Concern Trolls and Hillary Clinton

Concern trolls are a subcategory of trolls on blogs. Concern trolls pretend to be on the side of the blogger or the blog readers but sneakily put in opinions and arguments which are the very opposite, all the time bemoaning the horror, horror!, that such arguments can be true, because they totally destroy "our" positions and what the fuck can we do now? Well, blogs are not the only place where concern trolls can be found. Even famous liberal newspapers have them, when it comes to the topic of Hillary Clinton's possible presidential run in 2008.

Here is a beautiful example:

It was political Kabuki -- Bill Clinton, held in check -- on a night that some observers saw as the start of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. Bill is poised to mightily help or deeply hurt his wife's White House prospects. Either way, his impact will be profound as he undertakes the unprecedented role of ex-president turned male campaign spouse to the first woman ever to have a serious shot at the presidency.

Yes, Bill can deliver political superstardom. He's a razor-sharp political strategist. He knows the institution of the presidency. His fundraising chops are unrivaled. All that is well and good -- perhaps too good, according to a September CNN poll, which showed his favorable rating higher than hers, 60 percent to 50 percent.

But there's the other Bill, the one who could be a massive and messy distraction. That Bill is the ex-president known for his outsize appetites and indiscipline, the Bill who still revels in the limelight, who runs with global jet-setters. He is prone to pop up in the press for even the smallest of curiosities, like being spotted at dinner with another woman -- bad news for an ex-president already infamous for marital infidelity.

If she runs, will voters focus too much on him? Will they remember too much of the national trauma known as "that woman" (Monica Lewinsky) -- and the presidential prevaricating, hair-splitting (what is"is," anyway?) and impeachment that followed? Can voters look at Bill without thinking of sex? If they don't think of sex, they'll likely think the word: "president," which may also not be such a good thing for the spouse who wants that title.

"If she runs, will voters focus too much on him?" Just in case they won't, the author of this article helps the focus by pointing out Bill Clinton's cocksucking episode as an example of what the voters could, perhaps, just perhaps, focus on. And for the bestest, most astonishing concern-trollery, just savor this sentence slowly:

Can voters look at Bill without thinking of sex? If they don't think of sex, they'll likely think the word: "president," which may also not be such a good thing for the spouse who wants that title.

Do you remember reading an article about George and Laura Bush in these terms? Something about what people might think about events in Laura's past? I don't remember reading one, either, and if such articles are going to be written of one candidate then they should be written of all candidates.

How much of this concern-trolling is because Hillary has the wrong genitals? I'm not sure, but I'm sure of one thing: If the voters didn't have Bill Clinton's shenanigans and stature in mind before reading this article they do now.

Time Magazine's Person of the Year

It's a mirror! Honestly. Buy the magazine and what you find is a mirror on the cover. This is a smart way of saying that YOU are the Time Magazine's Person of the Year. Though not "you-you" but some mythological type of "you":

It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes," said Grossman, Time's technology writer and book critic.

"The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web," he said. "It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter."

So why didn't they name the Web the person of the year? I guess it's because the Web is not a person. But then neither are millions and millions of us "a person". In any case, the concept of the Person of the Year has changed from being the Person of the Year with Testicles to being a Good Person of the Year Who Had an Effect. Osama bin Laden never made it, even though he clearly was the person with the most effect on the world in 2001. The effect was horrible, true, but the initial definition for winning this competition didn't require goodness.

There is a point to the selection, though, if only we called the competition the Time Magazine's Trend/Fad/Fashion of the Year. But we don't call it that.

I get the reason for the selection, of course, and people on the internet can indeed be marvelous to each other, all sorts of political power is being grabbed and the powers-that-be are desperately trying to grab it back. But there are also trolls on the net. Just saying.

Franz Kafka's Trial Re-Enacted?

Read The Trial if you haven't already. It begins with a simple announcement:

Someone must have slandered Joseph K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.

Joseph K. learns that he is accused of a crime so secret and mysterious that he himself is not allowed to learn its name. Thus begins his futile and panic-filled struggle against the blind and impossible-to-understand processes of criminal justice; a struggle like that of a fly desperately trying to free itself from the sticky web of an unfeeling spider, causing nothing but further enmeshment. Kafkaesque. This is where that word was born.

Now compare Joseph K.'s experiences with those of Donald Vance. Sadly, Vance is not a fictional character:

One night in mid-April, the steel door clanked shut on detainee No. 200343 at Camp Cropper, the United States military's maximum-security detention site in Baghdad.

American guards arrived at the man's cell periodically over the next several days, shackled his hands and feet, blindfolded him and took him to a padded room for interrogation, the detainee said. After an hour or two, he was returned to his cell, fatigued but unable to sleep.

The fluorescent lights in his cell were never turned off, he said. At most hours, heavy metal or country music blared in the corridor. He said he was rousted at random times without explanation and made to stand in his cell. Even lying down, he said, he was kept from covering his face to block out the light, noise and cold. And when he was released after 97 days he was exhausted, depressed and scared.

Detainee 200343 was among thousands of people who have been held and released by the American military in Iraq, and his account of his ordeal has provided one of the few detailed views of the Pentagon's detention operations since the abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib. Yet in many respects his case is unusual.

The detainee was Donald Vance, a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago who went to Iraq as a security contractor. He wound up as a whistle-blower, passing information to the F.B.I. about suspicious activities at the Iraqi security firm where he worked, including what he said was possible illegal weapons trading.

But when American soldiers raided the company at his urging, Mr. Vance and another American who worked there were detained as suspects by the military, which was unaware that Mr. Vance was an informer, according to officials and military documents.

At Camp Cropper, he took notes on his imprisonment and smuggled them out in a Bible.

"Sick, very. Vomited," he wrote July 3. The next day: "Told no more phone calls til leave."

Nathan Ertel, the American held with Mr. Vance, brought away military records that shed further light on the detention camp and its secretive tribunals. Those records include a legal memorandum explicitly denying detainees the right to a lawyer at detention hearings to determine whether they should be released or held indefinitely, perhaps for prosecution.

Can this be true? I'd prefer it to be from a book, even from the Trial. At one point in the book Joseph K. gives this speech:

"There can be no doubt—"said K., quite softly, for he was elated by the breathless attention of the meeting; in that stillness a subdued hum was audible which was more exciting than the wildest applause—"there can be no doubt that behind all the actions of this court of justice, that is to say in my case, behind my arrest and today's interrogation, there is a great organization at work. An organization which not only employs corrupt warders, oafish Inspectors, and Examining Magistrates of whom the best that can be said is that they recognize their own limitations, but also has at its disposal a judicial hierarchy of high, indeed of the highest rank, with an indispensable and numerous retinue of servants, clerks, police, and other assistants, perhaps even hangmen, I do not shrink from that word. And the significance of this great organization, gentlemen? It consists in this, that innocent persons are accused of guilt, and senseless proceedings are put in motion against them..."

Donald Vance also had a hearing:

"Boards," he wrote April 24, the day he and Mr. Ertel went before Camp Cropper's Detainee Status Board.

Their legal rights, laid out in a letter from Lt. Col. Bradley J. Huestis of the Army, the president of the status board, allowed them to attend the hearing and testify. However, under Rule 3, the letter said, "You do not have the right to legal counsel, but you may have a personal representative assist you at the hearing if the personal representative is reasonably available."

Mr. Vance and Mr. Ertel were permitted at their hearings only because they were Americans, Lieutenant Fracasso said. The cases of all other detainees are reviewed without the detainees present, she said. In both types of cases, defense lawyers are not allowed to attend because the hearings are not criminal proceedings, she said.

Lieutenant Fracasso said that currently there were three Americans in military custody in Iraq. The military does not identify detainees.

Mr. Vance and Mr. Ertel had separate hearings. They said their requests to be each other's personal representative had been denied.

At the hearings, a woman and two men wearing Army uniforms but no name tags or rank designations sat a table with two stacks of documents. One was about an inch thick, and the men were allowed to see some papers from that stack. The other pile was much thicker, but they were told that this pile was evidence only the board could see.

The men pleaded with the board. "I'm telling them there has been a major mix-up," Mr. Ertel said. "Please, I'm out of my mind. I haven't slept. I'm not eating. I'm terrified."

Mr. Vance said he implored the board to delve into his laptop computer and cellphone for his communications with the F.B.I. agent in Chicago.

Each of the hearings lasted about two hours, and the men said they never saw the board again.

Can this be true? How many times did Joseph K. turn the same question over in his head?

That Favorite Christmas Music Thread

Posted by olvlzl.

My favorite recorded Christmas music is Odetta’s Christmas Spirituals*. Odetta is incomparable, no news there, and this album is deep and rich and simple all at once. Virgin Mary had a Son, the first song sets the tone. This isn’t going to be a porcelain manger scene with a high fire finish, it’s going to be about life. A call, “Leave your sheep and leave your rams. Rise up Shepherd and follow,” and a charge to action, “Go Where I Send Thee,”.

Made at the height of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s the themes of freedom and responsibility are highlighted among the familiar details of the story. Odetta and Bill Lee created an album for the ages.

I’ve mentioned the Christmas music of Marc Antoine Charpentier, a French baroque composer. I don’t think my favorite, ravishingly beautiful, recording of his Midnight Mass by Les Arts Flourissants is available just now but a new recording of it is available on Naxos. I haven’t heard it so am unable to give details. Chapentier’s Pastorale** and his other Christmas music is all a refreshing change from the ususal Anglo-Germanic fare.

Another old album, The Holly Bears The Crown by The Young Tradition is one that is too hard to find but which is good if you can. Jean Ritchie’s Carols for All Seasons*** combines her traditional Appalachian soprano with a harpsichord and recorder played in best 1950s style. The several songs she sings with her dulcimer and without accompaniment are the best ones on the album.

A Music Box Christmas****, 19th century Christmas music played on period music boxes is another one which doesn’t seem to get old despite listening to it through LP, cassette and now CD.

* Christmas Spirituals Vanguard 79079-2
** M. A. Chapentier Pastorale Harmonia Mundi HMC 901082. Also try Marc Antoine Charpentier Antienne “O” de ‘Avent HMA 1905124, included is a Christmas cantata and several Noels. Both recordings are with Les Arts Flourissants conducted by William Christie
*** Carols for All Seasons Tradition TCD 1058
**** A Music Box Christmas Columbia CK 8498

Let’s Try The Christmas Narrative The Way It Must Have Been.

And watch the "christian" right go nuclear.

Posted by olvlzl.

A couple of months ago I wrote a piece about Andres Serrano’s infamous Piss Christ. To come clean, it was a defense of it. The piece went into quite a lot of detail about the meaning and use of religious imagery and how the casual and dishonest use of the cross, an instrument of one of the more brutal forms of widely used state terror ever devised, ignored the fact that people were killed with it. Reading it over, I had to conclude that the piece was dishonest in itself and so didn't post it. Having seen Serrano's other work I don’t really believe that was what he intended. Given that* I have to believe he made the photo to create a sensational splash, which it did.

But the issue of religious imagery is particularly important this time of year, what with FOX’s phony “war on Christmas” promotion and the annual fight over government sponsored religious displays. The issue is what the two Nativity stories found in the gospels of Matthew and Luke really say and if they have any effect on the daily life of believers.

I won’t deal with the virgin birth part of it, the part that usually gets the most attention because, well, as a New Englander that kind of thing always struck me as being none of my business. What Mary was doing was her own affair and, given the rest of the gospels, not particularly important. Besides, there isn’t any way to know what really happened.

In the stories, Jesus was born to parents of almost the lowest class. They were so low that both of the Evanglilists had to explain that they came of good families that somehow ended up in hear destitution. Mary apparently was the object of cheap gossip. Joseph was a carpenter or stone worker, and I don’t mean a union carpenter with benefits. She would have stood a good chance of being killed for dishonoring her family if Joseph had wanted to be a creep about it, which we are told he wasn’t. Apparently he was a nice guy who didn’t hold a grudge. Maybe the entire history of Christianity hinges on his not having been a macho jerk.

Somehow the couple found themselves in a distant town when the baby was born, so they were, in effect, homeless. They didn’t have the money to get a room anywhere so the baby was born in a barn of some kind.

Consider what the people who originally read the narratives knew about living with large animals in a crowded town. It means, most obviously, that the baby was born among manure and urine and a nightmare of flies and gnats. The original members of the Jesus movement would have known this. Even one cow or donkey can produce quite a bit of both in one day, anyone who has cleaned a barn could appreciate what that was like. Even a well kept barn is unpleasantly redolent. . And the likelihood was that in a town the barn would have held at least several large animals and few barns are well kept, even now. There were no tractor driven sidebars or hay bailers so bedding and fodder would have been at a premium. They would have been hard put to find clean hay to put in the manger. Have I mentionted that the best kept barn is thick with flies? Having cleaned barns, those flies are what really gets to me.

What was done to the plastic model in Piss Christ is nothing compared to this part of the story, nothing. Giving birth to a baby in a barn. And there isn’t any mention of an attendant. They were on their own. A carpenter who might well have never even seen an animal being born and a woman who would have been in her early to mid-teens. They must have been scared as hell.

The shepherds who Luke tells us were the first devotees to Jesus would not have been much higher on the social scale or likely much cleaner and they didn’t arrive in time to give any advice about the birth. All concerned would have been seen as the lowest of the low.

So, we have the only begotten son of God born in these conditions. And it gets worse. In the first mention of upper class people, pagans, the Magi, pagan astrologers, not the kings of orient were, came to worship Jesus and inadvertently set off a pogrom. Herod, himself, put a contract out on the baby and the family had to flee, becoming aliens in a foreign country**. You can imagine that Joseph would have had a hard time finding work, a casual laborer for at least a while. He might have stood on a street waiting to be hired as day labor. Who knows what other hardships they endured as aliens?

These people were not the figures in the creches, they were more likely to look like the really hard cases found on the street today. The original members of the Jesus movement in the middle east would have known this. How would a realistic depiction play with the FOX and ETWN cultists? It’s a question but you know as well as I do, a realistic view of the story would set off another war on Christmas, this time the suppression would be all from that side. The same people don't seem to have gained any respect for the dregs of society, the class that produced the baby they pretend to worship.


* The flagrantly sensational and gruesome photos of brutalized corpses and the rather gross pictures featuring mixed body fluids, for example.

** John Harbison's "The Flight Into Egypt" is one of the rare pieces of music dealing with this part of the story. As I remember he wrote it during the time when the Reagan administration was pursuing illegal immegrants from the homicidal, fascist regimes he was supporting in Central America. A fine recording of it is on New World Records 80395-2.

It’d Be A Blue Christmas Without Dreadful Christmas Music.

or Let’s stipulate The Little Drummer Boy and go on from there.

Posted by olvlzl.

Unfortunately, my favorite horrid Christmas album,
Steve and Edie’s Christmas in Las Vegas,

is a myth, a threat I thought up to try to clear out a party that was going on too long. Though it would be fun to have in your collection, if it existed.

To get us all in the mood of the season, what’s your least favorite Christmas music? Song, artist, album, genre? There is so much truly awful Christmas music of comic potential that could be mentioned. The only risk is offending someone who might love your choice, but it’s all in fun.

Me? I could mention anything by Elvis or Frankie for the season, though Lou Monte’s “The Little Italian Christmas Donkey” is worth an honorable mention.

Wet blankets might mention their favorites. Though a new thread for that might be a better idea.

UPDATE: I just remembered, Silver Bells in the unique stylings of Regis and Kathie.

Encouraging Brain Damage In Children Is Officially Wholesome. Moral, Even.

Posted by olvlzl, The Heretic.

I.
At a football game last weekend, Mike Vrabel, apparently one of the best liked of the New England Patriots, “got his bells rung”. That incident was newsworthy enough to break through my anti-ballistic defense shield which usually keeps me from knowing anything about sports. Never having heard of Mike Vrabel before seeing him on TV the other day, he seems nice. You certainly wouldn’t want him to damage his brain just playing a game*. And that’s really how this piece started out, with the thought, “They’re destroying their brains. It’s nuts”.


Mike Vrabel is an adult and so has a right to make that decision for himself, I suppose. You might wonder why other adults who choose to damage only their own brains through recreational drug use and not those of other people don’t have that same right.

Underage children don’t have the maturity to be allowed to make decisions like that. You have to wonder how the adults with the authority to prevent behavior this dangerous could allow it to continue. They are risking permanent damage to the one and only brain these children are ever going to have. Encouraging them to risk it is insane and immoral. If it was done in any number of other, very similar activities it would be called criminal neglect, child endangerment or some other crime. But try telling people that.

Rah, rah, glory, the habitual response to football in the past has given way to something much worse and more dangerously dishonest, conventionalized sentimentality. Football, a vicious and violent game, is now presented in the most cloying of celluloid images, soft iris, sappy music, golden lighting, valedictory language**. I once heard a nationally known sports commentator on the radio say that the most archetypical American paternal role model is the highschool football coach. Guess that makes most of us, all women to start with, fatherless. I don’t know about your father but mine didn’t make a living by getting a pack of boys to bash their own and other peoples’ brains out at public expense. Thanks Frank, but I’ll take my own father as a role model, not the one provided by the football industry.

II.

About ten years ago a bunch of our local, small town, police departments hosted an anti-drug event. Apparently they got a grant from the federal government to present positive, safe alternatives to taking drugs. While generally skeptical about the value of one-time events to change potentially harmful teenage behavior, what really got my attention is that things like car racing, sky diving and motocross were featured. While they might be thrilling none of them is remotely risk free. I would be very surprised if there aren’t more children permanently damaged or killed in these activities than, for example, by smoking pot while not driving. Assuming that the pot that is being smoked isn’t adulterated by the illegal trade in it.***

Football is just another officially wholesome activity that is often presented as being more positive than smoking pot or other demimondaine pass times. But almost every year there are school children who die and are permanently damaged by playing football entirely by the rules. The level of brain damage, “getting your bells rung” is almost certainly much higher than is caused by using marijuana. They’ve looked at every straw in that haystack and still can’t find conclusive evidence that moderate marijuana use is all that dangerous.

As for the wholesomeness of football, football players are not famous for their chastity, their sobriety, their kindness. Not that it’s just football. Almost any short, skinny, unpopular person who went to a highschool where there is a sports team can tell you about that. And there are children damaged by being physically and psychologically abused off the field in hazing and other forms of organized sadism. I’m afraid that those activities and the astonishing amount of support the sadistic bullies get in the community say a lot about one of the most unattractive features of American society. In really bad cases it’s the victims who suffer the barbs of community disapproval when a game or the season gets cancelled not their attackers.

While I’m sure there are football players who are models of conventional propriety and some who are actually rather nice guys, there are plenty who aren’t. I don’t think sports had anything to do with the character development of the ones who are nice guys. Maybe I’m wrong and the jocks who are jerks would have been jerks anyway, though the vainglory and pack behavior that sports encourages doesn’t produce positive personality traits in other endeavors, does it?

And football players aren’t famous for long life either. Through combination of obesity, brain damage, other physical damage and, in the greatest of all ironies, steroid and other drug abuse, the average life span of professional football players is more than two decades less than the national average**. The generally known and openly discussed fact of steroid use among these ever more enormous football players is probably one of the more interesting areas of legal hypocrisy. It also might play a part in the aggression that some of them wreak on spouses, girlfriends and other people. Baseball players seem to be returning to normal sizes after those congressional hearings a couple of years back but football players don’t seem to be returning to normal. Maybe if they weren’t so enormous they wouldn’t do as much damage when they smash into each other.

Just how much can the coaches, the trainers, the fans really care about the players when all of this evidence is right out there for anyone to see? Unless that evidence is willfully ignored the answer is that they are just objects to the world of football. They have even learned to see themselves that way. Considering how the game is played, why would anyone expect anything else?

III.

And with football there is also the spectacle of cheerleaders. Does the fact that they still keep on a few stitches of clothing change the fact that they are bumping and grinding in exactly the same style as strippers? Gyrating on the sidelines in order to further increase the glory of the boys on the field and the sexual arousal of their audience? What kind of a message is that to girls and young women? What attitude does that promote in boys and young men? And THEY are also getting killed and injured in the process of doing their own “sport”*****. That is a whole topic in itself, one which I’m researching.

As you can see I don’t much like football, the favorite game of American patriarchy. This might be the most heretical post I've ever done.

* One of the more common results of permanent brain damage is personality change, not for the better. Risking permanent brain damage for the sake of playing a game is immoral, I can’t in good conscience not point out that being a supporter of an activity that carries this as a guaranteed result is immoral too.

** There is a really disgusting example to be seen on a TV commercial running right now, for those of us who just will not sit through another one of those gawdawful football movies ever again.

***Marijuana use should, of course, be legalized for adults. Though I don’t like it myself - really messed up my counting during time signature changes when I tried it- it is not sufficiently dangerous to carry criminal penalties. That is if it is being regulated for purity. The sale of genuinely dangerous drugs should be banned though making just the possession and use of them a felony doesn’t seem to solve any problems. It’s a complicated topic, too complicated to be left in the hands of the anti-drug industry.

**** U.S. life expectancy is 77.6 years, the average for NFL players is 55, 52 for linemen.

***** Methods: We reviewed 29 of 39 incidents of cheerleading injuries reported to the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research from 1982 to 2002.

Results: Twenty-seven of the injured cheerleaders were women. There were 1.95 direct catastrophic injuries per year or 0.6 injuries per 100,000 participants. The rate of injuries among college cheerleaders was five times that of high school participants. The most common stunts performed at the time of injury were a pyramid (9) or a basket toss (8). Catastrophic injuries included 17 severe head injuries, resulting in 13 skull fractures and 2 deaths; 8 cervical fractures or major ligament injuries; 3 spinal cord contusions; and 1 concomitant head injury and cervical fracture.

Are Weathermen Screened for Their Stupidity?

Posted by olvlzl.

What did I tell you? I knew Echidne’s post about dislikes would be a roaring success, 77 comments by the counter.

In a shameless attempt to fan the flames of discontent and mostly because I’m already smoldering over it, what the hell is wrong with TV and radio weathermen?

“It’s another GREAT!! day of fabulous record breaking high temperatures!”. And this on public radio.

The idiocy of this and similar lines are, at worst, part of the corporate-oilgarches brainwashing of the American pubic to not do anything to limit greenhouse gasses or they are more evidence that being addled is a requirement to work in the American “news” media. Is it a requirement for weathermen that they have the intelligence of James Inhofe or just the dishonesty of his star witnesses?

Sorry about the Cheney-Poe Baby,

How Do You Feel About The Other Children?

Posted by olvlzl.
The Boston Globe printed an editorial on Wednesday calling for the privacy of Mary Cheney and Heather Poe as they become the parents of a baby. The editorial praises Dick Cheney for not being a Republican morality policeman on the issue of gay rights while attributing this lone spec of light to his having to deal with his daughter’s sexuality.

Sorry, Boston Globe but wrong, wrong, wrong on all counts. Mary Cheney campaigned to put the Republican party in power, the party that has been using hatred of lesbians and gay men as one of the pillars of its frighteningly effective electoral strategy. The Republican Party, with the Log Cabin dupes, is the home of hatred, the epicenter of the attack on all of us who go into the category.

Mary Cheney and Heather Poe gave up any right to privacy on this issue for themselves when they supported putting people in power who were dedicated to taking the same rights away from the rest of us.

It is one of the favorite gambits of wealthy, powerful conservatives to carve out these zones of personal privilege for themselves, even islands of alleged enlightenment as they support those who turn out the lights and break down the doors for those without power and protection. That tactic of “moderate” Republicanism is over. With the defeat of Lincoln Chaffee it is so over. If they don’t like where it leaves them, well isn’t that just too bad. The rest of us are even more inconvenienced by the hate campaign that the stinking Republican Party has waged against us. You don’t like it, Lincoln, Mary, Heather, choose sides but don’t expect us to make any concessions to your other loyalties. If your families and party weren’t using the politics of hate to begin with we wouldn’t even be talking about them.

As for Dick and Lynne Cheney, two bigger hypocrites are seldom to be seen in one marriage. Going so far as publishing, one expects perhaps even profiting from, very badly written lesbian sex scenes while campaigning for the party of gay baiting, campaigning for “traditional morality” against just such sex scenes and while insisting that out of all possible targets of their parties and their own hatred that their child have a place of safety? They are the poster couple of Republican-fascist degeneracy, “The Damned - America 2000 ".

The well positioned in the media, in academia, in the law talk about a lot of different, valued rights. Freedom, privacy, free speech, etc. But they don’t seem to be very much interested in that one value that gives everyone an ironclad incentive to not violate the most cherished rights of other people. EQUALITY, the absolute and firm requirement in the law and in society that rights and liberties that one person or one group is allowed to exercise are exactly the same for every single other person. Equal rights, equal exercise of rights goes to everyone or no one gets to exercise them. Mary and Heather don’t deserve privacy when they, their parents, their party actively violate the privacy of numerous other people and not just gay people and lesbians. They don’t get to promote bigotry while enjoying a sort of social Ziebart to protect themselves.

If you ask what about their child when it is born, what about it's rights and feelings? Well lots of other lesbians and gay men have children. What about them?

Friday Night Movies

Don With The Wind is a good one to watch. It also shows when profanities are useful.

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.