Worry Beads

The Washington Post recently had an article about a new contraceptive tool: CycleBeads. It's really just a way of counting fertile days, and in that way not truly new. The rhythm method has been with us a long time, beginning with the assumption that the least likely time for conception would be in the middle of a woman's menstrual cycle (you can imagine how successful that was in contraception) and later using the assumption that ovulation is most likely roughly seven to fourteen days after the start of the cycle. What's new about the CycleBeads is that this method is based on actual average ovulation rates and takes an extra safe position: it marks twelve days as high-risk for conceiving:

It looks like an uncommonly ugly necklace, made up of 32 oblong plastic beads. Slightly more than half are a translucent amber brown, a dozen are white, like piña colada jelly beans. One bead in the center is throat-lozenge red, and next to it is a small black plastic cylinder, which bears the necklace's brand name: CycleBeads.
CycleBeads are not jewelry, exactly. They're integral to a new pregnancy-prevention method called the Standard Days Method, developed at the Institute for Reproductive Health (IRH) at Georgetown University.
The necklace is a tool that helps a woman track her menstrual cycle: Slide the little black gasket onto the fat part of the red bead on the first day of a period. Then advance that gasket across the brown beads, at the rate of one a day. When the gasket reaches the 12 white beads, pregnancy is likely if a woman has unprotected sex. (This danger zone is easy to confirm in the darkness of the bedroom, since the white beads glow in the dark.) After the gasket slides past the white beads, it resumes its march across brown beads, and pregnancy is unlikely once more.
According to two studies in the peer-reviewed journal Contraception -- one published this year and one two years earlier -- the method, used correctly, is more effective than a diaphragm and nearly as effective as a condom. This summer, the Standard Days Method and CycleBeads will be inducted into the bible of contraception, "Contraceptive Technology." Being included in the latest update of this family planning reference book used by health care professionals could feed demand for CycleBeads, which retail for $12.95, and never require a refill. In the 13 months since they became available, 30,000 women have started to use this method, according to the IRH. CycleTechnologies, the New York-based company that's manufacturing CycleBeads, projects that figure will double by the end of 2005.

CycleBeads are fine for women who practise contraception but for whom a pregnancy would not be a disaster. For others certain warnings should be added, and the article mentions quite a few of them: there is a 2% risk of ovulation outside the white-bead days even for those with very regular cycles, women who have irregular cycles should not use this method alone, and remembering to move a bead each day is absolutely required.

Some other warnings should be added. For example, the article notes that only 15% of the couples in the study totally abstained from sex during the risky days. This suggests to me that abstinence may not work really well in this method, either, and that any user should do some soul-searching about how likely abstinence will be when the heart beats faster and the loved one looks especially delectable. Maybe adding a barrier method is needed, too?

Another warning I'd like to add concerns the way the study calculated the efficacy rates of contraception for this method:

Among women with regular cycles of 26 to 32 days, efficacy tests published in the journal Contraception show that over the course of a year, 12 percent will become pregnant with typical use -- a rate comparable to that for diaphragms and male condoms.

Given that this method does require some abstaining from sex, and even those who don't completely abstain might have less sex during the white-bead days than if they were using barrier methods of contraception like the condom or the diaphragm, these efficacy rates are not calculated on the same basis. The number of intercourses in the CycleBead method is likely to be smaller, and this means that the pregnancy rate per intercourse is actually likely to be higher than in the barrier methods. Just something to keep in mind.

If you like this method, buy your own nice beads and make a pretty bracelet or necklace. The white beads don't have to shine in the dark. If you're too shy to turn the light on to check them, choose white beads that feel different in the dark. Bulkier, for example.

Hubris

Hubris: it should be the name of all that green slime that contains tadpoles and in the spring covers ponds and ditches. Instead, hubris means overbearing pride or presumption; arrogance. The Greeks saw hubris in deeds where humans pitted themselves against gods and goddesses, and the term does contain the secondary message that the possessors of hubris are going to have their comeuppance soon after. A good example of this is the tale of Arachne. She started her life as a young woman excellent in weaving, but ended her life as a spider because her skills were held in higher esteem than those of the goddess of weaving.

Hubris is also the name of the goddess of insolence, lack of restraint and instinct. Not the person you like to share the occasional cup of nectar with. As might be expected, she spends most of her time with humans, so I have not made her acquaintance. But I think that the neocons have, and so has our president and his administration.

At least an anonymous CIA official, the author of the new book entitled Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, seems to think so. He is anonymous because of CIA rules, and his real name is widely publicized, but I'm going to adhere to the pretense that we don't know who he is. And who knows, maybe his anonymity will keep him from the sin of hubris.

"Anonymous" argues that the Bush administration has made a mess of the war on terrorism, but this should not make liberals especially pleased as he also believes in a 'military campaign that includes "killing in large numbers" and "a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure" as part of "relentless, brutal and blood-soaked defensive military action until we have annihilated the Islamists that threaten us".' His grudge with the administration is therefore not in their reluctance to spill blood but in the way they have interpreted the intelligence CIA and other organizations have gathered:

Indeed,["Anonymous"] blasts most elite experts whatever their political or philosophical persuasion, for "a process of interpreting the world so it makes sense to us, a process yielding a world in which few events seem alien because we Americanize their components." Ultimately, "ignorance of their own and world history, failure to appreciate the power of faith, and disdain for the views and analyses of idiosyncratic Americans and non-Westerners" begets a particularly perilous imperialism.

This is then the hubris that gives the book its name: the American tradition of not paying attention to the rest of the world, and, as is the customary thing with hubris, the current American administation is now going to get its comeuppance for acting like gods and goddesses, though this time the revenge will not come directly from the hands of Zeus or Artemis or even me. No, the revenge is largely self-created here, and it is still possible to avoid it, but only if one also gives up on the hubris that caused the crisis in the first place. To get rid of the hubris, we need to get rid of the current administration, I think. There have been many occasions for repentance and truth-telling and even for some old-fashioned humility, and none of the members of this administration have taken the bait. Their hubris is too strong, too much an essential part of their basic dogma.

Thus, I agree with "Anonymous" in his accusation of excessive American hubris, but I don't agree with his recommendations directing us to even more blood-spilling. Not at least yet. There is still time for diplomacy and cunning negotiations, and John Kerry might still be able to achieve a more peaceful outcome. Might. But time is running out very quickly, and Nemesis, the goddess of revenge is hovering at the edges of our horizon, waiting for the signal to swoop and do the bidding of Hubris.

Wouldn't it be lovely if we lived in a world where 'hubris' really refers to tadpole slime?

Toothpicks

I'm suffering from blogging exhaustion. Is this common, pray, tell me all you wiser and more experienced bloggers? Would you like to read my shopping list? That's about all I've written today, and it contained strawberries and dog food, among other important items.

Also toothpicks. I love toothpicks, and every house should have lots of them. They might even work against terrorism. The only thing I don't use toothpicks for is the picking of the teeth. But they're excellent for fixing door hinges: you stuff the screwholes with toothpicks and when you reattach the hinges, voila!, they're no longer loose and the door closes and opens sedately.

Toothpicks are also the second most important tool (after your nails) in house-cleaning. I love to clean the metal plate with my stove's name on it with toothpicks, never mind the dried sauce rivulets in the front, and I also love to clean the crevices in baseboards with them.

But there are also really bad uses for toothpicks. Some restaurants stick them into sandwiches, and if you're not aware of this you can have a toothpick stuck vertically between your tongue and your palate. This is very unpleasant, and then you need to insert your thumb and forefinger in your mouth in public to snap it into two (the toothpick, that is). And people will stare at you, wondering if you're performing emergency tonsilectomy on yourself.

Hank has the same problem with tree branches. (Hank is a dog who frequently contributes to this blog). She snaps at them ferociously, and then the middle bit is lodged horizontally in the back of her mouth. The first three times the veterinarian didn't charge us anything for removing the branch, but then he started charging. I bought a tool from a mechanic for removing these branches myself, fifty bucks it cost, and then Hank stopped doing it, the devil that she is.

Mae West is famous for saying witty things about real women as opposed to toothpicks, but I really like toothpicks, as long as nobody tries to get them into my mouth.

The Truth about John Edwards?

This is fun. I visited a Republican anti-Edwards website and learned the following facts about John:

Edwards Claims "Natural Connection" With Rural People, But Flunked Funk's Rural Q&A. (Matt Bai, "Nascar-Lovin," The New York Times, 9/15/02; Tim Funk, "Q&A With John Edwards," The Charlotte Observer, 5/26/03)
- Edwards Has "Never Done Any Serious Farming."
- Edwards Doesn't Follow Weekly NASCAR Races, Adds He "Doesn't Follow Anything Except Politicking."
- Edwards Hasn't Hunted Or Fished "In Years."
- Edwards Has "In The Past Been A Country Music Fan." (Tim Funk, "Q&A With John Edwards," The Charlotte Observer, 5/26/03)
Edwards Can't Even Remember Make Or Model Of His Own Truck. "In the New Hampshire interview, Edwards talked in detail on every policy question raised - but came up nearly blank when the questions turned to such everyday subjects as the people who had influenced him along the way, books he was currently reading, and even the make of his family's vehicles. … And the family fleet? A Buick 'with lots of miles on it' (Edwards said he couldn't remember the make; an aide said Park Avenue). 'A bigger car, more like this' (An SUV, an aide suggested, 'probably' a Ford Explorer or Expedition). A truck. Probably a Ford or a Chevrolet, Edwards says. 'It's white, and it's sitting in front of my house.'" (Jon Sawyer, "Sen. Edwards Pitches 'Real Solutions' In His Populist Message," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 8/10/03)

That's terrible, don't you think so? I, for one, insist on a vice-president who hunts and fishes every morning and spends the rest of the day following NASCAR races. Scraping the bottom of the nasty-rumors-barrel here, aren't we?

Hoo, Hoo, Hooters!

That's supposed to be owl sounds. I have never yet visited the Hooters restaurants, as I'm not that interested in standardized food and human female mammary glands, but I have heard that many people are.
So many, that the female waitstaff at Hooters has to wear uniforms which emphasize their chests and stuff.

But one shouldn't take this idea to its logical conclusion, of course. It's all supposed to be about just pretending to ogle at breasts or women who are scantily dressed. You are not supposed to really ogle. Well, one Hooter's manager didn't get this subtle distinction. He went a step further and videotaped applicants for the Hooter-role while they were changing from their usual clothes to the required uniform:

A former Hooters restaurant manager accused of secretly videotaping female applicants as they changed into waitress uniforms pleaded no contest Monday to felony charges.
Juan Martin Aponte, 32, has been held on $500,000 bail since his arrest in May.
He pleaded no contest to five felony counts, including two counts of using a minor for a sex act and three counts of eavesdropping, and will be sentenced to five years in state prison, the Los Angeles County district attorney's office said. A sentencing hearing was set for Aug. 24.
The taping allegedly occurred between November and February in a trailer outside a restaurant being renovated as a new Hooters - a chain best known for its scantily clad waitresses.

They found about 180 digital recordings of such clothes changes in Aponte's possession...

Of course the women didn't give their consent to this videotaping, while I assume that by accepting the job at Hooters you give your consent to public ogling? So that's what makes the restaurant's use of the women's bodies acceptable and Aponte's use of the same or similar bodies a felony.

The Hooters probably pay more than other restaurants, given that you both serve food and also work as eyecandy, I would think, or do they? And then there's the fact that these videotapings provided no extra revenues for the restaurant chain itself. So there are differences between the two cases, that of Hooters and that of Aponte, but there are also similarities. Both, for example, are interested in the generic female body, not the body of some specific individual or her skills with it. What seems to make the Hooters case perfectly legal and fine is that specific individuals are giving their permission for the display of the generic female body...

The Trees Don't Like This

The Bush administration is passing the control of Federal forests to state governors! The specific case has to do with whether roads should be built to remote forest areas to help with logging them:

Under the proposal, governors would have to petition the federal government to block road-building in remote areas of national forests. Allowing roads to be built would open the areas to logging.
The rule replaces one adopted by the Clinton administration and still under challenge in federal court. It covers about 58 million of the 191 million acres of national forest nationwide.
The Bush administration heralded the plan as an end to the legal uncertainty overshadowing tens of millions of acres of America's backcountry.
"Our actions today advance the Bush administration's commitment to cooperatively conserving roadless areas," Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman said in announcing the plan in the Idaho Capitol Rotunda.

'Cooperative conserving roadless areas'? I asked a friendly pine tree what she or he (I could never figure the right pronoun for trees) thought about this new adventure into environmentalism, and all I got as an answer was a silent scream so blood-chilling that I couldn't move for several minutes. So the trees and I are opposed to this proposal, and so should you.

Why? This is why:

Philip Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, called the administration proposal the biggest giveaway to the timber industry in history, arguing that many western states would likely press for development to help struggling rural economies.
"The idea that many governors would want to jump head first into the political snake pit of managing the national forests in their states is laughable," he said. "Besides, the timber industry has invested heavily for years in the campaigns of governors with the largest national and state forests, giving almost equally to Republicans and Democrats."

Look, either we want to have some undisturbed nature left or we don't. It's that simple. If we decide we don't want any, then we better work quickly to find another planet that we can go and savage next as this one will not endure us very much longer, and when earth has had enough of our incessant desire to turn perfectly good trees into umbrella stands, guess what will happen? It has something in common with what happens when you put a plastic bag over your head.
And no, I'm not a treehugger, whatever that particular sexual act might involve. I just like to breathe and to have shade in the heat of summer.

Hi! It's Me! I'm Bubbly and Cute!

This quote from the Chicago Tribune via ms. musings serves as the fodder for a not-so-deep thought for the day:

"What is the most talked-about aspect of Jessica Simpson's show? How stupid she is," said Jennifer Pozner, director of the New York-based non-profit organization Women in Media & News.
The message, in Pozner's mind, is clear: "They're telling girls that being pretty, being bubbly, being, a la Jessica Simpson, a really polished airhead is the ideal. That's what you should aspire to be. These images are a real useful mechanism to reinforce some retrograde, Stepford-ized ideas about women and what they should aspire to."

Time for a makeover, don't you think? Being a really polished airhead isn't that difficult. You need to widen your eyes in admiration whenever you look at someone. Think of Nancy Reagan's tactics, and you'll get this one. And then you need to purse your lips into a pretty little O, or you could stick your tongue out just a little bit, at one corner of the mouth. You could also screw your eyes when doing this. That's the cute bit.

The bubbly bit means laughing a lot at wrong places and trying to stand on one foot, plus not knowing anything about cars or football or how to kill someone in 27 different ways, but being very admiring of all of this. I know, I've done this act myself; a shameful confession if there ever was one. It's good for fishing, but what you get in your net is all throw-backs and the endeavor is ultimately pointless.

It's also really cruel if you think about it in more detail, and I suspect that it's sexist, too, because it's based on assumptions about men that give them a very low intelligence. And it's not at all entertaining unless you really happen to be a polished airhead. Besides, polished airheadedness is not a good earnings strategy, and if it's used for husband-hunting it needs to be kept up 24/7 and I have yet met anyone who could do this without becoming a withered balloon on a stick.

That's the reason why I do a lot better with the goddess act.

Bush Tales

The Bush family has been busy doing many things, and some of them are more interesting than others. In Florida, Jeb Bush has had a fascinating week. First, he failed a math question asked by an eighteen year old Florida school student at an occasion where Bush was speaking about the importance of passing the Florida FCAT test that is required there for high school graduation. Here's Jeb's excuse for failing:

"If the point is I haven't been in school for the last 30 years, that's true. But if I'm going to be graduating from high school and I can't pass a 10th-grade aptitude test, then I'm fooling myself," Bush said. "The fact that a 51-year-old man can't answer a question is really not relevant. You're still going to have to take the FCAT, and you're still going to have to pass it in order to get a high-school degree."

Hmm. I wouldn't be convinced by this if I was a student in Florida.

Though Jeb's administration does seem to suffer from some type of math angst. Consider the fact that it recently released a list of Florida felons, barred from voting, and this list missed most Hispanic felons, supposedly due to data handling problems:

The decision to scrap the list was made after it was reported that the list contained few people identified as Hispanic; of the nearly 48,000 people on the list created by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, only 61 were classified as Hispanics.
That was because when voters register in Florida, they can identify themselves as Hispanic. But the potential felons database has no Hispanic category, which excludes many people from the list if they put that as their race.

Hmm. What language is the name "Florida"? Never mind. I have been told by several data handlers that the omission of the Hispanic names can't have been due to computer problems, unless the Florida state workers are unusually incompetent. So perhaps this is another example of Jeb's math anxiety? Or something.

Meanwhile, Jeb's big brother has been busy sulking in public and sticking his tongue out at the NAACP. He refused an invitation to speak at the annual meeting of the NAACP, and when asked to reconsider this is what Bush answered:

Bush, campaigning in Pennsylvania on Friday, said he would not attend this year's NAACP event. He said his relationship with its leadership was "basically nonexistent" and he referred to being called "names" by organization members.

Hmm. Interesting behavior. Reminds me of spats between little children. Its use by the president of the United States is novel, though. There are more than twelve million registered black voters in the country, but most of them vote for Democrats. Maybe the president isn't for every American anymore, just for those who vote Republican?

Some More on Self-Defense

I'm a firm believer in learning the basics of unarmed self-defense. I'm also a pacifist in that I'd never launch an attack on anybody. But my pacifism is combined with the idea that sometimes the way to hold the peace is to kindly (in a relative sense) but firmly restrain the person who tries to attack you. That way nobody gets badly hurt.

Still, the most important aspect of self-defense is what one does before a risky situation develops, and the most important skills to learn are the skills to stay out of trouble, to learn to anticipate it and to learn to diffuse it. Having said that, I also believe that it gives us more freedom and confidence if we know what to do in the undesirable event that fighting is necessary. These skills should be acquired with a good teacher of self-defense, and they need to be practised to really learn them.

So now you can understand why I blow my stack every time I see women practising 'self-defense' in traditional Hollywood movies. Imagine the scene: some nasty rogue has just picked up the heroine and holds her tightly against his chest, her legs flailing in the air. She arches her back and hammers his chest with her fists. Of course all this is totally useless, and seems to demonstrate to us, the viewers, that no woman can ever defend herself.

The only thing she's doing that would make any sense in a real-world situation is the leg flailing, but only if she was held with her back against his front. Then flailing the legs (or bicycling in the air, if you like) is a good idea: it moves the balance of her weight forwards and makes it very hard for him to hold her in the air. This is something small children do instinctively when they don't want to be held. Everything else she does is counterproductive.

The chest is one of the best defended portions of the human body. The ribcage serves as an internal armor, and it's really pretty pointless to attack the chest in any unarmed fight. It's especially pointless to attack the chest with fists, as the fists are wider than the spaces between the ribs. And arching the back serves no useful purpose here at all.

Thus, what Hollywood has been teaching women for decades is a way of fighting that wouldn't work even if the 'she' in the scene was twice as heavy and bulky as the 'he'. I can't help feeling that this is purposeful, though it probably isn't. But is sure is stupid.

In reality, you don't want to be picked up as the ground is where you get your power from. But if you indeed are picked up by an assailant, then hammering on his chest is the last thing you want to. The basic principle in fighting someone mean, nasty and most likely stronger than you is to go for the most vulnerable targets using the dirtiest tricks imaginable. Any good self-defense teacher can show how this is done. Don't trust the Hollywood movies on this one.
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Please read the Consumer Warning to the next post, too.

Public Health Announcement #1

The Proper Use of Elbows

Elbows are excellent weapons. Imagine yourself being attacked by someone (yes, I know this isn't nice) who has you in a hug that leaves at least one of your arms free. Then imagine the movement you make if you wish to scratch your neck. Hold it right there! Now you have the 'elbow punch' ready. When your arm is bent over like this the elbow becomes its new extremity, and it's quite a hammer, even when the person who owns it is small and frail.

The elbow has a limited range of movement, but not much movement is needed. To go back into the hostile hug example, all you need to do is to raise the elbow straight up in front of your body. It's good to hammer noses with, or whatever else might happen to be in its way. Of course you want to swing it, not just raise it.

Another neat use for the elbow is towards the back. Suppose that you are held from behind by some nasty assailant of the night. If the creep's arm is around your neck, the first thing you want to do is to lower your chin as much as possible towards your chest. This guarantees that you won't choke. The next thing you do is to make a fist (thumb on the outside of the fist, please). Then you can swing your arm backwards towards the groin of the assailant, and as your fist hits home, you can continue the trajectory back and upwards by bending your elbow. It should reach the stomach region. If all this is combined with a nice stamp of the attacker's instep with your shod foot, you should find yourself freed. What you do next is run. (If you're all alone with the assailant and running will not work something a little more drastic is needed. I'd recommend a hip throw which might break a bone or two (not yours). I'll explain it later if there is interest.)

The elbow is also efficient sideways. Imagine reaching towards the left with your right hand so that it is actually past your body on the left. This is the beginning position of a useful elbow punch to the right. You simply return the arm, bent at the elbow to its home position on the right. It's good when used at the side ribs of an attacker.

Your elbows are your friends! Remember that, especially when you need something for close-quarters fighting. You can practise these moves in your mind or with a willing partner if you are both really careful not to actually hit. Repetition is needed to put the moves into the body memory.

A cynic might argue that these moves won't work with all types of attacks, especially armed ones. That's true. But then appendectomy doesn't cure heart disease either, and learning to speak French is not very useful if you happen to go to China. So let's not be overly pessimistic.
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A Consumer Warning: This post is written partly in fun, and it's important to add that no self-defense technique works in all situations and for all people, that no technique should be used where it's illegal, that sometimes it may be better not to use physical defense, that practising such techniques as these should be done with care and under proper guidance if at all possible, and that whether practising these or any other techniques is advisable depends on many factors, including the practitioner's health status. Consult a physician if you are in doubt. Add here any other warning that makes me totally free of any and all misuses of such techniques...

Zero Sum Games: Stepford and the Wall Street

Have you seen the new movie version of the Stepford Wives? The original book and movie were thrillers focusing on the deeper meaning of misogyny and rigid sex roles in the 1970's America, but the new movie is a satire where the plot laughs at everybody, including the heroine:

In the 1975 movie, Katharine Ross' Joanna was a very likable everywoman who wanted to resume her career in photography now that her children have started school. Seeing none of the other women in town shares her desire to pursue interests outside the home, Joanna thinks she's going crazy and eventually fears for her life.

...

Nicole Kidman's updated Joanna is a negative stereotype of an overly ambitious, non-maternal career woman. Her best friend Bobbie, who was quirky and fun in the original, is played by Bette Midler as hilarious but also dark and bitter. The re-make adds a new gay character who is predictably neurotic and sarcastic. All three newcomers to Stepford are taking anti-anxiety or anti-depressant pills implying there is something inherently unhappy in their career-obsessed lives.

It's no longer so unusual to portray a woman as wanting to do something interesting with her remaining years, of course, so it may be natural that the remake would change Joanna's character. But why make her into a career-obsessed harridan?

This is what we do with many sociological and political problems, and especially those that have to do with women's roles. You're either one thing or the other, either a mother or a careerist, either a good girl or a bitch, either a virgin or a whore, either a madonna or a witch and so on. Once the problem has been reframed in this rigid two-extremes way, we then continue to decide which extreme end-point each woman should be placed at.

A failed attempt, from the beginning, but there is a good reason why this false dualism is so religiously practised: it makes women's choices into zero-sum games and serves to keep women apart from each other as a social or political force. Zero-sum games are those situations where winning for one person or group by necessity means losing for the others; like deciding on how to divide a chunk of strawberry-and-cream cake between two greedy eaters. But not all social or political situations actually resemble zero-sum games. In many all parties can be winners at the same time. The way we Stepfordize women's choices makes this possibility disappear from public debate, makes the debate take the form of an either-or argument and threatens to turn it into another version of wars among women.

In the real world most people are complicated creatures and want to have both water and bread, both love and work. That's why career harridans and Stepford wives are not real and shouldn't be placed in front of us as somehow the only two choices. This is utter rubbish. But it's clever rubbish, as evidenced by the fact that we talk about this silly stuff and silly movies that contain it, rather than about how to make work and home both feasible for all individuals who need and/or desire them.

Good Morning!

People always dream about the places they're going to visit when they go on vacation (at least in countries where people get vacations, not the U.S. that much). I dream about sleep. So today I'm on vacation, and I just woke up and it's about three in the afternoon! Greetings from the Sandy Man's Island!

The name is supposedly because of all that white slime you gather around your eyelashes when in deep sleep. Well, actually it's because of the way your eyes feel gritty when you're tired, but the grittiness is the white slime that slowly makes it way out to your eyelashes. It never gets to the eyebrows, for some reasons, which makes me wonder even more what eyebrows are really for. They look like windshield wipers, so they could be there to stop bugs from flying into your eyes, but most people have too puny eyebrows for that. Maybe they're primitive sunshades?

Anyway, I dreamt a lot during my most recent slumber. I dreamt about people walking to and fro along a busy street, leading large pink pigs in dog harnesses. Then I dreamt about renting a collapsing manor house in deep woods. I had no money to pay the rent, so I couldn't evict the people who were already living in it: a three-foot tall English barrister who wanted to talk to me about death taxes, a wild artist with a purple beard who had invented a previously nonexisting color, and a very old royal lady who offered to sell me costume jewelry at outrageous prices. All the time in this dream I kept plastering and sawing and propping up walls that collapsed, and these people kept coming in and pestering me about death taxes and art and jewelry. And I feared the day when they'd find out that I had no money at all! But the forest was very beautiful.

And this whole vacation trip cost me nothing! Now I have written about my dream! This is supposed to be an absolute no-no, and doing it feels so good. Plus you can now psychoanalyze me to your heart's content! Or tell me the best dream you ever had. Now I have to take Hank and Henrietta out and feed them, and then I can come back and post something more serious.

We are not Amused

This photo, via skippy the bush kangaroo, is priceless. It was taken after the president was asked unpleasant questions about his relationship to Kenneth Lay. Look at the body language. Even the flag and the door drapes reflect his grumpiness!



And for more visual fun, here's a picture of Kenneth Lay with his most recent date.... Thanks to Athenae at Eschaton for this one. See how easy blogging can be some days! You just go around and reap the harvest of others who are more industrious...

Meanwhile, in Pakistan...

The New Republic online edition has an article which is very hard to believe, but we have all gotten more and more used to 'very-hard-to-believe' matters before breakfast in the last four years. So perhaps this one is true, too:

This spring, the administration significantly increased its pressure on Pakistan to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri, or the Taliban's Mullah Mohammed Omar, all of whom are believed to be hiding in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan. A succession of high-level American officials--from outgoing CIA Director George Tenet to Secretary of State Colin Powell to Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca to State Department counterterrorism chief Cofer Black to a top CIA South Asia official--have visited Pakistan in recent months to urge General Pervez Musharraf's government to do more in the war on terrorism. In April, Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, publicly chided the Pakistanis for providing a "sanctuary" for Al Qaeda and Taliban forces crossing the Afghan border. "The problem has not been solved and needs to be solved, the sooner the better," he said.
This public pressure would be appropriate, even laudable, had it not been accompanied by an unseemly private insistence that the Pakistanis deliver these high-value targets (HVTs) before Americans go to the polls in November. The Bush administration denies it has geared the war on terrorism to the electoral calendar. "Our attitude and actions have been the same since September 11 in terms of getting high-value targets off the street, and that doesn't change because of an election," says National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack. But The New Republic has learned that Pakistani security officials have been told they must produce HVTs by the election. According to one source in Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), "The Pakistani government is really desperate and wants to flush out bin Laden and his associates after the latest pressures from the U.S. administration to deliver before the [upcoming] U.S. elections." Introducing target dates for Al Qaeda captures is a new twist in U.S.-Pakistani counterterrorism relations--according to a recently departed intelligence official, "no timetable[s]" were discussed in 2002 or 2003--but the November election is apparently bringing a new deadline pressure to the hunt. Another official, this one from the Pakistani Interior Ministry, which is responsible for internal security, explains, "The Musharraf government has a history of rescuing the Bush administration. They now want Musharraf to bail them out when they are facing hard times in the coming elections." (These sources insisted on remaining anonymous. Under Pakistan's Official Secrets Act, an official leaking information to the press can be imprisoned for up to ten years.)

The article does mention one source, Lieutenant General Esan ul-Haw, by name, and he reveals the following interesting tidbit:

a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July"--the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

I have no idea if any of this is true. That I still decided to post it is based on the old adage: better safe than sorry, as well as the sum total of my recent innocence-stripping experiences with our current administration. We'll see what happens during the first three days of the Democratic National Convention, won't we?

The Experiences of Some Detained at Guantanamo Bay

You can read some stories here. There is no way of corroborating what these men say, of course, but I think the mainstream media in the United States should not ignore them. Be warned, the reading might not be easy for all.

The One that Got Away

If you write you know all about that feeling of being nothing but a conduit from some deeper, wider, more important place. Maybe you don't feel it often, but you do feel it sometimes, and then writing is more than pleasure, more than joy, something happening elsewhere yet everywhere. You look up from your work, and five hours have passed! Where did the time go?

The answer is that it didn't exist, because you were in an in-between place, out of time and out of space. You were nothing but a door through which the holy winds blow and everything you wrote down was perfect and nothing you wrote down was from you. It is a blessing to have these moments, worth of years of dental visits without novocaine and good beer.

This is what happened to me this morning, and I'm still weak at the knees. Then I erased it all, accidentally, and the sun died. It deserved to die, and I deserve to die and also to tell about it as publicly as possible. What I had on the screen is gone for ever, and this is because I was a clumsy oaf more in need of my decaf gallon than saving these sacred messages from Elsewhere. So. I hope you feel as bad as I do now. No, not really. Just wanted to share.

The Contraceptive Pill: A New Frontier for the Pro-Life Movement

I googled 'contraceptive pill' and 'implantation' this morning, and found literally hundreds of biased pro-life sites. Try it, if for nothing else, than to find out what the pro-lifers are het up right now. The topic of the day seems to be the regular contraceptive pill, not the 'morning-after' type, and its abortifacient characteristics. In other words, pro-lifers argue that the birth control pill kills babies. Or rather, tiny, tiny sons and daughters. The cunning way it manages to do this is by preventing the implantation of the fertilized egg onto the lining of the uterus.

Some sites tell about this in vivid terms: how 'your' desperate, starving tiny son or daughter is trying, trying, but failing to hook onto 'your' now-shriveled and hostile uterine lining. The writers of these tragedies have lost good career opportunities in some of the lesser known genres of literature, but I wish that they didn't assume the reader is a woman who is also the location of these events.

The reason why taking the birth control pill is murder, in the pro-life world, is the possibility that there might be an ovulation even though the pill tries to stop ovulations from happening, and that as a consequence an egg might be fertilized, but fail because of its inability to implant. The reason I was googling with those keywords as well as others more refined was to find out the studies that show exactly how the contraceptive pill stops implantation of the fertilized egg. I was unable to find any such study, and in fact an article in the Prevention magazine states that no such research exists:

At the heart of the debate between anti-Pill forces and mainstream medicine lies a profound difference of opinion about when pregnancy and life begin. The long-standing medical definition of pregnancy, held by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, is that it starts not when an egg is fertilized, but when the fertilized egg implants in the uterine lining.

This distinction is practical: A pregnancy test won't show a positive result before implantation. "It can't be an abortion before there is a pregnancy," points out David Grimes, MD, a clinical professor in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and one of the leading contraception experts in the US.

But anti-Pill doctors and pharmacists say life begins sooner, at fertilization. Sloughing off a fertilized egg, in their view, is a "chemical abortion."

"How many women know that if they become pregnant after breakthrough ovulation, these 'contraceptives' will almost always kill any son or daughter they've conceived?" asks the anti-Pill organization Pro-Life America on the group's Web site, ProLife.com.

Surprisingly, there's no science to back the theory that birth control pills really do discourage implantation. This claim, made by contraceptive manufacturers for decades, has never been proven, Grimes says. Even the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists agrees that it's just speculation.

This is so important it bears repeating:

Surprisingly, there's no science to back the theory that birth control pills really do discourage implantation. This claim, made by contraceptive manufacturers for decades, has never been proven, Grimes says. Even the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists agrees that it's just speculation.

You'd never think that there is any doubt about the scientific basis for the implantation-argument in the tens and hundreds of pro-life websites. No doubt at all. Contraceptive pills are abortifacients!:

The Pill and its "cousins" kill children earlier in their life than surgical abortion. In America, chemical abortions are estimated to kill more than 7 million babies each year -- while surgical abortions kill about 1.5 million babies each year.

That's how pro-lifers think. Even the smallest, hypothetical possibility of a fertilized egg not being implanted is adequate grounds to 'estimate' that seven million 'babies' are killed each year by women who use the birth control pill. This is the next frontier of the pro-life warplan, the natural next step to take after fighting abortion: to fight contraception. The frontlines will no longer be drawn at the offices of physicians who perform abortions, rather, they will be in the wombs of millions and millions of American women. Or that's what the pro-life movement would like to see happen, I believe.

Here's a glimpse of the first moves in this new stage of the anti-abortion war:

Though three states have conscience clauses for pharmacists, there is no such legal provision in Texas, where the CVS druggist refused to fill Julee Lacey's prescription.

The night it happened, Lacey says, she was shocked and responded, "Are you sure? I've had this filled here many times before." But the pharmacist was emphatic. "I just couldn't believe what I was hearing," recalls Lacey. "It was a school night, and I knew I had to put my kids to bed and get organized for work the next morning. I didn't want to run all over town for my Pills." Lacey and her husband complained to the assistant store manager that night and the district manager the next day. Finally, the pharmacy supervisor called and said he would have Lacey's prescription delivered that day. "He apologized and said he was unaware of the pharmacist's moral objections to the Pill. Apparently it was a new belief," says Lacey. (A CVS corporate spokesperson contacted by Prevention confirmed Lacey's story. None of the employees has ever been named.)

All that Ms. Lacey suffered was a small delay and some frustration. But what would the consequences be if ethical refusals by health professionals were more generally legal? What would a woman in a rural area with just one pharmacy do? Where would she go if the only gynecologist refused to prescribe the pill? Do these ethical refusals take into account all the abortions that might ensue because women get pregnant in the absence of the birth control pill they can't get prescribed?

More generally, do ethical refusals consider the fact that many women use the contraceptive pill for something else than pregnancy prevention? It is used to control acne, to reduce fibroids, to control endometriosis and to prevent ovarian cancer, a particulary deathly and symptomless form of cancer (the efficacy of birth control pills in preventing this type of cancer may be as high as 80%). Does this matter to the refusing professional? That the woman denied the pill might then actually die herself? Of course this is unlikely to happen today, given that most other professionals will not refuse to prescribe oral contraceptives, but shouldn't the ethical refuser consider his or her own choices and their consequences alone? After all, most of those denied the pill for birth control purposes will get their prescription filled elsewhere, and if the pill is killing tiny babies, it will do it irrespective of the person who prescribed or dispensed the order.

I'm unhappy with this ethical refusal rule, and wonder where it might lead us. Suppose that I present myself at the front desk of a pharmacy somewhere with a big packet of red and pink condoms. If the clerk helping me doesn't believe in adultery, can she or he quiz me on my marital status and on what I intend to do with the condoms? And does it matter that I'm going to use them in lieu of birthday balloons?

I'm also unhappy with the argument I found on a pro-life website that scientists have conclusively proved that life begins at conception. I believe, deeply, sincerely and fervently, that life begins before conception. The ova and the sperm are both alive and both human, and any man who ejaculates during sleep is guilty of mass murder. Likewise, any woman who needs to buy tampons this month is guilty of serial murder. When I get around to it, I'm going to start my own pro-life movement and go after the Catholic priests first of all. Think of all the lives they have denied! But even if I believed in the lukewarm version the current pro-life movement holds true, I'd be a little bit concerned about going after all women who use oral contraceptives just on the basis of a hunch. This seems a cruel and non-Christian thing to do, though to be fair to the pro-lifers, any woman who gives up her pills right now can still get forgiveness and a place in heaven. I wonder what the writers of this stuff will get when they knock on the final gates? A nasty surprise? Who knows.


Via the Rubber Nun

J. Leon Holmes was Approved

So. Religion has been affirmed, never mind about all that political correctness crap. You might be interested to know that Mary Landrieux voted for Mr. Holmes. I'm sure that she had asked for the permission of her husband before venturing to raise her voice in public in such a manner. If not, she can always repent later at leisure.

Actually, it's a good reminder, a cold shower if you like, about what is important in this world. Religion is, and bombs are and wars. Human rights are very unimportant, except when they come handy as a shield behind which better political plots can be hatched.

And you will not get a link or anything. I'm a fed-up goddess, and in fact I've put in my application to start a new world somewhere far away. Populated by nothing but snakes.

Guess Who's Really Oppressed in America?

This is an easy one: it's white Christian men, especially the ones who try to get appointments as Federal Judges. The most recent victim of this incessant harassment of Christians is J. Leon Holmes, a district court nominee. He's mercilessly oppressed by not only the Democrats, of whom we expect nothing but such stigmatizing, but even by some wishy-washy quasi-Republicans! Yes, indeed, moles have buried deep into the Republican underbelly, and the season to get rid of them is now!

So tremble, Arlen Specter, Kay Bailey Hutchison and Olympia Snowe! Quiver and shake, ye women of the Republicans in the House and Senate! We shall smite you down in your arrogance! We have heard mutterings and rumblings that all Republican female Senators are against this noble and valiant Christian soldier, and we warn you that the Right will prevail.

Why does any misguided soul oppose our brother-in-faith J. Leon Holmes? He is, after all, wielding the sword against abortionists and people who refuse to see the righteous truth in the commands of the holy Bible. All Leon is accused of is stating clearly that which we all know to be true deep in our bosoms: that women are not equal to men. It is not Leon's fault that this is how things are, what is written is written. And what is written must be true. Read Ephesians 5 yourself if you doubt me.

And did you ever hear anything more idiotic than this:

Critics have portrayed Holmes as anti-woman. Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way, issued a statement yesterday saying that "Holmes' record and extreme views about the role of women and other subjects will make it impossible for many who come before him to believe they will get a fair hearing."

How lamentably wrong can these communists be? What is wrong with taking Epheseans 5 as your guiding light in deciding on court cases concerning the weaker sex? What is wrong with holding the holy truths about the submission of women above the purely earthly concerns of this republic? What is fairer to women than the religion we know to be the only right one?

See, brethren, how we battle the dark forces. Yet they rise again and again, and in their anger and wrath trample over our sacred rights and the True Way of Life. They oppress us and don't let us rule over their pagan multitudes. They discriminate against us and don't let us preach the true words from the judicial pulpits. We are the oppressed and the victimized, we are the ones who must be affirmed.

Please rise and assure that our brother J. Leon Holmes receives the judgeship that is his by right. If he can be denied on such puny grounds as not seeing the sexes as equal, how can we ever grant equal opportunity to those of us who hold even firmer views on these matters?


Via Holden on Atrios.

John Edwards

So now it's a campaign of the two johns. About the only real opening this gives the wingnuts.

Edwards was a good choice, I think, if there is such a thing as a good choice in thir particular election year. Anyone Kerry would nominate would be treated to an immediate autopsy by the right-wing pundits. Just to see what Edwards might have in store, I went around looking for any nasty things that was said about him.

Here's a sampling:

From corporate America:

Wall Street was also concerned about Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's selection of John Edwards as vice president. Edwards, a trial lawyer, is seen by the conservative investment community as a proponent of the expensive class-action litigation that often plagues corporate America.
"Clearly, Edwards isn't the choice of business. But the primary question is John Kerry the choice for business?," Pears said. "The answer to that question is less clear for John Kerry, and he's the one running for president, not Edwards."

From the Bush/Cheney campaign:

The Bush/Cheney campaign released new TV ads in an attempt to downplay Kerry`s announcement. They show Bush and Republican Senator John McCain hugging on the campaign trail and say McCain was Kerry`s first choice in a running mate, not John Edwards.

From Republican commentators more generally:

But Larry Sabato also says Republicans will question whether John Edwards is qualified to become vice president.
"Edwards is so inexperienced," he said. "He has never served in public office before this one Senate term and he has a very thin resume in the Senate. He really was not a very dedicated senator. So, I think the question can fairly be asked, is this fellow really ready to assume the presidency on a moment's notice in this very dangerous time?"

and from the mouth of the beast itself, the National Review Online:

Party strategists will undoubtedly answer that in the general election it is the presidential candidate who really matters, and that in the area of national security, voters placed much more trust in John Kerry. That's true. But given that the war in Iraq, and to some extent the larger issue of national security, will likely dominate the fall campaign, it's also true that Kerry has chosen a running mate who is extraordinarily weak on those issues that matter most.

All this sounds very weak to me. Which means that John Edwards was a good choice for Kerry. Let the games begin.

Blogger Pains

The Blogger is experiencing growing pains again. If you have trouble getting here or to any other blogspot site, it's not your fault. Normally trying again a couple of times will work, or if not, alternating http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com with http://www.echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com should do the trick. We apologize for this inconvenience, but plan to do nothing to fix it as blogspot is extremely appropriately priced. Though I will personally scold them, again.

Women Priests

I am for them, but the Roman Catholic church is somewhat less enthusiastic. Well, considerably less enthusiastic. This is not hard to understand: if women became priests, who'd be left to do all the drudge work that is needed in running the churches? Still, I don't understand the Pope's brain on the topic of women. He appears to have but the faintest idea of what women are. Maybe this isn't so unexpected given the way the Catholic church makes sure that its priests will not live in families which would be one way of finding out about women, at least partially. Not that women are very different from men, of course, but it seems to be part of the Pope's belief systems that they are. For example, women can't be priests because they weren't among Christ's disciples (ok, I have no idea if the Pope believes this, but many in the church do, and I want to make the argument here). This hasn't stopped the church from electing a Polish pope, and I'm willing to bet my pocket money against the possibility that any of the original disciples was Polish. In any case, some scholars argue that Mary Magdalene was a disciple and that her role was erased in later rewritings of the gospels.

I think that women should be priests because I would have made a wonderful priest, if I had happened to have been born Catholic (and human). This makes me believe that we are losing countless numbers of wonderful priests because of attitudes which really should be outdated by now. I also don't like giving little girls messages about their second-class status, and being told that you can't become a priest simply because you are a girl tends to do funny things to your head. It may even serve to breed future feminists!

So the following news should be regarded as good ones by all concerned:

Six Catholic women, including two Americans, were ordained as Catholic deacons on June 26 at a service on the Danube River in Passau, Germany. The service was a continuation of a series of ordinations that began in 2002 in the same location, at which point seven women were ordained into the priesthood.
For a religious community still in the shadows of the clergy sex abuse scandals, these ordinations are seen as a positive step toward the healing of the Catholic church, according to advocates of female priests.

...

Ida Raming, a German theologian and one of the priests who performed the ordinations of women two years ago, argued that baptism, not gender, determines eligibility for the priesthood. At the 2002 service she said that the opinion of the current church leadership on women priests--as well as the Biblical canons that it is derived from--are "based on a grave lack of respect for the human dignity of women and their Christian existence."

Not that any of this will be accepted by the Catholic church. The most likely outcome is that all those involved in these ordinations will be excommunicated. There is something very sad about a church which must excommunicate those who most desperately want to serve it.

Be Afraid! Be Very Afraid!

Welcome to the post 7/4 world. It's time to be afraid again:

The federal authorities, concerned about a terror attack during this summer's national political conventions, have begun a new effort to identify potential extremists inside the United States, including conducting interviews in communities where terrorists might seek refuge, government officials said.
The fears about an incident during the conventions or later in the year have also led state and local officials to impose extraordinary security precautions. Persistent if indistinct intelligence reports, based on electronic intercepts and live sources, indicate that Al Qaeda is determined to strike in the United States some time this year, the officials said in interviews last week.
Almost half the budgets in each convention city will be spent on security, local officials said. The Democratic National Convention will be held in Boston at the Fleet Center from July 26 to 29. The Republican National Convention will be held in New York at Madison Square Garden from Aug. 30 to Sept. 2.
New York is regarded as a higher risk than Boston by counterterrorism officials because George Bush is a Republican and because of consistent intelligence.

Clearly, the counterterrorism officials have been busy protecting George Bush already from possible terrorists. In his ninth visit to West Virginia since taking office, Bush told Americans that their country is safer because Saddam Hussein is in a prison cell. However, his own security seems to have been seriously endangered by this brave public appearance:

Two Bush opponents, taken out of the crowd in restraints by police, said they were told they couldn't be there because they were wearing shirts that said they opposed the president.

Ok. We've got Saddam in a cell and probably the Bush protesters as well (no, turns out that they were let loose, after all!). How about catching some of Al Qaeida, too? Or is this just not doable given the current budgeted expenditures needed in Iraq? To be honest, I'd much rather pay taxes for Al Qaeida hunting than either the fiasco in Iraq or the fiasco that took place in West Virginia. Though I guess we'll soon have nothing left to protect of the freedoms that Bush argues make the terrorists so mad at us.
----------
Thanks to Tena at Eschaton for the link to the second quote.

Barbara Ehrenreich on the Fourth of July

From the New York Times:

When they first heard the Declaration of Independence in July of 1776, New Yorkers were so electrified that they toppled a statue of King George III and had it melted down to make 42,000 bullets for the war. Two hundred twenty-eight years later, you can still get a rush from those opening paragraphs. "We hold these truths to be self-evident." The audacity!
Read a little further to those parts of the declaration we seldom venture into after ninth-grade civics class, and you may feel something other than admiration: an icy chill of recognition. The bulk of the declaration is devoted to a list of charges against George III, several of which bear an eerie relevance to our own time.
George III is accused, for example, of "depriving us in many cases of the benefits of Trial by Jury." Our own George II has imprisoned two U.S. citizens — Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi — since 2002, without benefit of trials, legal counsel or any opportunity to challenge the evidence against them. Even die-hard Tories Scalia and Rehnquist recently judged such executive hauteur intolerable.
It would be silly, of course, to overstate the parallels between 1776 and 2004. The signers of the declaration were colonial subjects of a man they had come to see as a foreign king. One of their major grievances had to do with the tax burden imposed on them to support the king's wars. In contrast, our taxes have been reduced — especially for those who need the money least — and the huge costs of war sloughed off to our children and grandchildren. Nor would it be tactful to press the analogy between our George II and their George III, of whom the British historian John Richard Green wrote: "He had a smaller mind than any English king before him save James II."

It is all good stuff.

Colin Sings. Colin Dances.

If you want to see and hear Colin Powell dance and sing, click here, then click on the Watch and Listen square on the right.
Don't say I didn't warn you!


Via the Original Amazon.

Some News on U.S. Employment

The United States economy created 112,000 new jobs in June 2004. This is good news, or at least better news than a loss of 112,000 jobs would have been. But given the natural business cycles, recessions tend to be followed by employment upswings in due time. The latest recession appears atypical in many ways, and one of these is it's length: every other recession since 1939 has shown full recovery of the lost jobs within 31 months of the start of the recession. This time, thirty-nine months later, 1.2 million jobs are still missing.

The jobless nature of this recovery has economists scratching their heads. But not the Bush administration: they believe that we are experiencing the beginning of a very vibrant recovery and that the jobs are just lagging behind a little. Perhaps. But the administration has been unable to match its own employment predictions. According to them we should have 2,230,000 more jobs now, at the end of the first year after the highly touted tax cuts took effect. In other words, they promised much more than they are delivering.

Consider the numbers: The unemployment rate has remained steady at 5.6% since January this year, and the rate of underemployed people (those who work part-time involuntarily, those who are so discouraged that they have stopped looking for jobs and those who are only marginally attached to the labor force) is now 9.6%, up from 7.3% at the start of the recession. All this despite the increased number of jobs.

And what are the jobs like that were lost in the recession compared to those that are now being added? It seems that the new jobs are lower paying, less stable, self-employed and part-time jobs (eBay, anybody?), while the lost jobs were what's called high-quality jobs in sectors such as transportation, utilities, natural resources and manufacturing. The numbers of part-time workers and the self-employed have risen by roughly 5% since early 2002. Compare this to the 1.7% growth in regular employees. Since late 2001, jobs in high-paying industries fell by more than 2% and the jobs in low-paying industries rose by 1.2%.

It's fair to summarize these overall changes as a labor market that is paying less for jobs with less stability. We are not getting the good old jobs back; instead we are being offered poorer jobs with less hours of work. To be fair, the most recent statistics indicate that some of the better paying sectors are also beginning to hire, but the overall impact of these factors is to make the quality of the American jobs worse. For those who can find them, that is.

TGIF

I can't force myself to post anything serious. Maybe tomorrow; I do have the materials together for something very long and tedious on labor economics. It's going to cause fireworks on the blog.

Instead of such an erudite treatise on the big questions in life, I want to ask you an even bigger question, one that requires every iota (what is an iota?) of your concentration, intelligence and senses:

If you could come back to life after death, what would you choose to be?

I would like to be very tall if human, and have eyes which send out angry zaps. If I could be an animal I'd probably want to be a turtle, if I could be a vegetable, I'd want to be an ornamental bean (they don't get eaten), if I could be a tree, I'd want to be an oak (and drop acorns on wingnuts). Oaks live a long time and don't cause a lot of raking in the fall, and I would be a very considerate tree.

Insects are not a good idea for reincarnation. Too much work for just a few days' worth of life, and I already have nightmares about being stepped on by a large rubber sole. Though being a disease-carrier could be a nice revenge for something.

Ok. This is what they mean by pure waffle. As I said, it's Friday and this is all that Friday produces in early July.

Happy Fourth of July!

I'm posting this early both because that way more people see it (and my attempt to be nice and culturally sensitive) and also because that leaves me free to go back to being nasty over the weekend.

So if you're an American who celebrates the Fourth of July, have a good time! Beware of hot dogs in excess and political debates in family get-togethers. And wear sunscreen.

Something very patriotic to do: Get registered to vote if you haven't done so already, or get someone else to register. Then consider the candidates for presidency carefully, and decide to vote for Kerry come hell or high water.

Zen Sarcasms

Via heini.


1. Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead of me,
for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me either. Just pretty much
leave me the heck alone.

2. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a broken fan belt and a
leaky tire.

3. It's always darkest before dawn. So if you're going to steal your
neighbor's newspaper, that's the time to do it.

4. Sex is like air. It's not important unless you aren't getting any.

5. Don't be irreplaceable. If you can't be replaced, you can't be
promoted.

6. No one is listening until you fart.

7. Always remember you're unique. Just like everyone else.

8. Never test the depth of the water with both feet.

9. If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of
car payments.

10. Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their
shoes. That way, when you criticize them you're a mile away and you
have their shoes.

11. If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.

12. Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to
fish, and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day.

13. If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was
probably worth it.

14. If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.

15. Some days you're the bug; some days you're the windshield.

16. Don't worry; it only seems kinky the first time.

17. Good judgment comes from bad experience, and a lot of that comes
from bad judgment.

18. The quickest way to double your money is to fold it in half and
put it back in your pocket.

19. A closed mouth gathers no foot.

20. Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side and a dark side,
and it holds the universe together.

21. Generally speaking, you aren't learning much when your lips are
moving.

22. Experience is something you don't get until just after you need
it.

23. Never miss a good chance to shut up.

24. We are born naked, wet and hungry, and get slapped on our
butt...Then things get worse.

25. Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a
laxative on the same night.

26. There is a fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness."

27. No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too
seriously.

28. There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to
make a big deal about your birthday...around age 11.

29. Everyone seems normal until you get to know them.


I agree with the last one.

Mantras

Every time I log to my SiteMeter to check on if Aphrodite is still reading my blog I see the advertisements on the top of the page. Most of them are of the type that require being clicked on to tell the whole story. I never click on them, and so I'm only left with the mysterious messages they give at first.

In the spirit of proper liberal recycling, I decided to use these mysterious sayings as my meditation mantras. Here's how it worked:

The first one I chose says: "Colon Polyps. Stop them before they go bad." Translated into a mantra, this is the meditation it created:

Stop the polyps. Stop the polyps. UMMMMMM. How do you stop the polyps before they go bad? Do you squeeze your anus harder? Stop the polyps before they go bad. In the colon. In the Colin. Is this what is wrong with Colin Powell? How do polyps go bad? UMMMMM. Do they stink like sour milk? How do you find out if your polyps stink like sour milk? Do you ask a kind bypasser? UMMMMM

I don't think that I got any nearer to enlightenment with that one. The following week I had a new mantra:"How can you stop a car crash with a few ounces of metal?" This was very unpromising. Car crashes tend to make me uptight, and meditation is meant to do the opposite. But perhaps I was ready for the challenge:

Car crashes. Stop the car crashes. AAAAAA! Don't buy a car. With a few ounces of metal, AAAAA. What metal? Buy a gun and shoot all other drivers on the road? AAAAIIIIIH!

Then I had to go and have a nice liedown. The next one I'm going to work with is:"Yo. I'm Mike Mahi Mahi." It comes with a picture of a very happy fish. Happy to be eaten? I'll never know.

Hillary Bashing

Hillary Rodham Clinton is in a lot of wingnuts' nightmares, it seems, given the amount of negative publicity she attracts. Here is Robert Novak, for example:

On the June 29 edition of CNN's Crossfire, co-host and syndicated columnist Robert Novak again ridiculed Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) by calling her "Madame Defarge" -- a reference to a distasteful character from Charles Dickens's novel A Tale of Two Cities .
According to BookRags.com , a website that provides study guides for classic novels, Madame Defarge is "a cruel, vengeance-seeking agent of the [French] revolution ... [who] spends her days knitting a 'register' of names of people she has marked for death."
Novak went on to say that Senator Clinton's proposal to raise taxes on the wealthy "sound[ed] like communism." Pointing out that Hillary Clinton's title is "senator," Novak's Crossfire co-host Paul Begala defended Clinton against Novak's attacks:
NOVAK: For a while, I thought that Hillary Rodham Clinton was actually trying to be nice. What disappointing behavior that would be for Madame Defarge. But she has been back in form lately. This week, in San Francisco, where else, she vowed to defeat what she called the Republicans' extraordinarily ruthless campaign.
She told Democrats who paid up to $10,000 to attend that event that she was going to raise their taxes -- quote -- "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." Doesn't that sound like communism?
[applause]
NOVAK: But it's probably what the rich San Francisco liberals want, and certainly what they deserve, even if they don't want it.
BEGALA: Well, what Senator Clinton -- and that is her title, Senator Clinton -- deserves is better than being called a communist and better than being compared to Madame Defarge, who the English majors here will know is the woman who sat and knitted while people were beheaded during the French revolution in the book A Tale of Two Cities.
I think, given what's happening in Iraq right now, it's a really unfortunate way to characterize one of the finest people in public life that I know. And I know you'll apologize for that unfortunate...
[applause]
NOVAK: I'll tell you. Certainly, next time I talk about her, I'll call her senator. Will that make you happy?
BEGALA: What about Madame Defarge? That is kind of across the line. I mean, come on.
NOVAK: Well, not my line.

Robert Novak has a habit of calling Senator Clinton Madame Defarge. You'd think that he could find more variation; the literary canon is full of evil and power-hungry female characters. I hope that Robert stays off cheese and wine late at night. Maybe he will then dream something nicer and more creative.

Robert is not alone in his Hillary-obsession. She is hated out of all proportion to both her importance and anything that she has ever done.
She isn't even especially left-wing in her opinions, and she has been a good little senator during her term in office. What makes the wingnuts say things like this?:

In a Washington Times op-ed about former President Bill Clinton's memoir My Life, titled "Harry Potter and Bill Clinton: 'My Life' should be titled 'My Lie,'" Jack Wheeler, identified by The Washington Times as publisher of www.tothepointnews.com, asserted that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is bisexual.
Wheeler wrote of Bill Clinton's memoir:
All of that stuff about Hillary being mad, making him sleep on the couch, going to marriage counselors for a year, yada yada, is all made up. They have had a pact for decades: He gets to fool around with women, and she gets to fool around with women (plus the occasional man like Vince Foster).
Yes, she's bisexual -- I disclosed that in an infamous Strategic Investment column in January 1993, and Dick Morris publicly revealed it a few years ago. You knew that, right?

I know that there is a bizarre connection between being obsessed about sex and wingnuttiness, but it really gets sick when we add it to the stew of Hillary-bashing. Remember Limbaugh and the testicles in a lock-box?

There aren't enough psychiatrists in this country to tend to all those affected by the Hillary hatred. She is not just a communist but a fascist (!), not just a sexual adventurer but a woman who wants to castrate men (!). She is Hitlery, the all-powerful, all-evil woman who is going to get us all if we don't stay alert, fight our nightmares and every morning write them down carefully for publication.

I'm sick and tired of this. Hillary isn't that horrible or that wonderful. She is probably a pretty ordinary politician, but in the minds of so many she is the worst threat to Western civilization since Karl Marx. And the reason isn't that hard to figure out. She stands as a symbol for all the things that men like Novak fear in women: independence, power and refusal to play by his rules. Whether Hillary in fact is a feminist or not doesn't matter. She has become the mythological nightmare for all those who fear equality.

Dawg Bloging

Hiya there!

Hank here. And boy, don't I have a story to tell! Yesterday when I was snoozing real nicely under the table, the goddess dragged me out and bathed me. Now, I don't mind a little bit of water, even when there's nothing interesting swimming in it, but she always has to pour that stuff on me, you know, the perfume stuff that looks like soap. Soap is not bad to snack on, although the dish is kind of hard for your gullets, but that perfume yuck is horrible. Man, it's horrible.

And what really pisses me off is that the only reason I got a bath is because her royal highness Henrietta the Hound (a.k.a the Main-Pain-in-the-Butt) needed one so I had to pretend to be dirty, too. Hypocricy, I cried. Hypocricy. But she don't care.

So I bided my time. Which came this morning. We went out for some running and terrarist hunting and squirrel torturing, and I was so good you could've thought I was a libural poodle! Except at the last minute, right before we went home, I jumped into the river and then quickly swam to the muddy side for a nice long rollaround! The screaming and the hollering! Heh, heh, as my idol Limbaugh would say. That'll learn them. And then I ran back, all affectionate-like and when I got near enough, guess what I did? Yep. I shook.

That's why they call me the Baptist and the Shaker. Get it? Get it?

Yours.

Hank
the Murican Labrador Retriever

Good to Know

George Bush in Turkey:

"Some people in Muslim cultures identify democracy with the worst of Western popular culture and want no part of it. And I assure them, when I speak about the blessings of liberty, coarse videos and crass commercialism are not what I have in mind," Bush said. "There is nothing incompatible between democratic values and high standards of decency."

I'm very relieved by this. For a while there I thought that democracy in Iraq had a lot to do with crass commercialism in the energy field.
And I'm not that convinced about the "coarse videos" either, given that we've recently heard about quite a few the administration refuses to release.

More generally, curmudgeony goddesses like me (love that!) are very suspicious of the word "decency". Far too often it refers to something that women must not do or to something that is done to women whether they wish it or not. But so does the term "indecency".

What Smart Women Wear

In Iran they wear black chadors and scarves in ninety degree (F) weather. This is because the alternative cooler summer outfits cost a little too much in fines, prison and even flogging. The current Iranian conservative government (which wasn't actually elected) has ordered a crackdown on women who alter the required Islamic garb by wearing lighter-colored and/or shorter chadors. These corrupt the social morale (where is the social morale located, by the way?). Never mind that being shrouded in black in boiling heat corrupts the woman inside the outfit.

On Bees

Bees have taken residence in the wall above my porch door. They sting everybody who uses the door except for me. I've told them not to sting other creatures who live in the house, but it seems they are not paying attention. So now I have to deliver them an ultimatum: they have twenty-four hours to mend their ways. After that, apocalypse.

This is not that different from other human politics, sadly. Many of our quarrels and wars have their roots in problems of communication. How do you talk to the bees? To the Republican wingnuts? To terrorists? Or if you are a bee, how do you defend your right to live in the siding of someone's house? Sometimes it seems as if we are all separate species with no idea of how to share something: a thought, some pollen, food.

Some of us have a lot more power than others. I have the upper hand with the bees, and I have also planted the flowers that lured them here in the first place. This makes me twice responsible, at least in my bleeding-heart world: I promised them something better and now I threaten them with death.

At least none of this was based on conscious planning. Can the Bush administration say the same about Iraq? Or are we more similar than I'd like to think, just two bumbling fools in a world where every hole in the siding is someone's home?

I'm going out now to have a serious conversation with the bees, but I doubt that it will do much good.

The Cost of Liberty (Reposted)

Thanks for Dave for locating this erased post. I copied the comments thread as well, so everything is now beautiful!



Halla is a prostitute in Iraq. Before the war she was happily married, with two sons and a job in her mother's beauty salon. Now she is a widow with two sons and several younger brothers to feed, and the $5 per month she could earn at the beauty salon is not enough.
So she has become a prostitute. The money is good, and she can feed her whole family. But there are disadvantages to this job:

But as the U.S. occupation draws to an end, and more conservative Islamic clerics gain power, the fate of prostitutes like Halla is uncertain. In recent months, attacks on people and establishments accused of promoting vices have escalated. Masked gunmen have shot at liquor vendors, according to Iraqi police officials. Religious leaders have run renters of racy videotapes out of town. And anonymous vigilantes have kidnapped, beaten and killed prostitutes in several major cities. Women's rights groups, including the Organization of Women's Freedom, have decried the killings, saying the women are in need of help, not punishment.
Maybe there is an order to kill all the prostitutes," Halla would recall thinking that day. "If the Islamic parties arrive to power maybe even the Americans can't stop them." As she made her way through the rubble, Halla wondered what it would be like to have a real job, of being a receptionist at a hotel, a laundry woman or maybe opening a boutique for used clothes. She was 23 years old, healthy and a hard worker. There was a chance she could start anew. Wasn't there?

The rubble Halla is described as walking through is the rubble that remained after the extremists destroyed the windows of her mother's beauty parlor as a warning to her.

Read the whole thing. It's well worth the time.

Krugman

Paul Krugman is a rare type of economist: he actually knows something outside the narrow "let's pretend that all people have equal incomes and only care about how much beer they get tomorrow" models of neoclassical economics. He even reads novels and stuff, I bet.

Krugman summarizes the economic situation in Iraq in his latest column:

Up to a point, the numbers in the Brookings Institution's invaluable Iraq Index tell the tale. Figures on the electricity supply and oil production show a pattern of fitful recovery and frequent reversals; figures on insurgent attacks and civilian casualties show a security situation that got progressively worse, not better; public opinion polls show an occupation that squandered the initial good will.
What the figures don't describe is the toxic mix of ideological obsession and cronyism that lie behind that dismal performance.
The insurgency took root during the occupation's first few months, when the Coalition Provisional Authority seemed oddly disengaged from the problems of postwar anarchy. But what was Paul Bremer III, the head of the C.P.A., focused on? According to a Washington Post reporter who shared a flight with him last June, "Bremer discussed the need to privatize government-run factories with such fervor that his voice cut through the din of the cargo hold."
Plans for privatization were eventually put on hold. But as he prepared to leave Iraq, Mr. Bremer listed reduced tax rates, reduced tariffs and the liberalization of foreign-investment laws as among his major accomplishments. Insurgents are blowing up pipelines and police stations, geysers of sewage are erupting from the streets, and the electricity is off most of the time — but we've given Iraq the gift of supply-side economics.

And not only have we given Iraq the curse of an unproven economic theory (we did the same to Russia a decade ago and you can see the consequences for yourself in the new Russian maffia and in the old people who are now starving on their fixed pensions) but we have done this with a workforce whose main claim to competence is fervent Republicanism. Never mind if the person has no experience or training; what matters is a stint at the Heritage Foundation:

If the occupiers often seemed oblivious to reality, one reason was that many jobs at the C.P.A. went to people whose qualifications seemed to lie mainly in their personal and political connections — people like Simone Ledeen, whose father, Michael Ledeen, a prominent neoconservative, told a forum that "the level of casualties is secondary" because "we are a warlike people" and "we love war."
Still, given Mr. Bremer's economic focus, you might at least have expected his top aide for private-sector development to be an expert on privatization and liberalization in such countries as Russia or Argentina. But the job initially went to Thomas Foley, a Connecticut businessman and Republican fund-raiser with no obviously relevant expertise. In March, Michael Fleischer, a New Jersey businessman, took over. Yes, he's Ari Fleischer's brother. Mr. Fleischer told The Chicago Tribune that part of his job was educating Iraqi businessmen: "The only paradigm they know is cronyism. We are teaching them that there is an alternative system with built-in checks and built-in review."

More generally, I wonder about the wisdom of focusing so much on the 'free markets' paradigm in a country where so many people are living off what we'd call welfare checks from the country's oil revenues. One can't just skip from one extreme to the other, all the time dodging bullets and scimitars, and one can't have any kind of functioning markets without a functioning infrastructure (roads, bridges, electricty, water), and infrastructure requires government expenditures.

It's also not fun to watch an ahistoric theory being forced upon people who have a very specific history, religion and culture; none of which seems to support the basic assumptions of the theory. I can well imagine a handful of rich Iraqis gaining the fruits of all this theorizing while the rest of the country dodges forgotten land mines and tries not to starve.

Free Iraq?

Of course I wish them luck, and luck is what they need. That the handover came two days before the planned date may be due to some terrorist plot to be foiled, but it is equally likely that this change was made so as to maximize the benefits of the event to the Bush administration. Consider that the Supreme Court gave Bush at least a partial slap on the fingers today. It would be nice to have something else that the media can talk about while pretending not to have time for the Supreme Court decisions. Jeez but I've become cynical in the last four years...

So what is the new free Iraq going to look like? Several possibilities come to mind: a country torn apart by civil war, a country which will put Taliban to shame in its eagerness to enforce extremism, a little U.S. lackey country and so on. The most recent suggestion comes from the new Iraq administration, and that is a country under martial law. Maybe a martial law is needed to give the Iraqis some peace and time to recover, both emotionally and physically, from the operation of having been liberated. But a country under a martial law is not a free country, and let's not pretend that it is.

President Bush likes the idea of a martial law:

"Iraqis know what we know, that the best way to defend yourself is to go on the offensive," he said, speaking at a news conference with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain.

Remember that when you interpret Bush's words in the future. He also likes the new leaders of Iraq. I wonder why:

"They're gutsy, courageous and, as they say in Texas, they're stand-up guys," he said. "They'll lead. They'll lead their people to a better day."

It would be lovely if all that was needed in a leader was gutsiness and courage and being a stand-up guy, so lovely. But brains and some empathy would be nice, too. Maybe I'm just too picky for this world.

The Supremes Say

A very important day for democracy and the rule of law, I'd say. The U.S. Supreme Court has decided that there indeed are limits to what this administration can do to the detainees, whether American citizens or not:

In two crucial decisions today on the scope of presidential wartime powers, the Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration's claim that it can hold suspected terrorists or "enemy combatants" on American soil without giving them a day in court.
The court said detainees, whether American citizens or not, retain their rights, at least to a legal hearing, even if they are held at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Guantanamo Bay is under U.S. control and thus appropriately within the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, the high court ruled.
The president's constitutional powers, even when supported by Congress in wartime, do not include the authority to close the doors to an independent review of the legality of locking people up, the justices said.
"We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in Hamdi et al v. Rumsfeld.

The two cases that were decided today are Hamdi et al. vs. Rumsfeld and Rasul et al. vs. Bush (don't you just love those terms?). The Hamdi case concerns the rights of American citizens and the Rasul case those of foreigners who have been detained as enemy combatants and are now held in a location under U.S. control. In both cases the Court argued that the detainees must have at least the right to some kind of legal hearing. As expected, Scalia, Rehnquist and Thomas dissented on the decision concerning foreigners' rights to a legal hearing.

These decisions are wonderful, and made me skip and jump from joy. Which is really quite sad, as their contents are what any sane person would expect from a democratic country with an evolved legal system and values. So far have we strayed from such an ideal, I guess, that I fully expected something less from the Supremes. I'm glad I was proved wrong, for once.

I made a Mistake...

And this one I can't hide. I deleted the post about prostitution in Iraq by accident, and I never copied it anywhere. It was mainly just a link to the story in Washington Post, so not that much was lost, but when the post went the comments went with it. I do apologize for that and will try to do better in the future.

Fahrenheit 9/11

I'm going out now to see it. The fuss here in the Snakepit Inc., all of us looking for something that would make me look like your average run-of-the-mill recanting wingnut (I want to use this outing for a good purpose)! We've decided on a very prim look with a flowery dress and white pumps and a handbag, but the look is beginning to unravel at the edges. Some hair coming out of the bun, some smeared lipstick, perhaps, and some very strong-smelling cough drops. And lots of tissues; I plan to weep buckets. Which of course I would do anyway.

More seriously, I'm going to post more once I get back, but if you want to you can use the comments to tell what you thought of the movie if you have seen it or even if you haven't.


-------------
I have seen it now. The theater was sold out, as theaters have been all over the country this weekend, and the audience gave the film a spontaneous applause at the end, as also seems to happen all over the country.

My impressions about Fahrenheit 9/11 are a little bit like my impressions about life: good and bad, all jumbled up in complicated ways. The whole movie looked to me like fireworks, the way the storyline ran around and suddenly erupted into a major joke or something painfully poignant. In fact, there were many storylines: the legitimacy of the administration, the bin Laden connections of the Bush family, the 9/11 massacres and how the president coped with this emergency, oil and its relationship to warfare and the utter inanity of the needless blood-shedding and destruction of lives in so many different ways in Iraq. At times I felt like watching a speeded-up rerun of my own recent memories about the politics of this country, but then something new would be added to the story, something that would make me go "ooh" and "aah" like when I watch fireworks. Yet the underlying plot is really about class in the United States, and its inadmissibility as a concept in public debates. Even Moore sneaks it in without calling it what it is: that the rules for the poor are different than the rules for the rich, that the poor are fighting the wars that the rich got us into.

This is of course one of Moore's major themes, and he deserves kudos for persisting on it. I believe that the public debate in the U.S. would be immeasurable richer and more meaningful if we did take class more seriously. And in his movie he shows us how class interlinks with patriotism, with serving ones country and even with who will die and when.

And of course I cried when watching the movie. It was hard not to, while listening to a woman telling how she heard about her son's death, or while seeing the damage that war does to little children. But I laughed, too, at the silly one-liners and the funny juxtapositions of politicians words against each other. And on the use of spit as a hair spray...

There has been a lot of debate about the meaning of Fahrenheit 9/11, especially whether it really is a documentary, or perhaps just sarcasm or propaganda; whether it is 'fair and balanced'. I don't think that a documentary can ever be objectively neutral, and no really good film would avoid trying to affect the emotions of the viewer. Whether Moore intends his movie to be seen as sarcasm is not clear, but considering that it opens with a 'dream scene', I think that he would agree with me in seeing our whole lives as a kind of sarcastic dream by someone else. All he is really doing with this movie is showing us the other sides: of politics, of politicians, of war, of suffering, of wealth.

So, yes, I'd recommend going to see this film. Still, it didn't affect me as strongly as I expected, given the prior accolades I had read. The most probable reason (other my cold and callous character) is that I have spent the last year reading blogs and other sources of news on the internet, and very little in the information of the movie was new to me. Still, to show something by using living pictures, sound and every single emotional device that filmmakers govern is different than reading about it in a newspaper or blog. It's a more direct way to the brain and heart of the audience, and as we desperately need the American public to hear both sides of the story, and as this side of the story has so long been neglected and misrepresented as "America-hating", I believe that Moore's movie is an important one to see by as many people as possible. And no, it's not an anti-military movie; if anything, it is an ode to the common soldier.