Friday Embroidery Blogging

Flying... 


This is not an embroidery, strictly speaking, but a reverse applique. With glitter. And I forgot to say that the shapes are snakes, of course.

Today's Bible Quote

This will not become a habit, but I thought that you might enjoy this one:

Malachi 2:1-4: And now, O ye priests, this commandment is for you. If you will not hear, and if ye will not lay it to heart to give glory to my name, ... behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces.

From Walter Neff on the Eschaton threads.

The Conscience Clause

This is an interesting piece of news about the sort of events that the conscience clause for health providers might cause to become much more common:

Wisconsin Administrative Law Judge Colleen Baird on Monday recommended that the state... Pharmacy Examining Board reprimand and limit the license of a pharmacist who refused to refill a woman's oral contraceptive prescription because of moral objectives to birth control, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports (Forster, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 2/28). Neil Noesen in July 2002 refused to fill university student Amanda Phiede's oral contraceptive prescription while he was working as a substitute pharmacist at a Kmart pharmacy in Menomonie, Wis. When Phiede confirmed that she was using the drug for birth control, Noesen told her that he would not fill the prescription. Phiede then asked him where else she could get the prescription filled, but Noesen refused to provide her with that information. Phiede later went to a Wal-Mart pharmacy, but when the Wal-Mart pharmacist called Noesen to have him transfer the prescription, Noesen refused, saying again that artificial contraception is against his personal beliefs. Noesen continued to refuse to fill the prescription even after two police officers and the Kmart assistant manager spoke with him. The police took no further action, and the managing pharmacist filled Phiede's prescription when he returned to work on Monday (Kaiser Daily Reproductive Health Report, 10/13/04).

I am a vegetarian. If I got a job at a supermarket, could I refuse to sell people meat or refuse to tell them where to find it? Probably not. Even if I decided to act this way (during the short time before I'd be kicked out) not much harm would be done as there are lots of supermarkets and most people know where the meat department is. But pharmacists have quite a different kind of control over their inventory and sometimes there is no other nearby pharmacy that could step in. Also, if the pharmacist refuses to transfer the prescription the consumer could be in deep trouble. And I'm not even mentioning the possibility that a health care provider might act in this way in a medical emergency.

We are vulnerable when we need the help of health care providers. What would conscience clauses do to the trust that patients must have in their providers? Should each of us demand to see the list of things that a particular provider might oppose, and should we demand to see it while we are still healthy and strong enough to find another provider if necessary? Maybe providers could be color-coded? Those who oppose birth control could wear scarlet coats or something and so on.
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Thanks to Kimberst for the link and many others for some of the ideas.

Plagiarism

A sharp-eyed reader of Eschaton spotted some similarities between the Gibbons rant (scroll down a few posts) and an earlier one by Beth Chapman. Like that they are the same speech.

Please Mr. Gibbons, hire me. I could invent a new rant every two minutes.

Housecleaning

I have finally updated my blogroll (do any Brits think this is a funny term?) by adding some daily reads. Imagine my horror when I realized I didn't have American Street there earlier, and I blog there on Saturdays! Luckily they don't pay me or anything.

I still have to go through all the links to see that I don't have too many dead ones there. This is something that can be easily done in a flu, though my flu is finally packing its bags in preparation for a departure, I hope.

Then there will be some real housecleaning. The other day I dropped a jar of grated Parmesan in the kitchen and the dogs washed the floor in no time. I have to refine this a little and maybe one day I don't need to do any vacuuming, either. Then I can write a book combining dog-care and housecleaning.

The dogs are doing well. They are sleek and fat as seals because I haven't been able to let them run as much as usually. Hank is due for her shots this week and I have to put her in a corset to avoid the stern sermons from my excellent vets on the topic of fat Labs. Hank goes to the vet often, because of her obsession of grabbing large tree branches horizontally and then snapping her teeth together. The middle bit gets lodged in the back of her throat and I can't reach it. Then we drive to the vet with all the lights flashing and they take the branch out. I even bought some pliers to keep in the car but they didn't work as well as what the veterinarians have. They love Hank there, she keeps them employed single-handedly.

Which reminds me of the funny terms we use: single-handedly, when it's a dog I'm talking about. And single-mothers: what is the opposite for this one: multiple mothers? Don't tell me the proper answer.

Guckert-Gate

It doesn't exist, because we have a one-party administration, and it is the administration which decides what is important. Nevertheless, some Democrats are still trying:

The Ranking Members for House Committees on Rules, Judiciary, Government Reform, Homeland Security and Ways and Means have authored a Resolution of Inquiry, which would require the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security to turn over all documentation regarding James Guckert's (AKA Jeff Gannon) regular access to the White House.

The resolution comes on the heels of repeated requests by Rep. Louise Slaughter and Rep. John Conyers that the White House and the Department of Homeland Security, which has jurisdiction over the Secret Service, turn over any and all materials related to the GannonGate issue. To date, the White House, the Secret Service, The Department of Homeland Security, and the Justice Department have all failed to respond to such requests.

"We cannot allow the White House to stonewall the United States Congress and the American people on an issue of such importance. This is a matter of national security and unethical White House media manipulation. Everyday more questions are raised and so far, the White House is not providing any answers. We intend to find out what the White House is hiding." stated Congresswoman Slaughter.

"We had hoped that the half dozen congressional and senate requests for information would have been sufficient. However, to date, they have not even merited a response from the White House or its agencies. We hope that this resolution gets to the bottom of whether any processes were abused in favoring Mr. Guckert, a fake reporter from a fake news organization," Rep. Conyers said.

Making the right noises and all that.

Today's Action Alert

Today's Action

Senator Byrd is coming under attack because he was willing to stand up to the Republicans. Today's WaPo reports:

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In his comments Tuesday, Byrd had defended the right senators have to use filibusters -- procedural delays that can kill an item unless 60 of the 100 senators vote to move ahead. He is a long-standing defender of the chamber's rules and traditions, many of which help the Senate's minority party.

Byrd cited Hitler's 1930s rise to power by, in part, pushing legislation through the German parliament that seemed to legitimize his ascension.

"We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men," Byrd said. "But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends."

Byrd then quoted historian Alan Bullock, saying Hitler "turned the law inside out and made illegality legal."

Byrd added, "That is what the 'nuclear option' seeks to do."

The nuclear option is the nickname for the proposal to end filibusters of judicial nominations because of the devastating effect the plan, if enacted, would have on relations between Democrats and Republicans.

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Today's action is to send Senator Byrd a message letting him know that you support him and asking him not to back down. You can contact Senator Byrd at:



311 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING

WASHINGTON DC 20510



(202) 224-3954


Web Form: byrd.senate.gov/byrd_email.html



Thanks for taking today's action.

Gibbons Gibbering

Representative Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., is one of those uniter wingnuts. He wants the whole country to unite behind his values and George Bush. If you don't share these values or his great adoration of George, you should leave the country. It's as simple as that:

He wondered what Lincoln's feelings would be at this juncture of American history.

"How would he feel, what would he be thinking about, all of the dissension, all of the division, that the liberals and a few others, including some our movie stars and song makers, are trying to divide this country over its efforts to establish freedom and liberty in countries around the world?" Gibbons questioned.

Gibbons answered with his own thoughts on the issue.

"We are all here tonight because men and women of the United States military have given their lives for our freedom," Gibbons continued. "We are here tonight not because of Rosie O'Donnell, Martin Sheen, George Clooney, Jane Fonda or Phil Donahue - they never sacrificed their lives for us or for liberty."

Gibbons said it was not movie stars but soldiers and sailors that defended freedom in the deserts of Iraq, the jungles of Vietnam, the sands of Iwo Jima and the beaches of Normandy.

"I say we tell those liberal, tree-hugging, Birkenstock-wearing, hippie, tie-dyed liberals to go make their movies and their music and whine somewhere else," Gibbons said to another burst of applause.

Gibbons has been studying his wingnut bible, the rulebook written by Frank Luntz. This book tells all wingnuts what to say in each social situation; it's like an etiquette book for the permanently foot-in-the-mouth brigade. And Luntz tells that wingnuts should always compare real American values to false values which arise in Hollywood. Always.

I haven't read the whole wingnut bible yet (I keep falling asleep in the middle of it) so I don't know if Luntz advocates dehumanizing and objectifying the liberals and if he does so whether this is the first step in the final eradication of all liberals. Or maybe this little hate-variation was Gibbons's own invention?

Sarcasm isn't probably one of Gibbons's strong suits. Otherwise he'd notice that he is doing what he blames the liberals for: causing divisions and growing hatred. So. What else is new?
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Link via Big Daddy Mars on Eschaton threads.

Bush Wants the Troops Out!

So that "good democracy" can flourish:

President Bush raised the pressure on Syria today, saying the world was "speaking with one voice" in demanding that Damascus pull its troops from Lebanon.

There was a time, not too long ago, when the world was speaking pretty much in one voice, too, and speaking "loud and clear", telling one country not to invade another one. But that was something quite different, of course. Maybe "bad democracy"?

Menopause: Bless You!

About the only reason I can think for looking forward to menopause is this: At least then the society will leave my body alone. I can count the years and cross them off my almanac, and one day I will wake up - free at last! Maybe.

What brought up these musings you may ask (if you are still reading), as if there isn't quite enough material on all the pro-fetus stuff every day to make me fret. But you are sharp-eyed, there is indeed something extra that has made me hope for more rapid aging, and that is our dear U.S. Surgeon General, one Dr. Richard H. Carmoda. He is very concerned about the health of babies, and this concern comes out as - you have guessed - concern over the behavior of women. And not only the behavior of pregnant women but the behavior of all types of women who might, just might, get pregnant some day.

We get lots of advice from Dr. Carmoda:

U.S. Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona today rolled out his 2005 agenda, announcing it as The Year of the Healthy Child. The Year of the Healthy Child agenda will focus on improving the body, mind, and spirit of the growing child. A healthy child begins before birth, so the Office of the Surgeon General will highlight steps that women should take to keep themselves healthy, especially when they are considering becoming pregnant. This includes a healthful diet, exercise, and eliminating tobacco use and alcohol consumption.

Do you know what this new prevention approach is called? It's pre-pregnancy prevention! It might seem as if Dr. Carmoda is just talking to women who are planning to become pregnant some time soon, but nope. He is actually talking to all menstruating women:

U.S. Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona today marked Folic Acid Awareness week by reminding all women of childbearing age to consume the recommended amounts of folic acid each day.

Folic acid is a B vitamin necessary for proper cell growth to ward off such birth defects as neural tube defects, serious birth defects of the brain (anencephaly) and spine (spina bifida). Research has shown that, if taken before and during early pregnancy, folic acid can prevent 70 percent of these birth defects. Therefore, every woman of childbearing age, even if she is not planning on becoming pregnant, should supplement her diet with 400 micrograms of folic acid each day.

Even nuns living in convents should supplement their diets this way. Why? Because so many pregnancies are unintended. This means that the Surgeon General can trust no woman to plan her pregnancies and can trust no woman to remain childless. I am not making this up. You can read on all this in the archives of the Office of the Surgeon General.

And here's the most recent advice on alcohol and women:

1. A pregnant woman should not drink alcohol during pregnancy.
2. A pregnant woman who has already consumed alcohol during her pregnancy should stop in order to minimize further risk.
3. A woman who is considering becoming pregnant should abstain from alcohol.
4. Recognizing that nearly half of all births in the United States are unplanned, women of child-bearing age should consult their physician and take steps to reduce the possibility of prenatal alcohol exposure.
5. Health professionals should inquire routinely about alcohol consumption by women of childbearing age, inform them of the risks of alcohol consumption during pregnancy, and advise them not to drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy.

So if you are a pre-menopausal woman, prepare yourself to hearing little speeches about alcohol when you go for your annual checkup. And about your folic acid intake. And possibly about your diet and exercize, too, if we find that these directly impact fetal health.

Ok. One can argue that the cause is a good one: to have only healthy babies born in this country. That is certainly true and it is good that the information is available for those women who need it. But I find it pretty insulting that all women are seen as potential receptacles for babies in this way, incapable of controlling their own fertility. Will the health professionals be advised to ask men about their alcohol consumption? After all, alcohol consumption is involved in many violent acts.

And what about the advice the Surgeon General gives prospective fathers? I see none on his website, yet a quick Googling brings up several studies that bear upon this topic: on the effects of father's exposure to radiation and various occupational health hazards before the birth of an affected child and on the effects of aging sperm on the child's health.

Maybe these studies are not good enough. Who knows? But I suspect that most studies look at women rather than men, not for any medically valid reasons, but because we all tend to think of women as the loci of parenthood, and the Surgeon General is unlikely to be free of this bias. That women are not the sole loci of parenthood or not just the loci of parenthood tends to be forgotten.

There is something very puritanical about all this, and it is most clearly visible in the information about alcohol and pregnancy which states:

* No amount of alcohol consumption can be considered safe during pregnancy.

What does this mean, exactly? Consider that the Italians and the French have been drinking wine routinely for centuries, including during pregnancies. Do these countries suffer from extremely high levels of the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome? Or what about the older generations in the United States?

I am not advocating drinking alcohol during pregnancy, but I wonder why the usual risk analyses we perform before making various societal recommendations don't apply in this particular case, why instead an absolutist standard is selected. Using the same method, we should reduce the allowable blood alcohol levels to whatever teetotallers might have in deciding when someone is driving under the influence. Or at least recommend zero drinks to anyone who plans to drive or to interact in general with other human beings. After all, most accidents and fights are not pre-planned.

Just think about that. This is what women are being told, right now.

On Flu

Which I have, again. Don't worry, I'm not going to write about the physical symptoms this time. What I want to write about is the funny effect that any illness can have on ones psyche. It's like I'm a different person when I'm ill, or at least like I'm living in a different room of my brain, one darker and less airy, with older furniture and odd memories piled up in the corners.

What interests me when I'm ill is not what usually interests me, and in some ways illness gives me the opportunity to be someone different. Maybe people who have trouble with empathy should think about themselves when ill? This might let them understand how someone else might feel about the world. For example, the weakness that has come over me is instructive for understanding how some of the elderly live every day, how they have to choose which parts of the chores to do and when. I have an orange marmelade jar in the kitchen which refuses to open in my feeble fingers. Why are jars made so that we can't open them unless we are healthy? And why do I want to get the hammer and smash the damn thing?

Then there is this feeling I have in illness of looking for something strong enough to break its shell and return me to the realm of the healthy, but I have no idea what that "something strong" is. Is it a food or a drink or a certain physical exercize or a thought that could suddenly blow all the heavy clouds out of the door? Or is the whole feeling just awkwardness in being unaccustomed to visit this particular room of my mind? And if so, should I fight back and start looking through the rubbish that is piled up in the corners? What are the memories that I have selected not to look at on my normal days?

Some of them crop up in my fevered dreams, like the memory of watching another girl lose her grip on some gymnastic equipment at school. She fell down head first. I can see why this particular memory has been stored in the back of my brain, but I don't really get why I should dream about it right now, unless my usual prohibitions are weaker and just let more stuff through.

Ok, this is turning into something morbid and I had better stop right now.

On Capital Punishment

The Supremes have ruled that capital punishment is unconstitutional if the murderer was under eighteen at the time of the crime. In a 5-4 ruling (squeaking tight, again), the Court decided:

that executing young killers violates "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society," and that American society has come to regard juveniles as less culpable than adult criminals.

The ruling, which acknowledged "the overwhelming weight of international opinion against the juvenile death penalty," erases the death sentences imposed on about 70 defendants who were juveniles at the time they killed. Although 19 states nominally permit the execution of juvenile murderers, only Texas, Virginia and Oklahoma have executed any in the past decade.

The case decided today had attracted attention around the world. Briefs on behalf of the young Missouri killer, Christopher Simmons, had been filed by the European Union, the 45-member Council of Europe and other organizations. A brief filed by former United Nations diplomats asserted that the United States' failure to repudiate the execution of juveniles was an irritant in international relations.

Until today, the United States and Somalia were the only nations that permitted putting teenage criminals to death. The court's ruling today held that, while the "overwhelming weight of international opinion" was not controlling, it nevertheless provided "respected and significant confirmation" for the majority's finding.

The majority consisted of all those judges that Bush would like to see go extinct. If he's successful, the future resolutions will sound a lot more like this dissent:

Justice Scalia, in a dissent joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Thomas, said the majority opinion had made "a mockery" of constitutional precedent and was based "on the flimsiest of grounds."

"The court thus proclaims itself sole arbiter of our nation's moral standards - and in the course of discharging that awesome responsibility purports to take guidance from the views of foreign courts and legislatures," Justice Scalia wrote.

There is something deeply disappointing in a Supreme Court which bases its decisions on bickering of this kind. I want to look up to my judges, even though I know I can't. Well, I guess Scalia could have argued that the United States doesn't have to consider the opinions of the rest of the world as we are still in the middle of the thirteenth century or something, so the opinions of another era are irrelevant.

Private Communism

Did you know that this is what David Brooks advocates? He is one of those light-weight wingnut columnists, installed in the New York Times to irritate all correct-thinking progressives, and mostly he writes total rubbish. Like in his last column, about the holiness of shared financial accounts in families:

I'm not saying that people with separate accounts have marriages that are less healthy than anybody else's. I'm saying we should pause before this becomes the social norm. Private property is the basis for our market democracy. But private property in the home is an altogether trickier proposition.

For one thing, separate accounts can easily turn into secret accounts. A person's status and resources inside the home shouldn't be based on how much he or she is making outside it. A union based on love can easily turn into a merger based on self-interest, where the main criterion for continuing becomes: Am I getting a good return on my investment, psychic or otherwise?

This is a very revealing article, in many ways. We are told that you can be a selfish narcissistic pig in the public sector, to be a greedy hog in the markets, and that is all perfectly fine (sorry, pigs, I know that you are not really like that but we use you to reflect our lowest characteristics). But at home you must be a communist. Connect this with the hidden idea behind all this wingnut poetry: that it's the women who are supposed to be at home and the men who are supposed to be in the public sector, and you get David's point: women should not have independence.

This has something to do with Tolstoy:

Leo Tolstoy wrote a lovely novella called "Family Happiness," narrated by a young woman who goes out for a walk with a man she loves. They talk about nothing in particular - frogs, actually - but exchange looks and gestures. "He said goodbye as usual and made no special allusion; but I knew that from that day he was mine, and that I should never lose him now."

They are married but grow apart. She likes parties, while he doesn't. Then one day they are sitting at home and her heart suddenly grows light. She looks around and realizes that the courtship phase of their relationship has ended, but it has been replaced by something gentler and deeper:

"That day ended the romance of our marriage; the old feeling became a precious irrecoverable remembrance; but a new feeling of love for my children and the father of my children laid the foundation of a new life and a quite different happiness; and that life and happiness have lasted to the present time."

Tolstoy's story captures the difference between romantic happiness, which is filled with exhilaration and self-fulfillment, and family happiness, built on self-abnegation and sacrifice.

Too bad that Tolstoy had a terrible marriage which ended in dreadful rows about all the money that he decided shouldn't be given to the children. According to his wife, Tolstoy was a really bad husband, never mind his status as a writer. But yes, they had their finances pooled so all was fine, according to Brooks. Never mind that they ended up not talking to each other.

Of course Brooks is mostly just waffling, filling up the required space with something that would look good from the wingnut point of view but that wouldn't completely disgust the progressive readers of the New York Times. I mean, who could earnestly say that shared finances wouldn't be just fine? Of course they are. But so are separate finances, depending on the personalities of the people involved in the relationship, and on what works for them. So what's all the fuss? Let David write whatever he writes.

Sure. But it's interesting to think about what he might be really saying here when he talks about private communism. The traditional view of family finances was one where the husband owned all of them, including the moneys that the wife brought into the marriage, and where he could alone decide on their use. This was not private communism at all, and when we talk about pooled finances in families many have this arrangement in mind: where one person determines how the funds are being spent. And this is what such readers react to: the idea that women should not have control over their own incomes. Or that men should not have control if it is the woman in a particular family that decides on money. For such readers separate finances have a lot to say for themselves.

What I find interesting about Brooks's arguments is that the underwear of the wingnuts is showing so very clearly here, the playing rules of the capitalistic game, if you like. He's telling us that you can be as horribly self-centered and greedy as you wish out in the public, but in the private sphere of the family someone at least must be self-abnegating for the game to work. And I suspect that that someone would not be called David but more like Davida.
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Thanks to NTodd for the link. See his take on the topic here.

Today's Action Alert

Today's Action

Today's action is simple. Contact Senator Joe Lieberman and tell him that if he helps Bush out of the political mess that Bush has created for himself on Social Security, you'll contribute to Joe's primary opposition. You can contact Liberman at (202) 224-4041. Thanks for taking today's action.

Laurie Says Goodbye

Laurie Garrett is leaving Newsday, and uses the opportunity to say a few things about the state of the U.S. media. For example:

Honesty and tenacity (and for that matter, the working class) seem to have taken backseats to the sort of "snappy news", sensationalism, scandal-for-the-sake of scandal crap that sells. This is not a uniquely Tribune or even newspaper industry problem: this is true from the Atlanta mixing rooms of CNN to Sulzberger's offices in Times Square. Profits: that's what it's all about now. But you just can't realize annual profit returns of more than 30 percent by methodically laying out the truth in a dignified, accessible manner. And it's damned tough to find that truth every day with a mere skeleton crew of reporters and editors.

This is terrible for democracy. I have been in 47 states of the USA since 9/11, and I can attest to the horrible impact the deterioration of journalism has had on the national psyche. I have found America a place of great and confused fearfulness, in which cynically placed bits of misinformation (e.g. Cheney's, "If John Kerry had been President during the Cold War we would have had thermonuclear war.") fall on ears that absorb all, without filtration or fact-checking. Leading journalists have tried to defend their mission, pointing to the paucity of accurate, edited coverage found in blogs, internet sites, Fox-TV and talk radio. They argue that good old-fashioned newspaper editing is the key to providing America with credible information, forming the basis for wise voting and enlightened governance. But their claims have been undermined by Jayson Blair's blatant fabrications, Judy Miller's bogus weapons of mass destruction coverage, the media's inaccurate and inappropriate convictions of Wen Ho Lee, Richard Jewell and Steven Hatfill, CBS' failure to smell a con job regarding Bush's Texas Air Guard career and, sadly, so on.

What does it mean when even journalists consider comedian John [sic] -- "This is a fake news show, People!" -- Stewart one of the most reliable sources of "news"?

It would be easy to descend into despair, not only about the state of journalism, but the future of American democracy. But giving up is not an option. There is too much at stake.

Read the whole thing. If I didn't have a relapse of the flu I'd write a lot more about the connections between profit maximizing and the quality of journalism. It's an interesting topic.
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Link from pixie on Eschaton threads.

Ten Years After the Beijing Conference on Women

The United Nations is having two weeks of meetings to assess the progress of women in the last ten years:

Sponsors say significant progress has been made in the goal of gender equality, with many nations adopting new policies to eliminate discrimination, enroll increasing numbers of girls in primary school and recognize rape and sexual violence as war crimes. According to a new report from the World Bank, the lives of women and girls around the world have improved in the last 10 years due, in part, to action by the international community following the Beijing conference.

But the global human rights group Amnesty International says violence against women has continued unabated since the adoption of the Beijing Declaration a decade ago, with many nations not fulfilling their pledges.

Kyung-wha Kang, the chairperson of the Commission on the Status of Women, said the issue remains the biggest obstacle to the advancement of the world's women. "I would have to say that the prevalence of violence against women in many forms in almost all countries. In some countries it could be the problem of domestic violence. In some other countries it could be other manifestations of that. But I think almost wherever you go whether it is the developing countries, the developed countries, western countries, wherever, there is still violence again women," she said.

The United States has used these meetings to focus on the question of abortion. This is a reflection of the current administration and its fundamentalist base:

But even before the two-week meeting began, delegates were wrangling behind closed doors Friday on a draft declaration that the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women put forward — and had hoped to have adopted by consensus before Monday's opening session.

The short declaration would have nations reaffirm the Beijing platform and a declaration adopted with it, welcome progress toward achieving gender equality, stress that challenges remain, and "pledge to undertake further action to ensure their full and accelerated implementation."

But at an informal closed-door meeting on Thursday, the United States said it could not accept the declaration because of its concerns that the Beijing platform legalized the right to abortion as a human right, according to several participants.

On Friday, the United States proposed an amendment to the draft declaration that would reaffirm the Beijing platform and declaration — but only "while reaffirming that they do not create any new international human rights, and that they do not include the right to abortion," according to the text obtained by The Associated Press.

This is pretty much what has happened in every international meeting about women since Bush got elected: the U.S. delegation focuses on the question of abortion or on something like trying to stop sex education at schools, and if there is any voting the U.S. votes en bloc with Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Funny, if you start thinking about it.

Carnage in Iraq

It happens every day there, of course. But some days are even worse than others, and this is one of those days. And yes, the carnage is based on a political game plan. If you don't know it already you can find the details in the linked article.

May those who died find peace. May those who loved them find peace.

Jonah Goldberg on Torture

Jonah Goldberg of the National Review Online thinks it would be good if nobody knew that the U.S. adminstration uses torture. In fact, that people know about the torture is worse than the torture itself:

For him, that concept extends to the clandestine activities of the U.S. government. "If, because of a legal regime in the U.S. which guarantees the civil liberties of Americans -- and I'm all in favor of that -- we have to go to other countries in order to successfully interrogate terrorists, then I'm not horrified by that proposition," Goldberg says. And while he concedes that it fundamentally contradicts what the United States stands for, "what undermines what we stand for," he says, "is the publication of all this information."

"We did all sorts of terrible things in World War II, and there was a reason why we had military censors," he says. "I do think there's a reason why the CIA does this stuff in secret, and why I think it should do a lot of things in secret. These things have a lot of propaganda value, both negative and positive, so I think we need to separate out what we think are 'good policies' from what the consequences are if those policies are publicized."

"There are lots of things that are ugly and terrible about war," Goldberg adds. "I think that people on the right are more comfortable allowing for that."

Especially those like Jonah who are fighting safely from behind a desk and who don't have to worry about what would happen to them if they were caught by the enemy. But still, how odd for Goldberg to own up to all this, to say that he is comfortable allowing for the ugly and the terrible about war. Has he ever experienced any of it, except vicariously? Or is that what he means, that he's comfortable with someone else's experiences of ugliness and terror?

I find this very creepy.

Not Blogging On Oscars

I don't watch them and I know nothing about them. I also know nothing about music so rarely blog on musical topics. My ear is one large tin drum or like Vincent's ear, and despite all sorts of desperate attempts to understand music I don't. I can divide it into noises of varying pleasantness, and some are even useful for meditation purposes or because the words are funny, but I'm totally amusical. The missing fairy at my birth was the musical appreciation one, which means that the evil fairy was present. Which you knew already.

But I do like movies, I just don't like the commercial hullabaloo around them or the really long televized speeches about thanking the niece-of-the-lookalike for something or other. And now that I know the answer is double-sided tape, the only interesting question about the Oscars has been answered (the one about how the dresses stay up those years when straps are not allowed).

There are many other topics I haven't blogged on yet, but they are not safely beyond my reach. I have plans to write about painting and sculpture and the best ways of taming wild horses, for example.

Hocus Pocus Filiocus!

How the adminstration does science these days: a sort of a magical recipe with the eye of the Newt and the wallet of the corporation all thrown into a pot with lots of religious broth. Here, you can taste the result:

Ten members of the Food and Drug Administration advisory panel who voted that a group of powerful pain killers should continue to be sold had ties to the drug makers, an advocacy group says. A study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest indicates that 10 of the 32 panel members had ties to either Pfizer Inc. or Merck & Co., ranging from consulting fees and speaking honoraria to research support.

The FDA issued a statement saying it screened members of the panel for conflicts of interest. "This transparent process requires the agency to carefully weigh any potential financial interest with the need for essential scientific expertise in order to protect and advance the public health," the agency said.

Hard to find wingnuts who wouldn't be taking naps in the lint-lined back pockets of pharmaceutical companies, of course. We all understand.

And then there is this new "science" about how mercury is really quite innocent:

House Resources Committee chair Richard Pombo, R-Calif. -- longtime bete noire of the environmental community -- seems to have cooked up some fishy science in a report released last week titled "Mercury in Perspective: Fact and Fiction About the Debate Over Mercury" [PDF].

The report -- written not by scientists but rather by aides to Pombo and another member of his committee, Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev. -- aims to downplay the overwhelming evidence that mercury from coal-burning power plants poses a significant health risk to Americans. Two of the report's claims are particularly stunning, as science journalist Chris C. Mooney points out. One: "There has been no credible evidence of harm to pregnant women or their unborn children from regular consumption of fish." And two: "Current, peer-reviewed scientific literature does not show any link between U.S. power plant emissions and mercury in fish."

The report ignores reams of data indicating that mercury disrupts fetal development and can cause learning and memory disabilities in children, as well as recent research linking mercury exposure to increased risk of cardiac problems in adults. And it gives short shrift to the well-established fact that coal-burning power plants are the major industrial source of mercury pollution in the U.S.

The national controversy over mercury pollution, having simmered for more than a year, will finally come to a boil on March 15, when the Bush EPA is legally required to finalize its rule determining how rigorously the toxic pollutant will be regulated. The first draft of the rule, published in January 2004, was roundly criticized by dozens of members of Congress, public health advocates, and environmental groups for being notably weaker than a rule proposed during the Clinton administration.

The Clinton-era proposal would have required mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants to be aggressively reduced using the best technology available on the market -- or, as the wonks put it, maximum achievable control technology (MACT) -- which would slash emissions by as much as 90 percent within a year, starting in 2008. In contrast, the Bush administration's draft rule proposes a cap-and-trade program requiring smaller and slower reductions of 70 percent from 2005 levels by 2018. And critics argue that these results would not be fully achieved until 2025, due to the nature of the market-based trading system.

The Pombo-Gibbons report argues in favor of the Bush administration's mercury-reduction plan, just in time to feed the heated tussle expected to break out in coming weeks as the final rule is released. "The report is essentially a preemptive strike," said John Walke, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, the environmental group that sued the EPA over delays on its mercury rule and forced it to comply with a March 15 deadline.

According to Walke, the report repeatedly references data from industry-funded groups such as the Edison Electric Institute and the Electric Power Research Institute, the latter a "quasi-scientific body that has repackaged the basic talking points that the utility industry has been relying on for years," he said. Walke accuses congressional Republicans of trying to drum up "wildly off-base claims about mercury just to make EPA's abominable rule look good by comparison."

Odd. Wasn't it just a few months ago that the FDA told pregnant women to avoid eating tuna and various other fish? Never mind, it's all too much to absorb, except perhaps the mercury.

On Racing Calves

This old lady I knew (well, ok, my grandmother) said that debating a fool is as profitable as trying to have a speed race with a calf. (If you find this mysterious you have never tried to catch a calf who doesn't want to be caught. The calf zigzags and kicks you with its hindlegs.)

This has hidden relevance for the next post about turds and trolls, because trolls are defined by their very inability to debate logically. To enter such a debate is foolish, yet to stay out of it is very hard if you are a competitive know-it-all type goddess. But out of it you must stay if you want to stay sane, because a troll will not follow any of the usual debating rules such as presenting actual evidence to back arguments or accepting your evidence in return. Trolls also turn the issue upside down in the middle of the debate or move on to some totally unrelated topic. If all else fails trolls attack you for saying something you never said or for being responsible for everything a certain ill-defined and possibly nonexistent group of individuals has ever done. Or they accuse you for not having explained everything that ever happened.

It's very tiresome and utterly pointless. It's also pretty similar to the O'Reilly show or Limbaugh's tirades or Ann Coulter's writings. None of these have much to do with real debates. Real debates can be interesting and even enlightening but trollabates are neither. Sadly, though, real debates are getting increasingly rare.

Many so-called debates are pre-orchestrated to come across as prize fights: pick an issue and then find two people with extreme and opposite opinions on the issue. They must express strong emotions and bombard each other with their absolutist messages. The audience is then supposed to conclude who is right and which side won.

This is rubbish, of course. It's quite possible that a middle-of-the-road position would be the most correct one or that the person who seems to win is just a better debater or that the whole issue is framed badly. It's even possible that such an adversary setup will not enlighten us at all, whereas a cooperative "fill-in-the-missing-pieces-of-the-puzzle" approach might get us somewhere. In any case, I'm very sceptical about the ability of an uninformed public to learn anything from most debates the way they are currently run.

Not that education is the objective of most staged debates. Rather, the idea is that the audience will relish the fighting and not get bored. Debating as entertainment.

How Wingnut Trolls Argue

Usually this topic would be beneath my interest, but this particular comment on Eschaton is really hilarious:

I can't imagine why real Americans would accuse you people of being seditious turds

It's intended to be read in a satirical voice, I presume. "Real Americans" is wingnut for, well, wingnuts. But the really odd part is the "seditious turds" bit. How can turds be seditious? They don't do much anything, except float down passively in the stream of water. And if they were seditious, what would they rebel against? The hole from which they emerged?

Friday Embroidery Blogging

Fallen Angel 


This is an embroidery joke. The red things on the angel's arms are supposed to be long evening gloves all wrinkled up. You can see more technical details by clicking on the picture. Sorry about the reflection from the glass. I forgot to remove it again.

A Funny Thought for the Day

Jeff Gannon has a new blog (no, I'm not going to link to it). Guess what it is called?

A Voice of the New Media

Heh.

On Sex and Power

Robin Givhan in the Washington Post muses on the way Condoleezza Rice is dressed:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived at the Wiesbaden Army Airfield on Wednesday dressed all in black. She was wearing a black skirt that hit just above the knee, and it was topped with a black coat that fell to mid-calf. The coat, with its seven gold buttons running down the front and its band collar, called to mind a Marine's dress uniform or the "save humanity" ensemble worn by Keanu Reeves in "The Matrix."

As Rice walked out to greet the troops, the coat blew open in a rather swashbuckling way to reveal the top of a pair of knee-high boots. The boots had a high, slender heel that is not particularly practical. But it is a popular silhouette because it tends to elongate and flatter the leg. In short, the boots are sexy.

Givhan then goes on to interpret this outfit as the way a woman can look powerful:

Rice boldly eschewed the typical fare chosen by powerful American women on the world stage. She was not wearing a bland suit with a loose-fitting skirt and short boxy jacket with a pair of sensible pumps. She did not cloak her power in photogenic hues, a feminine brooch and a non-threatening aesthetic. Rice looked as though she was prepared to talk tough, knock heads and do a freeze-frame "Matrix" jump kick if necessary. Who wouldn't give her ensemble a double take -- all the while hoping not to rub her the wrong way?

Rice's coat and boots speak of sex and power -- such a volatile combination, and one that in political circles rarely leads to anything but scandal. When looking at the image of Rice in Wiesbaden, the mind searches for ways to put it all into context. It turns to fiction, to caricature. To shadowy daydreams. Dominatrix! It is as though sex and power can only co-exist in a fantasy. When a woman combines them in the real world, stubborn stereotypes have her power devolving into a form that is purely sexual.

Rice challenges expectations and assumptions. There is undeniable authority in her long black jacket with its severe details and menacing silhouette. The darkness lends an air of mystery and foreboding. Black is the color of intellectualism, of abstinence, of penitence. If there is any symbolism to be gleaned from Rice's stark garments, it is that she is tough and focused enough for whatever task is at hand.

A dominatrix indeed...

Givhan's article is annoying in that it drapes the issue of female power into an issue of clothing, as if we could all be powerful by just finding the right things to wear. On the other hand, she (or he?) has a point: there is no generally accepted way for a woman in power to dress. But to borrow from the sexual arena seems a big mistake to me, because so many of the sexual signs of female power make women into passive objects of adulation, not into active leaders.

Take the high heels that Givhan mentions:

Countless essays and books have been written about the erotic nature of high heels. There is no need to reiterate in detail the reasons why so many women swear by uncomfortable three-inch heels and why so many men are happy that they do. Heels change the way a woman walks, forcing her hips to sway. They alter her posture in myriad enticing ways, all of which are politically incorrect to discuss.

The politically incorrect parts probably have to do with the fact that a woman in high heels is showing her availability for sex in two ways: first, her pelvis is tilted to receive rear-entry and second, she is clearly unable to run away. Or so I imagine. Though high heels are also excellent weapons of self-defense, especially if used against the eyes of the attacker. Just kidding, just kidding! Don't quote me on any of this and don't try any of this at home.

I have never been able to learn how to walk in high heels, so whenever I wear them I end up barefoot, carrying the damn things strapped together around my neck. Which gives me an idea for power-dressing women: how about a pair of stiletto heels hanging from a belt? Or better still, a sword?

Bush and Putin Holding Hands

Not really. It's more like each trying to be the top, but on the whole they come across as almost equally stupid. Almost, because it's impossible to beat Bush. Just listen to these comments by our dear leader:

"Strong countries are built by developing strong democracies," Bush said he told Putin. "I think Vladimir heard me loud and clear."
...
"This is the kind of fellow who, when he says `Yes,' he means yes, and when he says `No,' he means no," Bush said.

But Putin did almost as well in the stupidity competition:

"I'm not the minister of propaganda," Putin said, standing alongside Bush at a news conference.

And these guys are the leaders of the so-called free world? Give me a break.

Well, you can't give me a break. It just goes on and on. This bit is especially interesting:

Bush was challenged as well, by a Russian journalist who asked about "violations of the rights of journalists in the United States" without giving specifics.

Bush seemed irritated. He said he talked with Putin about Russian press freedom and that the Russian leader asked in turn about practices in the United States.

"People do get fired in American press," the president said, adding that they get fired by editors or producers or others -- not by government.

But while saying that a free press is the sign of a healthy society, Bush added, "Obviously there has got to be constraints. There's got to be truth."

And how do we get that truth, hmh? By paying money to journalists to be the government mouthpieces? By giving press passes to nonjournalists? I guess so.

It is interesting that Bush seemed irritated. He fares poorly under any kind of criticism and that is perhaps why he has walled himself into a little circle of yes-men and yes-women. Frightening, isn't it? Nothing is so important as good and open criticism on the highest levels of government but we might not be getting any of that.

Why Blog?

Atrios has an interesting post on the topic of blogging, on what we want to get from it and on how to do it well. At the end of the post he gives advice to new bloggers:

1) Don't send me an email saying "read my blog." I won't. If you want to get my interest, send me something interesting. If you have something interesting, it'll get noticed and linked. Have enough interesting things, people will start coming back on their own to look for it, and you'll have a larger regular readership.

2) What's interesting? Your opinion on stuff by itself isn't really interesting to anyone except your friends. If you're funny, or you write well, or you actually know something, or can make a good argument, or are good at unearthing interesting and relevant tidbits, that's interesting.

3) One things blogs do is act as news aggregators/filters and places for discussion. You may be an excellent news aggregator/filter, but that's a pretty crowded market. That's one place where being an early entrant helps. If you want to distinguish your blog, you need to have some additional interesting original content.

4) Don't create a spam list and send out every blog post to the list. We all get too much email. Send me something you think that I would be interested in. It's personal. I don't cover every issue under the sun. Nobody else does either.

5) Don't just focus on trying to get a link from me, or Kos, or Instapundit, or whatever. If you have something good, send it to blogs with somewhat less, but still decent traffic. They probably get less email than we do. s

6) Establishing a large regular readership takes a lot of time, no matter how brilliant and persistent you are. And, persistence is key. While some fairly popular bloggers post inconsistently, most people with a large regular readership post at least daily. People will click on your site more often if they think there's a good chance there will be something new to look at.

My first emotional reaction to this advice was that I'd never have started blogging if I had really thought it out carefully. This has something to do with my upbringing which consisted of a lot of discouragement against the dreadful possibility of gaining a big head (So you ranked number one in the country? Big deal. They're all crazy.) But more generally, how do we ever know if we have something interesting to say without trying to say it?

My second reaction was a great depression over my inability to market my blog. I'm really bad at it, never mind my MBA. Once every six months or so I send out two feeble e-mails to Famous People and that's about it, so it's a relief to hear that most e-mails go unread anyway. Artful Asp will take on the marketing of the blog in the summer when she has more time (the snake school has a vacation then), and she's planning t-shirts and keyrings and stuff. I'm looking forward to the great influx of money and new readers that I will gain then.

What Atrios doesn't mention in his description of what might be interest to the readers is that some topics may not be discussed very much. If you feel strongly about one of those topics you can have a valid blogging voice even if you are not the greatest writer or the funniest person or otherwise really fascinating. Or that's what I hope, anyway, given that this was my original impetus for blogging.

The really interesting question is why people blog at all, and the answer to this question determines how suitable Atrios's advice is. If you want to write a general political blog with a high readership, go on and follow his advice. If, however, you are more interested in talking to a particular group of people than the general blogistan, you need to modify the advice accordingly. For example, the feminist blogs have their own internal relationships and if you write on feminism it may make more sense to e-mail blogs in that group than one of the big political blogs.

Skippy said somewhere that the only valid reason for blogging is when one must. This is like the old argument for writing: that you should write only if you can't do the alternatives. Though this is not the whole truth there is something to the idea that you should absolutely love to blog. If you don't, the days when you get lots of trolls and when your writing stinks will be too hard to take, especially if you have bothersome details such as work-for-money to take care of. And if you love blogging the numbers and the fame are not so important. They are both fickle gods, anyway. They also quickly turn into hollow gods if you don't love blogging, whereas the love of the work itself will keep you going even if nobody reads you at all.

It's Kansas, Dorothy!

Via Atrios I learn about the incredible things going on in Kansas:

Attorney General Phill Kline is seeking the complete medical records of nearly 90 women who received late-term abortions to search for evidence of crimes, according to court documents.

The secret investigation began in October, according to written legal arguments filed Tuesday by two medical clinics that are opposing Kline's effort. They are asking the Kansas Supreme Court to intercede, saying if it doesn't, "a woman who exercised her constitutional right to privacy" could find government agents knocking at her door.

Kline, an abortion opponent, scheduled a news conference for Thursday afternoon, and his office said he would discuss "questions raised relating to child rape and abortion in Kansas."

The records include the patients' names, medical histories, birth control practises and psychological profiles.

This smells to high heavens. Late-term abortions are almost always abortions where something has gone horribly wrong with the fetus. Going through one of those is not something taken lightly, and the families involved have severe traumas. Then someone comes digging for details about their sex lives!

It's yet another step in our road to Gillead, another step in harassing and stigmatizing anyone who has had an abortion. But to do it to those parents who have gone through one of the most painful experiences parents can have is plain wrong and plain disgusting.

There are much more productive ways for going after child rape than such random searches in medical files.

Today's Action Alert

Today's Action Comes from the NRDC. Visit their webpage at www.nrdc.org and click on:

"Stop Global Mercury Pollution The U.S. should lead the way," to send an email to the State Department asking them to adopt meaningful goals for reducing mercury pollution. Or, copy and send the sample letter below.

*************************************************************

February 24, 2005

Claudia A. McMurray
Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Environment
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20520

The Bush administration has frequently pointed to the fact that much of our mercury pollution in the United States comes from abroad. The upcoming United Nations Environment Program meeting in Nairobi provides the first chance to take meaningful action to address this pollution in a coordinated fashion with the rest of the world. But the current U.S. position falls clearly short of the bare minimum required to make any substantial progress on reducing this harmful pollutant.

The U.S. plan should be greatly strengthened for this meeting. We should adopt goals for reducing mercury use by 50 percent by 2010 and 75 percent by 2015. We should promote a policy to phase out mercury uses across the globe and to put excess mercury into long-term storage rather than selling it into global commerce. Finally, our government should provide technical and financial assistance to countries in the developing world to phase out their current mercury uses, starting with the largest, most dispersive uses for which there are alternatives, particularly in chemical manufacturing and for switches and measuring devices.

The global problem of mercury pollution needs a global solution. The United States should lead the way, and the upcoming UNEP meeting would be a good place to start.

Sincerely,

*******************************************************************



Thanks for taking Today's Action

Sex Toys

These are toys for sex, either with yourself or with another person. Things like vibrators or handcuffs or whatever catches your fancy. Probably inflatable dolls are a sex toy, too.

Sex toys are dangerous! In many states their use is illegal due to old laws still on books about immoral behavior, though mostly these laws are not enforced. But the state of Alabama has a law explicitly banning the sale of sex toys and the U.S. Supreme Court has just refused to review the constitutionality of the law. This means that states can go on making laws that ban certain private forms of behavior in the name of public morality.

It is odd, especially given that the sale of condoms is quite legal in Alabama, but the sale of vibrators is not. This shows a bias towards fornication, don't you think? Though it's legal to own a vibrator, provided that the user has purchased it out of state.

Cumbersome. This reminds me of the illegal nature of growing opium poppies, yet the seeds are available on top of every poppyseed bagel we eat. Baking doesn't stop the seeds from sprouting, so it would be theoretically possible to have the poppies growing in the yard quite by accident. But the police wouldn't believe this story so you better not try.

Of, By and for Big Business

This is the title of an article by Robert Scheer, one that is well worth reading. A snippet:

In fact, the GOP's legislative calendar looks like a wish list sent over to the White House from the Chamber of Commerce across the street. Senate Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist (Tenn.) dropped in there the other day after a breakfast meeting with the president to assure the chamber that its wishes would soon be law. After all, the chamber spent $168 million to push the anti-class-action lawsuit bill along. Still to come this session: raising allowable emissions standards on major pollutants, oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the granddaddy of all corporate payouts, privatization of Social Security.

And getting rid of those pesky consumer lawsuits against medical practitioners and those pesky cancer lawsuits by workers who had to deal with asbestos. Note how the administration has time for all this but not for the Defense of Marriage stuff. This tells who the real masters of Bush and co. are, and they are not extremist clerics, at least not in off-election years. Nope. It's the money, as always.

Eberle and Gannon

An interesting Salon article tells us more about the day-passes that Gannon (aka Guckert) was able to procure for months on end:

So the mystery remains: How did Guckert, with absolutely no journalism background and working for a phony news organization, manage to adopt the day-pass system as his own while sidestepping a thorough background check that might have detected his sordid past? That's the central question the White House refuses to address. And like its initial explanation that Guckert received his press pass the same way other journalists do, the notion first put out by White House officials that they knew little or nothing about GOPUSA/Talon News, its correspondent Guckert or its founder Eberle has also melted away. Instead, we now know, former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer personally spoke with Eberle about GOPUSA, so concerned was Fleischer that it was not an independent organization. (Eberle convinced Fleischer that it was.) Additionally, Guckert attended the invitation-only White House press Christmas parties in 2003 and 2004, and last holiday season, in a personal posting on GOPUSA, Eberle thanked Karl Rove for his "assistance, guidance, and friendship."

The article notes that during the Clinton administration a reporter would get a day-pass only if she or he could justify the need for the reporting to happen from inside the White House rather than from elsewhere on that specific day. Clearly, the Bush administration doesn't use the same criteria. So what criteria do they use?

Whatever they might be, it turns out that Bobby Eberle, a conservative activist and the founder of Talon News, was also able to get a White House pass:

Yet, if there's one other person who did manage to receive the same type of kid-glove treatment from the White House press office, it was Guckert's boss at GOPUSA and later at Talon News, Bobby Eberle. A Texas-based Republican activist and a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 2000, Eberle founded Talon News after he became concerned that the name GOPUSA might appear to have a "built-in bias." With no journalism background, he too was able to secure a White House press pass, in early 2003, on the strength of representing GOPUSA, dedicated to "spreading the conservative message throughout America."

Is there anything wrong with any of this? I believe that there is a clear ethical problem in letting political activists infiltrate the press corps for the purpose of asking planted questions or steering the questioning into a safer direction. This makes the White House press conferences into total farces. It is also an attempt to manipulate public opinion in ways that are at least sneaky if not outright nasty.

Other problems with careless screening of journalists should be obvious to even the White House. For example, a terrorist could get in on a day-pass.

But my major concern with the whole Gannongate is how it reveals the tentacles of the administration in all sorts of improper places, just as the earlier revelations about paid journalists did. How much else is there that we don't know about yet? How many superficially independent journalists are getting their talking points and their bank accounts filled by the White House?

More on Women in Iraq

Is freedom coming to the Iraqi women? It is most doubtful:

As the Shiite clerics and Kurdish nationalists, who suddenly find themselves in power in Iraq, debate the form and function of the new government, one often ignored group of Iraqis finds itself ambivalent about the future. Although women participated in January's election in unprecedented numbers, a heartening sign that women would have a strong political voice in Iraq, many Iraqi women remain extremely anxious as religious party leaders, with strong ties to Iran, sit down to write a constitution.

Keep in mind that the majority of Iraqis are women. Yet they are in great danger of being totally ignored in the reconstruction effort and in the creation of a new constitution. The latter may be based on the shariah law which would mean lesser rights for women in the areas of family law (including the right to divorce and inheritance rights) as well as in women's rights to participate in the legal process as equal individuals.

But maybe the Iraqi women don't want such equal rights? Maybe this is all Western propaganda? Maybe. But a recent survey in Iraq suggests something different:

What's also dismaying to activists is that the election appears to conflict with what Iraqi women really want. Women for Women International, an American-Iraqi advocacy group, recently conducted a survey of Iraqi women and found that high percentages of them expect a role in the reconstruction of Iraq. "Many Iraqi leaders have claimed that women do not want to be involved in the reconstruction process," Women for Women founder Zainab Salbi said in a statement. "This survey clearly shows that women overwhelmingly believe they should have a seat at the table." The survey also reveals that Iraqi women expect equal rights -- 94 percent want legal protection as women, and 84 percent want to vote on the final constitution.

It's hard to interpret these two phenomena (large numbers of women voting for the religious list of candidates and so many of them also wanting what the religious candidates won't provide) in any other way except as an indication that most Iraqi women (and perhaps most Iraqis) don't know what the religious candidates stand for. This wouldn't be surprising. How could anyone know what democracy entails when it hasn't been tried in the recent past or even in the lifetimes of many of the voters?

I hope that the future is bright for all the Iraqis, both women and men, but this hope is not based on anything realistic. The most likely outcome in Iraq is a civil war followed by a theocracy which will not be good for women and girls. But at least we brought freedom there...

Today's Really Dum Comment

Not from my blog. I rarely get dum comments. This is from Washington Monthly and has to do with the recent round of lamenting the lack of female political bloggers:

More women are high verbal than men. They should do better at blogging.

As long as the blogs are devoid of content about chess, go, or mathematics.

Now you know.

Today's Action Alert

Today's Action comes from Seraphiel via Eschaton:

Find a postcard of Guernica and write on it (or print a copy of the picuture out from the web and write on it) "From the Citizens of Honduras." Then send it to Mr. Negroponte, c/o The White House, 1600 Pennylvania Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C.

You might also want to send a copy to your Senators along with the message: Don't confirm Negroponte.

And if you need more motivation, consider this picture via Patrick's blog:

Alice in Wonderland

Or Bush in Europe. It amounts to pretty much the same story in many ways. We learn that Bush wants to mend the frayed relationship to the countries of Old Europe:

Bush's speech, during his five-day trip to Belgium, Germany and Slovakia, was aimed at both U.S. and European audiences. "In a new century, the alliance of America and Europe is the main pillar of our security," he said.

He uses the word "alliance" 12 times in the speech to underscore his aim to repair relations with Europe that were frayed over the war in Iraq. But not all his speech was conciliatory.

The president has been pushing Russian President Vladimir Putin -- some say not strongly enough -- to work toward, not away from, democratic reforms and transparency in government.

"We recognize that reform will not happen overnight," Bush said, just three days before he meets with Putin in Slovakia. "We must always remind Russia that our alliance stands for a free press, a vital opposition, the sharing of power and the rule of law. The United States should place democratic reform at the heart of their dialogue with Russia."

Fun, isn't it? "Our alliance stands for a free press, a vital opposition, the sharing of power and the rule of law". Has Bush looked at his own country recently? The United States is rapidly turning into a one-party state more like the old Soviet Union than anything else, the press is scared of the government and the wingnuts' screams about the liberal media so that an open government control is not necessary to get the news the government wants, and there is no sharing of power with anybody who is not an extremist member of the Republican party. The rule of law is being rapidly changed to mean something Orwell would have understood. Now granted, the U.S. is not as bad as Russia in human rights but we are getting there, my dear readers, we are getting there. So if I was Bush (a dreadful thought) I'd clean my own backyard first.

Ok, so Bush pissed off Putin. Putin deserves to be pissed off, and in itself this is not a bad thing, especially if Bush also said a few nice things about the Old Europeans. Did he? I'm not sure. Here is a different view of the same speech:

"Mr. President, the floor is all yours," Verhofstadt said. Bush looked more relaxed. He told jokes. Ben Franklin came to Europe and was greeted as "a friend to humankind. I was hoping for the same reaction. Secretary Rice said I had to be realistic."
.
He was wearing a blue tie, white shirt and dark suit. He stared out over the audience. He read from his script, turning the pages, tapping the podium when he was emphasizing a point.
.
"No power on earth will ever divide us," got some claps. But the biggest applause was for the Middle East. It was what the Europeans wanted to hear. Egypt and Saudi Arabia must develop democracy. But from then on it was a tour of standard American foreign policy. "Syria must end its occupation of Lebanon." "Iran must not build nuclear weapons," he said. The U.S. and Europe have a "moral duty to heal the sick, feed the hungry, comfort the afflicted."
.
Suddenly the words "freedom" and "liberty" began to pepper the speech. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. "May God bless you all."
.
There was a short standing ovation for two or three seconds. Bush jumped from the stage and into the crowd. Beethoven's Sixth started again, as Bush moved along the front row, shaking hands. Onto the stage again, a wave, and "Thank you all," and he was gone.
.
"I missed a page about the European Union," said Timothy Garton Ash, the British academic, as he filed from the room. "About why it is important for the EU and America to work together. I am not convinced he will convince many Europeans talking like that."

The audience was carefully selected to be friendly towards Bush, of course. Outside the Europeans who felt differently held their vigil. I'm sure that they would have a lot more to say about Bush and his speech than I do. I'm used to seeing all sorts of emotional balloons appear from Bush's lips; Europeans tend to want to hear facts. It is indeed unlikely that talking about freedom and God and alliances will make much of a dent in the great European unhappiness about our current administration. Because this unhappiness is based on facts, only changing the facts would work. And Bush will not go there.

Bad Poetry for the Presidents' Day

This is an old and a bad one, written to commemorate this day:


The Presidents' Day


All these holidays for Them -
We eat and eat and shop.
Not thinking of the days when
we work and never stop
to buy ourselves the needed rest
to eat and eat and shop.

Where Have All the Women Gone?

It's that time again, the time to lament the dearth of female political bloggers in the upper ranks of the blogging hierarchy. I learned about the newest wave of this lamenting from Roxanne on the American Street, but it was all begun by Kevin Drum. These lamentations have happened three times since I started blogging fifteen months ago, so this is a recurring theme in the blogosphere.

(While I write this Freddy the spider is sitting on my shoulder, watching. When I was reading Kevin's discussion on the dearth of woman bloggers Freddy quickly slithered down into the relative safety between my breasts. Now this is the kind of writing that might get me a big audience, don't you think? I'd probably have to make Freddy hairier and somewhat bigger, first.)

The story usually goes like this: Some blogger, a male one, notices that there are very few women bloggers among the top one hundred most popular political blogs (or in some other similar measure). He then points out that the internet doesn't discriminate so the reason for this cannot be in discrimination. In what then? The answer usually consists of some kind of a combination of the following: a) women are not interested in politics, b) women don't like the rough nature of political writing and commenting and c) women are too busy cooking and taking care of children to spend time on the blogs. Sometimes a note is added to the effect that women might be above all such bickering and self-aggrandizing behavior or that women are genetically doomed not to reach for positions which indicate dominance in the human society. And so on.

The next stage of the lamentations is the chorus of responses. These take several different forms from purely misogynistic shit to arguments that there are plenty of famous women bloggers, only nobody knows about them. I'm kidding here, but truly the chorus does cover the whole octave of possibilities. Somewhere in the refrain the following points are emphasized: that the early adopters have a great advantage on the internet and most of the early adopters were men, that men tend to link to blogs by other men and that the measures we use for gauging popularity are in themselves biased towards older blogs and those that belong to various blogger groups. All of this is true in some ways, as are many of the other theories I have summarized here. But none of them are completely true and many of them are totally untested against actual data.

(Now Freddy is whispering sweet nothings into my ear. Tickling me in ways that none of my readers has been able to, so far...)

But the lament has so many discords that I get frustrated in trying to follow the music. For example, the idea that women don't savor bickering goes against the archetype of bitching as something that women do, and Ann Coulter goes totally against the idea that women don't like to say outrageous things for attention. The idea that women don't like politics may be true, but then there are many men who don't like politics, and it might all depend on how we define politics. I find it fascinating that one of the lament cycles argued that women like to talk about people and men about concepts but my experience is that most political blogs talk about people nonstop and about concepts very rarely, and those that do focus on the latter are often written by women (I have in mind Rivka of the Otters (who hasn't blogged recently) and Trish Wilson's blog here). It seems that the theories themselves are rubbery and can be turned whichever way the debater wishes. Take the genetic bunch: Here they should be pointing out how all the tests show that women are better writers than men, on average. But instead they tend to argue for other sorts of genetic reasons why women wouldn't be famous bloggers. A girl can't win.

(Except with Freddy. Freddy knows what a woman wants. His velvety forelegs are caressing my neck, slowly, so excrutiatingly slowly. I feel my breathing speed up, my heart melting my juices flowing, flowing.)

There is one theory about all this that has some merit, I believe, and that is that some men don't want to read what women write (unless it is on sex), so if a blogger can be identified as a woman she will lose those readers whose print looks too feminine. I have a book by Molly Peacock, entitled How to Read a Poem...and Start a Poetry Circle, and in its appendix Peacock includes a long list of poetry books that famous poets recommend for poetry clubs. I analyzed this list of recommendations to see whether male and female poets recommended books written by their own gender more often than those written by the other gender.

The results are interesting: For the group of twenty-seven male poets, the percentage of male recommendations is 87%, for the group of thirty female poets the percentage of male recommendations is 58%. (Most poets gave more than one recommended text. I was unable to tell the sex of a few poets from their names and omitted them from my calculations.) This is a sizable difference. The women appear to give female names almost as often as male ones whereas the men are much less likely to list female poets as recommended ones.

(Freddy! Where are you going, Freddy? Ahhh. MMMMM...)

What does this mean, if anything? I don't know but I suspect that there are at least some men who will not read female writing. Unless it is on hot sex.


(Oh Freddy, Freddy!!!! YES! YES!)

My Absolutely Last Post on Lawrence Summers' Opinions

At least I pray to the Great Spirit that this is the last post, because I'm fed up with President Summers and his utterances. But even Maureen Dowd is mentioning him in her atypical rant against sexism (atypical because Maureen usually finds feminism the cause of everything that has gone wrong with women in this country.) Surely I can't keep my mouth shut if everybody else is having a go at our Lawrence.

So here it goes. Summers' statement on women in hard sciences and the reasons why there are not more of them have finally been made available as an actual transcript. I read it a few days ago and it says pretty much what the rumors indicated. Summers mentions three different theories for the scarcity of women in physics, mathematics and the like, and they are a) the long working hours expected in these professions and the expectation that women take care of the family, b) the possibility that more men are innately able to do sciences well and c) discrimination. Nothing wrong in mentioning these theories, I think. Where Summers goes wrong is in the way he ranks them without any good evidence:

There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference's papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call the-I'll explain each of these in a few moments and comment on how important I think they are-the first is what I call the high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.

It is that last sentence and the words "in my own view" that I have difficulty with. True, we all are entitled to have our own views, but if we give a speech as the President of Harvard University then our views will take a significance much greater than those of a private person musing over these questions while having a beer or two. And it seems to me that Lawrence was doing the latter, throwing out various half-baked examples and anecdotes, carefully picking and choosing among existing research and so on, even mentioning that his twin daughters called their trucks mommy and daddy (which, according to many commenters, is really common among both boys and girls). All this in front of an audience that consisted of experts in the field.

This is insulting, isn't it? And just to make it quite clear that Dr. Summers doesn't think much of the discrimination explanation he reiterates:

So my sense is that the unfortunate truth-I would far prefer to believe something else, because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true-is that the combination of the high-powered job hypothesis and the differing variances probably explains a fair amount of this problem.

The differing variances refers to the idea that more men are capable of doing sciences on a high level. Why would Summers view this "truth" as unfortunate? After all, it would let him off the hook. If Harvard doesn't discriminate against women in science and if nobody else does, either, then there is no need for special efforts to avoid discrimination. Which makes Lawrence's job as a gatekeeper much easier.

The discrimination part of the speech is especially interesting, largely because of what is missing from it: any mention of the many studies which show that discrimination exists. Instead, Summers muses on two theoretical questions:

On the other hand, I think before regarding it as pervasive, and as the dominant explanation of the patterns we observe, there are two points that should make one hesitate. The first is the fallacy of composition. No doubt it is true that if any one institution makes a major effort to focus on reducing stereotyping, on achieving diversity, on hiring more people, no doubt it can succeed in hiring more. But each person it hires will come from a different institution, and so everyone observes that when an institution works very hard at this, to some extent they are able to produce better results. If I stand up at a football game and everybody else is sitting down, I can see much better, but if everybody stands up, the views may get a little better, but they don't get a lot better. And there's a real question as to how plausible it is to believe that there is anything like half as many people who are qualified to be scientists at top ten schools and who are now not at top ten schools, and that's the argument that one has to make in thinking about this as a national problem rather than an individual institutional problem. The second problem is the one that Gary Becker very powerfully pointed out in addressing racial discrimination many years ago. If it was really the case that everybody was discriminating, there would be very substantial opportunities for a limited number of people who were not prepared to discriminate to assemble remarkable departments of high quality people at relatively limited cost simply by the act of their not discriminating, because of what it would mean for the pool that was available. And there are certainly examples of institutions that have focused on increasing their diversity to their substantial benefit, but if there was really a pervasive pattern of discrimination that was leaving an extraordinary number of high-quality potential candidates behind, one suspects that in the highly competitive academic marketplace, there would be more examples of institutions that succeeded substantially by working to fill the gap. And I think one sees relatively little evidence of that.

I wrote in an earlier post the reasons why the latter of these arguments is a lame one. Becker's prediction applies only in a world where nobody but the employers discriminate and where everybody knows everything relevant, including the real productivities of all workers. When these assumptions are relaxed the conclusion stops applying. In fact, alternative models produce predictions which show that even nondiscriminating firms might be driven to discriminatory forms of behavior if the markets demand this. You pick a model you like, you get the results you like. As Lawrence well knows, and this is why he can't be absolved from using this particular example.

The first point is even worse: He argues that trying to attract women or minorities won't work because there aren't that many qualified members of these groups to begin with. Note that he provides no evidence for this view; only Summers-musings.

Then he returns to his views on this issue, just in case you have already forgotten them:

So my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination. I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are, and working very hard to address them.

He would love to be proved wrong which shows what a nice guy he is. But he doubts that he will be proved wrong as his views are pretty much set already: women don't enter the hard sciences in large numbers because there are few women who are capable of doing so and because few women want to work as hard as the job requires. This latter cause may be made worse by the societal expectations that women take care of the children and also by some discrimination, but on the whole the problem is insoluble. Or that's how I read Summers' opinions.

Now, remember that this speech was given by the president of Harvard University at a conference about how to get more women into sciences. The message seems pretty obvious: there is not much Harvard can do to encourage more women in these fields. Sure, they can provide childcare, perhaps, but that's about it. This from a man whose reign has seen a considerable drop in the number of women who get tenured at Harvard. So even if we ignore the details of Summers' speech we are left with an emotional message which can be quite chilling.

What about the question whether men are inherently more likely to have the ability to do science in the upper tail of the distribution? Note that these distribution tails that are being talked about here apply to various standardized tests. They are not the actual distributions of scientific ability as we can't really quantify such a beast. All we can do is create various tests that measure some small aspect of abilities and learning and test people on these, and these tests are created by human beings. I would be very careful about equating the findings of such tests with innate ability differences, given that they are administered by humans on other humans who already have had years of environmental effects working on them.

Note also that girls and women score as much higher in tests of essay writing, yet we rarely hear the argument that men are innately unable to become great writers in the same numbers as women. Note that many men who are scientists now did not score in the upper tails of these test distributions and finally note that boys might have larger variances in such tests if they do more guessing than girls. Of course men could simply have larger variances in the underlying abilities, whatever these might be for each specific test, but these other pieces of evidence also exist. Though they appear not to have much impact on Summers' opinions.

I suspect that Summers said what he said because of the recent fashion of viewing most everything as genetic. This has something to do with the Human Genome study and the publicity it has attracted, never mind that the study has so far been pretty silent about human psychology. Who knows what is genetic? Some gender differences surely are, but to argue for the rank ordering of causes the way Summers has done is arrogant; we don't have the science to justify such a rank-ordering. The science of genetics is taking baby steps, right now, yet many of us appear to be eager to saddle it with findings it has not yet produced and might never produce. At the same time, real women who score in the upper tails of various standardized test distributions may now not choose science because of comments like this one.