Addicted...

You may have not noticed it but I've been posting less this week. I found a new addiction, and I hope it's going to be temporary. It is weffriddles. There are probably many similar games on the net, but I usually avoid games because I tend to get hooked so easily.

Anyway, these riddles did nothing for me until Batch 3, but then I got addicted. So I give you the link here to spread the pain. Heh.

Why is problem solving so enjoyable? It shouldn't be. When I have a financial problem I hate to solve it, though I always do. Doing these games reminds me in some ways about the reason why I read so many detective novels at one point in my life: it's a way of channeling various worries and feeling a resolution at the end. Though nothing actually changes, the belief that good endings are possible gets reinforced. Not to mention the vicarious revenge one can experience in detective novels. Or the brain workout, which is always nice.

The Other Side

I sometimes get nasty e-mails from people who hate feminists, and these tend to attribute very odd interpretations to my behavior. Something that Feministe linked to a couple of days ago made it all much clearer to me. If you want to understand what the other side thinks, read the comments thread attached to this post about single women buying houses and apartments.

It's not fun reading as ninety percent of the comments (perhaps by just a few men, though) are extremely misogynistic. But there is learning to be had almost everywhere, even by shifting through crap, and this is what I gained from that thread: The men who most hate or fear women have been personally rejected or damaged in a way which they then attribute to all women. They also tend to take the worst stereotypes of traditional women (seeking a mealticket for life) and the "new" women (seeking to outperform and dominate her partner) and they combine these two into something they view as an actual living creature, called "all women". And this creature is then labeled stupid, too. Interestingly, one commenter there compares women to cars and other gadgets which goes nicely with my earlier post about women as property.

Now, that is misogyny. It wouldn't be surprising to find it on one of those Men's Rights sites, but I was a little startled to see it so freely flowing on a site about real estate.

Science-Schmience

This is pretty frightening stuff:

The Bush administration is clamping down on scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey, the latest agency subjected to controls on research that might go against official policy.

New rules require screening of all facts and interpretations by agency scientists who study everything from caribou mating to global warming. The rules apply to all scientific papers and other public documents, even minor reports or prepared talks, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

Top officials at the Interior Department's scientific arm say the rules only standardize what scientists must do to ensure the quality of their work and give a heads-up to the agency's public relations staff.

``This is not about stifling or suppressing our science, or politicizing our science in any way,'' Barbara Wainman, the agency's director of communications, said Wednesday. ``I don't have approval authority. What it was designed to do is to improve our product flow.''

Product flow? That term tells you all about how science is viewed by this administration: as a product, something to be tinkered with, depending on the demands of the market which in this case is the wingnuts.

And it gets worse:

The new requirements state that the USGS's communications office must be ``alerted about information products containing high-visibility topics or topics of a policy-sensitive nature.''

The agency's director, Mark Myers, and its communications office also must be told - prior to any submission for publication - ``of findings or data that may be especially newsworthy, have an impact on government policy, or contradict previous public understanding to ensure that proper officials are notified and that communication strategies are developed.''

Patrick Leahy, USGS's head of geology and its acting director until September, said Wednesday that the new procedures would improve scientists' accountability and ``harmonize'' the review process. He said they are intended to maintain scientists' neutrality.

``Our scientific staff is second to none,'' he said. ``This notion of scientific gotcha is something we do not want to participate in. That does not mean to avoid contentious issues.''

It used to be called censorship. But wait, there is more:

At the Environmental Protection Agency, scientists and advocacy groups alike are worried about closing libraries that contain tens of thousands of agency documents and research studies. ``It now appears that EPA officials are dismantling what it likely one of our country's comprehensive and accessible collections of environmental materials,'' four Democrats who are in line to head House committees wrote EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson two weeks ago.

Democrats about to take control of Congress have investigations into reports by The New York Times and other news organizations that the Bush administration tried to censor government scientists researching global warming at NASA and the Commerce Department.

Sounds like the old Soviet Union, it does.

From The Archives of Odd Dislikes

Probably most of us have those, things they dislike, instantly and strongly, for no obvious reason. One of mine is hearing someone say "inner-resting" for "interesting". I don't know why it grates on me so. I know what the spoken word refers to, so it's not because I'm asked to work on getting it. I just find it as irritating as long nails scraping on a blackboard.

Sometimes these odd dislikes have to do with half-forgotten childhood events, though not in the case described above. And yes, this is a totally pointless post. Totally pointless posts are the new fashion in blogging.

Misogyny and Fundamentalism

Philip Slater has an interesting post on this at Huffington, entitled "'Morality' is What Right-Wingers Call Misogyny":

UNICEF reports in a new study that children suffer in a variety of ways when women are discriminated against. Big surprise. Let's face it. All over the world, male-dominated societies tend to be thug-dominated societies, violence-dominated societies, war dominated societies. They're also religion-obsessed societies.

Last October Australia's top Muslim religious leader said women without headscarves were like uncovered meat to a cat, and men couldn't be blamed for raping them any more than cats could be blamed for eating the meat.
This attitude shouldn't surprise anyone. Fundamentalism--in Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, or any other guise--has nothing to do with religion. The primary distinction between fundamentalists and all other religious groups is their attitude toward women. For the fundamentalist, women are inferior creatures who should be rigidly controlled and prevented as much as possible from exercising free will. Fundamentalists are not merely anti-choice when it comes to abortion. They are anti-choice of any kind.

Read Slater's whole post. He refers to several theories that have been going around within the feminist literature on the connections between male-God religions and male-dominated societies, and he has several valid points to make. At the same time, the connections between misogyny and fundamentalism are trickier than he describes.

For instance, think of a misogynistic society in general. In such a society, fundamentalism can actually provide a haven for women. At least they won't be hated on randomly, and if they follow every command carefully enough they may even semi-thrive. The point I'm trying to make here is that the realistic choices have seldom been between women and men living as equals or some sort of a fundamentalist woman-hating system. The realistic choices may well have been between a Playboy-magazine type of society where every woman is meat for the cats and a fundamentalist society where some cats are locked out. This is not a defense of fundamentalism, which I see as one of the major threats against women's equality today, but an attempt at understanding why some people, including some women, defend fundamentalist religions as protectors of women.

Or think about this in terms of property rights, the rights that someone has over a commodity: to buy it, to use it, to sell it or to destroy it. In the past (and even today) human beings have been property and other human beings have had the property rights over them. If women are seen as a commodity (for the use of making children and for having sex in general) then the fundamentalists usually say that the property rights to this commodity (oh so valuable! oh so revered!) belong first to the woman's father and then to her husband and finally to her sons, though the property rights of fathers and sons are limited to monitoring the uses of the woman. A Playboy-magazine based world would have these property rights attached to any and all men in the society, which is not necessarily good news for women. Feminists tend to argue that women themselves should have the property rights to their own persons, but feminists have never had the opportunity to actually determine how societies see women, which means that the relevant choices may well have been between different types of men owning a woman. From this point of view fundamentalism may indeed have been preferable to other systems of ownership, if for no other reason then for the simple one that a woman has many more opportunities to influence her fate through her power over a close family member.

All of this is a long way of stating that I think Slater oversimplifies a little in his post, even though his basic argument about the control of women being the essential part of fundamentalisms of all types is very valid. At least I can't think of a single fundamentalist type of religion where women have equal rights.

Added later: This old embroidery of mine may explain the point better. Or its name, "Choices", may do so, in a world where someone else defines the acceptable choices:

On Phill Kline

Does the name sound familiar to you? In that case you might live in Kansas or you may have read about Kline's crucade against abortion. He's the guy who as Attorney General wanted to mine the medical records of women who have had abortions for any potential crime that he might then prosecute. The voters gave him a kick in the butt but the wingnuts had different ideas:

Republican activists chose Attorney General Phill Kline as Johnson County's new district attorney Monday night to replace the Democrat who ousted him from statewide office last month.

The tally among Republican precinct committee members who gathered at a Lenexa church was 316 for Kline to 291 for Steve Howe, who is an assistant district attorney in Johnson County.

In the attorney general's race last month, Kline received just 35 percent of the vote in Johnson County against five-term district attorney Paul Morrison, a former Republican who became a Democrat to challenge Kline for the statewide office.

Despite serving four years as attorney general, Kline has almost no experience prosecuting criminal cases in District Court. But he retained support of many of his fellow conservatives and abortion opponents.

"I'm not new to the cause," Kline said in a speech Monday night before the vote. "I have been tested in leadership, and you know I will stay the course."

And we know what that course is, don't we? The wingnuts are still playing hardball.
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Link via this blog.

On Senator Tim Johnson

He is in critical condition after brain surgery:

U.S. Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson was in critical condition after undergoing brain surgery, the U.S. Capitol physician said on Thursday, an illness that could deprive Democrats of their precarious hold on the new Senate.

The party narrowly wrested control from President George W. Bush's Republicans in the U.S. Congress in last month's elections, gaining just a 51-49 majority in the Senate when it convenes on Jan. 4. However, if Johnson, 59, were to leave office, Republicans could gain control of the Senate.

I'm sending good energy to Senator Johnson. Governor Rounds (of the rapists' fatherhood rights school), not so much.

On Truthiness

Stephen Colbert hugs this word against his chest, shouting "MINEmineMINE!" whenever anybody suggests that he didn't invent it. So I'm going to go with the flow and call the term "truthiness" Colbert's creation. It might well be his creation. He was certainly one of the first to popularize its use:

Colbert introduced the word truthiness on the premiere episode of The Colbert Report, on October 17, 2005. According to Newsweek, he came up with the idea of truthiness just moments before filming for the show began.[1] He used truthiness in a monologue that emphasized its role as an ironic political polemic compressed into a single word, as demonstrated in the following excerpts:[4]

Truthiness
I will speak to you in plain, simple English. And that brings us to tonight's word: 'truthiness.' Now I'm sure some of the 'word police,' the 'wordinistas' over at Webster's are gonna say, 'hey, that's not a word.' Well, anyone who knows me knows I'm no fan of dictionaries or reference books.

I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart. And that's exactly what's pulling our country apart today. 'Cause face it, folks; we are a divided nation. Not between Democrats and Republicans, or conservatives and liberals, or tops and bottoms. No, we are divided between those who think with their head, and those who know with their heart.

Consider Harriet Miers. If you 'think' about Harriet Miers, of course her nomination's absurd. But the president didn't say he 'thought' about his selection. He said this:

(video clip of President Bush:) 'I know her heart.'

Notice how he said nothing about her brain? He didn't have to. He feels the truth about Harriet Miers.

And what about Iraq? If you think about it, maybe there are a few missing pieces to the rationale for war. But doesn't taking Saddam out feel like the right thing?

The word "truthiness" has had a great honor dumped on it: it is the Word for the Year 2006:

An online poll run by US dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster has found Colbert's term, 'truthiness', best sums up 2006.

The satirist, who stars in The Colbert Report and The Daily Show With Jon Stewart as a not so sharp right-wing commentator, has defined the word as "truth that comes from the gut, not books".

I have trouble with "truthiness" because it sounds like "toothiness" to me and then I start thinking about chewing things quite thoroughly and ripping them apart fiercely and that has contaminated my ability to analyze truthiness with my usual analytical clarity. Luckily Colbert can be used as a sturdy crutch here*:

Colbert gave an out-of-character interview with The Onion's A.V. Club, in which he responded to the question, "What's your take on the 'truthiness' imbroglio that's tearing our country apart?" by elaborating on the critique he intended to convey with the word truthiness:[5]

Truthiness
Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don't mean the argument over who came up with the word...

It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty. People love the President because he's certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don't seem to exist. It's the fact that he's certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?...

Truthiness is 'What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.' It's not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There's not only an emotional quality, but there's a selfish quality.

This is interesting. Think of facts as the foundation for what we usually think of as truths, to be called brain-truths here. Then what is the foundation of emotional truthiness, or heart-truths? And what is the foundation for gut feelings or bowel-truth? I think the last one refers to the selfish quality Colbert mentions in the above quote, because gut judgements tend to be quick and easy and rarely require wrestling over difficult issues. A lot of prejudice comes from the gut, though good judgements may, too. When I feel something from the gut it makes me feel...more me, more open, more honest, even if I'm completely in the wrong.

It is this feeling of genuiness that people mistake for truth, I suspect, and it also applies to the heart-truths or emotional truthiness. There is something wonderful about decisions made from the heart, because they so often fight that fairly self-centered call of the gut and also the cold calculations of the brain. And I think humankind would be poorer and meaner without the emotional and physical reactions I've described.

But they are not facts, and that is where the importance of a ridiculing term such as "truthiness" comes in. It's not enough to make emotional or gut assessments about a phenomenon without understanding or studying it, not enough at all. Those assessments are based on sloth and laziness and inertia and they result in silly but sweeping generalizations. The last six years should have proven for good that intellectual sloth is a sin however well it may be wrapped in pious sentiments.

But of course truthiness isn't that new. It's what advertising has used for decades if not centuries, and that is why I'm not willing to forgive the sin of truthiness quite as easily as I might otherwise be tempted to do. For we all know that ads lie and they do it more convincingly than the current political regimes of this world.

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*As an aside, the penultimate sentence in that quote might have a typo, because it would make more sense if the second "feel" was replaced by "want". Or we miss vocal emphasis.

Meanwhile, in Nigeria

Same-sex marriage is going to be banned but not only marriage: almost all forms of association between homosexuals are going to become illegal:

Lawmakers in Nigeria are debating a bill that would ban same-sex marriage and any form of association among gays, even sharing a meal at a restaurant.

Few in Nigeria's deeply closeted gay community have publicly opposed the legislation, which proposes penalties of up to five years in prison and is widely expected to pass.

Engaging in homosexual acts is already illegal in Nigeria, with those convicted facing jail terms in the mainly Christian south and execution in the mainly Muslim north.

"This meeting, right here, would be illegal," said activist Bisi Alimi, stabbing the air with a French fry for emphasis as he sat at a table with three gay friends and a reporter.

Other activities prohibited under the proposed law include belonging to gay clubs or reading books, watching films or accessing Internet sites that "promote" homosexuality.

Alimi has been trying to drum up opposition to the legislation, but says Nigeria's gay community is too far underground and the subject too taboo.

Even accessing Internet sites that "promote" homosexuality? Hmmm. I will take up promoting homosexuality as the new neat way to spend your vacations. I will even offer discounts for first-time visitors to Homosexualia.

Jokes on this topic don't really work. If you read the above quote carefully you may have noticed that homosexuality in the Muslim north of Nigeria is a crime punishable by execution. Stoning, perhaps? It used to be burning in England, once. What vile creatures we humans can be when we put our mind to it.

It isn't an accident that a society's views on homosexuality correlate with its views on the equality of women and men. You can even see that correlation in microcosm inside the United States: the most fervent opponents of same-sex marriage are also likely to be the most fervent supporters of patriarchal male-dominated customs in general. The hidden threads that tie these topics together are not only about sexuality and what one finds repulsive or appealing in that dangerous field but also about the proper way to have sex and the proper person to be the bottom in the act, and that person is always supposed to be a woman. That's what women are for, in the minds of lots of people.

Even the possibility of homosexuality turns the patriarchal applecart (or perhaps the patriarchal bed) upside down, and that is why it is so threatening to so many. But we are not just discussing sex here. We are discussing the hierarchies and power structures of the society in general. If we are discussing anything at all. The Nigerians don't seem to be able to even allow that to happen.
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Want to read something hair-tearingly funny on the topic of wingnut theories of homosexuality? Check out this.

Rumsfeld Unmasked

It's like the time at the end of a children's game, the time when everyone tells where they hid or what they pretended to be. Only it's not a children's game, of course, but thinking in those terms keeps my head from exploding, given that I'm a somewhat idealistic goddess.

I'm talking about Donald Rumsfeld, of course. He's coming clean now that not coming clean doesn't benefit him. First, he has a different interpretation of his resignation than our Dear Leader. Remember that Bush argued Rumsfeld was going to go whatever the election results might have been. But this is what Rumsfeld himself said to Hannity (a wingnut pundit on Fox):

HANNITY: What happened this time, though?

RUMSFELD: I think that this time the outcome of the election, just to put it right up on the table, created a situation where I personally believe, and the president agrees, it is better for someone else to be leading this department with that new Congress. And it's better for the military; it's better for the department; and it's better for the administration. And I feel comfortable with that.

Ok, so this is fairly trivial. But note that Rumsfeld has been making other contradictory statements, too. Such as these:

In a new interview posted on Townhall.com, conservative columnist Cal Thomas asks outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, "With what you know now, what might you have done differently in Iraq?" Rumsfeld offers a remarkable response:

I don't think I would have called it the war on terror. I don't mean to be critical of those who have. Certainly, I have used the phrase frequently. Why do I say that? Because the word 'war' conjures up World War II more than it does the Cold War. It creates a level of expectation of victory and an ending within 30 or 60 minutes of a soap opera. It isn't going to happen that way. Furthermore, it is not a 'war on terror.' Terror is a weapon of choice for extremists who are trying to destabilize regimes and (through) a small group of clerics, impose their dark vision on all the people they can control. So 'war on terror' is a problem for me.

Click on the link to find Rumsfeld saying the exact opposite umpteen hundred times in the past.

Isn't it odd how quickly things change in the faith-based reality? And how very hard it is to tell what the conservatives actually think? If they think, that is.

Still Staying The Course In Iraq

Yet another event like a mini-9/11 took place in Baghdad:

A powerful car bomb exploded in central Baghdad early this morning near a crowd of mostly Shiite day laborers, killing 59 people and wounding 149, Lt. Col. Mahmoud Abdul Aziz of the Iraqi Interior Ministry said.

Major Gen. Jihad Habri said on state television that the blast came from 120 kilograms of explosives packed into a Chevrolet pickup truck. The bomb was detonated in Tayaran (Aviation) Square about 7 a.m., a time when scores of day laborers gather looking for construction, cleaning or painting work.

Britt Hume sees no reason to change the policy in Iraq:

On the December 10 edition of Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday, Fox News Washington managing editor Brit Hume falsely characterized the Iraq Study Group's report as a "stay-the-course document" that "did not reject the president's policy on Iraq," and said its only recommendations for change were "at the margins." In fact, the report issued by the ISG specifically states that "[c]urrent U.S. policy is not working, as the level of violence in Iraq is rising and the government is not advancing national reconciliation," and adds that "[m]aking no changes in policy would simply delay the day of reckoning at a high cost."

But American citizens don't agree with him:

Americans believe the war in Iraq is going badly and getting worse, and think it's time for the U.S. either to change its strategy or start getting out, according to a CBS News poll.

Forty-three percent say the U.S. should keep fighting, but with new tactics, while 50 percent say the U.S. should begin to end its involvement altogether. Only 4 percent say the U.S. should keep fighting as it is doing now.

You figure it all out. But it looks to me as if those in power are the only ones who refuse to see the truth.

Haloscan Is Down Back Working

Sorry about that. If you wish, you can e-mail me with your comments and I can put them in when Haloscan is all better. Click on the website mentioned at the top of this page for e-mail addresses. You can also tell what you think of the statistics primer under construction there.
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I failed to make a note of the website where I got that wonderful picture of frustration from. Apologies.

No Wheels For Meals

This story about the difficulties of the Meals On Wheels program serves as an example of stupidity in policy making:

Meals on Wheels, which has delivered food to the elderly and disabled since 1954, is experiencing shortages of volunteer drivers and about four of 10 programs have waiting lists of needy clients.

The rapidly growing population of Americans age 85 and older is increasing the need for nutrition programs and high gasoline prices make it harder to recruit volunteers, says Peggy Ingraham of the Meals on Wheels Association of America.

Houston's largest Meals on Wheels provider has 700 people on its waiting list who can wait six months or more before they can get food, says David Roberts, director of senior nutrition at Interfaith Ministries for Greater Houston, which runs the program.

"It's just a hard job some days," Roberts says. His program delivers meals to 3,200 with paid drivers because volunteers are scarce.

Why stupidity? Because programs such as Meals on Wheels are much, much cheaper than institutionalizing the elderly, and often all that is really needed to avoid or delay the institutionalization is that someone looks in once a day and brings a warm meal or two. And of course people prefer their own homes to nursing homes.

So due to the want of a few dollars we are going to see the nursing home expenses skyrocket. Where's all that money that was spent for abstinence education, by the way? Perhaps some of those abstinent teens could be talked into delivering meals instead.

God And Government

Two news stories give us further evidence of the ways in which religion is working in the public sector. The first one is about prisoners getting more amenities if they go along with some religious indoctrination:

Life was different in Unit E at the state prison outside Newton, Iowa.

The toilets and sinks — white porcelain ones, like at home — were in a separate bathroom with partitions for privacy. In many Iowa prisons, metal toilet-and-sink combinations squat beside the bunks, to be used without privacy, a few feet from cellmates.

The cells in Unit E had real wooden doors and doorknobs, with locks. More books and computers were available, and inmates were kept busy with classes, chores, music practice and discussions. There were occasional movies and events with live bands and real-world food, like pizza or sandwiches from Subway. Best of all, there were opportunities to see loved ones in an environment quieter and more intimate than the typical visiting rooms.

But the only way an inmate could qualify for this kinder mutation of prison life was to enter an intensely religious rehabilitation program and satisfy the evangelical Christians running it that he was making acceptable spiritual progress. The program — which grew from a project started in 1997 at a Texas prison with the support of George W. Bush, who was governor at the time — says on its Web site that it seeks "to 'cure' prisoners by identifying sin as the root of their problems" and showing inmates "how God can heal them permanently, if they turn from their sinful past."

One Roman Catholic inmate, Michael A. Bauer, left the program after a year, mostly because he felt the program staff and volunteers were hostile toward his faith.

"My No. 1 reason for leaving the program was that I personally felt spiritually crushed," he testified at a court hearing last year. "I just didn't feel good about where I was and what was going on."

For Robert W. Pratt, chief judge of the federal courts in the Southern District of Iowa, this all added up to an unconstitutional use of taxpayer money for religious indoctrination, as he ruled in June in a lawsuit challenging the arrangement.

The Iowa prison program is not unique. Since 2000, courts have cited more than a dozen programs for having unconstitutionally used taxpayer money to pay for religious activities or evangelism aimed at prisoners, recovering addicts, job seekers, teenagers and children.

Is this what Bush meant when he said that his government wouldn't discriminate against religious groups?

The second story has to do with the military:

A military watchdog group is asking the Defense Department to investigate whether seven Army and Air Force officers violated regulations by appearing in uniform in a promotional video for an evangelical Christian organization.

In the video, much of which was filmed inside the Pentagon, four generals and three colonels praise the Christian Embassy, a group that evangelizes among military leaders, politicians and diplomats in Washington. Some of the officers describe their efforts to spread their faith within the military.

"I found a wonderful opportunity as a director on the joint staff, as I meet the people that come into my directorate," Air Force Maj. Gen. Jack J. Catton Jr. says in the video. "And I tell them right up front who Jack Catton is, and I start with the fact that I'm an old-fashioned American, and my first priority is my faith in God, then my family and then country. I share my faith because it describes who I am."

...

Weinstein, a White House lawyer in the Reagan administration, cites Defense Department regulations barring personnel from appearing in uniform in "speeches, interviews, picket lines, marches, rallies or any public demonstration . . . which may imply Service sanction of the cause for which the demonstration or activity is conducted."

All the officers are identified in the video by their Defense Department positions, "yet the video failed to include any disclaimers indicating that the views expressed were not those of the Department of Defense," the letter says.

Sounds iffy to me. But at least the military is not discriminating against Christianity, I guess.

What these two stories share is the implied use of power in the hierarchy to benefit Christianity or some sects of Christianity. The power is more than implied in the first example, because the prisoners are provided with material incentives if they join a religious group, which means that those who won't join are punished by the absence of these material comforts. But the second example links to power, too, as any grunt watching the video would know. How do you refuse to listen to your superior in the military, even if he or she is preaching religion?

I recently read that the Pope wants religion to be present in the public sector and the same argument is not uncommon in this country. But to be "present" is a very different thing from fairly forceful conversion efforts, and to me these two news stories are about conversion.

Crime And Punishment

It's somewhat shocking that one in every 32 Americans is behind bars, on probation or on parole. This is not an international ranking the U.S. probably wants to lead, but there you go:

According to the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College in London, more people are behind bars in the United States than in any other country. China ranks second with 1.5 million prisoners, followed by Russia with 870,000.

The U.S. incarceration rate of 737 per 100,000 people in the highest, followed by 611 in Russia and 547 for St. Kitts and Nevis. In contrast, the incarceration rates in many Western industrial nations range around 100 per 100,000 people.

Groups advocating reform of U.S. sentencing laws seized on the latest U.S. prison population figures showing admissions of inmates have been rising even faster than the numbers of prisoners who have been released.

"The United States has 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's incarcerated population. We rank first in the world in locking up our fellow citizens," said Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, which supports alternatives in the war on drugs.

"We now imprison more people for drug law violations than all of western Europe, with a much larger population, incarcerates for all offenses."

There are other reasons for the greater incarceration rate, too, having to do with how crime tends to rise with income inequality and such.

It's an interesting topic. One of those invisible elephants in much public debate. For example, when the fashion in the 1990s was to attack poor single mothers on welfare as the source of all our problems very few voices pointed out how much more expensive the prisons are for taxpayers to maintain. I chose that comparison, because incarceration is predominantly a male problem, and that may be why it is an invisible one.

Commies Under The Garden Beds?

Posted by olvlzl.

Have you ever had a seed catalog that prints letters from customers warning that it is too leftist?

“When you stick to facts and seeds, I am in your camp.... but when you run babbling off into the leftist dogma wilderness... you are close to losing me as a customer,” Customer from Shrewsbury, VT

But the response isn’t all that way. Right below that they printed: “ I love Fedco. The cooperative. The politics. The information. The prices. The catalog!” Customer from Plainfield, VT
You can look at page 55 of the Fedco 2007 Seed catalog to see.

The Fedco Cooperative is my favorite source for seeds and growing supplies. Its catalog is, well, to quote another customer: “This catalog is more engaging than most novels: all those intriguing characters. Who should I root for???” (Page 40)

There are a few other seed catalogs that come close to matching the number of varieties but none that match the Fedco catalog for its informative and entertaining descriptions and boundless asides.

Here, from a sidebar on it’s essay on global warming, Top ten reasons for not curbing global warming:
8. Does evolution really work? - we’ll soon find out.
5. No more Florida election surprises.
1. Maine-grown coffee at MOFGA’s Common Ground fair.*
All joking aside, the essay on page 6 is serious and worth reading.

The pictures, all black and white on newsprint, are funny and beautiful and make wonderful coloring books. It is one of the few seed catalogs that I’ve seen children who are uninterested in gardening leaf through.

Other than being a customer and an admirer, I have no financial interest in Fedco Seeds, Moose Tubers or Organic Grower’s Supply. If you are interested they have a website but the paper catalog that carries the mystique. There is nothing like picking it up on a snowy January day when the power is out and imagining the garden in August. To conserve paper, you can download it. All seed is untreated, many heirloom and open varieties are sold and all of them are worth considering if you have a garden.

* The Maine Organic Farmer’s and Gardener’s Assoc. fair’s “no coffee because it’s not a Maine grown product” fight is one of the most enduring controversies up here. Ok, so it’s an inside joke, unless you get stuck at the fair with caffeine withdrawal.

Goodbye, Patchwork Cat

The Patchwork Panther is too cool to be contained.
You try to hold her, the cat just won’t be restrained.
The Patchwork Panther is so free (four and a half beats rest) she won’t be chained.

But if you are cool too,
and not to eager to hold her.
Just wait and she’ll jump
right into your lap
And if you don’t bait her,
just wait until she’s all settled
The kitty won’t feel like she’s jumped right in to a trap.

The Patchwork Panther is too cool to be contained.
You try to hold her, the cat just won’t be restrained.
The Patchwork Panther is too free.....




to be contained.

Swellfare Cassocked Hacks? Is It Really Charity?

Posted by olvlzl

Is the book "Who Really Cares" by Arthur C. Brooks an indictment of stingy liberals who don’t put their wallets where their mouths are or is it yet another in the long, long series of books written to both further the ideological propaganda effort of conservatives and make them feel smug? Is it another fat-cat and wannabe, feel good book? What I’ve seen about it doesn’t exactly put it on the top of my “to read” list.

"Who Really Cares" is creating a stir in philanthropy circles -- and garnering acclaim from conservative pundits like ABC News's John Stossel and the radio host Michael Medved -- but is it to be trusted? At the AEI forum, Alan Abramson, director of the philanthropy program of the Aspen Institute, said that one should treat Brooks's sweeping conclusions with caution, given the "softness of the data" on charity in general. (He noted that Brooks himself concedes that we don't even know with certainty whether 50 percent or 80 percent of adult Americans donate to charity.)

I’ll pass up the temptations presented by the Stossel and Medved acclaim, though their recommendation would be a red flag of fawning that what was contained within was probably predictable B.S.* What really should concern anyone who is interested in the truth is Abramson’s “softness of the data” statement. Soft numbers can’t give you accurate results. They can’t and anyone who uses them should be called on their use. Even professors at Syracuse University. No, make that, especially professors at major universities.

Brook’s concession that there could be as great a gap as thirty percent in such a basic number makes me wonder why he would have gone on to write the book. Even the gap in the value of that variable would be enough to make everything else unreliable. But even if you had a solid value, what does it mean? Would it really show what Brooks and his happy audience of right wingers say it does? It all depends on how you define “charity”, the rigor with which you observe your defined limits and the general agreement that your definition is the right one.

Junk in junk out is the polite way of putting it. You plug in all kinds of numbers collected from various places and dazzle the innumerate press and the side your results are spun for and no one looks to see where the numbers came from and what they mean. When it comes to crunching numbers dealing with complex phenomenon, such as an observable behavior, it becomes a bit tricky to even tell if what the hopeful researcher wants to see is what was really there. If it is something too complex and diffuse to observe, say “charitable giving”, then the numbers can really mask other intentions.

First, what constitutes “charitable giving”? Giving itself can be anything from entirely self-serving to entirely selfless. Is that huge donation, with tax exemption, given to the already obscenely huge money hoard of Harvard to get your name put on a building, or will it go anonymously to pay tuition and instructors at Roxbury Community College? Does the condition and level of need of the recipient matter? Does ten-grand given to the Mercedes fund for the pastor of a mega-church qualify as charity? How about paying for a piece of stained glass in a window of dubious artistic merit? How about giving to an ideological institution which will lobby against the estate tax? Of the above, only the donation to the Roxbury Community College, if it goes to teaching children in need, makes it as charity with me.

Before I’m going to even consider a book about who is more generous I’m going to have to know what the numbers represent in both their raw form and in their refined form. Then we can go on to how they are used. This section of the Globe article raises some other interesting points:

Other scholars, like Paul Schervish, a sociologist and head of the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy at Boston College, express doubts about the claims, though he found them hard to check on short notice. "One thing he does do," Schervish says in an interview, "is to go to different data sets depending on what he wants to be proving." Among other sources, Brooks uses IRS data, the University of Michigan's General Social Survey, and surveys conducted by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.

This review at Amazon.com brings up some interesting issues. I include it for a reason. **

*Stossel in particular is untrustworthy. A “journalist” who has declared that his job is to promote the corporate agenda is a self-proclaimed propagandist dishonestly pretending to be a reporter. Junk journalism from a junk journalist. Medved, just one of the legion of those Hollywood hangers on who can tell us what Mel Gibson’s shoes taste like. Anyone who wants me to read their book should not use their blurbs on the cover.

**J. Straka - See all my reviews (REAL NAME) In the national press release for this book, the big "news" is that "religious conservatives donate far more money than secular liberals...". What an interesting spin! What makes it especially interesting is that in an October 2003 article by Arthur Brooks in the Policy Review, he states that religious liberals give and volunteer at rates comparable to religious conservatives. Now that is an apples to apples comparison, but not very interesting "spin material". I wonder why the press release didn't contain the findings found on Mr. Brooks' own web page showing that the "working poor" give more to charity than both the middle and upper class. That statistic wouldn't sell books to his conservative audience, I guess. And while Mr. Brooks tries to come off as a neutral observer "shocked" by the results of his studies, all the other articles he has written on the internet shows he has no love for the liberals (one article entitled "The Fertility Gap" predicts the demise of the liberal party because they were having 41% fewer babies than the conservatives!).

I question the need for this book: if you are giving your money and time to those in need out of true compassion, why do you need to compare yourself to others? If you have a need to compare and judge and belittle others, I really question that you are that compassionate. Though I'm sure many conservatives will buy this biased book because it will make them feel good about themselves, they would be much further ahead to donate the money to a charity.

Note: I wonder why only 24 of 126 people found his review helpful. Maybe Brooks is preaching to the choir gloriously robed in his kind of charity. I wonder how many of the admirers of Brooks' soft numbers have uttered the phrase "evolution is just a theory,".

Maybe A Better Discussion Could Be Had From “The Little Foxes”.

Posted by olvlzl.

The other day on Christopher Lydon’s usually excellent “Open Source” he and a small group of well spoken people considered the Bush II regime’s Iraq war in terms of Moby-Dick. The assigning of roles from the book to various people in the incumbent regime was generally unsuccessful, I almost hit the radio when one of them suggested Colin Powell as Starbuck. But it was in the attempt itself that the program failed. Moby-Dick is a rather overdrawn presentation of the dilemmas of human existence and our limited and too short consciousness. It is a novel. As a novel it is entirely inappropriate as a vehicle for looking at the Bush II regime’s entirely sordid and thoroughly banal mishmash of a war. Whaling by a ship of isolated, sexually repressed sailors led by a mad man might be a good metaphor for the Bush II adventure, but as reportage not with the glamour of existential despair and futile striving that Melville attached to a rotten and mercenary activity.

When or, since they seem intent on ending the world, if the history of the Bush II regime is written it will be mythologized . Republicans and the Bush Crime Family have the resources to do that, they will need to and it will be insisted on. In fact they are already shaking down large donors for that effort this very week. But for those of us who are interested in what really were the motives of Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz, Chalabi, Feith, Miller, the entire range of people in government and the media who made this disaster there is one certainty. If we start looking for motives more noble or exculpatory than a quest for power and plunder we will propagate the lies that began this, the greatest crime committed by a modern American President, the kind of evil that ends empires. Those always begin in people telling themselves a tale, one in which what they want turns into what is noble, good and epic. Maybe the problem is that they were brought up on novels. An education based in fiction is a very bad idea. Look where the Homeric fables got it’s audience.

The origins of the Second Bush War were in the desire to get hold of the American government, the richest and most powerful government in the history of the world. It was a desire to use the mechanism of the military to invade Iraq to hand it’s oil concessions over to the Bush family and its associates. To do this invasion, especially with the “streamlined” military that Rumsfeld provided it was impossible to avoid paying large numbers of contractors associated with Cheney and the Bush family. Various other power players also made out. There are no metaphysical considerations that will shed light on the invasion of Iraq, there are no mitigating features of the kind Melville gave his fictional creations. There is nothing in this that is epic or tragic or revelatory in a greater sense. It is a case to study in the field of international criminology. It is entirely banal every way you turn it.

My Best Christmas Present Ever!!!! Can Now Be Yours Too

A war on Christmas proposal

Posted by olvlzl.

Getting asked once too often decades ago what my best Christmas present ever was my usual response is "I don't know,". But having thought about it again I've got a definite answer, one that can keep on giving.

Once in a meeting of the board of a small, local non-profit I used to sit on, our most irritatingly juvenile member proposed, "We aren't doing enough for our volunteers. We need to show how much we value them by throwing them a Christmas party,". All of us slumped in our seats. Not another damned Christmas event we would have to go to.

In a really impressive bit of quick thinking, for which all of us have since been truly thankful, one of our members said, "Yes, let's have something but not now. How about in May,". Everyone, almost, immediately brightened, even smiled. The vote in favor was unanimous. A small non-profit was spared from instituting one of the most onerous burdens of the season, it has not had a single "Volunteer Christmas Party" since that blessed night.

NOTE: I had some unexpected family concerns come up this morning. I am sorry for the light posting and hope to be able to write some more later tonight. Here are two posts from my blog this week.

Before the Bargaining Begins

Posted by olvlzl.

Without environmental and worker’s protection here and abroad the answer would have been, no dice. So it’s good that Open Source had Barney Frank on the other night to explain his proposed grand bargain. That’s the one in which businesses get a decrease in some kinds of regulations and more open trade in return for things like a more friendly climate for unionization, increased wages and national health coverage. Robert Kuttner has a column this morning that gives more information about the deal and why it could bring in a return to policies that built the now moribund middle class.

I’m not entirely sold on the bargain and am very skeptical that it will be taken up. Kuttner mentions in his column that the ideas seem strange to the left because they haven’t been taken seriously by those in power for decades. That is primarily the fault of conservatives who from the late 40s till today have done everything they could to destroy the New Deal and other programs that benefitted the large majority of people in the United States. They owned the media that carped about every tiny fault and blew those into a climate of cynical dismissal of both the public sector and unions. When they didn’t have anything to blow up, they invented it. And there was also the conservative, entrenched leadership of the unions who not only played the very unattractive roles assigned to them by the conservative media, they squandered too many opportunities to increase membership. Without an expanded membership the union movement started to die. Both will have to be overcome to make this bargain work, neither side will give up their perks without being forced to.

One of the other guests on Open Source gave one more essential part of the bargain, this time business goes second. Last time, with NAFTA etc. they went first and our turn never came. Without the pressure of them not getting what they want, they will never allow us to get what we need. After the failure of the Clinton administration to give us health care and the essential protections that should have been a preliminary requirement, NAFTA should never have been passed. Our rule going into this has to be that without us getting the things we need in the bargain then the others things don’t happen.

And if it fails, if the conservatives refuse the offer? What then? I hope that Barney Frank has thought of that. I can’t imagine he hasn’t. If it fails then, among other things, free trade should be scrapped. Without the things Frank has listed as the requirements of the labor side then free trade is a quick trip to the bottom, the one the middle class has been on since Reagan took office. If a decent standard of living isn’t possible under the rules as they stand, it’s not time to give up on people having a decent standard of living. It’s time to burn the rule book and get rules that provide for one. To start, I’d say that the program in Marjorie Kelly’s book, The Divine Right of Capital, is a good place to start.

Why is it that workers who produce all of the wealth don’t have at least as much ownership of a company as the one-time investor gets in perpetuity? Investor ownership is eternal. Stock can be sold over and over again without a single cent of additional capital investment in the company being made. Yet a worker who works for the company from the beginning till her job gets outsourced when the eighteenth owner of the stock decides that slave-labor overseas will maximize the value of the stock, has no legally protected ownership rights at all.

Friday Embroidery Blogging

This is a reposting of an embroidery which didn't turn out as well as I wanted it to. But the idea still fascinates me. How do you turn the tables on someone?

The technique is mostly chainstitch. I was experimenting with using it to fill space. And the flying thing is supposed to be a bomber.

Important Announcements

I've taken part in a blog survey and as part of that survey the researchers also want answers from my blog readers. If you'd like to participate, click here. There are no awkward questions about income or identity, just political questions. There are questions about income but not anything that would identify you.

The new Carnival of Feminists is out at Diary of A Freak Magnet. I'm included, but so are many much more interesting feminists and their writing. Enjoy.

WIMNs Voices, a blog on women in media and the news, has been appointed for the best new blog in 2006. You can vote for it every day until December 15, here. I like it because I write there sometimes.

Jeanne Kirkpatrick, RIP

She died in her sleep at the age of eighty:

Initially the only Democrat in Reagan's cabinet-level team and for a time the only woman, Kirkpatrick later became a Republican who adopted an activist stance at the United Nations, hitting back whenever the United States was attacked.

Kirkpatrick was a major architect of U.S. policy in Central America

And how is Kirkpatrick remembered among her own? Here is Ledeen:

People often forget that her "career" came third for her, both emotionally and chronologically. The important things in Jeanne Kirkpatrick's life were husband, children, and career. She was one of the first women to show that, with our longer lifespans, you really can have it all. But not all at once. And I think her life suggests that in some cases it's much better to postpone "labor market entry" until you've got the children up and running, and the marriage in good order.

I'm interested in learning how Michael Ledeen is working out the order of important things in his own life in the proper chronological order, given that he adopted the cute term "You really can have it all. But not all at once."

GodMen

That would make a very good name for a band. It isn't a band, sadly, but a new form of Promise Keeper-type all-men organizations which desire to make men more interested in religion by promising more violence and dominance over women:

The strobe lights pulse and the air vibrates to a killer rock beat. Giant screens show mayhem and gross-out pranks: a car wreck, a sucker punch, a flabby (and naked) rear end, sealed with duct tape.

Brad Stine runs onstage in ripped blue jeans, his shirt untucked, his long hair shaggy. He's a stand-up comic by trade, but he's here today as an evangelist, on a mission to build up a new Christian man — one profanity at a time. "It's the wuss-ification of America that's getting us!" screeches Stine, 46.

A moment later he adds a fervent: "Thank you, Lord, for our testosterone!"

...

In fact, men taking charge is a big theme of the GodMen revival. At what he hopes will be the first of many such conferences, in a warehouse-turned-nightclub in downtown Nashville, Stine asks the men: "Are you ready to grab your sword and say, 'OK, family, I'm going to lead you?' " He also distributes a list of a real man's rules for his woman. No. 1: "Learn to work the toilet seat. You're a big girl. If it's up, put it down."

Read the whole article, and you will find an interesting interpretation of what it means to lead the family with a sword in hand:

Eric Miller, a construction worker, admits his wife is none too pleased when he takes off, alone, on a weekend camping trip a few weeks after the GodMen conference this fall.

"She was a little bit leery of it, as we have an infant," he reports. "She said, 'I need your help around here.' "

Miller, 26, refuses to yield: "I am supposed to be the leader of the family."

I've sometimes wondered what would happen if the women of these male-dominant families started taking the schtick seriously: Ok, so he is the boss. This means that I will sit on my ass doing nothing at all until he's in the room and then I will only do whatever he explicitly tells me. Let him worry about the children's dentist and doctor dates, let him worry about whether there is toilet paper in the house. It's up to the boss to do those things or very explicitly and carefully tell the underling what to do.

I actually had to claw at my goddessy corset while reading the initial article. Oppression articles always make me feel like I can't get a breath in. But then I read the bit where the men blame their alienation from the church on the frilly and pink atmosphere of churches, and my Inner Interior Decorator saved the day by giving me something else to think about. That "something else" is how to redecorate all the churches to get guys back into the lap of Jesus:

We will hang beer mobiles from the ceiling. There will be a spittoon by the door and a large manly receptacle for swords and cell phones. All paintings of Jesus will be violent ones, showing him winning. So the crucifix is out. And the ministers will preach in boxing shorts. An air-freshener smelling of farts might be used at exciting points in the sermons, the points where God tells that a lot of people will be slaughtered and enslaved.

Women could be given a small annex to pray in.
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Stole the link from Pandagon.

Give A Buck To An Unemployed Satirist, Buddy

How do you make fun of a president who says things like this:

I also believe we're going to succeed. I believe we'll prevail. Not only do I know how important it is to prevail, I believe we will prevail. I understand how hard it is to prevail. But I also want the American people to understand that if we were to fail -- and one way to assure failure is just to quit, is not to adjust, and say it's just not worth it -- if we were to fail, that failed policy will come to hurt generations of Americans in the future.

That, my friends, is the Leader of the Free World.

There is no justice in this world. The wingnuts are also almost impossible to satirize, because every time I write something satirical about them they read it and make the satire into reality.

I call unfair competition.

Volunteering For Iraq Duty

This is not popular among civil servants, for fairly obvious reasons:

Apparently, folks haven't been stepping up to the plate. So you civil servants might not have a choice in the matter, if the Iraq Study Group gets its way. From the final report, Recommendation #74 reads:

In the short term, if not enough civilians volunteer to fill key positions in Iraq, civilian agencies must fill those positions with directed assignments. Steps should be taken to mitigate familial or financial hardships posed by directed assignments, including tax exclusions similar to those authorized for U.S. military personnel serving in Iraq.

This is such an odd "war" (using Bush's terminology for the Iraq occupation). For most of us the required sacrifice consists of shopping harder or buying one of those car magnets the Chinese make for us. But for some, the sacrifice asked is a rather frightening one.

More on Funniness

The discussion Christopher Hitchens's "Women Ain't Funny. Smooches, Bitch" story provoked suggests to me that there is a market (nonpaying, sadly) for a longer post on funniness in general. Not that I plan to write it, but I'm throwing out the idea for some enterprising blogger to pick up and run with. And here is the outline for the post:

First, make a distinction between being funny (as in a comedian) and laughing at something as being funny. The two are different things, yanno.

Second, make a note of the fact that people laugh at very different things. Racists laugh at jokes about minorities. Misogynists laugh at jokes about women. Smart folk laugh at clever jokes. Lots of people laugh at situational comedy but for different reasons. Think of the Borat movie. People laughing in the movie theater may not be laughing at same things at all. Some (gasp!) may actually laugh "on the other side" so to speak. People in the countries I've lived in don't laugh at all the same things, because jokes depend on context and shared history and many other details which don't carry over very well.

Third, discuss the hostility underlying a lot of humor, and explain why certain types of jokes will not often be told in the presence of women, and even why some men think women don't have a sense of humor. For example, the so-called dirty jokes. Not because they are dirty jokes, but because they are jokes based on hostility towards women, and women might not find that funny. In a reversal, note also that women might not tell certain types of jokes in the presence of men, and that this does not mean those types of jokes are not told.

Fourth, talk about the privileging the whole humor discussion has given to "jokes", the kinds of things which require a long preparatory statement and then some sort of a reversal. A very linear and in some ways a very predictable type of joke, and one which falls flat a lot. Other types of humor are every bit as important in my view.

There should be more points to the outline but that should get someone going.

Something else that this discussion brought to my mind is how I have to fight the humor wars with one arm tied behind my back, if I want to avoid insulting a whole bunch of people in some form of hostility-based humor. It isn't just humor wars that handicap me in these ways: Just imagine a reversal of Hitchens's column, something that would bash all men while pretending to praise them. Such a reversal would never be published in Vanity Fair.

Which is funny, I guess.

The Mystery Of The Dog That Didn't Bark

The Hound of Baskerville, was it? In any case, when I was reading through all the blog posts on NARAL and its leader Nancy Keenan, I couldn't help thinking about the dog that didn't bark when it should have.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, this might help: It is about the wingnut proposal for an act which is called "The Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act". Not that fetuses can feel pain, according to medical studies, until quite late in the gestation. But this act is part of the wingnut takeover of women's reproductive rights, and Nancy Keenan, as a representative of NARAL, gave this statement about the proposed act:

"Pro-choice Americans have always believed that women deserve access to all the information relevant to their reproductive health decisions. For some women, that includes information related to fetal anesthesia options," Nancy Keenan, NARAL's president, has said in a statement on the bill.

This is an odd statement, coming from the mouth of a representative for a group like NARAL. An odd statement, because "information" usually assumes that the stuff has some bearing to facts, and as far as I can tell physicians don't know how to give anesthesia to the fetus without endangering the woman's health. Assuming that the fetus could feel pain, which doesn't seem to be the case.

Keenan is also famous for supporting Joe Lieberman (the man who said that rape victims can always walk to another hospital if the first one refuses them the morning-after pill). More and more, she comes across as the dog that didn't bark when it should have barked.

Now Fred Vincy found this* on Keenan's opinions from an article that appeared in 1990:

For many public officials, personal conviction that abortion is wrong does not extend to public responsibility. "As a Catholic, I accept the teaching of my church on abortion. That is my personal religious belief . . . As a public official, there is no question in my mind that depriving women of the right to follow their conscience is the same as imposing religious beliefs," Montana's school superintendent, Nancy Keenan, said in a Dec. 5 letter when questioned by her bishop.

Fred points out that nothing appearing since this quote suggests that Keenan has changed her views on this topic. She may have, of course, but if so isn't it curious that nothing about those changed views has been published? Keenan is leading one of the most important pro-choice organizations of the country, and her personal views on abortion are....unclear?

The usual explanation for the way Keenan acts with wingnuts is not about an abused spouse acting dysfunctionally, though that is the one I find most apt. The accepted explanation is that Keenan is hedging her bets. What if wingnuts get back into power very soon? Isn't it a good thing to be nice to them so that they will leave abortion alone?

It's pretty clear how inane such a wish is, because wingnuttery is based on the idea of reining in all women and making women behave, and abortion is one of the most central of the wingnut targets. They're not going to be reasonable about abortion just because Keenan kowtows to them at every chance she gets. They're going to make abortion illegal and then birth control, too. Which brings me back to the dysfunctional abused spouse model for Keenan.

But Vincy's find suggests yet another theory: That of a mole. Wouldn't it be something if all the time NARAL had been led by a wingnut activist? - Just joking.
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*I'm assuming Fred checked that it is the same Nancy Keenan.

Let's Play the One Hundred Friends Game

This game takes general income and wealth statistics and converts them into the number of friends out of one hundred that would match each statistical group. Stuff like this:

The richest 1% of adults in the world own 40% of the planet's wealth, according to the largest study yet of wealth distribution. The report also finds that those in financial services and the internet sectors predominate among the super rich.

Ok. So one of the 100 friends gets 40 chocolate cakes, the other 60 chocolate cakes have to feed the other 99. What next? Perhaps this:

The bottom half of the population owned merely 1.1 percent of the globe's wealth. The net worth of the world's typical person — whose wealth was above that of half the world's population and below that of the other half —was under $2,200.

The widening gap between the global haves and the have-nots in large measure reflects the failure of less- developed countries to develop, while rich countries — particularly the United States — have experienced fast economic growth and a spectacular buildup of assets.

"Developed countries have pulled ahead of the rest of the world," said Edward N. Wolff, a professor of economics at New York University who is a co-author of the new study. "With the notable exception of China and India, the third world has drifted behind."

We have to rearrange the 60 cakes we gave the 99 friends. We have to take ONE chocolate cake and give it to 50 of those friends, while ONE friend gets 40 cakes and the remaining 59 cakes will be divided in varying proportions among the remaining 49 friends. This is how the world wealth distribution looks.

And what about Americans? Well, five of those 100 friends are Americans and those five get to eat 33 chocolate cakes.

Wealth is not the same as chocolate cakes, of course. Wealth is not the same as income, either. Wealth is like your bathroom sink with water in it. Income is the water that runs into the sink from the tap, and your expenses are the water running out through the hole at the bottom of the sink. Inheritances and such are like someone dumping a pailful of water into the sink whenever you get one.

This United Nations study on world wealth and its distribution is the first large study of its kind and it suffers from some obvious problems. For instance, it's hard to measure wealth and many countries don't keep good statistics on it. The valuing of wealth across countries is also tricky, because different countries have different pricing levels and it's a little easier to live on low incomes in low-income countries. But the inequalities are still very severe, even if we adjust the prices used to reflect this:

Worldwide wealth comparisons become somewhat less skewed when they use so-called purchasing power parities — the exchange rates at which products like a quart of milk or a TV set would cost the same thing everywhere. They correct distortions resulting from, for instance, the undervaluing of the Chinese yuan, and reflect more accurately the purchasing power of typical consumers in different countries.

Using this method, the United States still comes out on top but with a smaller share — about a quarter of the world's wealth. And China's share jumps to about 8.8 percent.

That's still like five chocolate cakes per American, on average. Note, though, that wealth is also unequally distributed within the United States, and here is where my game analog breaks down.

What does the very unequal distribution of world wealth mean? Other than rising anger from the poor as more and more of them get televisions in their villages and learn about how wealth is distributed? The answer varies depending on whom you ask. Here is a selection of opinions:

"These levels of inequality are grotesque," said Duncan Green, head of research at Oxfam. "It is impossible to justify such vast wealth when 800 million people go to bed hungry every night. The good news is that redistribution would only have to be relatively small. Such are the vast assets of the rich that giving up a small part of their wealth could transform the lives of millions."

Madsen Pirie, director of the Adam Smith Institute, a free-market thinktank, disagreed that distribution of global wealth was unfair. He said: "The implicit assumption behind this is that there is a supply of wealth in the world and some people have too much of that supply. In fact wealth is a dynamic, it is constantly created. We should not be asking who in the past has created wealth and how can we get it off them." He said that instead the question should be how more and more people could create wealth.

Ruth Lea, director of the Centre for Policy Studies, a thinkthank set up by Margaret Thatcher, said that although she supported the goal of making poverty history she did not think increasing aid to poorer countries was the answer. "It's no use throwing lots of aid at countries that are basically dysfunctional," she said.

Sigh.

Wealth may be in some ways more important to own in the poor countries, because the governments themselves are poorer and lack the ability to provide pensions or health care or other programs which serve as insurance against calamitous life events. A poor person in a wealthy country has at least some access to these social insurance programs. Perhaps we should start by making the poor countries themselves wealthier?

The Iraq Study Group Report

It's like one of those fairy tales which starts with "If we had a penny and then found another" and which ends with "Then we'd be billionaires."* But O the unity of the group! O the civility of the group! O the bipartisanship of the group! O also the very high age and unelected nature of the group and the fact that its recommendations will not be adopted by George Bush who said this about them:

"This report gives a very tough assessment of the situation in Iraq," Bush said. "It is a report that brings some really very interesting proposals, and we will take every proposal seriously and we will act in a timely fashion.

"The commission is headed up to Congress, and I urge the members of Congress to take this report seriously. While they won't agree with every proposal -- and we probably won't agree with every proposal -- it, nevertheless, is an opportunity to come together and to work together on this important issue.

mmm. And ten more Americans died in Iraq today, in addition to many more Iraqis. I've grown cynical of all the political posturing.

And especially of the suddenly fashionable call for more civility, now that the very rude wingnuts are losing some of their power. Even Bush wants the bickering to stop:

"The country, in my judgment, is tired of pure political bickering that happens in Washington, and they understand that on this important issue of war and peace, it is best for our country to work together. And I understand how difficult that is, but this report will give us all an opportunity to find common ground, for the good of the country -- not for the good of the Republican Party or the Democrat Party, but for the good of the country."

(Bush's alleged commitment to bipartisanship would probably be easier to swallow if he referred to the opposition party by its proper name. Although the White House press office tidied up the official transcript, the fact is that even in talking about finding common ground, the president referred to the "Democrat party" -- a clipped, derogatory locution favored by those who suggest that it isn't "democratic.")

Besides, saying "Democrat" rhymes with "rat".
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*It's not that bad, actually. But no report will make much difference at this point.

The World of Funny According to Christopher Hitchens

Did you read the piece Hitchens wrote on why women are not funny? If you didn't have the time or the interest or the ability to understand funniness, here are some snippets:

Be your gender what it may, you will certainly have heard the following from a female friend who is enumerating the charms of a new (male) squeeze: "He's really quite cute, and he's kind to my friends, and he knows all kinds of stuff, and he's so funny … " (If you yourself are a guy, and you know the man in question, you will often have said to yourself, "Funny? He wouldn't know a joke if it came served on a bed of lettuce with sauce béarnaise.") However, there is something that you absolutely never hear from a male friend who is hymning his latest (female) love interest: "She's a real honey, has a life of her own … [interlude for attributes that are none of your business] … and, man, does she ever make 'em laugh."

Now, why is this? Why is it the case?, I mean. Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about.

All right—try it the other way (as the bishop said to the barmaid). Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women? Well, for one thing, they had damn well better be. The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex, and Mother Nature (as we laughingly call her) is not so kind to men. In fact, she equips many fellows with very little armament for the struggle. An average man has just one, outside chance: he had better be able to make the lady laugh. Making them laugh has been one of the crucial preoccupations of my life. If you can stimulate her to laughter—I am talking about that real, out-loud, head-back, mouth-open-to-expose-the-full-horseshoe-of-lovely-teeth, involuntary, full, and deep-throated mirth; the kind that is accompanied by a shocked surprise and a slight (no, make that a loud) peal of delight—well, then, you have at least caused her to loosen up and to change her expression. I shall not elaborate further.

Women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way. They already appeal to men, if you catch my drift. Indeed, we now have all the joy of a scientific study, which illuminates the difference. At the Stanford University School of Medicine (a place, as it happens, where I once underwent an absolutely hilarious procedure with a sigmoidoscope), the grim-faced researchers showed 10 men and 10 women a sample of 70 black-and-white cartoons and got them to rate the gags on a "funniness scale." To annex for a moment the fall-about language of the report as it was summarized in Biotech Week:

The researchers found that men and women share much of the same humor-response system; both use to a similar degree the part of the brain responsible for semantic knowledge and juxtaposition and the part involved in language processing. But they also found that some brain regions were activated more in women. These included the left prefrontal cortex, suggesting a greater emphasis on language and executive processing in women, and the nucleus accumbens … which is part of the mesolimbic reward center.

This has all the charm and address of the learned Professor Scully's attempt to define a smile, as cited by Richard Usborne in his treatise on P. G. Wodehouse: "the drawing back and slight lifting of the corners of the mouth, which partially uncover the teeth; the curving of the naso-labial furrows … " But have no fear—it gets worse:

"Women appeared to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon," said the report's author, Dr. Allan Reiss. "So when they got to the joke's punch line, they were more pleased about it." The report also found that "women were quicker at identifying material they considered unfunny."

Slower to get it, more pleased when they do, and swift to locate the unfunny—for this we need the Stanford University School of Medicine? And remember, this is women when confronted with humor. Is it any wonder that they are backward in generating it?


(snip)

Precisely because humor is a sign of intelligence (and many women believe, or were taught by their mothers, that they become threatening to men if they appear too bright), it could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny. They want them as an audience, not as rivals. And there is a huge, brimming reservoir of male unease, which it would be too easy for women to exploit. (Men can tell jokes about what happened to John Wayne Bobbitt, but they don't want women doing so.) Men have prostate glands, hysterically enough, and these have a tendency to give out, along with their hearts and, it has to be said, their dicks. This is funny only in male company. For some reason, women do not find their own physical decay and absurdity to be so riotously amusing, which is why we admire Lucille Ball and Helen Fielding, who do see the funny side of it. But this is so rare as to be like Dr. Johnson's comparison of a woman preaching to a dog walking on its hind legs: the surprise is that it is done at all.

Very funny, our Hitchens is, hammering away at this other sex he knows so very well without obviously ever bothering to spend any brain cells he still might have on that trivial and uninteresting and unfunny topic. "For some reason, women do not find their own physical decay and absurdity to be so riotously amusing". For some reason? Why doesn't Christopher offer us some sort of a quasi-theory on this assertion which he in any case rejects in the next mouthful?

The weirdest part of the whole rant is when Hitchens decides that to bash all women as unfunny, unintelligent and vain he must put in something slightly less negative, so we get this:

For women, reproduction is, if not the only thing, certainly the main thing. Apart from giving them a very different attitude to filth and embarrassment, it also imbues them with the kind of seriousness and solemnity at which men can only goggle. This womanly seriousness was well caught by Rudyard Kipling in his poem "The Female of the Species." After cleverly noticing that with the male "mirth obscene diverts his anger"—which is true of most work on that great masculine equivalent to childbirth, which is warfare—Kipling insists:

But the Woman that God gave him,
every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue,
armed and engined for the same,
And to serve that single issue,
lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be
deadlier than the male.

My cup runneth over. First I get bashed for not getting jokes, for not being able to make them, for not being intelligent, for being vain, and then I get told that this is because I'm my uterus and in any case women are deadlier than men even though prisons are chock full of men for some reason and even though wars are a guy thing.

It's pretty awe-inspiring to think that someone like Christopher Hitchens can get up one morning (or whenever he gets up) and write something like this and then feel smug about it because he has explained Everything! Except that when I was a child I read a book my father had, called something like Speeches For Every Occasion, and it had a speech to Honor Women which said all the same things Hitchens said here, and this book was published in the 1920s. Pretty awe-inspiring, and pretty arrogant and also pretty stupid.

Why should I go through Hitchens' rant step-by-step, to correct all the stuff he hasn't bothered to study at all, because the Christopher Hitchenses of this world don't have to understand such lowly creatures as us baby factories? I'm not going to, because I'm pissed off and totally unfunny. But I can do the explaining, even spelling it out in simple terms and great detail, and if this is needed I will. But perhaps a short example will do:

I used to take my dogs for an early morning run at a local dogpark and there I used to meet the Jokey Guy with his dogs. He would eagerly grab my arm to tell the newest of his jokes, and I would politely listen and laugh at the appropriate point before getting away as nicely as possible.

One morning he accosted me with this joke:
"Why do women have shorter feet than men?"
"No idea," I said. "Why?" (See how nice I was.)
"Because evolution caused them to shrink so that women got closer to the sink. Hahaha!"

Funny how those large, florid men always turn out to taste stringier than you'd expect.
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Thanks to g for the link.

BRRR!

The Snakepit Inc. ran out of heating oil yesterday, for reasons having something to do with a computer malfunction at the firm which meant that they forgot to send a truck around last month. I didn't notice the rapidly dropping temperature until I realized that I could see my outcoming breath in the air inside the house. Then things got colder pretty fast and much calling and yelling and pleading took place, and other miraculous events happened, including the arrival of a little man in a little van in lieue of the anticipated large oil truck, because a mere snake goddess cannot KNOW that she has run out of oil (those indicators are too tricky to read and trying to restart the boiler is too technical for her, of course). Then the little man kept going back and forth while carrying canisters of oil which he poured into the empty gut of the oil tank, all the time being menacingly monitored by Henrietta the Hound whose hackles never went down. That is how we got twenty gallons of oil, with the reassurances that more would be coming this morning, in an actual truck, the kind dependable people get instead of the little man and his canisters. Well, he wasn't a little man, rather a fairly large one, but it makes a better story with the little van.

The truck did arrive this morning. Praise all goddesses of ignitable materials and fossils. But then the boiler valve burst. You don't really want to know my mood for today's post or how it feels to move from the multi-layered look of clothing to the soaked-through-and-smelling-of-oil look. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, they send to fix the water valve problem. A temporary stopgap solution is in place right now, so I don't have mittens on though they are ready by the side of the keyboard.

Only women would write about their heating problems in such an excruciatingly boring detail, according to Christopher Hitchens, who just wrote an article about why women are not funny. Something to do with women having all the power in the world and also something to do with the need to have an audience for all those guy jokes about poop and penis problems. And then women don't get the joke until much later, so they mainly laugh on their way home from the standup comedy party. I'm so glad that Hitchens tells me how this world works, because of in vino veritas, you know.

Hmm. Maybe I should get drunk as a skunk while waiting for the valve man.

Model Envy - A Post On Economists

I'm allowed to bash economists a little, given that I belong to that stuffy group myself. And boy do we deserve some bashing. Via Atrios, I read the following from Angry Bear:

Robin Hanson thinks we economists are poorly treated:

Consider how differently the public treats physics and economics. Physicists can say that this week they think the universe has eleven dimensions, three of which are purple, and two of which are twisted clockwise, and reporters will quote them unskeptically, saying "Isn't that cool!" But if economists say, as they have for centuries, that a minimum wage raises unemployment, reporters treat them skeptically and feel they need to find a contrary quote to "balance" their story. I see the same pattern with my students - they'll easily believe physics claims, but are very reluctant to entertain standard economics claims.

The obvious next step (which Hanson takes) is to deplore the low level of economic education among nonexperts. If only, we sigh, sipping our Scotch through a plastic straw, if only those unwashed masses would kneel in front of our erudite mathematical models as eagerly as the do in front of those physics models. If only, we sigh, and fade back into the world where a mathematical model is fitted more because it's the simplest one to solve than because it would be the right one to use.

It sounds a lot like religion to me. Also like penis envy, in the sense that physics is a hard science, a rigorous science and one in which researchers climax early. So enviable. Economics, on the other hand, is a social science, a soft science, and one in which Milton Friedman was still quoted right before his death at a very ripe old age. - Shall I tell you what we economists really want? We want you to find our simple models far too difficult mathematically to follow, so difficult, indeed, that you must just accept them without understanding them at all. And we want you to confuse reality with our models or perhaps even prefer our models to reality. A few temples to us would be nice, too.

I sound angry here, and I am, a little, because model envy or physics envy or whatever you want to call it takes a tool and makes it into the thing itself. It's reality we are trying to explain, after all, not some sterile and often stationary world with no uncertainty or informational asymmetries and with assumptions never fulfilled in many real world markets.

Models can be very useful, but they are models. Natural sciences can test the formulas and models in laboratory circumstances. Social sciences don't have that luxury, partly, because even if laboratories were used they would be artificial environments likely to affect the outcomes, not ways of holding external influences constant. This means that social sciences muddle through and actually study something more complicated than some of the physics models do, and it also means that we must view the social science models with a greater deal of scepticism.

And what about the claim in the quote above, the one which says:

But if economists say, as they have for centuries, that a minimum wage raises unemployment, reporters treat them skeptically and feel they need to find a contrary quote to "balance" their story.

As Atrios points out there are several models of labor markets and not all of them predict that unemployment would increase. It might also be useful to note that the standard model predicting a rise in unemployment with higher minimum wages is based on a model which assumes that all market participants know everything relevant in the market, including all wage offers and the productivity of every single worker, and that it is a partial model, not following through the chains of events caused by the wage changes in neighboring markets or the local area in general and then back to the market where the firms products are sold.

But even if every single model gave the same prediction of higher unemployment levels economics must take into account something over and above that, and this something is the actual evidence on what happens when minimum wages are raised. Just like physicists' models must be proven in laboratory tests. Funny, innit?