Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters. Part 1.

NOTE: The next parts of this series are here, here and here.


Phila linked to an article in Psychology Today about 10 politically incorrect truths about people. In the context of psychology, the term "politically incorrect" means either that the authors are going to talk about evolutionary psychology theories where women don't compete at all but men do, like ferocious kangaroos, or about evolutionary psychology theories which tell us how racial minorities have lower intelligence levels. Or both.

I call the kind of evolutionary psychology this article represents Evolutionary Psychology, capitalized, because it's a sort of religion-cum-ideology and not a real study. There was a time when I cruised the websites of Evo-Psychos quite regularly and found most of them to be woman-haters. You can look up the work of Stephen Sailer, for instance and just follow the links he scatters to go to where I went. Take a shower afterwards.

I always have a lot to say about the Evolutionary Psychology pieces, and that is the reason why this post is given the haughty name of "Part 1". This post is going to be just about the fringes of the article; about one of the authors and what I found about his work by Googling. The next post will look at the ten politically incorrect truths in a little more detail.

Let us go then, you and I, and look at the beginning of the article more carefully. It states:

Human behavior is a product both of our innate human nature and of our individual experience and environment. In this article, however, we emphasize biological influences on human behavior, because most social scientists explain human behavior as if evolution stops at the neck and as if our behavior is a product almost entirely of environment and socialization. In contrast, evolutionary psychologists see human nature as a collection of psychological adaptations that often operate beneath conscious thinking to solve problems of survival and reproduction by predisposing us to think or feel in certain ways. Our preference for sweets and fats is an evolved psychological mechanism. We do not consciously choose to like sweets and fats; they just taste good to us.

The implications of some of the ideas in this article may seem immoral, contrary to our ideals, or offensive. We state them because they are true, supported by documented scientific evidence. Like it or not, human nature is simply not politically correct.

I bolded the two sentences I want to say a little more about.

Evolutionary Psychologists (note the capitals) usually make this assumption: That human nature is a collection of psychological adaptations, adaptations, which happened a long time ago, and adaptations which still affect our behavior even if they might now be useless.
What these guys usually fail to point out is that they are also assuming that adaptations stopped at some point in the early dawn of prehistory. They are not explaining why this would be the case and they usually ignore the evidence that adaptations in other fields have been shown to sometimes be quite rapid. Neither do they allow for much flexibility in the human psyche. What they want to have is a situation where we all are, deep inside, nomadic early humans walking the African savannas in small family groups.

But they don't want us to think too much about that actual setup, because that might make us question some of those theories they give us. For instance, many of their theories really require that humans or their ancestors would have had a large amount of access to unknown individuals of the opposite sex (so that large, non-sagging breasts, say, would be used as a proxy for youth in women) and an opportunity to amass material wealth. Neither of these seems to be true for the current or recent nomadic tribes in Africa.

That was about the first bolded sentence. The shorthand of the authors demands respect for a very partial theory which is totally untestable today, given that we can't send observers back into prehistory and that we don't have the kind of genetic information that would be needed to test the theories today.

What about the second bolded sentence? Whenever I see the kind of argument presented as here, I know that something smells off. Real scientific articles don't say that they are going to "tell the truth." That's just not the way science is written. Then the codeword "politically incorrect." Before reading any further I knew what the piece was going to contain. I also knew that it would be linked to on Free Republic, Pajama Medias and other wingnut sites. The wingnuts secretly agree with the authors of this piece so they will link to the article. That's ok. What is not ok is to pretend that "science" has found these arguments to be true. The second part of this post will explain why that is not true.

Enough about the preamble to the article. What about the authors? They are listed as Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa, the authors of the book with the same name as this post, to be published in September of 2007. Mr. Miller appears to have died, which means that Mr. Kanazawa is likely the actual author of this article. I decided to focus on him at first, to see what else he may have written and what is being said about him.

It turns out that he is a controversial guy:

The London School of Economics is embroiled in a row over academic freedom after one of its lecturers published a paper alleging that African states were poor and suffered chronic ill-health because their populations were less intelligent than people in richer countries.

Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist, is now accused of reviving the politics of eugenics by publishing the research which concludes that low IQ levels, rather than poverty and disease, are the reason why
life expectancy is low and infant mortality high. His paper, published in the British Journal of Health Psychology, compares IQ scores with indicators of ill health in 126 countries and claims that nations at the top of the ill health league also have the lowest intelligence ratings.

It also turns out that Kanazawa is the author of many of the findings he discusses in the Psychology Today article. This means that much of what he says is not backed by other people's research but his own. That matters. It is very important to see what kind of a statistician he is. More about that in the next post on this topic.

What is quite fascinating, by the way, is reading the various wingnutty blogs which have posted on this article, and the comments threads. The following is not an atypical comment:

The real proof of the analysis-- which contradicts feminism-- is that the more status and power a woman has-- the fewer men she sees as potential mates-- because they must be at least as high status as her and preferably higher status.

Women are most powerful from 16-30 or so (" You might get lucky tonite"). As they age , they lose power over men ( women over 40 ,"they are so grateful") For men-- it is the reverse-- young men have little status and little power over women, but as they age,, they get more power typically, as they accumulate resources. Its absurd for a 25 year old man to date a 45 year old woman. But the reverse is the norm, if he has the big bucks.

Sigh. Actually, most married couples are approximately the same age. This commenter makes it sound as if 45 to 25 is the usual case. And all those surveys about partner preferences take place in a world where women, on average, have less money than men do. But that is not taken into account.

I included that comment because it tells a lot of the appeal of the church of Evolutionary Psychology and the fact that many of its congregants are fervently anti-feminist.

This whole thing reminds me of that old saying about the lie being half-way around the world before truth gets its shoes on. It's very easy to write stuff like that and keep publishing it. To refute it takes time and by the time the criticisms are ready the story has moved to some other field.

Lead Exposure And Crime

An interesting article in the Washington Post discusses some new research on the correlation between childhood exposure to lead and increased propensity to crime in adulthood. Further on in the article one expert notes that lead exposure has been found to be associated with worse impulse control in general, and that could explain the correlation.

On the other hand, lead exposure also correlates with socioeconomic class, because poorer areas are more likely to have buildings with old, peeling lead paint, for example. The way I read the article, though, indicates that the researchers controlled for income and perhaps also for education. If this is true, the findings can be useful.

But be careful about how much to attribute to lead. The crucial paragraphs are these:

The theory offered by the economist, Rick Nevin, is that lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical theory for fluctuations in the crime rate, and it is based on studies linking children's exposure to lead with violent behavior later in their lives.

What makes Nevin's work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries.

"It is stunning how strong the association is," Nevin said in an interview. "Sixty-five to ninety percent or more of the substantial variation in violent crime in all these countries was explained by lead."

Note the word "variation". It is not the case that lead exposure would explain 65-90% of all crime, only in variations of that crime rate across locales and perhaps time periods. To give a rough example (with no actual basis in any real numbers), suppose that violent crime has increased by 10% over some time period in one place. Then what Nevin argues is that between 6.5 and 9 of those percentage points are attributable to greater lead exposure.

That is still quite a strong finding, if true.

On Trophy Wives and Haircuts

It's almost as if the mainstream media wants everybody to read my article on the Man-Crush Primary. Maureen Dowd's most recent piece in the New York Times is all fluff about John Edwards with this ending:

Recalling his first date with Elizabeth, in law school, he says: "I was such a classy guy, I took her to the Holiday Inn to dance. It was loud. Elizabeth made fun of me for weeks for taking her there. Elizabeth thinks the two rules you always use in politics are: Don't dance. And don't wear hats."

Especially not if you've got such a fabulous haircut to show off.

That haircut has been the big news, again.

But if you read the conservative press and blogs another topic gets even more mention than Edward's haircut, though only by a slight margin. It is the question whether the mainstream media wants a Democratic president because an article in the New York Times wondered if America is ready for a president with a trophy wife. This refers to Fred Thompson and his much younger wife. The National Ledger writes:

Of course. The media is in a bit of a tight spot here. If it is okay to attack a candidate's wife (or non-candidate) for her looks do we now get to blast away at Hillary's looks? Or trash Obama's wife?

Errr. Michelle Obama has certainly been trashed in the press already, and Hillary Clinton's looks have been reviewed many, many times.

The game that is being played here is the pretense that only the other side does whatever you are aghast about. I did quite a lot of research for my Man-Crush Primary article to make sure that I wasn't playing that game, and if the trophy wife piece had appeared earlier I would have included it. Right now, though, the game looks heavily weighted to benefit the Republicans. But it doesn't look that way to Hugh Hewitt:

It is an astonishing attack, really, one that tells us --again-- that no line of attack on the GOP big three will be left unexplored by the MSM desperate to get a Democrat back into the White House.

Says he, in regard to the trophy wife piece. I wonder if he read my piece about how much praise the GOP big three have been getting from the very same press he accuses? How would he explain that praise? Or the attention recently given to, say, Al Gore's family members? Is it that even one negative mention of Republicans in the press is enough to prove his point?

Given all that, I don't like the trophy wife piece. Family members of politicians are individuals on their own right and should not be treated as if they are owned by the politician they are related to.

Garden Story

Flower Power?

I love to ponder over the concept of power. It is one of those elusive terms which are loaded with so many intended and unintended meanings that any attempt to trap it proves futile. We use power all the time, in our dwellings, our cars and in our lives. Without power in our bodies we die, without power in the society we also soon die. Yet power is often viewed as evil, perhaps because it may be unfairly distributed and/or misused, and there are people who fear power not only in others but even in themselves and find an otherworldly glory in being powerless.

But all that power really does is to enable. It is like the water flowing from a garden hose. We can use it to save parched plantings or to drown the neighbor's marigolds. We can waste it by leaving the faucet dripping or by flooding the driveway and the street. Or we can decide not to use it at all.

The water in the garden hose is not good or evil, and neither is power. It is what we choose to do with them that determines the goodness or evilness of the act. The responsibility for this decision is ours, and can sometimes feel like a heavy burden. Perhaps this is the appeal of powerlessness: one can't be held responsible for the consequences of having been unable to act.

But it is a false appeal. Trying to give up power doesn't protect us from its consequences. It just makes us helpless victims in the larger power plays. It is also an insult to all those (whether people, animals or plants) who truly are disempowered, and whom we could have helped with the careful use or sharing of our power.

Gardens are wonderful places for learning to use power in a cooperative, creative way. Every gardener is powerful, a necessary part of the creative process. There is no garden without a gardener. But every gardener is also relatively powerless compared to the other creative partner: nature. There is no garden without nature either, but neither is there anything else, including gardeners.

I like to believe that gardeners graduate as Masters of Limited Power Use, ready to reach for world dominion. But even if this proves untrue, thinking about water hoses and their uses is not a bad way to address the concept of power.

Friday Prince Blogging

If you kiss a frog it will turn into a prince. I'm not sure what one would do with a prince. Do they do windows?

Picture by FeralLiberal

Louann Brizendine's Book Revisited. Or: Do Women Talk More Than Men?

Brizendine is a pop psychologist. Her 2006 book, called The Female Brain, naturally caught the attention of the Washington Post:

According to pop psychiatrist Louann Brizendine, author of the best-selling new book "The Female Brain," men and women come equipped with completely different operating systems -- not only below the belt but between the ears.

Like bath towels, there are his-and-her brains.

Or so Brizendine interprets the latest skull scanning: Woman is weather, "constantly changing and hard to predict." And man? Man is mountain. But maybe you knew that.

...

Her bottom line? "There is no unisex brain," says Brizendine, and "it follows these two brain models can produce quite different behaviors." Such as: Average Woman sure talks a lot. Average Man does not.

...

In the pages of "The Female Brain," briskly selling as an owner's manual for women and a kind of cheat sheet for men, Brizendine promises to reveal the neurological explanations why:

· Men think about sex every 52 seconds, while a woman does only once a day.

· Women speak faster on average -- 250 words per minute vs. 125 for a typical male.

· A woman uses 20,000 words per day, while a man uses only 7,000.

I have bolded the sentences you should read. All that stuff about women talking a lot more and using many more words. I remember reading earlier that researchers were rather puzzled with these findings, given that nobody could unearth the study that presumably produced them.

Well, now someone has done such a study, and it shows no statistically significant difference between the number of words men and women use on average:

Another stereotype _ chatty gals and taciturn guys _ bites the dust. Turns out, when you actually count the words, there isn't much difference between the sexes when it comes to talking.

A team led by Matthias R. Mehl, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, came up with the finding, which is published in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

The researchers placed microphones on 396 college students for periods ranging from two to 10 days, sampled their conversations and calculated how many words they used in the course of a day.

The score: Women, 16,215. Men, 15,669.

The difference: 546 words: 'Not statistically significant,' say the researchers.

'What's a 500-word difference, compared with the 45,000-word difference between the most and the least talkative persons' in the study, said Mehl.

Co-author James W. Pennebaker, chairman of the psychology department at the University of Texas, said the researchers collected the recordings as part of a larger project to understand how people are affected when they talk about emotional experiences.

They were surprised when a magazine article asserted that women use an average of 20,000 words per day compared with 7,000 for men. If there had been that big a difference, he thought, they should have noticed it.

They found that the 20,000-7,000 figures have been used in popular books and magazines for years. But they couldn't find any research supporting them.

The study also looked at vocabulary differences by gender. Out of the six samples of data in the study three showed men using a larger vocabulary, three showed women using a larger vocabulary.

What are the chances that Brizandine corrects those errors in the next edition of her book, eh? And what are the chances that the researchers of this most recent study will be invited to discuss their findings in all sorts of television programs?

Peacherine Rag

In bottles.

The Mosque Siege in Islamabad

General Musharraf is in trouble in Pakistan, trying to walk the tightrope between American demands and the strong Islamic extremist segment of his population. The most recent troubles are taking place in Islamabad, where a mosque and its attached madrassa are surrounded by Pakistani forces. The mosque was the center for a Taliban-type version of Islam and the students have for some time applied a vigilante justice to the general population of the city:

For the past six months the militants have challenged the Government of President Musharraf by attempting to establish a Taleban-style Sharia system in the capital. Many of the students come from tribal areas of the North West Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan.

The stand-off intensified when the clerics established Islamic courts and their supporters raided houses, dragging out women who they alleged were involved in prostitution.

The situation came to a head last month when they raided a massage parlour and abducted about half a dozen Chinese women.

Moderate Pakistanis had expressed frustration over General Musharraf's reluctance to take action against the militants.

Government forces claimed that one reason for their inaction was the fear of causing the deaths of dozens of innocent bystanders. More than 3,000 female students, some as young as 5, lived in the seminary and were used as human shields against any threat of the use of force. Leaders of the mosque also threatened to launch suicide attacks.

The siege has indeed already resulted in deaths, and more may die before it is over.

Although most of the students have surrendered, a core group remains within the mosque. That group does not include the "bombastic cleric" of the mosque, Maulana Abdul Aziz who tried to escape clad in a woman's burqa*:

Throughout the day, a steady stream of female students left the mosque grounds, and a burqa-clad Aziz tried to join the exodus, Information Minister Mohammed Ali Durrani said.

Aziz -- a tall man with a substantial gut -- apparently raised the suspicions of female police officers who were checking the students. He was placed under arrest and has been charged with murder for his role in the Tuesday clash, a day-long shootout between army rangers and Red Mosque militants that claimed at least 12 lives.

The cleric's arrest while wearing a burqa was a jarring sight, and Pakistani television stations showed endless replays of a gray-bearded Aziz being led away from the mosque by shotgun-wielding security forces. In the video, he was still wearing the all-black burqa from the neck down, though he was clutching the outfit's hood in his hand.

"This is totally unexpected. It's also unacceptable," said Misbah Saboohi, a law professor at the International Islamic University who grew up with Aziz.

In fiery speeches to his followers, Aziz had preached a strict separation of men and women with rigid adherence to gender rules that he said are set forth in Islamic law. He once issued a fatwa, or religious edict, against a female government official for publicly hugging a man who was not her husband.

"He himself was doing what he preached people should not do," Saboohi said. "He said that men and women should be separated. And here he's dressing like a woman and mingling with women."

Others were more forgiving. "Everyone has freedom to wear what they'd like," said Siraj-ul-Haq, senior minister in the North-West Frontier Province and a member of a far-right religious party. "If he is wearing pants or shalwar or burqa, it's up to him."

Even awful events have their humorous moments, I guess. They certainly have material for a feminist interpretation.


------
*All the sources I found call the outfit Aziz wore a burqa. But I don't think burqas have detachable hoods.

From My Mailbag

I get mail from the anti-contraception folks. Most of it is pretty much what you'd expect from people who try to free us from the chains of easily available birth control. But sometimes the mail is even more enlightening. This is from a recent e-mail:

While contraceptives don't cause teens to have sex, they do enable them to do so, a point those on both sides of the issue seem to miss.

There is a healthy fear in the pro-life movement that addressing contraception may be counterproductive in the efforts to win public opinion. This fear is partially based upon the idea that the public won't tolerate a ban on contraception.

Unfortunately, this well founded fear has often resulted in near silence about the negative aspects of contraceptives, including the role it plays in adolescent sexual decisions.

How do contraceptives impact on these decisions? Simply put, contraceptives (and abortion) act as an "insurance policy" against unplanned pregnancy (and birth), lowering the perceived risks of premarital sexual activity. This "policy" enables people who would normally not engage in sexual activity to do so. Unfortunately for many, these policies often fail, resulting in pregnancy and disease transmission.

Religious beliefs also have a role in the avoidance of this issue - many non-Catholic denominations approve of contraceptive use among married couples, so they are reluctant to even speak out on the issue to begin with. The thinking is that the prohibition against premarital sex already covers the use of contraceptives, and that use by unmarried teens is implicitly forbidden. Yet that ignores the public health crisis that exists in part due to easy access to contraceptives by teens.

It's nice seeing it spelled out that clearly. Contraception should not be available, because that way sex causes more unintended pregnancies (and abortions) and more sexually transmitted diseases. The idea is that teens would be so frightened of these possibilities that they would stay away from all premarital sex.

Well, it hasn't worked in the history, as far as I can tell.

What do these people really aim at, I wonder, though pretty idly and only because I have nothing else to wonder about right now.

Mississippi Fred McDowell

Goin Down to the River

The Man-Crush Primary

You might be interested in this piece I wrote for the American Prospect website.

Happy Fourth of July!

To all my American readers. Happy Wednesday to everybody else.

I'm giving you a choice of Uncle Sams, a young and innocent one and one who wants the troops brought home.









This is an interesting story related to the celebrations: Whether states can require that the American flags they use are made in this country and not in, say, China. There's nothing about them being made by workers who actually could unionize, though, and in any case it might be that the states don't have that right.

A Short Story: The Quilt

This is a first draft I wrote when the Iraq war started. It's about the war and about life and stuff. Some patches are not that good and entering it is a little slow but I like the way it spews.

She was dreaming a quilt. In her dream the blocks were dancing, changing, turning. There was color, joy, hatred, rage, sex. There was loneliness and too many people. One block was mysterious, empty perhaps. She needed to sign it.

After work the next day she made a detour to a fabric store and a bookstore. She came home loaded with fabrics and books about quilts and spent the whole weekend on the floor among the fabrics, stroking them, spreading them out, trying to see her dream again. Something was missing.

Most of the next week she thought about the quilt. Evenings she pored over the books, read about patterns called "The Trip Around The World", "The Drunkard's Path", "The Flying Geese". Something was still missing.

After a time she gave up, packed the fabrics away, put the books on high shelves and went back to her life as it used to be: days spent in the office, evenings at the television set, weekends visiting relatives and friends who talked about their lives. She read the papers about the war, about the laws that were changed to make her life safer, snugger, more suffocating. She collected money for good causes, exercized, paid her bills, brushed her teeth, took a course on using the internet.

The war talk got more heated, the friends and relatives more absorbed in their own lives. Her life hardly changed. Then she dreamt about the quilt again. This time the quilt made itself, then disintegrated, the pieces attacking her like vampire bats. The blocks had eyes and mouths and they all whispered something. The reds bled all over her, the yellows singed her eyelashes, the blues were so cold her teeth hurt, the greens like grass run amok. She couldn't hide from them. "Sign me", they all demanded.

She was torn awake by her terror. The dark apartment was quiet, her heart making the only sound. She got up and went into the cold kitchen. Snow was falling outside. She stood watching it while the water for her tea boiled. The tea warmed her and calmed her down.

What to do? Should she see a doctor? Was she going mad? She sat in the kitchen the rest of the night, thinking.

In the morning she called in sick. She took out all her clothes from the closets and spread them over the furniture. Then she climbed up into the attic and dragged down all her storage boxes. The dust on them made her sneeze, the smells inside them brought back memories. She had never discarded anything that was still wearable. She took everything out and covered all the surfaces of her apartment with old fabrics. She turned the radio on and sat on the floor, listening to war talk and legal talk, all in low, measured voices, while the fabrics around her came to life.

They whispered, too. She looked at the yellow dress she had worn to the first party in which a boy had kissed her. She remembered he tasted of chewing gum and forbidden cigarettes, with an undertone of bologna sandwiches. He had dumped her, later, when she had been wearing the polka-dotted pink top. She had saved for it for months. The faded jeans spoke about the day when she had thrown her dinner plate, full of mashed potatoes, in her grandfather's face, because he had called her fat. The jeans were too small for a stick figure made of toothpicks. But she had once fitted in them, once been given compliments about her looks by strangers in shopping malls. The green suit she had worn for all those interviews. All the hopes she had worn with it. The zipper never worked right, the seam was made buckled. The black lace top that had been to her mother's funeral. How she had cried, finding the world empty and desolate for a year afterwards, full of guilt, regrets and longings to have time turn back.

The radio discussed civilian casualties, interviewed people who were expecting to be attacked, debated about the likely effects of chemical warfare on small children. She pulled at a small piece of grey silk showing under a pile of clothes. It was the hem of her wedding dress. Why did they decide on grey for a wedding? Was it a foretaste of what the marriage was to become: two strangers without words groping for each other in a grey mist? He had been a lovable man, a good man. Yet he faded away so that when he finally left she couldn't remember what she had worn the day she came home to a silent house to find him gone for ever.

The same pile of clothes produced an exercise outfit, all neon colors and energy. She had bought it for aerobics, to start a new life after the divorce, then worn it for yoga, tai chi, even boxing. Some of the energy had stuck; she still loved moving and dancing, finding the animal spirit in her.

The radio droned on about the need for more internet surveillance, more secret agents. She glanced furtively at the windows and drew the curtains closed. Then she pulled out the red silk negligee she had bought when her affair with the lone rider had started. She always called him that, the lone rider, because he came and went alone. All she had wanted from him were nights in bed, skin heated from within, teeth teasing her. She had wanted him dancing inside her, dancing slowly to the rhythms of jazz and cinnamon and despair that it would end, that it wouldn't end. Of course it ended, but she still had the red negligee, smelling faintly of cinnamon and sweat and sex.

The radio had switched to music and outside night was falling. She felt as if she had really been ill but was now a convalescent, beginning something new, a recovery from death. But she still didn't see her way clearly.

The dream didn't return that night. It didn't have to, it had now taken over her waking hours. She went back to work but she lived for the time when she could return to her scissors and fabrics. Every night she created art: She cut out hearts of hopeful yellow and embroidered them with polka-dotted knives of betrayal. She sewed interlinked hands of grey silk, and hands that slowly let go of each other. She scattered them with seed beads in the shape of question marks and tears. And as she sewed she listened to the body count on the radio and cried, or turned to a station of old love songs and smiled through her tears.

She hardly ate and washed some days. Waves of life and death soared through her.

She backed her creations with fabric from her everyday clothes, backgrounds of ordinary days. She didn't turn seams, let them fray as they wished, and when she accidentally cut into her thumb she let the blood speckle over the blocks that called for it.

She made law books and police truncheons out of her blue jeans. Below them she attached small falling birds of white lace. This made her angry for days. Then she added angry birds with black eyes flying upwards, tearing into the law books and crapping on the truncheons. Out of the green interview suit she made trees of aspiration with quivering leaves, then trees that dropped their leaves. She gave them a shower of dollar signs in white pearls, getting smaller and smaller as the leaves wrinkled under her fingers.

Someone at work one day asked if she was all right. She smiled back. She was quite all right, thank you. But she needed more material for her dream. She hunted the shops for feathers, bolts and nuts, sequins, dried pasta rings. She added all of this to her art. She added her own hair and fingernail clippings, tampon covers.

The dead of the war started to have names. She listened to the names on the radio. She cut huge red penises out of the red silk and surrounded them with lines which meant throbbing. She smeared the sex blocks with cinnamon and her own saliva, and pricked her finger to get blood on them. She seemed to be growing taller as she worked, but she had to make notes for herself about when to eat, when to wash. Her nights were peaceful.

Most of her clothes now had missing sections. She kept back one outfit so that she could go to work, go to the stores to hunt for materials. Her finger tips grew thick leather gloves, her hair was full of bits of thread. She was alive.

But she came against a wall when time came to add the grief over her mother's death. She was going to cut the black lace top into shreds and sew them all over the quilt. Somehow she couldn't bear to cut it. She became blocked, constipated, consumed by the enormous sorrows of the world. Then she had another dream about the quilt. The black top was whole, a large black area that wouldn't be shredded or absorbed or even crossed. It just was there, in the middle of the quilt, like a vast black mountain.

So that is how she made it the following morning. She sewed all the other blocks around it, sat back and looked around her. The apartment was a mess, bits of fabric, lint and threads everywhere, dust in the air, dirty plates and cups, staleness. She looked into the mirror and saw a near-skeletal woman dressed in rags.

The next day she spent cleaning her apartment. She swept away the lint and threads, vacuumed, washed the dishes and windows, aired the rooms. She took a long, scented bath, made her face up carefully, dressed in her one decent outfit and went out for a meal in a restaurant where they served good wine and played classical music. She wore her best pearls and a diamond ring, and a feeling of peace and accomplishment.

When she got out snow was falling again. Wind blew it into a diagonal whip that threw her pearls around and her hair into her eyes. She had to bend forward to be able to walk to her car. That is when she saw the newspaper dispenser headlines: war accelerating, bombings of innocents, body parts found. She read how the government guarded her by reading e-mails, by asking neighbors to keep watch. By the time she got home the quilt, spread out in the living room, no longer excited her as it had. She felt indigestion from all the good food, dizziness from the good wine. She went to bed vaguely disgruntled.

The dream came back. Now the quilt looked like the one she had made but it wasn't finished. It had enormous gaps through which snow blew, wolves howled, bullets flew. The gaps were going to suck her in, to shred her, to use her as a filler. She tried to wrap her naked body in the quilt but it wasn't enough to cover her. The emptiness sighed "Sign me".

She woke up truly angry. She had had enough, more than enough. She would no longer listen to anybody or anything. She drove to work through red lights, she stuck her tongue out at people tooting their car horns at her. She had an argument with her boss about being late, and when he walked away, she took scissors from her desk, slipped into his empty office and cut a piece out of the back of his coat.

She ran back into her room frightened to death. What had she done? How could she ever explain this and keep her job? Had the spirits of the quilt taken her over? It was too late to put everything back. She packed up her desk, gave her notice and left. But before that she cut pieces out of her office curtains and the cardigan the secretary left on the back of her chair when she went out for lunch.

She called her relatives and visited them that weekend. She came home with stolen bits from their tablecloth and sofa cushions. She stole patches from her friend's scarf, from her now-and-then lover's tie. She added them all to her quilt, embroidered with thought bubbles of words that never met each other, in invented languages that nobody understood.

She disconnected her telephone, refused to answer her door. She looked up addresses for the government, the military, invented reasons to visit them and, when opportunity arose, whipped out her scissors or knife and ripped out sections of upholstery or curtains, even the lining of a military cap left on a hook. The more she stole the more honest she felt. Once she followed a couple who came out of a car festooned with war banners into a busy restaurant and cut out the hems of their jackets without anyone noticing. She returned home with her spoils and looked in the wild eyes in her mirror. She was past questions now.

She knew where the missing pieces of her quilt were. She filled them in with legal fabric, embroidered with lips sewed shut, eyes gouged empty, feathers sticking out of hearts that bled red sequins. She cut patches of war from the military pieces, added her kitchen knives, doll's legs and arms, made herself vomit on them. Then, after some time, she added flags of many countries in beading, the word "freedom" in all colors of wool. She added Christian crosses, Islamic crescents, swastikas. She embroidered cages with women perched in them, cages with open doors, cemeteries seen from the underside. She used nails, screws, bolts and washers to make little skeletons deep under the surface. Then she took all the paper money she could find, ripped it into confetti and stitched it all over the war blocks.

The snow was falling again. It was night, and she was nearly finished.

The next week she went to anti-war demonstrations, clipped bits off T-shirts calling for peace, a hunk of hair hanging down the back of a demonstrator. She patiently followed an old smelly woman living on the street until her overflowing cart of newspapers, empty bottles and old blankets was left unguarded for a moment, then cut off a piece from a blanket, leaving bread and money in its place.

She went to bars, prowling, getting kicked out, getting propositioned, until she managed to cut off a sleeping drunk's sleeve cuff and to beg a prostitute for a piece from her feather boa. She returned home like a hunter from the forests, and spent delirious days attaching her finds around the edges of the quilt. She embroidered them with signs meaning "silence" and "voices in the distance", with dead seedheads and broken nutshells, and appliqued white and black netting over the feathers of the boa. She wove the peace fighter's hair into the edges of her war blocks where its colors melded in. She placed the homeless woman's smelly bit of blanket in the upper right-hand corner, with arrows leading to it from her heart blocks, her aspiration blocks, her legal and war blocks. Then she went out into the nearby woods, collected dead twigs and frozen grass, pebbles frozen into the snow, trudged back to the apartment and added it all, still frozen, still cold into the quilt. She was emptied, hollow, cold. She went to bed exhausted, knowing that her quilt was done.

But she didn't know what to do with it. She needed one final dream. It wouldn't come. Her bank account was now almost empty, her savings nearly gone. The landlord sent her a notice about late rent, then an eviction notice. She started selling off her furniture, roaming the slowly emptying apartment, listlessly applying for jobs. Something was still not right.

Her face in the mirror looked old or perhaps newly born. She prayed to that face for a dream, prayed to all the faces that might hide in the mirrors. She prayed to the quilt itself; its shining beauty, warmth and elegance, its utter ugliness, stench and despair. And the dream finally came.

The quilt was alive, it floated in the air, nearer and nearer, until it, slowly, slowly devoured her. Yet at the same time she also floated, nearer and nearer to the quilt and devoured it. Then they danced, the quilt-that-had-been-a-woman and the-woman-that-had-been-a-quilt. And danced and danced.

In the morning she woke up, hung the quilt on her balcony railing for all the world to see, got in her car and drove away.

Keith Olbermann's Special Comment

It is on the commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence. You can watch a video and read the transcript at Crooks&Liars.

On David Ritcheson

A recent story in the news tells that he committed suicide by jumping overboard from a cruise ship. Earlier he was in the news for being attacked:

A Spring teen who survived a brutal beating with a pipe last year jumped to his death from a Cozumel-bound cruise ship on Sunday.

Carnival Cruise Lines officials would not confirm his identity, but Rick Dovalina, head of LULAC in Houston, said Sunday night that he learned through the family's attorney, Carlos Leon, that 18-year-old David Ritcheson has died.

...

Ritcheson's death comes less than three months after he testified before Congress about how two teens nearly killed him on April 23, 2006, by repeatedly kicking a patio umbrella stand into his rectum while shouting "white power!"

The two teens who raped him got very long sentences for their crime. Ritcheson got a very short life. It's important to remember that the suffering of the victim does not end when the crime does.
----
Initial link via mia culpa.

On David Brooks And Other Commenters

Brooks wrote about Bush commuting Libby's sentence. If you want to know what I think about it, go to the TAPPED blog.

And pretty surprisingly, Chris Matthews sees the decision as a bad one.

A June 21 post by Josh Marshall seems very relevant here, too. Thanks for Barry for linking to it:

The Supreme Court made it harder Thursday for most defendants to challenge their federal prison sentences.

Appeals courts that review prison terms imposed by trial judges may deem them reasonable if they fall within federal sentencing guidelines adopted in the mid-1980s, the high court said.

The justices upheld a 33-month sentence given to Victor Rita for perjury and making false statements. Rita is a 25-year military veteran and former civilian federal employee.

The prison term falls within the guidelines range and was upheld by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, posing the question of whether sentences within the guidelines ordinarily will be considered reasonable.

Go Free, Scooter

I was taking a nap when George Bush decided to commute Scooter Libby's sentence. I'd bet that Bush thought most of the country was looking elsewhere, given the Fourth of July taking place in midweek. So Bush decided to reward his good friend: Old Scoot doesn't have to go to prison, after all. He just needs to pay the fine which won't be too hard for him.

Why not give Libby a full pardon? The Republican commentators have already made this into a noble and just and thoughtful gesture: Libby wasn't innocent but the sentence was too harsh. This way he is still punished but can stay with his family.

On the other hand, as Josh Marshall noted, a full pardon would have exposed Libby to possible questioning from the Congress. This way he still has the Fifth Amendment privileges.

There are always several different games people play when they write about events like this one, and the above two paragraphs are an example of one game in two moves, if only inside my head.

Games. Whenever I'm sick of writing about politics it is because of all the games people play while elsewhere real people suffer and die. I get the point of the games: they are strategy and tactics. Think of politics as baseball (with a Mafia flavoring) and you get the strutting games and the top-rooster-of-the-tip games, even if you have no testicles. So in that world the way to write about this event is by asking thoughtful questions about the consequences of Bush's act on his popularity with the Republicans (who wanted Libby pardoned) or the Independents (who probably don't know who Libby is, on the whole).

Or if you want to go all erudite you can compare this case to the Clinton impeachment case, even if they are not really the same at all. Or you can write long posts about how the base of the Democratic party is going to react, given the "witchhunt" they have engaged in. You know, trying to get Dick Cheney or Karl Rove and only managing to get poor liddle Libby who is a kind and thoughtful man.

All these games share one thing: They don't ask whether Bush's actions are morally right. Atrios writes that he is very mad today. He sees Bush's act as "obstruction of justice" and none of the many Democrats he quotes has brought that up.

I see Bush's act in the baseball sense. It's as if the coach of one team has decided to overrule the umpire's decision, and everybody just goes and buys more popcorn.

Why?

Why does all technology crash on the same day? Even if you pay the services? Or especially if you pay the services.

Do you think that the machines have gone on a Fourth of July holiday? I wouldn't put it past them.

I'm going to get a quill pen and a bottle of blood-red ink.

Weird Thoughts On Whole Foods

I visited a Whole Foods store recently and thought about Jonah Goldberg. According to Slate he is working on a book about us Nazis:

Three months ago, I speculated that Jonah Goldberg's forthcoming book, then titled Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation From Mussolini to Hillary Clinton, was the victim of a swift and violent paradigm shift. The 2006 elections and the right's critical drubbing of Dinesh D'Souza's The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11—which proposed a strategic alliance between Muslim theocrats and the American right against the degenerate American left—had rendered conservatism's lunatic fringe suddenly unfashionable.

...

Gone is The Totalitarian Temptation From Mussolini to Hillary Clinton. Now the subtitle is The Totalitarian Temptation From Hegel to Whole Foods. This is undeniably kinder, gentler, and less political. But it isn't necessarily more truthful. As liberal blogger Ezra Klein points out, John Mackey, founder and chief executive of Whole Foods, is a libertarian.

So what is so very Nazist about Whole Foods? Well, one of the notices said that shoes and shirts must be worn. That is pretty authoritarian, isn't it? I fleetingly wondered if anyone had tested this Nazist rule by wearing nothing but shoes and shirts. Perhaps Goldberg's book will tell us.

Inside the store was a large placard telling me all about how Whole Foods is in cahoots with the local organic growers. That is pretty Nazist, too. On the other hand, I couldn't find very many organically grown fruits or vegetables at the store at all and only one thing grown locally. On the third hand, I did learn why some people call Whole Foods "Whole Paycheck."

Five Years For A Terrorist Attack

A man douses the interior of his car with gasoline and drives it into a women's health clinic, planning to start a fire and to die in it himself. This sounds quite familiar in an odd way, given the failed attempt at Glasgow airport. It turns out that the clinic he chose doesn't actually perform abortions at all, and that he didn't manage to make much of a fire. But the intentions were there.

He was given a five-year prison sentence for this act.

What would he have gotten if his attempt had been motivated by radical Islam?

My point is not to argue that we should treat terrorist attacks in general like this example case, rather the reverse. But note that the workers and clients at that health clinic could have died because of someone else's religious beliefs. This is no different from the kinds of cases we usually regard as "real" terrorism.

Going Visiting

In the land of unthinking fear. I read the comments section of this post tonight. It is worth wading through, despite the nastiness of doing so, because it tells much about the reasons for the wingnut behavior and how well the terrorists' policies are working. Note how many of the comments advocate wholesale killings of large numbers of Muslims? Note how many explain that liberals, progressives and others with similar views are the real enemies, because they don't allow this mass killing to defend "our values"? That those values appear to include the slaughter of yet more innocents doesn't seem to be noticed. When you read the comments remember that the three recent attacks killed exactly zero people (unless the terrorist who was hospitalized died).

It was helpful for me psychologically to read those comments, though also upsetting. Mostly, because the impact of these (pretty clumsy) U.K. attacks in the U.S. seems to be exactly what bin Laden would desire: fear is growing and so is the desire to start a world war against Islam. If you read about bin Laden's plans you will find out that this is exactly what he intends. He wants to unite the Muslim countries into one unit which will fight the west, and he wants to destroy the open societies of the west. Well, the open societies are closing pretty rapidly already.

But the strongest impression I got from those comments was how they were written from the lizard brain, with the exception of a few reasoned ones. The lizard brain is my term for the times when we act out of some very primal emotion: hate or fear or lust, and when we send the logical part of the brain out drinking. The lizard brain hates liberals, too, because liberals don't write about these topics from the lizard brain. Or most of them don't.

I think the British police operations are the proper response to real terrorist attacks. Treating terrorism as a crime takes away some of the glory it gets when terrorists are given the honor of having a war waged against them. We don't wage wars against criminals; we put them behind bars.

There is much more I want to write about this topic, especially about the values angle, but that will have to wait. Also about the hopeless feeling I get in trying to think how to debate issues with someone who is that afraid. Fear makes us stupid, sometimes.

For now, I hope that most of those frightened-to-death comments were by a handful of sock puppets.

Sunday Cats And One Mouse

This is Darryl Pearce's Caesar:





And this is FeralLiberal's Emma:





This is a mouse in a birdhouse. Picture also by FeralLiberal.





All these would be good for the captioning game.

Saturday Hope Blogging

This can be done by stealing Phila's Friday Hope Blogging. It's a useful corrective for the general sense of gloom-and-doom I and quite a few others spread in our attempt to change things. Because some good change is taking place, and it needs to be given attention, too.

The Focus Of Terrorism

Is to make people frightened. This is important to remember when judging the coverage of the recent car bombing attempts in the United Kingdom. It's perfectly fine to report on the attempts. But it's not perfectly fine to spread panic or to make the attempts into something more sophisticated than they really are. That way the media serves the goals of the terrorists. Or so I think.

Lilies, Roses and Delphiniums

Another garden essay. The picture doesn't show any of the plants I write about, but it does show some red daylilies at about this time of the year.





I love lilies, the tall-stemmed perfumed white ones with enormous flower cups. They look unapproachably regal, like the cold queens of some ancient barbaric tribe. Yet their scent in a summer evening evokes much earthier thoughts: one thinks of skin and lips, husky voices whispering endearments, the ladies of the night.

As much as I love lilies I hate the lily beetle. This small orange-red beetle lives for two things: to destroy lilies and to copulate, and it is extremely successful in both. It appears to have no natural enemies in my garden, myself excluded, and each year it comes out a little more victorious in the war I wage against it. I am also getting tired of the manner in which it has turned my daily garden strolls into beetle crushing campaigns. I am beginning to think that my lily growing days may soon be over.

Or perhaps not. There are no good understudies for lilies as August star performers, and some stars are necessary for each month of the gardening season.

Roses are similar divas of the garden. My climbing roses are finally large enough to be admired from below. Their June dance of ivory, silk and lace coincides with the flowering of honeysuckles and leaves me drunk with the garden for days. But once the perfect flowers are gone, the awkward disease-ridden bodies remain to demand the gardener's attention.

Never mind that my roses were bought as disease-resistant, they seem to get blackspot almost before they get leaves. Organic remedies have no perceptible impact, so my blackspot treatment consists of careful removal of the sickened leaves. By August, the roses are close to skeletal, and the lilies are then also needed to draw the spectator's eye away.

Deciding the destiny of my lilies and roses is not going to be easy. Most real choices aren't. For whatever I choose, something essential will be lost: satiny petals, intoxicating scent and beauty of the floral form on the one hand, time and peace of mind on the other. And when the choice is finally made, regrets follow.

I still miss the delphiniums (delphinium elatum) to which I dedicated most of my compost, waking hours and miles of stake and string for several summers. The last summer I grew them they stood seven feet tall with hundreds of slowly opening sky blue eyes. Then one night it rained hard, and the following morning the delphiniums were lying helter-skelter across other plants, looking like duchesses who were dressed for a ball but chose instead to stand on their heads in mud puddles. This may have seemed funny to them, but was not my idea of a star performance. It wasn't too difficult to let them go. But I still have some regrets.

The lilies and roses would be much more painful to lose, as they, at least, complete their performances, and all the understudies I know for them are just that, understudies.

So should I grow them or not? There should be a third answer to this dilemma, just like there should be one for other difficult choices in life.

On The Fourth Branch

That would be Dick Cheney. It's now acceptable to notice how he has amassed power out of all proportion to the actual role of the Vice President and how he uses secrecy and the refusal to acknowledge laws to go on holding it. Acceptable, because David Broder wrote a column on the topic:

Cheney, as described in a breathtakingly detailed series in The Post this week by reporters Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, is something else.

What they discovered, in a year of work that reveals more about the inner workings of this White House than any previous reporting, is a vice president who used the broad authority given him by a complaisant chief executive to bend the decision-making process to his own ends and purposes, often overriding Cabinet officers and other executive branch officials along the way.

Cheney used his years of experience, as a former White House chief of staff, as the secretary of defense and as the House Republican whip -- and all the savvy that moved him into those positions -- to amass power and use it in the Bush administration. He was more than a match for the newcomers to the White House, and he outfoxed even the veterans of past administrations when it came to the bureaucratic wars.

As Josh Marshall notes, most of this is not new for those who read progressive and liberal blogs. It is the mainstream media which has been finally given the green light to go after Cheney. It could be too late, of course.

Why did it take so long for Cheney to be properly criticized? Opinions vary (as they say), but my guess is that fear and proximity to the government have their role to play. Also that "he-said-she-said" schtick which means that Cheney could control the debate in many venues.

By the way, read the series Broder mentions. It's good reporting.

A Deep Thought For The Day

Caught on a wingnut blog:

The conservative court campaigned over for the last 25 years has finally come to fruition.

Remember this when the conservatives pretend that they don't want activist judges.

Now Watch This Video

It's about the Paris Hilton case. MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski rebels on air about having to make the Hilton case the first piece in the news. Note how she is treated by Joe Scarborough.

Bugs

You know what happens usually this time of the year if you open a window without a screen at night and turn the lights on? Bugs come in. All sorts of flying insects.

Well, they didn't last night. Not only are there no honey bees around the Snakepit Inc., but I don't even see that many moths.

It's an odd feeling to miss something that is a bit of a nuisance. But I do miss the bugs. So do my resident spiders.

And The Third In My Series Of Deep Posts on a Humid Day

This one has to do with Cuba. George Bush is anticipating the death of Fidel Castro and the events that might come about after that:

President Bush openly anticipated the death of ailing Cuban President Fidel Castro today, picturing it as an opportunity to bring freedom to the Caribbean island after nearly a half century of iron-fisted rule by the fiery Communist leader.

"One day, the good Lord will take Fidel Castro away," Bush said during a question-and-answer session at the U.S. Naval War College here. As the audience laughed and began to applaud, Bush seemed to realize that cheering the death of another head of state, even an enemy, might appear unseemly and quickly quieted the crowd. "No, no, no," he told them.

But he then imagined what it would be like once Castro is gone and forecast a debate over how aggressively the United States should try to open up the totalitarian system in Havana. "The question is, what will be the approach of the U.S. government?" he said. "My attitude is that we need to use the opportunity to call the world together to promote democracy as the alternative to the form of government they have been living with."

Wouldn't it be the horned guy who will come for Fidel in Bush's worldview? Never mind. What I wanted to write about is the question what Cuba would look like in the future if Bush's wishes are realized.

Many good things might happen, true. But if Cuba becomes a country of unbridled capitalism, what will it lose? Somehow the comparisons are always with Cuba as it actually is and some libertarian paradise of a society. A more realistic comparison might be between Cuba and other countries nearby. And then you might start to notice that there are things the Cubans might lose, too. Such as good education and fairly accessible health care. They might end up with a country which looks a lot like that Cuba from the 1950s, with few very rich people and loads of poor people without much hope for improvement. Perhaps that is a better country than the present Cuba. I'm not an expert enough to tell.

But it's never useful to compare some real-world society only to a phantom utopia, without telling us how that utopia might actually be achieved.

The Countries Which Lead

Today is the day for wide-ranging goddess posts. Probably because it is so very humid. In any case, I saved this story about how people all over the world rate various countries, because it woke up one of those humidity-related deep thoughts in me. Here's the summary of the survey:

Anti-American sentiments are on the rise in many parts of the world, driven by concerns that U.S. leaders are prone to act unilaterally and have widened the gap between rich and poor nations, a new international survey found.
At the same time, global attitudes about China have also declined, with residents of many countries expressing concerns about China's growing economic and military power, the survey concluded.
The survey of 45,239 people in 47 countries by the Washington-based Pew Research Center found ``worldwide support'' for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and substantial opposition to U.S. and NATO military operations in Afghanistan.
``There is a question as to whether we are living up to our own values, which is what is making people question what our policies are,'' former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said at a news conference today announcing the poll's findings.
America's image ``has plummeted throughout much of the world'' over the last five years, the center said in its report on the survey, which was conducted April 6 through May 29.
It found ``sharp drops in favorability among traditional allies in Western Europe, as well as substantial declines in Latin America, the Middle East and elsewhere.''

Note that the United States is the greatest military power on earth and that China is the rising economic power. Also the factory of the rest of the world, right now, with minimal quality controls. And neither of these countries currently seems to care about the rest of humanity at all. Both are pursuing quasi-imperialist policies and navel-gazing. Both sound a little militaristic.

The easiest way I can think of this is with the parable of a school class. There are the wealthy kids who might be cool and admired, because they treat others well and offer leadership. Or they might be the class bullies, using their position and wealth to get even more from others while telling them what to do. To me the U.S. and China, too, look a lot more like class bullies right now. That's what the opinions reflect.

I think the world is quite leaderless right now, in the good sense of leadership.

On School Integration and The Supreme Court of the United States

Remember the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision? It argued that racial segregation of schools should be ended, because "separate" is inherently "unequal". One part of the evidence in that case was a sociological study which showed that black children thought white dolls were better and more desirable than black dolls. But most of the evidence was about the enormous inequities of resources between the racially segregated school systems.

Fifty-three years later, the Supreme Court of the United States has made another decision on school integration. Purposeful school integration should be ended because it is discriminatory:

In a decision of sweeping importance to educators, parents and schoolchildren across the country, the Supreme Court today sharply limited the ability of school districts to manage the racial makeup of the student bodies in their schools.

The court voted, 5 to 4, to reject diversity plans from Seattle and Louisville, Ky., declaring that the districts had failed to meet "their heavy burden" of justifying "the extreme means they have chosen — discriminating among individual students based on race by relying upon racial classifications in making school assignments," as Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the court.

Today's decision, one of the most important in years on the issue of race and education, need not entirely eliminate race as a factor in assigning students to different schools, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in a separate opinion. But it will surely prompt many districts to review and perhaps revise programs they already have in place, or go back to the drawing boards in designing plans.

The opinion's rationale relied in part on the historic 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education that outlawed segregation in public schools — a factor that the dissenters on the court found to be a cruel irony, and which they objected to in emotional terms.

Guess which Justices were with the majority? Yup:

In the now familiar lineup, Justices Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. sided with the chief justice on most points.

The blogs at the National Review site (a conservative paper) had this to say on the decision:

Today's Supreme Court decision striking down Louisville's and Seattle's race-based student assignment plans will surely lead to much gnashing of teeth, recriminations, and accusations of America slipping back to the era of Jim Crow. Politically correct experts, educators, and advocacy types will express outrage and declare their intent to find a way — any way — to ensure that the remaining handful of white students in urban districts attend schools otherwise populated by black and Hispanic children.

They're wrong. Not because we shouldn't feel guilty that so many of our urban schools are racially isolated. Of course we should. And not because Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of an integrated society isn't compelling. Of course it is. But the surest route to such a society is to help all children achieve academically, prepare for higher education as well as jobs with futures, and enter the great American middle class. Because here's the good news: Middle-class black children living in suburbs are much more likely to attend racially diverse schools than poor black children are. The way forward is through progress — which starts with academic progress. That means shaking up the urban school systems that are producing such abysmal results.

When I read that response and also when I read the initial decision by the SCOTUS I had the same odd experience of parts of my brain separating and floating above me in the clouds. Because of that cloud-cuckoo-land aspect.

First, note that the National Review blog post doesn't tell us how we are going to achieve all the wonderful things we should do with inner-city schools populated predominantly by minority students. Schools are funded mostly from local property taxes, which means that poor areas get poor schools. Whenever a proposal tries to change this, the middle-class parents go into a rebellion. In short, there will be no improvements of urban schools as long as this is how the system works. So all that extra stuff in the blog post is meaningless.

Second, the whole SCOTUS decision smells of ignoring the fact that people of color are, on average, poorer and less powerful. To imply that a system that ignores this is somehow fair and balanced is silly.

Put it this way: If I had a child denied access to my most preferred kindergarten, say, I would have very little trouble taking that imaginary child to another good kindergarten or a private school, and I'm not especially rich. But if I was stuck in a ghetto, with two jobs and little education, the slot in a good kindergarten for my child might be the only chance that child ever gets. Now put the two Echidnes in the story fighting each other in a court system for the same kindergarten slot. The SCOTUS says that the rich Echidne must win if the slot is in her backyard. Because she will be a victim of discrimination otherwise. The poor Echidne can just get a third job to pay for a private kindergarten slot.

A hidden underpinning in this whole discussion is the question what integration was supposed to achieve. Was it better education for minority children? Was it an attempt to reduce racism in the society? An attempt to create a society where all children had equal opportunity? I don't quite see what the recent SCOTUS decision thinks it is achieving, but it's none of these things, for sure.

Yes, I am upset over this ruling. I'm one of those politically correct goddesses, I guess. Or perhaps I just happen to have a heart. I'm also frightened of a racially segregated world. It's not good for anybody's basic security.
---
Scott Lemieux has a good piece from the legal eagle angle. He also makes a point I forgot to make in this post, which is the fact that this decision rules out most things courts could do to remedy the effects of past discrimination. Such remedies will always have effects on others in the present time. Hence remedying discrimination is...discrimination!

Pointed Words

This New York Times headline is an odd way of framing the conversation Elizabeth Edwards had with Ann Coulter on Hardball the other day:

Ann Coulter's Pointed Remarks Draw Edwardses' Pointed Reply
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

I know that the headline is most likely not written by Nagourney. But it's an odd headline to pick, because it somehow equalizes the remarks on the two sides. Yet if you watched the video of the encounter you can tell that Coulter was just being rude whereas Edwards tried to discuss actual topics. And what John Edwards said later on wasn't rude, either.

One reason why I don't like the "he-said-she-said" distortion of objectivity is shown in this example. It replaces objectivity with balance and the balance can be a false one. It's fine to give both sides of an argument. But to imply that the two sides are equally weighty is often wrong.

The FBI And Graduate Students Working Late

Via No Capital:

THE FBI IS visiting the nation's top technical universities in a bid to stop students taking their holidays outside the country.

MIT, Boston College, and the University of Massachusetts, have all had a visit from the spooks to warn them about the dangers of foreign spies and terrorists stealing sensitive academic research.

The FBI wants the universities to impose rules that will stop US university students from working late at the campus, travelling abroad, showing an interest in their colleagues' work, or have friends outside the United States, engaging in independent research, or making extra money without the prior consent of the authorities.

If this is true it shows that the FBI doesn't have anyone working for them who used to be a graduate student. Working late at the campus is what 99.9% of graduate students do. That's how you work. And not to show an interest in the colleagues' work! How are you going to network so that you will one day get a job?

This sounds paranoid to me. Maybe it isn't true.

Added: The original source seems to be this one. Hard to know if the Inquirer take above is correct or not. Thanks for the conversation on Eschaton for this link.

Added even later: Trademark dave on Eschaton linked to the actual FBI instructions(pdf). Remember that this is all about nonclassified research. The FBI document does warn about keeping unusual working hours, for example. But late night hours are actually not unusual, as I stated.

Some Good News

It makes me feel weird to write about good news from our side, but they do happen and I must pay more attention to them lest I push all of you over that high ledge.

Remember the post about the committee planning to raise the money spent on abstinence-only education, even though the well-done studies show that it doesn't work? The good news about that is that the committee reversed some of that. From an e-mail from ACLU on June 21:

The American Civil Liberties Union today applauded the Senate
Appropriations Committee's decision to cut funding for the Community Based Abstinence
Education (CBAE) program and raise funding for the family planning program Title X. In a
markup Tuesday, subcommittee members voted to decrease CBAE by $28 million and increase
Title X by $16 million, a move the full committee ratified today.

That makes more sense, too.

The other piece of good news has to do with the recent Supreme Court finding that individuals (in this case women) who have suffered from wage discrimination have only a few months to sue:

On June 22, 2007, Representative George Miller (D-Calif.) and 23 other House co-sponsors introduced H.R. 2831, the "Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007," a bill aimed at fixing a recent Supreme Court decision undermining protections against wage discrimination that have been bedrock principles of civil rights laws for decades.

...

H.R. 2831, which addresses wage disparity based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, and disability clarifies that such discrimination is not a one-time occurrence that starts and ends with the first paycheck, but that each paycheck represents ongoing discrimination by the employer. This bill reaffirms the fundamental principle that our civil rights protections are intended to have a broad remedial purpose – to addres and correct injuries suffered because of unlawful employment discrimination.

It might not work, of course, but it's important that the bill is introduced.


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A correction to the last item. The bill is H.R. 2831: The Ledbetter Fair Pay Act
of 2007 and is now available at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c110:1:./temp/~c110u
3rOy4.

To Eat A Peach. Or Fruit Erotica

There it sits, nestled in your warm hand, glowing with that internal peach glow. See the fuzzy fur? Will it tickle your lips? Notice the blushing cheeks and the hint of a cleavage between them?

Lift the golden globule slowly to your nose and inhale. What IS that scent? Come-hither? Does it remind you of cardamom and sandalwood and hot tropical nights in far-away places?

Now bite into the peach. Go on, use your teeth but gently. The peach will resist, ever so slightly and then it will burst with flavor. The waves of taste will spread and spread and spread, recede and spread again. Have another bite. And another. Feel the peach with your tongue and let it feel you. The juice! It runs down your neck and down your fingers like a perfume from a forbidden paradise.

And you will end up all sticky.

What Religious Rights Really Mean

For some people in this Christian country. Via Hecate:

Rita Moran is the Chair of the Kennebeck County Democratic Committee in Maine. She runs a local bookstore, Apple Valley Books, that sells Pagan books, including books related to Pagan parenting, a popular topic among Pagans, most of whom converted to Paganism as adults and are now having families that they want to raise in their religion. Moran is also a member of the Immanent Grove, a gnostic circle.

A group that goes by what I consider to be the un-American name The Christian Civic League has put up a web page with information about Moran's political position and her religious beliefs, including the terrifying fact that she sells books for Pagan parents. The Christian Civic League helpfully provides lots of contact information, including Moran's address, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses. We all know the purpose of that.

Note that the Christian Civic League is attacking someone for the religion she has and posting information in a way which could be viewed as menacing. If atheists were doing this to Christians, we'd rightly hear complaints about oppressing the faithful. This case is no different. Should you wish to help, check out Hecate's original post for ways.

Accolades for a Murderer

Suppose that you find that a man has strapped his wife's legs together and then asphyxiated her. Suppose that the following day he asphyxiates his young son and that he then kills himself. Suppose that the man was a famous wrestler (of the pretend-type). What would be the proper media response to the events? It seems to be this:

After learning of what occurred, the WWE canceled its live Monday Night RAW, and USA Network aired a three-hour tribute to Benoit in lieu of the scheduled wrestling telecast.

"WWE extends its sincerest thoughts and prayers to the Benoit family's relatives and loved ones in this time of tragedy," the federation posted in a statement on its Web site.

Read the whole article. It stops just one inch from asking what the wife could have done to anger the poor guy so that he ended up killing his seven-year old son.

Bread And Circuses

The Romans knew that if you give people enough food and enough entertainment they are much less likely to rebel. Too bad about the Barbarians and the Vandals and so on. Today they wouldn't be much of a problem as we have television, and the Romans could have beamed the goodies all over the European continent. Imagine all the Huns (my people!) watching diet programs and ads for the latest in war gear! I'm not sure what would have taken the place of "missing white women" but I'm sure the Roman impresarios would have thought of something.

These are the thoughts that came to my mind when I read that Glenn Beck will guest host for Paula Zahn on CNN's Paula Zahn Now. I wonder if he will eat a rat on teevee? That would be the next logical step in the politics-as-entertainment trend that is so obvious in lots of television. Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck in our living rooms. Next: eating poop and live rats?
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Added later. Elizabeth Edwards called in to the Hardball show in which Ann Coulter was the main course. Here is the video of the conversation they had, if you have stomach for it. The point Edwards makes is a very important one, though.

Those Activist Judges...

It's one of the wingnuts' phrases, to call judges activist when they rule in a way the wingnuts don't like. Well, let's see how the new passivist conservative judges do:

In a series of 5 to 4 decisions, the United States Supreme Court today veered sharply to the right. The Court voted along strict ideological lines to side with the Bush administration in deciding four contentious, high-profile cases.

The four cases ran the jurisprudential gamut. They included challenges to the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, the Endangered Species Act, and taxpayer-funded faith-based initiatives, as well as a free speech case involving an Alaskan student who waved a sign reading "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" in front of television cameras during an Olympic ceremony. In the end, the Court opened loopholes in McCain-Feingold and in the Endangered Species Act, dismissed a suit objecting to publicly-funded religious programs, and upheld the suspension of the Alaskan student.

In all four cases, the majority consisted of the same conservative bloc and the minority of the Court's left wing. The conservative majority in all four cases included Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy and the two Bush appointees, Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts. John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer dissented.

Note that freedom of speech is important for electoral campaigns but not for students in schools.

I'm not a lawyering goddess, but even I can see that a lot of interesting information can be derived from these decisions simply by asking: "Qui Bono?" Or "Who Benefits?"

Because all these decisions benefit the Republican party. Odd, this passivist judging.

Today's Action Alert

Also today's humorous moment if you have a dark and sour sense of humor. The PBS is going to have Frank Luntz as the commentator on the next debate between Democratic candidates for the presidency. Now, Luntz is the creator of most wingnut memes (death tax for federal inheritance tax of the very wealthy, say, or the Clear Skies Initiative for pollution-producing policies). He is a dyed-in-the-wool wingnut, and to present him as a neutral analyst stinks to high heavens. See how funny it is, in the sense of the hollow laughter of zombies and those doomed to live in an upside-down world?

If you're not quite there yet, you can complain to the PBS here and to the Tavis Smiley show here. You can inform your friends about the problem at this site.

Chris Matthews on Ann Coulter

Watch the video at Think Progress. It tells us, in Tweety's own words, that Ann Coulter will be the honored guest on Hardball tomorrow. You might also notice, as I did, that Matthews describes Coulter as "dressed for success" in that black cocktail frock.

Tweety has a problem with women the size of Mount Everest. But Coulter's presence on Hardball is not explicable by just his desire to see a sleeveless mini-dress as the way women dress for success. Note that last time Coulter was on Hardball (in 2006) she called Al Gore a "total fag". But, according to Tweety, she sells books and that is enough of a reason to have her on.

I'd really love to know who pays for those books she sells.

A Marine Tutorial on Speech

This article in the New York Times is worth reading. It shows how the marines are taught to speak to the press in cases of, say, murder accusations.

Murders Worthy Of Attention

All murders are horrible. But I can't help noticing that certain murders are seen as more newsworthy than other murders. Compare this murder and the publicity it has attracted:

The boyfriend of a missing pregnant woman was arrested on two counts of murder charges Saturday, and a body believed to be hers was found nearly a week after she vanished from her home, authorities said.

To these murders and the publicity they have attracted:

A suburban Chicago man found shot near the bodies of his wife and their three children in the family sport utility vehicle earlier this month was charged Saturday in their shooting deaths.

The former is familiar to most of you if you live in the United States and watch television. The latter got a lot less attention, despite the fact that many more people were killed. What caused the difference?

I leave that for you to figure out, although I have my own theories.

Lawns

(Something apolitical for Sunday: a garden essay. Well, as apolitical as I can be. The picture is of my ex-lawn last year. Heh.)





Gardeners fall neatly into two political parties: those who love lawns and those who see them as vacant space for more "real" gardening. I am a card-carrying member of the latter party. If I had my way, no lot would have a single non-ornamental blade of grass.

Given my political views, it should come as no surprise that I find lawn fanatics curious people. They spend time, money and water encouraging grass to grow. The minute it obeys, out comes the lawn mower. The process is then restarted. Lawn lovers continually fret over the turf and keep looking for solutions to improve it. It never seems to occur to them that cutting a plant's head off every seven days or so weakens it and may even cause it to lose the will to live. This is what creates most of the problems lawns experience: lawns don't want to be lawns; they want to be tall hayfields swaying in the wind, preferably with lots of other plants thrown in.

But lawn fanatics, and some city ordinances, don't let them fulfill this destiny. Not only is the natural process stunted but often the poor grass is expected to survive on infrequent high-calorie snacks of inorganic fertilizers. All dying vegetation (including grass clippings) is neatly removed so that the lawn never gets a decent meal. And when it throws in the towel, the lawn-obsessed turn to the myriad chemical remedies available in all garden centers. But none of them will work for long, for lawns are an aberration against nature; an aberration which may be successfully maintained in none but a few climatically favored (i.e. rainy) areas. Elsewhere keeping a lawn going is a task suited only to wealthy masochists.

Am I biased against lawns, you might ask. Of course. But I do admit that grass has its place in sports fields and perhaps also as a ground for sunbathing and picnicking; and if it required no upkeep it would even serve as a pleasant green frame for other plantings. I even admit that all gardening is an aberration against nature in that gardeners attempt to slow down nature's plans of making the garden into whatever ecoscape would take its place without human intervention.

But in most cases the natural process we tamper with would take longer than a few days, whereas a lawn unattended for a week's vacation is already well on its way to its natural destination. In fact, it sometimes seems that this is true for a lawn unattended for just an hour

This is my major objection to lawns. They require too large a chunk of gardening time in exchange for barely looking average. And I don't enjoy time spent caring for grass. Perhaps the lawn-obsessed do. If so, how come none of them has offered to take over the upkeep of my lawn?

Me Opinionating in the Dallas Morning News

Thanks to trifecta in the comments, I learned that my earlier TAP piece on research into gender roles is now available in the Dead Tree Press, too. So you can read it again. Or the first time should you have somehow missed it. The reprint doesn't have the links of the original piece, so some of the argument is weakened if you don't check the original, too.