This is Henrietta the Hound, the intelligent feline in this madhouse. The other one hardly bears mentioning among the noble breed of dogs, being a mere Labrador. Everybody knows Labradors are really Laboratory dogs, and the development was never finished. Anyway, she brought home a Bug. From the mud in which she pretends to swim. And gave it to me.

After watching her gorge and vomit, gorge and vomit, I succumbed to the same condition. There's no justice in this world.
I read only the classics, I refuse to obey the lowly humans, I bite butt most efficiently, and what do I get for all this? The same humiliating bug.

But I've nearly finished with the vomiting, and even managed to nibble on a small piece of French toast. This was after an exhausting day of chasing away a woman who pretended to want to change the gas meter, and also successfully chasing away some man in a telephone repair truck. He was yelling about mad dogs as he run away. And then the thankless cur of a goddess threw things at me while screeching something about the telephone lines having been down for days.

Well, nobody told me. All she had to do was a little groveling, and they came back and fixed it all. Luckily I didn't have to go the veterinarian, so it's all the same to me.

The spring is here, which means much more interesting smells. Have you noticed this? Even humans, the poor smell-challenged creatures, seem to sniff more these days. Not that they catch all the intriguing stuff that's going on. I even smell something from the distant Washington D.C.: a whiff of desperation, the bitter smell of scared armpits. Could it be that the right-wing political march is out of lockstep? I would be surprised if the humans got it right this year. They hardly ever do.

Take Clinton. Who should have replaced him? Me, that's who! I'm extremely good-looking and charismatic, I'm very dominant, and I mount all dogs irrespective of sex or which end of the dog it happens to be. If I had been selected, none of the humans' current problems would have existed. And there would have been no Labrador retrievers.

Yours, in solidarity,
Henrietta the Hound, CEO of Snakepit Inc, PhD, DPhil etc.


Postscript: Hah hah ha! I snuck in when she wasn't watching. That's me Hank the Labrador! And I gave her the bug on purpose. She is one of the libural elites, and she should puke! Me, I'm really good again, and yesterday I almost caught a squirrel. It was probably a terrorist or a communist. I'm shedding now! See me shake!
Smooches to everybody!
hANK

Is the Nightmare Over?

As my computer was down I had time to engage in that antiquated activity: reading stuff on paper pages. I re-read the Onion satire from 2000 on the Bush presidency ("Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over'"), and as others have said, what is scary about this satire is that it turned out not to be a satire at all, but a very good forecast of what has actually taken place.

If you don't believe me, read for yourself:

"Bush swore to do "everything in [his] power" to undo the damage wrought by Clinton's two terms in office, including selling off the national parks to developers, going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of the hospitals and onto the street."

If this is satire, it's very weak. Now consider these more detailed predictions:

"During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years."

"On the economic side, Bush vowed to bring back economic stagnation by implementing substantial tax cuts, which would lead to a recession, which would necessitate a tax hike, which would lead to a drop in consumer spending, which would lead to layoffs, which would deepen the recession even further."

Both of these predictions have turned out to be true, though Bush is having the tax hikes done through the state taxes rather than the federal ones. I also found this prediction very relevant:

"Bush had equally high praise for Attorney General nominee John Ashcroft, whom he praised as "a tireless champion in the battle to protect a woman's right to give birth"."

Once again, not satire at all. That's the problem with our current administration: it's pretty much impossible to satirize them by using exaggeration. It just won't work. I know this from personal experience: I once tried writing a satire entitled "The American Right's Advice to Mothers". What I came up with would have been regarded as a serious academic treatise by a very large number of right-wingers. This is most depressing, and yet another reason to vote in a Democratic administration come November.

Computer Trouble

I'm having it. Plus tax trouble. Plus the telephone lines to Snakepit Inc. are down. If you call the repair number, you get connected to number inquiries... And Henrietta the Hound is vomiting all over the property. If you call the veterinarian, you get connected to the local bakery.

For all these reasons I'm now A Goddess In Her Wrath and not very good company. All should be fine tomorrow, though, and I should then be back to my usual wordiness. Happy Tax Day to all my American readers!

On Chairs, Spoons and Toasters, OR: What I Saw in A Dream

How do you write a letter to someone who doesn't want to read it? Doesn't want to read it not because you are an enemy, a nuisance or a guilty reminder but because you are a complete nonentity, a thoroughly uninteresting everyday object, a piece of the background against which heroes do their stuff.

How do you write to people who don't plan to pay any attention? How do you get their attention? Should we cry? 'Look, guys, a chair just walked in and cried!' Should our words be weapons? 'Hey man, that toaster just tried to cut my throat!' Should our sentences plead? 'Gee, I could've sworn that spoon just begged me for understanding.'

No. All it would achieve is a small surprise, the astonishment that an inanimate thing suddenly acts and feels. This would be added to the list of supernormal events. It wouldn't make us seem any less of a chair, toaster or spoon; only an uncommon kind, a weird chair, toaster or spoon. Something that, for one fleeting second, might deserve curiosity. But not for long.

How do you touch someone who doesn't believe in your existence? Can it be done?

And if not, is it enough to talk to the other chairs, toasters and spoons? To write 'chair books', 'toaster stories', to be exhibited with the works of other spoons? Is this of value?

Perhaps. If you know that at night the chairs dance, beautifully, on one leg, twirling around the kitchen, leaping over the toasters which tell stories about their lost loves and vanished hopes, while the spoons drum a rhythm from misty worlds full of desperate questions and complicated answers. Perhaps . Isn't this life, too? Isn't this a sort of heroism, a type of victory in the war against dying? Isn't this human, too?

So why bother trying to reach the others? Because they are the sitters on the chairs, the eaters of the toast, the stirrers of the spoons. Because theirs is the kitchen in which we dance, whisper stories, sigh and cry. And because when they see us and say 'Such a comfortable chair, such an efficient toaster, such an elegant spoon. What would we do without you?' they turn away without expecting an answer, without hearing us scream.

Foot Washing in Atlanta

This has to do with Christian traditions. The Holy Thursday foot-washing ritual commemorates the biblical story of Jesus washing his disciples' feet. Archbishop John Donoghue doesn't like to wash women's feet in this ritual:

A Catholic archbishop has banned women from participating in Holy Thursday foot-washing rituals in Roman Catholic churches in Atlanta.
Archbishop John Donoghue of Atlanta issued a letter to all of his parishes stating that only 12 men at each parish should be selected for the ritual, The Associated Press reported.
The ritual represents Jesus washing the feet of his disciples at the Last Supper and is offered to girls, women, and men in most archdioceses or dioceses around the states. This is the second time, however, that Archbishop Donoghue has banned women from the ritual, issuing a similar ban in Charlotte, N.C. 15 years ago.

This exclusion of women is no longer customary in Catholic churches, but maybe Archbishop Donoghue finds women's feet too stinky? Or maybe including women would deviate too much from the 'religious correctness' required in the event? In that case why not exclude all men of non-Semitic or Roman origin, too?

I think John has got it completely backwards (I can call him John, can't I? Calling him my father would be a lot more insulting for him.). The point in the story about Jesus washing his disciples' feet was a reversal: a teacher much above his disciples is doing a very menial task, a task associated with humility. Why exclude anyone then? Unless, of course, John believes that women are much superior to men...

GDP for Econophobes: Fun and Sexy!

I swear. Once you've read this post you can go out and radiate the dangerously sexy aura of someone who knows about economic acronyms. It's a real guy or gal magnet, at least in my experience.

GDP is short for Gross Domestic Product. "Gross" doesn't refer to the ugliness of the term, but to the opposite of "Net", meaning that we don't subtract certain things when arriving at this measure. What these things are will become clear later. "Domestic" means that we will ignore stuff that's produced abroad. Sort of. And Product is a term meaning all the stuff we produce within a year: cars and haircuts, psychiatric visits and cups of coffee. Sort of. For the United States, say, GDP then tries to measure the total amount of goods (physical things) and services that are produced within the United States (whether by foreigners or natives) within one year.

The larger the GDP number, the more is being produced. This has made GDP into one measure of economic well-being, with the idea that a larger GDP means we are better off. But there are also problems with this interpretation: First, the GDP doesn't tell us how many people were involved in producing it. If two countries had the same GDP figures, but one had to support twice as many people than the other, the larger country would clearly be worse off. This problem can be solved by dividing the GDP with the population size of a country to arrive at an average or per capita GDP.

This doesn't solve all the problems yet. Another sticky one has to do with the way we add up the amounts of goods and services produced. How do you add up, say, 20,000 Fords and 1,000,000 bagels? The GDP does this using money: the value of the 20,000 Fords is their price multiplied by 20,000, and the value of the million bagels is the price of one bagel multiplied by a million. Ok. But prices change over time. If bagels or Fords double in price, but we still make the same amounts of them as in the past, the GDP figures would tell us that we now produce more even though that's not true. To solve this problem, GDP is often given in real rather than in nominal terms. This means that the prices used in multiplying the quantity items are standardized to some specific year in the past. For example, we could use 1994 prices of bagels and Fords to multiply the quantities produced both in 1994 and in 2004. Then any difference between the two total GDPs would show if we are indeed producing more today. This works some of the time, but we get into some iffy areas when the products produced today didn't even exist in 1994, so they couldn't have any prices then. There are ways around this problem, too, such as using chain-linked indexes for the prices, but the point is to remember that we value the stuff we produce with its prices, and prices may not always reflect what we want them to. Another example of this is when the prices of some product are severely distorted by a monopoly which charges much more than a competitive industry would. The GDP would record these 'too high' prices as an increase in the GDP.

A third problem with the GDP as a measure of economic well-being is in its gross nature. We produce a lot of stuff just to replace the bits that are worn out. I just made a shower curtain to replace a really old moldy one. How much did my personal economic well-being increase? Well, some, as the new curtain is nicer, but on the whole the change wasn't very large. If we really wanted to use the GDP to measure changes in economic well-being we should adjust it by subtracting all the production that goes to replacing worn-out items. But then we'd have Net Domestic Product, and as economists can't agree on the way to measure wear-out, we don't want to have one of those. Still, keep in mind the gross nature of the figure.

And now we come to the really serious problems with the GDP as a measure of economic well-being.* The first of these is that the GDP ignores the negative effects of economic activity on the environment. If I first produce coal and a lot of pollution, the value of the coal increases the GDP, but the negative value of the pollution is not included. If I then start a company to reduce the pollution I caused, the value of this activity increases the GDP! Say the value of my coal in the market is 1,000,000 dollars, and the extent of my pro-environment activity earns me 500,000 dollars, but the environmental degradation I caused would have a value of minus 3,000,000. The GDP gives my contribution as 1,500,000 dollars whereas it really should be -1,500,000. Of course it's really hard to put a dollar value on the environmental effects, and that's one of the reasons why they are ignored.

This omission of environmental consequences is a serious problem with the GDP. Another equally serious one has to do with the omission of nonmarket output in the GDP calculations. By 'nonmarket output' we mean goods and services which are produced but which are not sold and bought in the markets so that they have no easy prices to use in the calculations. Almost all production at home falls into this category: the production of home-cooked meals, childcare of one's own children, cleaning, laundry and yard-work. If I and my neighbor both do this work for ourselves, none of its value will be entered in the GDP figures. If, on the other hand, I hire my neighbor to do my chores, and he hires me, suddenly both of our outputs are entered in the GDP, which now shows an increase in production, even though no increase actually happened.

Our omission of nonmarket outputs in the GDP figures means that it's very hard to compare two countries by using their GDPs if they have very different patterns of market and nonmarket work. Also, the GDP underestimates women's production drastically, as the majority of household work is done by women. Estimates of the omitted value of nonmarket production vary, but most of them suggest that as much as one half of the total GDP may be omitted in omitting this part of the production.

Ok. Given all these omissions and problems, what is included in the GDP? How do we get the actual figures? To understand the procedure, note that we don't have any readily available measures of production, so we need to sort of deduce the production values from other stuff. Something that is produced today in the United States must go to one of the following uses:
-It's consumed by someone in the U.S. ( either because the person consumes it in a private act of consumption or because the person consumes it as part of government-provided consumption (use of roads, say)).

-It's not consumed right away, but it will provide goods or services that can be consumed in the future (this category includes durable consumer goods such as washing machines and also all investment). Some of this investment goes to replacing worn out equipment.

-It's consumed by someone abroad. This is counted as U.S. exports. But note that U.S. citizens can also consume things made abroad, and we don't want to include this in Domestic Product. What we need to do, then, is to add the value of exports to the GDP, and then subtract the value of imports from it.

So if we can add up the values of current and future consumption and correct this for the foreign influences, we should get a measure of GDP (though with all the problems I talked about earlier). By now you are up to reading the following summary of the included items, I hope:

It is common to see the following equation in economics textbooks:
GDP = C + I + G + NX

Consumption spending (C) consists of consumer spending on goods and services. It is often divided into spending on durable goods, non-durable goods and services. These purchases accounted for 68 percent of GDP in the first quarter.
Durable goods are items such as cars, furniture, and appliances, which are used for several years. (10%)
Non-durable goods are items such as food, clothing, and disposable products, which are used for only a short time period. (20%)
Services include rent paid on apartments (or estimated values for owner occupied housing), airplane tickets, legal and medical advice or treatment, electricity and other utilities. (38%) Services are the fastest growing part or consumption spending.
Investment spending (I) consists of nonresidential fixed investment, residential investment, and inventory changes. Investment spending accounts for 19 percent of GDP, but varies significantly from year to year.
Nonresidential fixed investment is the creation of tools and equipment to use in the production of other goods and services. Examples are the building of factories, the production of new machines, and the manufacturing of computers for business use (15%).
Residential investment is the building of a new homes or apartments. (4%)
Inventory changes consist of changes in the level of stocks of goods necessary for production and finished goods ready to be sold. (Less than 1%)
Government spending (G) consists of federal, state, and local government spending on goods and services such as research, roads, defense, schools, and police and fire departments. This spending does not include transfer payments such as Social Security, unemployment compensation, and welfare payments, which do not represent production of goods and services. (17%)
Net Exports (NX) is equal to exports minus imports. Exports are items produced in the US and purchased by foreigners (12%). Imports are items produced by foreigners and purchased by US consumers. (16%). Currently, the US imports more than it exports so that net exports are negative, about -4% of the GDP.

Got it? The total value of what is produced domestically goes either into what people consume (the first item), or into future consumption (investment, the second item) or into what the government consumes (the third item). In addition to that, we consume some things which are produced abroad (imports) and we produce some things which are consumed abroad (exports). The difference: exports-imports adjusts the other three groups for this, so that we are not omitting production that was consumed elsewhere or including consumption that was produced elsewhere.

Pretty simple, isn't it? Well, I hope so anyway.
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*I'm not covering all the serious problems with the use of GDP as a welfare indicator. See this link for more information.

A Sunday Post

In other words, something light and frothy is called for. Perhaps interior decoration? Tassels, bows and dried flower arrangements? I hate them all.

The problem is that I love to make awful items for interior decoration, yet I can't bear the sight of them. Giving them out as gifts works, but it tends to severely reduce my population of friends. So most of these creations are hidden in the basement where they make a good surface for spider eggs to rest (see post below on spider eggs). I just finished a homemade lamp shade. It has a long fringe and it's bedecked with blue-centered daisies made out of fabric! It was such fun to make, and now I have to hide the thing before breakfast or I lose my appetite. I also have a mini skirt in the basement, made by tearing up several silk shirts and by sewing the fragments on a canvas base. Also several 'ancestor' portraits made out of stuffed fabric shapes, flea market jewelry and so on. They are ancestor portraits for people who don't have ancestors, as well as for goddesses like me who just always existed. The idea is to hang them around the dining room, in massive, dark frames.

That's enough of light and frothy. In reality, I like my buildings stark, with marble and big open fireplaces. If there has to be furniture, it better be as simple as possible, and the only portraits allowed are of my favorite snakes and lovers.

But then I want to make something, and it always involves tassels, gilding and everything I can find at the local flea markets. Do you think I would benefit from some new age therapy? Or would that be too risky, given that seeing a real live goddess might make some therapists cross the border between sanity and insanity? In the wrong direction, I mean, though maybe the opposite is equally likely, and in that case I'd be a benefactress by resorting to medical help.

In the meantime, I have to decide what to do with all my frothy and light art creations when the basement overflows.
How about a lottery for some nice charity? And the winner would get his or her pick of my goodies! Would you buy a ticket for a good cause, say a rest-home for retired goddesses?

Killer Moms

I didn't want to write another feminist rant, but what can you do when the world offers you a topic like this on a salver?
The first two news stories that I saw on the AP Breaking News were about killer moms, with titles like these:

Florida Woman Charged in Death of Her Infant Son; Husband Sought for Questioning

Illinois Woman Convicted of Killing Son in 1989 Now Wants to Raise Her Second Child

The impression one gets from these headlines is pretty obvious: women murdering their children. However, the actual stories are a tiny bit more complicated. Take the Florida story. Here's an excerpt from the body of the article:

A woman has been charged in the death of her infant son, who had burns, bruises and broken bones when he was brought to the hospital unconscious, police said.
Lakyna Anderson, 26, was charged Friday with aggravated manslaughter in the death of 9-month-old Jamarion. She told investigators her husband was responsible for the boy's injuries and that he was watching Jamarion the day he died, according to an arrest report.
Nicklous Anderson, 23, had been found by the state to have abused one of her children previously, although he was not listed as a suspect in the death Thursday of 9-month-old Jamarion, according to Diane Carhart, a spokeswoman for the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office. Police were searching for him Saturday for questioning, Carhart said.

And here's an excerpt from the Illinois story:

A woman convicted of killing her 2-year-old son is now fighting the state of Illinois to be allowed to raise her second child.
In 1989, Sheryl Hardy - then Sheryl McGee Coe - smoked a cigarette while her husband at the time punished her son for soiling his pants by lifting him by his ankles and repeatedly dunking him in the toilet. The boy, Bradley McGee, died the next day of head injuries.

In other words, neither woman was necessarily the murderer of the child in question, and in both cases the women's roles look more like those of someone assisting and abetting a crime, or at least not stopping a crime, than those of the killer, though the Florida case is too open for final judgment. But you'd never get this from the headlines.

And just in case the reader misses the main point: that mothers are held to higher standards than fathers, both articles include a quote from someone making it explicit. In the Florida case:

Authorities said Lakyna Anderson was charged because she left the baby with a man who had a previous history of abuse.

Very bad if she did, but not the same as killing the child. Or it wouldn't be regarded the same if Lakyna was the child's father, I bet.

In the Illinois case we get an even more explicit example of different standards for mothers:

"They tortured this child," said Kip Liles, an emergency shelter parent who cared for Bradley McGee temporarily before his death. "Any mother who sits back and lets her child get abused and does nothing about is just as guilty. People like that should never get a second chance."

There you are. Mothers are held to higher standards.

What Conservative Blogs Say

Or a few of them. I did a tour of this odd land tonight, and decided to pick one topic likely to be on all conservative political blogs to study their approaches. Condoleezza Rice's testimony seemed a topic that would be covered. Here is what three popular conservative blogs say about her testimony:

1. Instapundit:

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Missy Nelson wonders if Time pulled an OJ and darkened Condi's skin for this It looks like they've cranked the contrast up in order to produce an unflattering photograph, but beyond that, who knows? They've certainly demonstrated in the past that they're not above this sort of thing.

Deconstruct that!

2. Andrew Sullivan:

CONDI: What is there to say? We have a frigging war on and the major networks all run this? I have nothing to add. Except to say: we have a war on. We used to win them before we engaged in elaborate blame-games as to who was asleep at the wheel when they broke out.

Deconstruct that!

3. The Volokh Conspiracy:

Hardball" Bingo: Condoleezza Rice is going to testify tomorrow. Many people (myself included) will be interested in what she has to say and have not already made up their minds about her and her testimony. But many others have made up their minds -- notably, the partisan talking heads who populate shows like "Hardball." They already have their talking points in their heads, I'd bet. Moreover, they have better reason than usual to write their scripts in advance: My guess is that there will be few, if any, surprises tomorrow. The short format (ten questioners dividing up 2 hours and 30 minutes) doesn't allow for any person to pursue one line of questioning at length, and Rice is too well-prepared and too poised to say something really stupid.

There was no follow-up by today's date. Deconstruct that!

I'd say that these bloggers didn't think Condi did very well. If Andrew Sullivan believes that Iraq would be a more favorable topic for the current administration, things must be a lot worse for Bush people than I thought from my admittedly much more lefty angle.

Speaking of my lefty angle, I'm not a real lefty (like in communist, for example), or even a born-again one. I'm the balancer of scales: if this country ever turns to the extreme left, expect me screeching and shouting arm-in-arm with Rush and Ann! No, cancel that. There are limits to everything in this world.

Some News from Pakistan

About honor killings:

A young woman from the Sindh Province of Pakistan has appealed to Pakistan's President Musharraf for protection from being killed in the name of "honor." According to IRIN News, Rozina Ujjar was divorced by her husband for standing outside of her house at the same time that a 15-year-old boy passed by. After her husband divorced her a local assembly of tribal leaders declared that the woman was "kari" (subject to honor killing).

The only way I have ever been able to understand the logic of honor killings is to think of someone I once knew whose whole self-esteem was tied with his cars. The cars had to be new and expensive. If they got as much as scratched in the parking lot, he'd sell them off immediately and buy a new one. He saw his own value in the value of his cars. Perhaps the honor killing system works the same way: the reputation of the family is based on the sexual purity of its women. When this purity is suspect, so is the family's honor, and the solution is to get rid of the offending female member. Of course this logic means that women are seen as property, but that view has a lot of historical precedence in most countries of the world.

Pakistan may be trying to do something about honor killings:

A bill specific to honor killings is supposed to be introduced to Parliament that will amend the current Criminal Procedure Code and Pakistan's Penal Code. However, according to the Daily Times of Pakistan, last week women members of Parliament protested against the assemblies for not allowing a debate on the bill.

How to Paint Snake Eggs

You don't, actually. Snake eggs are soft and look more like pebbles or shopping bags than bird eggs. Baby snakes are born with a special tooth for cutting their way out of the egg, and they are very good at self-defense from the moment of birth, so if you plan to go looking for some snake eggs to paint this Easter, plan again. In any case, most snakes in colder climates give birth to live babies.

But you can paint bird eggs, and almost anything will work on this media, even a pencil if you have nothing better. The simplest way to color eggs is to boil them in water with some onion skins added. You get lovely brown eggs that way. But water colors or acrylics work nicely, too, and you can even gild an egg. If you plan to eat the eggs, boil them before painting them. If you don't care about eating them, the eggs stay nicer if you empty them first. Make a hole in each narrow end of the egg, one very small, the other just slightly bigger, and blow in through the smaller hole. The theory is that the white and yolk will come out of the bigger hole. Sometimes this even works. You can then use these holes to put a string through the egg. Then you can hang the egg on a tree branch in your front yard. Or even several eggs.

You could even write important political slogans on the eggs and hang them somewhere where they would annoy politicians and other people your slogans attack.

I'm not going to paint any eggs this spring, but I do have lots of spider eggs in the basement, carefully guarded against the snakes. The baby spiders will be born any day now! I give them names when they are born, and then send them off to fight the good fight in the garden. Some types of spiders carry their eggs with them. They always remind me of harassed shoppers, desperately looking for one more thing while dragging all the other parcel with them. I wonder what happens to them in the winter, the spiders I mean. I suspect that the mother spider dies (having probably eaten the father spider after some satisfactory sex), and that leaves the eggs in charge of my basement. Nature can be very cruel, too.

But that's hard to remember in the spring.

On Iraq

I have not written much about the war and occupation of Iraq, and I'm not going to begin now, but I'd like to explain (if only to myself) why it's a topic I don't address very much.

The main reason for my silence is that there's very little that's funny about wars, and I want to write about funny things. Only twisted and sick humor thrives in the conditions of war, and I find that I can't laught while reading about dead people, people who are now legless and armless, people who are now homeless. War is about death, death of people and animals, of ideas and of places.

Sometimes there's no alternative for wars, or the alternatives are worse than the wars. But I never believed this to be the case in Iraq, and I found the U.S. administration unable to make a good case for this particular war at this particular time. This war was perhaps planned for a long time by the people now ruling the U.S., but if so, the planning appears to have been extremely poor. Iraq is not being 'pacified' or 'made safe for democracy'. It is a chaotic place where the most violent and desperate will win unless the U.S. troop strength is considerably increased, and even then any solution we impose is just that, an imposed solution which will not live once left to its own resources. Maybe the U.S. intentions were not all about oil or world dominance. I don't know. But democracy can't be imposed from above, and trying to do so while killing lots of people isn't exactly endearing the locals to Western ideals.

My second reason for relative silence is in the extreme sadness I feel whenever I try to think about the future for Iraq. The only realistic scenarios I can imagine are Iraq as an American colony and Iraq as a radical fundamentalist country. Neither scenario is one that I'd like to live under, and I doubt that the colony model would win out in the long run. Thus, by intervening in Iraq we have pretty much guaranteed another place like Afghanistan under Taliban, some time in the future, and I don't like such a society at all; if for no other reason than that I believe men and women are of equal worth and should have the same rights. I can't envisage a secular democracy in a country as religious as Iraq, especially given the number of people who are armed and the total historic lack of any real practise in democracy. Even countries with much less challenging problems than the ones Iraqis face have great difficulty with democracy. Just think of Russia. Or even the U.S...

Finally, my fear is that the net effect of the war and occupation in Iraq is to increase the forces of international terrorists, not to somehow make the world safer. Maybe the terrorists are right now concentrating on Iraq, but new ones are being created by the news from there, and the terror will inevitably spread out over time.

There you have it: my excuses for not commenting much on these historic events. I sincerely and desperately wish that my predictions and views are all wrong. I'd like nothing better than to be proved completely mistaken here, and to find, soon, a democratic and peaceful Iraq, with thriving institutions and civil society. But then I'd like the tooth-fairy to exist, too.

Miscellania

My muse has gone cavorting elsewhere. He got some new tattoos, that's why. But this leaves me without anything interesting to write about; only little beginnings of ideas. Here they are, in lieu of anything better:

1. An interesting article on Saudi women here. It seems that many Saudi women would like to work, drive cars and go out without a man's permission. A lively debate has ensued in the Saudi press. I want similar lively debates in other countries: should Republicans be allowed to drive if they refuse to have taxes for roads, should people who fraud corporations be allowed to go for walks without their victims' permission and so on. At least these debates are about something substantial, not about the humanity of some humans.

2. This is a very good site for checking on any lies in the presidential election campaigns. They seem quite impartial.

3. It's spring, and the symbol for all the glory of the spring is the egg. The egg is a perfect thing, without a single seam.
The only way to improve it is to fill it with chocolate. And the most beautiful color in the world is robin egg's blue. However hard artists may try, nature beats them easily. Except perhaps in the chocolate media.

On Bitches and Whores

I used a sleepless night in deep research of the blogoland area that is called 'Comments'. Quite a few blogs have them, mine included, though right-wing blogs for some odd reason tend not to allow commenting very much. Isn't the free exchange of ideas an important part of the free markets -religion? Anyway, I wanted to find out how commenters on political blogs use gender-related language when the topic isn't gender itself. The idea was to see what people do when they are not on their guard about sexism, for example.

The results are interesting, though I must warn you that no statistical significance is implied here, and I'm not going to give you a single mean or standard deviation; just some questions and guesses about what might be going on in this region of the cyberspace. Most of my data comes from reading the comments sections over a period of two days on just a few blogs, and what I say here may have no relevance in any wider sense. Or then again, it may.

What I found was a frequent use of the terms "whore" and "bitch". The term "slut" also appears, though not in any of the quotes I include here. These are all words that describe women who behave against the norms of the society either sexually (whore and slut) or in terms of aggressiveness (bitch), but the way they are used by blog commenters is different:

Who taught these bitches in the White House how to invade and conquer

Of course, these pampered millionare GOP whores threaten to move their teams if the voters don't approve a tax hike to pay for new luxury stadiums

One more time to blogwhore my comparison on Vietnam and Iraq

It's different, because the whores and bitches in these quotes are men, or at least not necessarily women, and the acts of whoring and bitching are defined differently: not as sex-related, but as unprincipled prostitution of ones ideas rather than of ones body and as pure nastiness, respectively. Reading them this way gets more complicated when the topic in the comments also happens to be a woman:

Not only did I get one hour less worth of sleep because of daylight savings or whatever it is last night, I was woken up to the inane blatherings of that worthless whore Cokie Roberts. She said something like ""If Richard Clarke hadn't destroyed Bush's credibility, Bush is actually doing quite well!"

Now she is a Media Whore Emerita and her comments don't have to have any tether to reality,

I can't stand the sanctimonious bitch. She reminds me of the Church Lady from SNL

I find my reading here shifting from the traditional definitions of bitch and whore to the ones that I think the blogoland has adopted. The overall effect is to make me feel that the woman is double-condemned here.

Not all blog comments-sections use whore and bitch in these ways. They can also be used to convey racism, as in this example:

I'll be a good crack 'ho in yo bitchinass blog, honky

What's interesting about this is the way terms denigrating women are used twice as often as terms denigrating race in this short statement, yet the final impact, on me at least, is purely racist. So somehow all these examples take traditionally derogatory female terms and make them into something else.

And now to the really fascinating question: what does this all mean? Is the mainstreaming (if this is mainstreaming) of nasty female epiteths a sign of decreased sexism? If men can be sluts, whores and bitches, too, aren't we all now more equal? Or is the real trend something completely different: the mainstreaming of misogyny under the disguise of this new wider interpretation of the terms?

I truly don't know. What do you think?


--------------------------------------
A postcript (April 9). This is a reprint of an exchange I had on the comments-section of Eschaton tonight:
Comment 1:

Person X,
I can smell your cunt.

My comment concerning it:

Person X,
I can smell your cunt.

This I found quite insulting. As if there's nothing worse in this world to be than a woman. Surely you can think of better ways to beat a troll.

Comment 2:

Echidne, grow some fucking cultural literacy, would you? Just google the phrase, add it to your netflix cue, and shut your runny hole.

Interesting....

Meanwhile, in Turkmenistan

President Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan is a man of some astonishing ideas:

In a televised address at an agricultural academy, Niyazov took note of the gold teeth of the female student who welcomed him.
"Don't take offense, your gold teeth are very beautiful, but you, young people, look much better with white teeth," he said, exhorting them to take better care of their teeth, according to the Interfax news agency.
"I watched dogs when I was young. They were given bones to gnaw ... Those of you whose teeth have fallen out did not gnaw on bones. This is my advice," he said.

My dogs would probably agree, but you just try to take a bone away for them, even if it's for the purpose of keeping your own choppers nice and white.

This is not the only shocking thing Niyazov has done in Turkmenistan:

Niyazov has banned all opposition and controls all branches of government and the media. Golden statues and busts of the president are scattered across the country, and his portrait is on every banknote and coin.

He is also a dear friend of the United States...

The Mrs. Degree

Women's Enews has an interesting article about marriage and highly educated women. Traditionally, more educated women were less likely to be married in the U.S., but this seems to be changing. As the article notes:

In 1980, a woman with three years of graduate school was 13 percent less likely to be married than a woman with only a high-school diploma. By 2000, that gap shrank to less than 5 percent...

More surprisingly, while the general rate of marriage among women aged 40-44 is falling, the most educated women in this age group are actually marrying at increasing rates:

... Rose found an overall decline in the percentage of women between ages 40 and 44 who were married. In 2000, 72 percent were married, down from 81 percent in 1980.
The decline in marriage rates for women in that age bracket is roughly equivalent for more- and less-educated women. Between 1980 and 2000 marriage rates for women with a high-school education declined 5 percentage points to 91 percent. For women with college education, the rate declined by the same 5 percentage points to 88 percent.
Women with three years of graduate school, meanwhile, have bucked the declining trend. For them the marriage rate has actually increased by 3 percentage points, to 86 percent.

What explains this change? One researcher speculates that marriage has become more egalitarian and less about division of labor between the sexes (i.e., about women cleaning and keeping house and about men going out to work).
Would this change affect the desirability of marriage for men and women in the same way? I wonder. It still seems to me that even researchers sometimes assume that all women (whatever their sexual orientation or other values) want to get married, and if they don't marry the reason must be that nobody asked them. I'd like to see a study looking at women's own decision-making in greater detail.

Still, this snippet of news is important, especially given the continuous mythmaking in the media about the unhappily liberated successful women who can't "get" a man or babies. Remember Sylvia Hewlet's lament about the professional barren women? Remember the urban myth that a forty-year old woman is more likely to get killed in a terrorist attack than to get married? Remember that "you can't have it all"? Somehow I doubt that the injection of these new pieces of evidence will have much evidence on this particular anti-feminist enterprise. It's far too ingrained in the so-called liberal mainstream media.

Another Poll... Plus Some Unrelated Ramblings

About Bush's job approval. It has dropped to 49%, its lowest level in 2004. The 'strongly disapprove' category beats the 'strongly approve' category by one percent. Whether these results matter at all is quite a different question. But horoscopes are fun to read, too.

The drop in Bush's job approval probably has something to do with what's happening in Iraq; to hand over power in that country in less than three months' time seems to me to be pure lunacy. No-one asked me, of course. More's the pity.
-------------
Elsewhere, I hear that China has at least eleven million eternal bachelors. Why is that, the BBC News wonders? Could it possibly have something to do with the still prevalent Chinese view that prefers boys to girls, combined with the strict limits on the number of children per family? But the real reason is the low value attributed to girls, not only in China but all over most of the world. Rather than worrying about these eleven million unmarried men, maybe we should worry about what happened to the women who in a different world might have married them.
-------------
And then some really good news, also from BBC! We are going to get Ruport Murdoch for good here in the U.S.! He's moving his headquarters from Australia to New York, so that he can keep a closer eye on all his media outlets here to see how well the brainwashing is going. Aren't we lucky? Or aren't the Australians lucky?

What U.S. Drug Companies Say

That importing cheaper drugs from Canada and other countries would be unsafe, would lower incentives to market generic drugs, and would increase drug prices in other countries. Not very surprising that they would say this; it would have been more interesting if they had pushed for drug importation at any cost.

But are these claims true? The last one probably is, at least in those countries where the government doesn't regulate drug prices. This prediction comes from standard economic theory of a firm which prices the same product differently in two different markets. This is only possible if resale can be stopped, or in our case, if the importation of Canadian drugs to the United States can be stopped. If resale is impossible to stop, the two market prices will become roughly equalized (ignoring the effect of any tariff or tax differences between the countries), and the most likely outcome is that the country with previously lower prices will find them go up. Incidentally, the firms' profits will also decline, which is why they are fighting the drug importation plan.

The Canadian government might not let Canadian prices rise, though. The health care system north of the U.S. border has much more government control over things such as prices, and this makes it harder to predict the impact of drug exportation on the Canadian markets.

The truth of the first claim of the drug companies, that imported drugs would be unsafe, clearly depends on the quality control system that is practised in the countries of origin. It's pretty hard to pretend that Canadian drugs would present any health dangers to American consumers, as long as the sellers use the same system of requiring physician prescriptions before filling orders for prescription drugs. Which they do. Importing drugs from some other countries could be more dangerous. Still, there are ways of insuring the quality of imported drugs (we do it all the time with other imported products), and quality problems exist with domestic drugs, too. Also, if the alternative to imported drugs for some poor American consumers is no treatment at all, the likely unsafety of such drugs should be compared to the unsafety of an illness possibly remaining altogether untreated.

But there are already cheaper alternatives for poorer consumers, say the drug companies. These are the generic drugs, i.e., medications which don't have brand names but do have the same chemical components that make brand name drugs effective. Would importing drugs reduce the incentives to market such generics? Maybe, but the current marketing efforts of generics aren't exactly noticeable, either, perhaps because there is a lot less profit in marketing them.

I think that drug importation should be allowed. Aren't we all now devoted followers of the free markets? Wasn't NAFTA supposed to make all of this continent into one big supermarket? Well, here, finally, is an opportunity for ordinary Americans to benefit from it.

Something I want to Share!

I am worried that I put my readers off by being so divine and perfect. Just to reassure you that my life isn't all roses and nectar, either, I am going to let you into a big secret: I am a Red Socks fan. That's enough of a burden for anyone.

So now you can feel sorry for me and have all sorts of other fuzzy, nice feelings! AND I get more visits. Is this what humans mean by someone having 'social intelligence'?

Right-Wingery 101: How To Interpret Fallujah

Thanks to Atrios, I have finally met Kathleen Parker. She's a right-wing journalist and columnist, and must be a good one. After all, in 1993 she won

>...the H. L. Mencken Writing Award issued by The Baltimore Sun. The judges praised Parker for "singing another note on the subject of family values and following the tradition of H. L. Mencken in attacking ignorance and stupidity with vividness and originality."

The new note on family values she sings is the normal conservative lament. Her Townhall biography reveals the fascinating fact that she had four stepmothers, and this may explain her take on family values: the sins of the fathers and so on. Anyway, I digress.

The reason I wanted to write about Parker is the promise of finding someone on the right who has vividness and originality in the attacks against ignorance and stupidity; someone who would actually be fun to read. Maybe even a new Dorothy Parker. We'll see if Kathleen is one. She's going to be our guide on the question how your average American right-winger interprets the horrible events in Fallujah where four American civilians were killed and their dead bodies then burned, mutilated and hung from a bridge. She's going to teach us how to see the world through right-wing eyes, and she's going to be vivid and original while doing it. What a treat!

Here we go then. She begins thus:

I suppose it would be considered lacking in nuance to nuke the Sunni Triangle.
But so goes the unanimous vote around my household - and I'm betting millions of others - in the aftermath of what forevermore will be remembered simply as "Fallujah."

Wouldn't it be lovely were justice so available and so simple? If we were but creatures like those zoo animals we witnessed gleefully jumping up and down after stomping, dragging, dismembering and hanging the charred remains of American civilians whose only crime was to try to help them.

"To nuke the Sunni Triangle" means to destroy it by using something called weapons of mass destruction, in this case of the nuclear sort. The effect of such 'nuking' would be to kill most living things in the area, as well as all the foetuses still inside their mothers. I thought this was a no-no for Parker.

But she's willing to make an exception in the case of Iraqis, or at least in the case of those Iraqis who happen to live near the ones she describes as zoo animals. It took me some time to connect this zoo story with Fallujah, until I realized that Parker is talking about the Iraqis who participated in the mutilation or cheered it. She calls them zoo animals. Why zoo, I wonder? Who has caged them? Nevermind. What we can conclude from Parker's opening comments is that she thinks a nuclear attack would be a good equalizer for the murder of four Americans, and that it wouldn't really be that terrible, given that some who would be killed behaved in a manner which she thinks would fit zoo animals.

We are also learning that Parker believes millions of others to have the same opinions. These millions must be right-wingers. Ok.

But then Parker rises to the expected high moral level, and tells us that using weapons of mass destruction on the Sunni Triangle isn't really such a good idea; instead we Americans must stay calm:

But keep our heads we must. Calmly we must transcend the primitive lust that compels ignorant others to mug idiotically for cameras.
Our revenge will be in facing down enemies who, though unworthy adversaries, impede the worthy goal of stabilizing a country whose future may predict our own. To retreat now would merely feed the terrorists' appetite for America's immediate failure en route to her ultimate demise.

And who are the primitive muggers for cameras? Perhaps American politicians? Or maybe she means the zoo animals in Fallujah. But 'we' (the American right-wingers?) are not like that: we are rational, cool and logical planners of important military strategies. The most important of these is to guarantee that we don't see the same future in the good old U.S. of A as we would see in Iraq without our military intervention.

I'm not sure what the similarities are supposed to be. Does Parker mean that the American Christian fundamentalists are having similar takeover plans here as the muslim fundamentalists harbor in Iraq? If this is the explanation, how would the American troops in Iraq help? Shouldn't they be brought home to defend us against the much more immediate domestic dangers? Or am I getting all confused here, and Kathleen is just telling us the old Republican story of how the 9/11 terrorists really were Iraqis though everybody knows they weren't?

We then learn that Parker wants the United States to stay in Iraq to avert this horrible American demise. She also wants more international help for all the averting:

We have no choice but to stay the course and fulfill our commitment. That said, it would be nice if the international community would step up to the plate and insist on justice. This isn't just America's war, but America's response to a war that was brought to us.

I thought that the international community had stepped up to the plate over a year ago. Millions of people all over the world protested against the Iraq war, and I suspect that most of them thought their protest were for justice. But Parker sees things differently: the international community should come in aid of the unfairly attacked United States. It doesn't seem to trouble her that 'America's response to a war that was brought to us' meant attacking a country that had nothing to do with the bringing of that initial attack. As far as I know the guilty party was an organization called Al-Qaieda, not the bogeyman called Saddam Hussein. But clearly my way of thinking wouldn't do in the right-wing circles; instead I should view the Iraq war as a logical consequence of the 9/11 carnage and the international community as lacking in proper cooperation if it doesn't occupy Iraq, too.

Parker has more to say in the same vein, but I have covered most bases already (See! I can do baseball analogies, too!) She ends her column by reminding us about the zoo animals one more time:

Still, a well-placed MOAB smack in the Sunni Triangle ... but then, we are not animals. A reel of Rambo will have to do.

There you have it: the proper right-wing views to hold, all presented to you in a vivid and original manner by Kathleen Parker. I think Dorothy Parker was a better writer by far, but Kathleen is quite entertaining in her own way.

Which Conservative Pundit Are You?

Take this test at World O'Crap, and find out!
I am 1/3 Ben Shapiro, 1/3 Jonah Goldberg and 1/3 Ann Coulter. I think the test needs some tweaking...

Bye, bye Athena!

I just waved goodbye to her! She threw some kisses back and disappeared in a puff of dark cloud. Then I collapsed.

But it was a good visit: the only thing that suffered was my blogging career. I just didn't have enough time, and I get all crooked-eyed from sipping on the nectar nonstop. So I apologize for not being my usual scintillating self.

I bet you want to know what happened. Well, Athena was kind of stiff at the beginning. She didn't take to the snakes very much, and when Artful Asp drew a picture of her with an enormous bottom, Athena sulked for a few minutes. But things got better after a while. I plied her with made-up stories about how loved she still is and how famous she's becoming among the feminists, and she lapped it all up.

Then she told me several risque stories that I hadn't heard before. Some of them would make your hair (if you have any) stand up, and would be on the front pages of most newspapers in this world. But I have sworn to remain silent about them. At least for a time. Let me just say that Athena is a lot hawter than all that steel and marble would make you suspect.

We also spent some time laughing at the U.S. politics. She finds the neocons extremely funny, and she's planning to work some sort of a joke on the freepers. (She knew nothing about blogging, by the way, and I had to enlighten her there. She really took to Atrios, though of course she prefers me.) We'll see if the freepers think the joke is hilarious, too. Athena sometimes has a rough sense of humor.

And then we imbibed some more nectar, and she got all weepy and teary about the past glories and all that crap. I have no time for self-pity, especially as I don't need any, so I started tickling her and then we practised some new assassination techniques on each other and also worked a Wild West act of lariat throwing with the snakes as the rope. It was a little childish perhaps, especially as she kept changing my lariat snakes into strings of chewing-gum and the snakes found this disrespectful. Anyway, we then went shopping at a mall! I bought a Marilyn Monroe outfit (I can do the head on my own but the clothes are a bit trickier), and Athena bought a new helmet and a set of Wusthoff kitchen knives. It was a real girly bonding time! Just the two goddesses together.

Well, then I fell asleep. I'm not that used to the way gods and goddesses get drunk anymore, but falling asleep was a big mistake, because Athena had gone out boy-scouting in the meantime. I did save everybody, pretty much, and I do apologize for any damage she caused to the bar furniture and the cars parked outside. I'll pay for all of it.

But this morning she was really nice and repentant about everything. She taught me a goddess trick I didn't know before, and even invited me for a visit! And as she was taking off Artful Asp burst into tears. It looked so sweet, and Athena was quite touched. It's good she didn't know that Asp had poisoned all the nectar she drank and had waited with great excitement for the coming death contortions. I did tell the snakes that venom doesn't work against goddesses, but Asp is an optimistic little one, and she was bitterly disappointed when she realized that if Athena would die it wouldn't be in front of us.

But on the whole it was a very successful visit, don't you think so?

Fingerprints and Photos Required

Welcome to the United States of America!

A program requiring foreigners to be fingerprinted and photographed before entering the United States is being expanded to include millions of travelers from some of America's staunchest allies, officials said Friday.
The move affects citizens in 27 countries - including Britain, Japan and Australia - who had been allowed to travel within the United States without visas for up to 90 days. Officials said the change was prompted in part by concerns that terrorists might try to exploit those exemptions.

And will this help to find any potential terrorists among the flocks of tourists eager to spend their money here? I don't know. The answer obviously depends on the number of potential terrorists that have their photos and/or fingerprints on record somewhere. Without such prior records the process seems pretty pointless.

It will certainly reduce the number of visitor to the U.S.. Most vacationers don't like to be treated like crime suspects, and there are plenty of other interesting places to visit instead.

Republicans in Hell

While walking down the street one day, a Republican head of state is tragically hit by a truck and dies. His soul arrives in heaven and is met by St. Peter at the entrance.
"Welcome to Heaven," says St. Peter. "Before you settle in, it seems there is a problem. We seldom see a high official around these parts, you see, so we're not sure what to do with you."
"No problem, just let me in." says the Republican.
"Well, I'd like to but I have orders from higher up. What we'll do is have you spend one day in Hell and one in Heaven. Then you can choose where to spend eternity."
"Really, I've made up my mind. I want to be in Heaven," says the Republican head of state.
"I'm sorry but we have our rules." And with that, St. Peter escorts the Republican to the elevator and he goes down, down, down to Hell. The doors open and he finds himself in the middle of a green golf course. In the distance is a club and standing in front of it are all his friends and other politicians who had worked with him, everyone is very happy and in evening dress. They run to greet him, hug him, and reminisce about the good times they had while getting rich at expense of the people. They play a friendly game of golf and then dine on lobster and caviar. Also present is the Devil (a Republican, too), who really is a very friendly guy who has a good time dancing and telling jokes.
They are having such a good time that, before he realizes it, it is time to go. Everyone gives him a big hug and waves while the elevator
rises. The elevator goes up, up, up and the door reopens on Heaven where St. Peter is waiting for him.
"Now it's time to visit Heaven." So 24 hours pass with the Republican head of state joining a group of contented souls moving from cloud to cloud, playing the harp and singing. They have a good time and, before he realizes it, the 24 hours have gone by and St. Peter returns.
"Well then, you've spent a day in Hell and another in Heaven. Now choose your eternity."
He reflects for a minute, then the head of state answers: "Well, I would never have thought it, I mean Heaven has been delightful, but I think I would be better off in Hell."
So Saint Peter escorts him to the elevator and he goes down, down, down to Hell. Now the doors of the elevator open and he is in the middle of a barren land covered with waste and garbage. He sees all his friends, dressed in rags, picking up the trash and putting it in black bags. The Devil comes over to the Republican and lays an arm on his neck.
"I don't understand," stammers the Republican head of state. Yesterday I was here and there was a golf course and club and we ate lobster and caviar and danced and had a great time. Now all there is a wasteland full of garbage and my friends look miserable.
The Devil looks at him, smiles and says, "Yesterday we were campaigning. Today you voted for us!"


The source of this joke is here.

One of those things you really should know

If Barbie were life-size, her measurements would be 39-23-33. She would stand seven feet, two inches tall.

But what about her feet? What shoe size would she take? Something very small I suspect. How would she walk on those tiny feet, given how front-weighted her body is? Lurch, totter, lurch, totter? Like some sort of a tiptoeing monster.

If she was actually to come alive in life-size, she'd also need surgery to let her heels come down once and a while. And as this is not a family blog I can reveal that she'd also need extensive surgery in her pelvic area.

No, Barbie is not a good role model for anybody.

Dear Charles

Sometimes it pays to rummage in old files: I found this pearl developed by an oyster also known as Charles Krauthammer. It was in a review of the movie "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World":

Weir's restraint carries into a remarkable austerity regarding women. In the movie's version of a love interest, a Brazilian beauty in a small boat selling wares offshore to the sailors of Captain Aubrey's ship catches Aubrey's eye for a moment at a considerable distance. For about five seconds you see Aubrey (Crowe) returning her glance.
And that is it. Indeed, that scene marks the only appearance of women in the entire two hours of the film, setting a new record for sexual austerity in an epic, a record previously held by "Lawrence of Arabia." (Bolds mine.)

It's so good it needs to be repeated: "Indeed, that scene marks the only appearance of women in the entire two hours of the film, setting a new record for sexual austerity in an epic". Hmmm. I wish someone told Charles that normal people don't necessarily think that women act in movies only when sexual titillation is called for.

A Snake's Eye View on Some Recent News

I refuse to write about the 9/11 commission scandal, about what the Bush administration knew or did not know, about who lies and why. There are plenty of very good blogs about all this, and they show us very convincingly that the Brooklyn Bridge is still a very good buy. Which is sooo depressing.

Let's look at something more cheerful instead. First, there are very good news for the mice: they can be vaccinated against the SARS virus. This makes it much more comfortable for them to travel to the Far East. Humans are very kind to the mice; sometimes it seems that almost all medical research has to do with the well-being of our four-legged friends. Can mice take artificial sweeteners without harm to their health? Can we solve extreme obesity in mice? Will Prozac work to keep the mice positive while hunting for the cheese? Large libraries consist of all the crucial findings on Mouse Health.

Too bad that humans are rather different from mice, and that not that many of the mice findings generalize terribly well to other mammals. I'm old enough (very old as humans count!) to remember countless mouse health revelations that ultimately had nothing to do with the health of humans. Still, studying mice is a lot more harmless than some other human activities (except from the mouse point of view).

If all these people weren't studying mice, they might be making movies like Mel Gibson. What do I think about his latest take on the last days of Jesus? This is what Father Thomas Hopko, a Christian, thinks about it:

Whatever the cinematic and artistic merits of Mel Gibson's film, "The Passion of the Christ," and whatever the conversations it provokes, it hardly portrays the fullness and depth of Christ.

Gibson's passion is a monotonous and misleading exaggeration of one aspect of the scriptural Christ's suffering and death to a distorting degree. His Jesus is God's suffering servant whose passion is reduced to his being ridiculed and beaten with a sadistic brutality far beyond what the four Gospels record. The film's relentless emphasis on Christ's physical sufferings which, contrary to scripture, begin already in the Gethsemane garden, and the almost comic ugliness of the villains - the priests, the soldiers, Judas, Herod, Barabbas, the devil figure and its child, the faces in the crowds - capture the viewer's attention and serve more to conceal than to reveal the fullness and depth of the passion's multiple meanings.

The sacrifice of a grain god is of course common in many older religions, and sacrifices of all types have always been popular in human religions. It's an extension of commerce to the supernatural realm: If I give you my son, will you give me victory and power? There is also something about the suffering of others that appeals to the worse instincts of some, yet portraying this suffering as a just sacrifice makes watching it ok, not sadistic or anything. In fact, it makes watching a holy experience. This is nothing singular for Christians. All humans seem to do it.

I don't pretend to understand Christianity, but I'm sure that the story of Christ has more important lessons (the Sermon on the Mount?) for us than the one Gibson chose to portray: That it hurts to be crucified. A lot.

It also hurts some to be a victim of racism. The University of Notre Dame has a spokesman in Paul Hornung that the university would probably prefer not to have:

Football great Paul Hornung said in a radio interview that his alma mater, Notre Dame, needs to lower its academic standards to "get the black athlete."

Where is this "black athlete" with the low academic standards? Who is she or he? And how did Hornung find out about this person if Notre Dame is still oblivious?

It is racist to stereotype a whole class of people in the way Hornung did, though maybe he doesn't know any better. I guess he will learn soon.

But what are universities for, anyway? If they are for team sports, why not just dispense with all the fusty academia and make all college campuses into big training camps for football, basketball and ice hockey? We can still have the alumni come and picnic at the games, and we can still have media coverage for the institutions. Plus, we'd save a lot of money and get rid of the evil lefty-liberal professors at the same time.

Maybe this will happen in time for my next snake's eye review of news.

A Totally Trivial Post (Well, Almost)

Can you lick your elbow? (It's not supposed to be possible. Thanks to heini for this tidbit of information.)
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If you drive an old, rusty car you might wish to redecorate. Bumber stickers are excellent for covering small holes in the car and also for striking up interesting conversations with total strangers. Here are some good suggestions for the 2004 presidential campaign:


Bush/Cheney '04: Four More Wars
Bush/Cheney '04: Leave no billionaire behind
Bush/Cheney '04: Deja-voodoo all over again!
Bush/Cheney '04: Compassionate Colonialism
Bush/Cheney '04: Because the truth just isn't good enough.
Bush/Cheney '04: Making the world a better place, one country at a time.
Bush/Cheney '04: Over a billion Whoppers served.
Bush/Cheney '04: Putting the "con" in conservatism
Bush/Cheney '04: Thanks for not paying attention.
Bush/Cheney '04: The last vote you'll ever have to cast.
Bush/Cheney: Asses of Evil
Don't think. Vote Bush!
George W. Bush: A brainwave away from the presidency
George W. Bush: The buck stops Over There
Bush/Cheney '04: This time, elect us!

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And finally the only nontrivial item in this post: I have looked into the reasons why some of my dear readers see my blog as a long, thin column on the right rather than the way it's meant to be seen. The problem only appears with older versions of Netscape (older than Netscape6), and so far at least I have found no solution except to recommend that those of you who have this problem download a more recent version of Netscape. Though my immortal words are equally immortal in a long, thin column so it's completely up to you!

Exercise and Cancer in Women

You must have heard by now that abortion does not cause breast cancer. The debates surrounding this topic have taught me how political the field of women's health research can be. This makes it extra important to scan all new studies carefully for political motives. Sad but true: there are people in this world who are more interested in making political points than in improving the health of the general population or of any of its subgroups such as women. Also, researchers and media pundits are only human, and quite likely to have the same biases as the rest of the population.

So what does this have to do with exercise and its potential effects on cancer? A study has recently shown that women who exercise regularly after the diagnosis of breast cancer have a better survival record than those who don't exercise. The effect is larger the more the woman exercises, but even a leisurely half an hour spent walking each day appears to help the odds of survival.

Another study, which was carried out in China, looked at the relationship between lifelong exercise and the risk of endometrial cancer, the fourth most common cancer in U.S. women. The researchers found that:

...those who stayed active through exercise, housework and walking and cycling for errands had about a one-third lower risk of this form of cancer.

Here's where the politics comes in. Washington Times, the very conservative newspaper owned by the Reverend Moon, reported these findings in an article entitled "Housework Cuts Cancer Risk". It begins as follows:

U.S. and Chinese researchers said Tuesday that doing housework can reduce a woman's chance of getting cancer.

Only later does the reader find that the research findings apply to all ways of staying active. Someone just skimming the headlines and first paragraphs of stories might have gotten a very different idea of the message of the story, one perhaps more suited to Reverend Moon's political values.

Just to make my point very clear: you don't have to do housework to get any possible benign effects of exercise on cancer prevention; water-skiing, figure-skating or boxing will work just as well if not better. And it's a lot more fun. On the other hand, if you feel that you have to do housework, at least now you can feel happy that you are also working out at the same time. To strengthen the positive effects throw plates at the lazier family members.

But does exercise actually prevent cancer or its reoccurrence? The evidence looks pretty good. The only general reservation I have concerns the possibility that we might be measuring a reverse causality here: Breast cancer patients who feel poorly are less likely to exercise, and the reason that they feel poorly may lie in them having a more severe form of the illness. Likewise, people who never exercise very much may be that way because they are not in good health. Still, I think that there is enough overall evidence to support the role of exercise in the maintenance of good health. Doing it partly for cancer prevention can't hurt.

On Polls

A CNN/USA Today poll just published tells us weird and wonderful things about the group of Americans that pollsters call 'likely voters'. First, 51% would choose Bush as the president and 47% would choose Kerry if only these two men were offered for s/election. Second, if Nader is added to the menu, 49% would pick Bush, 45% Kerry and 4% Nader. Third, half of the respondents believed that the Iraq war is a valid part of the war on terrorism. Fourth, president Bush's job approval percentage rose after a week of negative media headlines about the way the Bush administration handled the terrorist threat before 9/11. Fifth, 80% of likely Kerry voters trust Clarke's testimony more than the administration's, while 81% of likely Bush voters trust the administration's testimony more than Clarke's.

Well, not all of this is so weird and wonderful. The first result, for example, has a margin of error of plus or minus four percent, so it's even possible that Bush and Kerry would get the same number of votes if the elections were today and if all voters resembled the likely voters in this poll. Unless Nader entered the race, of course. Though, surprisingly, Nader seems to take votes away from both of the main runners. The fifth result isn't that unexpected, either, as the decision to vote for a particular candidate is pretty highly correlated with the opinions one has of that candidate. Of course, we can't tell which of these is the egg and which the hen...

But the remaining two findings are indeed miraculous. Think about it: there is no evidence that Iraq had anything to do with the terrorist attacks against the United States. Yet half of the respondents know something the world's elite intelligence professionals don't: the Iraqis had their fingers in the pie! Why aren't these people questioned by the 9/11 commission? Or better still, why aren't they hired to do the intelligence work for their country?

Even more awesome is the likely voters' reaction to Clarke's testimony: they now like Bush even better than before! I could understand Bush's job ratings not declining among those who are going to vote for him come whatever may, but for these ratings to rise? Once again, these likely voters are blessed with some extremely valuable inside information, and I want to know what it is.

Polls are silly things, on the whole. Imagine trying to make people answer a poll like this one: how many refusals do you think the pollster gets for each willing respondent? The answer is a lot. Then imagine trying to squeeze definite statements from people who often have but the fuzziest idea of the issues they are being quizzed about. The only scary thing about all this silliness is that it's rather reflected in the elections themselves: most stay away and those who participate often don't know what they are choosing.

Is NPR Ageist?

Not everybody listens to the National Public Radio's "Morning Edition", but those who do are familiar with the name Bob Edwards. Edwards has hosted the news program since it began twenty-five years ago. Last week he was forced to leave this post. Why? Linda Ellerbee believes that the reason is ageism. Edwards is 56 years old. Other than his age, what other reason could there be?

Were the ratings sinking, perhaps? They were not. "Morning Edition's" audience grew by 41% in the last five years; Edwards' is the most-listened-to morning radio program in the U.S.
A spokeswoman for NPR said only that the change was "part of a natural evolution." She said a new host would "bring new ideas and perspectives to the show." Uh-huh.

According to Ellerbee, NPR's thinking might have gone something like this: We want to attract a younger group of listeners. Younger listeners don't want to listen to boring old ways of presenting news. Old fogies present news in the boring old way. Therefore, we have to get rid of Edwards: he is too old.

If this scenario is true, NPR is ageist. It associates concepts such as rigidity and inability to evolve with the concept of physical age, and it also assumes that younger listeners are uniformly ageist themselves. I sure hope that Ellerbee is mistaken and that NPR has some other reasonable explanation for this firing, especially as I have always liked Bob Edwards. He has a voice like whisky-flavored honey.