Garden of Hate

I promised this post so that the blog can become a proper hate site.

The Garden of Hate

Today I walk around with a frozen burst of anger, like a cold rock, in the pit of my stomach. This is one of the costs of civilization: that anger must sometimes be swallowed rather than acted on. It is not comfortable, though, and may even harm me in the long-run. So I turn to my garden for help. Anger is good fuel for wood chopping, digging or raking leaves; and all these chores use it up nicely. Unfortunately, the garden doesn't currently require any of these. It just sits there, being beautiful.

Beautiful gardens are therapeutic against many human ills, but not against anger or rage, unless destroying plants by stomping on them, sawing down all the trees and scrawling obscene graffiti on the stone paths would effect a cure (I haven't tried this yet).

Or perhaps gardens could be used for the alleviation of anger without wrecking them. All that is needed is to create a Garden of Hate, and to invite all your favorite enemies to visit it. (Only in your mind, of course!) There would be a place by the garden gate where they would leave their shoes. A sharp gravel path would then lead them past skunk cabbages and marigolds (for scent), stinging nettles and poison ivy (for touch) to a garden seat erected on a bed of quicksand.

While your enemies, seated uncomfortably on rough splintery wood, slowly sink into oblivion, their eyes can feast on all the menacing topiary one can coax out of tortured suburban yews, and their ears on the whine of hungry mosquitoes and the buzz of angry hornets. Perfect.

If I could create such a garden and rent it out a few weekends each year the proceeds would let me observe it the rest of the year in effortless leisure.

Children and Careers

The test I link to in the post below contains a question about whether women should put children ahead of their careers. The question is intended to find out whether you, my dear reader, are a social conservative. But it's a loaded question, naturally, because there is no follow-up question about whether men should put children ahead of their careers. That question is never asked. Then there is the loading caused by the word "career" which refers to the uppity educated women who shouldn't really have jobs. These questions never ask whether people in general should have both jobs and families. Or even both careers and children!

Some time ago the Washington Post had an article about Congresswomen with small children. The fetching headline was: "Mom's in the House, With Kids at Home", and the article discussed the many ways in which "balancing" mothering with being a Congresswoman is hard. The only reference to Congressmen with young children was this:

While plenty of male lawmakers have small children, the pressures and responsibilities don't seem to weigh on them the way they do on women.

"Men have this fixture called a wife that's going to take care of the children," said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for the American Woman and Politics at Rutgers University's Eagleton Institute of Politics. "We hear very often from women who are running or elected that they wish they had a wife, someone to deal with the children, have fresh food in the house, pick up the dry cleaning."

Men running for office get kudos from voters for raising young children, but women are often penalized for it, said Celinda Lake, the Democratic pollster who has tracked voter attitudes on the topic for the past 20 years.

"For male candidates, people think having young children is a total plus -- people think, 'Oh, this is great, he's going to be concerned about family issues, he'll be more future-oriented,' " she said. "A male with young kids, everyone likes it -- men, women, seniors." For women, it's a different story.

The article tells us that there are ten women in Congress with children under 13. The article does not tell us how many men in Congress have children under 13, because it doesn't matter. Those men are not assumed to be in charge of the children, and mostly an absent father is not viewed as a major problem. But surely not seeing your father for several days a week can be as much of a problem as not seeing your mother?

The treatment of fathers in these stories is paradoxical. In one sense they get all the benefits of having children with none of the problems. In another sense they are deemed as totally unnecessary for their children except as providers of money to the family. They can be sent to Iraq to die and mostly that is not a cause for some great outrage. They can also go and pursue a career whole-heartedly, and that is not a cause for concern, either. Mothers, on the other hand...

I know that articles like the one I linked to must address the world as it is and not the way some feminazi goddess might like it to be. I also know that many of the readers are struggling with the same issues and want to read about the costs and benefits to these women. But the issue is always framed as having to do with mothers alone. Not the society, not the fathers, not the way we structure work. Just mothers are to bear the total burden on their shoulders. Even if it means that there will be no women of child-bearing age in Congress.

Political Compass

I've posted about this test before on the blog, but that was some years ago. You can click on the Political Compass site, answer some questions and find where you stand politically in comparison to such famous people as Hitler or Gandhi. Sinfonian provides a link to an exercise where the current U.S. presidential candidates are also rated using the same coordinate system. This means that you can find out where you stand in comparison to them, too.

I always find myself next to Gandhi in these tests, but then I lie a lot. Or Gandhi did.

Blogger arrested near UCLA child care center

NTodd noticed that headline in a CNN news story:

A man who blogs about his attraction to young girls but says he doesn't touch them was arrested Monday near a university child care facility with a camera, police said.

It's hard to interpret the headline as not indicating that bloggers are somehow an unsavory bunch of people on the whole.

Today's Bad Poetry

Or "kids, get off my lawn" poems:

Summer Days

June gallops past in light green shoes,
the days hardly born
when they turn to the blues.
Where are the first brave berries?
All I can find are plastic cherries.

July will enter, humid and ripe.
The days linger on
like stains I can't wipe.
Where is the lettuce I loved as a child?
All I can find is an echo too mild.

August is hardest, brown and hot.
The days are wounded
with sweet-smelling rot.
Where is the moon with August eyes?
All I can find is jetsmoke in skies.

Who took the summer
and made it so flat?
Give me the winter.
I can understand that.


An Ode for August

August is the foulest month of all.
He pretends to rest before
the coming of the fall.
As he totters on his last legs
and smells of sweat and rotten eggs.
Like a party overlong
August has a smell too strong.

And the men who are wild at fifty
glance around with eyes too shifty.


Heh. I don't like the summer weather very much.

The Hack Gap

This is Matthew Yglesias' term for something which the civility-supporters in political debate rarely address: The pundits of the right and the right blogosphere are much more eager and willing to grab on to any scandal on the other side and to milk it for months afterwards. No, even for years afterwards. I still get e-mails about the Clinton scandals of the early 1990s and the anger in them is as fresh as newly-spilled blood.

The pundits of the left (the few that exist) and the left blogosphere are, however, the ones who are mostly accused of incivility and of using bad language. But the left tends not to focus on the scandal-mongering. Remember the Republican married senator who admitted to using escort services while at the same time advocating abstinence outside the marriage? Fascinating rumors were floating around about the requests he made to the escorts he hired, but mostly liberal and progressive blogs did not write about that stuff. Neither have we milked dry Rush Limbaugh's addiction problems or the Congressional peers scandal. Or the many, many, many financial scandals infecting the Republican party.

Yet, as pointed by Mark Kleiman, something that Kos said a few years ago is still discussed in the wingnut blogs. Kleiman mentioned this in the context of the very limited attention given to a recent right-wing column by Stu Bykofsky which advocated a new 9/11 massacre as a way of getting Americans temporarily united again. As a way to stop the bickering, and most likely as a way to make Americans line up behind George Bush in our march towards the chasm again. Of course, Bykofsky did not volunteer to be one of the victims of this new massacre. It's always someone else's pile of dead bodies that we need for unity.

Where are all the lefty hacks to bring this up, again and again? Where are all the lefty hacks to imply that all wingnuts think like Bykofsky? I can't do all that work alone.

More seriously, it's interesting to place this whole idea into the generally accepted conclusion that only conservative Americans have Values and Principles. Liberals have dildoes, I guess.

Nah. It's just that liberal values are almost completely ignored because our public debate takes place within the conservative frame where only conservative values are seen as values.

At The Truckstop

David Brooks' most recent column is about the "other America", the place where the honest, dignified and hard-working people live in. Brooks views this place as Republicana, which you must remember when reading his observations.

The story he tells this time is about stopping at a truckstop and about a conversation he had there with a trucker. Some excerpts:

Last Saturday evening, I found myself at the counter of a truck stop diner in Caroline County, Va. I was sitting next to a weathered trucker whose accent betrayed an East Texas upbringing and a lifetime devoted to tobacco products. We quickly established that we were both celebrating birthdays. He was 68.

He'd been trucking for 46 years, away from home for nine months a year for most of them. He'd run through five marriages and now traveled with a little dog.

...

I don't know what came first, the mystique of trucking or the country music songs that defined the mystique, but this trucker had been captured by the ethos early on and had never let it go. He wore the right boots and clothes. He had a flat, never-surprised way of talking. He didn't smile or try to ingratiate.

He has one of those hard jobs, like mining and steel-working, that comes with its own masculine mythology and way of being in the world. Jobs performed in front of a keyboard don't supply a code of dignity, which explains the spiritual anxiety that plagues the service economy.

...

People in other classes may define the social structure by educational attainment, income levels and job prestige, but these men are more likely to understand the social hierarchy on the basis of who can look out for themselves, who has the courage to be a fireman, a soldier or a cop, who has the discipline to put bread on the table every night despite difficulties

My condensed version of the column lets you home straight into its inner core. This is all about a masculine mystique, as applied by Brooks to a blue collar worker. The story is deceptive because of phrases such as "people in other classes", but Brooks writes about men only. Women enter as past divorces or as something that exists outside of the occupation of trucking, to be fed and protected.

The message one is supposed to take home from the column is that the Democratic Party doesn't fit these manly truckers, because the truckers don't care about money or income inequality or any of that fluffy crap. They care about something else, some sort of a masculine mystique, I guess.

The Morale Dilemma

Is the morale among U.S. military in Iraq low or high? Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack argued for the latter case in their July New York Times op-ed piece:

Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.

So does Rep. Phil Gingrey, a Republican from Georgia, who recently wrote about his Iraq trip:

Two nights ago, I sat down in one of the base mess halls with several Georgia soldiers stationed in Iraq. Over dinner, these soldiers discussed the pride that they have in the job they are doing in Iraq. Their positive morale was a welcome change from the negativity that I hear every day in Washington. While they made it clear that they missed their families, they stressed that now was not the time to pull them out of Iraq.

I'm glad to hear that the soldiers feel so confident and cheerful. But the U.K. Observer has a very different story to tell about the morale among the American military in Iraq:

Where once the war in Iraq was defined in conversations with these men by untenable ideas -- bringing democracy or defeating al-Qaeda -- these days the war in Iraq is defined by different ways of expressing the idea of being weary. It is a theme that is endlessly reiterated as you travel around Iraq. 'The army is worn out. We are just keeping people in theatre who are exhausted,' says a soldier working for the US army public affairs office who is supposed to be telling me how well things have been going since the 'surge' in Baghdad began.

They are not supposed to talk like this. We are driving and another of the public affairs team adds bitterly: 'We should just be allowed to tell the media what is happening here. Let them know that people are worn out. So that their families know back home. But it's like we've become no more than numbers now.'

The first soldier starts in again. 'My husband was injured here. He hit an improvised explosive device. He already had a spinal injury. The blast shook out the plates. He's home now and has serious issues adapting. But I'm not allowed to go back home to see him. If I wanted to see him I'd have to take leave time (two weeks). And the army counts it.'

A week later, in the northern city of Mosul, an officer talks privately. 'We're plodding through this,' he says after another patrol and another ambush in the city centre. 'I don't know how much more plodding we've got left in us.'

When the soldiers talk like this there is resignation. There is a corrosive anger, too, that bubbles out, like the words pouring unbidden from a chaplain's assistant who has come to bless a patrol. 'Why don't you tell the truth? Why don't you journalists write that this army is exhausted?'

Perhaps the military is at the same time bone-weary and in good spirits, both eager to stay and eager to come home? That's unlikely. But what is the truth about troop morale?


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Cross-posted at TAPPED.

Conservative Free Markets Explained

Via Daily Kos, we get this statement about lead in toys and cheap prices from Erin Burnett of CNBC:

A lot of people like to say, scaremonger about China, right? A lot of politicians and I know you talk about that issue all the time. I think people should be careful what they wish for on China -- you know, if China were to revalue its currency, or China is to start making, say, toys that don't have lead in them, or food that isn't poisonous, their costs of production are going to go up. And that means prices at Walmart, here in the United States, are going to go up too. So, I would say China is our greatest friend right now.They're keeping prices low, and they're keeping prices for mortgages low too.

You know what? She is right, in a very perverted manner. When the price wars in the international "free" markets rage the only way someone can underbid is by substituting, say, a dangerous substance for a safe substance if it cuts the production costs by a quarter of a cent per million objects. That would of course only be the case in the kinds of markets where there are no rules at all. It's like a poker game with no rules. If you start losing you will cheat or pull your gun out and shoot all the other players.

A properly organized market has ground rules. They include stuff like not selling people toothpaste more cheaply by using an ingredient that kills. They include stuff like not using slaves to make the products. Rules. Just like in a poker game.

But the Chinese system right now doesn't have the same rules as the American system.

But of course what Burnett said was outrageous as an ethical statement. That this probably is the summary of the ethical views of many who support "free" trade is the really outrageous bit.

How To Build A Career

Imagine yourself in Erin Burnett's shoes. (Burnett anchors CNBC's Squawk on the Street and Street Signs.) You are discussing the financial markets with Chris Matthews, giving thoughtful comments and information on television. You are a professional, someone who has worked hard to get where you are now (I assume she has worked hard), and this is what happens on teebee:

BURNETT: -- and all those creative types of mortgages. And you could say that's a good thing, but, you know, Chris, I guess just to throw it out there and, you know, be provocative, but also ask a fair question -- you know, maybe not everybody is able to own a home. We like to think of owning a home as a right in this country.

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

BURNETT: It might not be.

MATTHEWS: Could you get a little closer to the camera?

BURNETT: My -- what is it? Is it zooming in strangely?

MATTHEWS: Come on in closer. No, come in -- come in further -- come in closer. Really close.

BURNETT: What are you -- what are you doing?

MATTHEWS: Just kidding! You look great! Anyway, thanks. Erin, it's great to -- look at that look. You're great.

Now isn't that the sweetest putdown in all history? How cleverly her feet were swept off from under her! How instantly she becomes nothing but yet another pretty face! Well done, Tweety! Where's Sylvester when you need him?

P.S. And yes, I know that Burnett says very stupid things, as described in the post above this. But Tweety was playing the cute-little-thing-and-it-talks! card against her and some of us goddesses have had the same card played against us. It stinks.

Dick Cheney on Iraq, Then

This YouTube interview was found by a Kos diarist. Enjoy.

from "MoreJust So Stories"

Posted by olvlzl.
Gina Kolata of the New York Times New Service began a recent piece in the usual way, with an explanation steeped in the current fashion for explaining everything as being an expression of an ancient and adaptive genetic heritage:

Everyone knows men are promiscuous by nature. It's part of the genetic strategy that evolved to help men spread their genes far and wide. The strategy is different for a woman, who must go through so much just to have a baby and then nurture it. She is genetically programmed to want just one man who will stick with her and help raise their children.

Surveys bear this out. In study after study and in country after country, men report more, often many more, sexual partners than women.

Which is an odd way to start when you go on to read the rest of the article which is about the surveys which show that heterosexual men, on average have had about three to four more sexual partners than heterosexual women. You might have seen similar “scientifically conducted” polls bandied about on the blogs, on TV and perhaps even mentioned as yet another prop for biological determinism of gender roles.

However, there is a huge mystery about all this. Who are the extra women these men are having sex with and why are they apparently keeping silent about it. Otherwise, it just couldn’t figure.

- It's about time for mathematicians to set the record straight, said Dr. David Gale, an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley.

"Surveys and studies to the contrary notwithstanding, the conclusion that men have substantially more sex partners than women is not and cannot be true, for purely logical reasons," Gale said.

Dr. Gale goes on to give a simple demonstration with equation anyone with fourth grade math could master. But not most of those in the media and even on some "Scienceblogs".

Despite all the confident assertions that the reported disparities are “proof” of a genetically programmed difference between mens’ and women’s brains apparently the original reporters of those illogical numbers know that what they’re reporting is bogus.

"I have heard this question before," said Cheryl D. Fryar, a health statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics and a lead author of the new federal report "Drug Use and Sexual Behaviors Reported by Adults: United States, 1999-2002," which found that men had a median of seven partners and women four.

But when it comes to an explanation, she added, "I have no idea."

"This is what is reported," Fryar said. "The reason why they report it I do not know."

While they’re noticing these seldom mentioned lacunae in today's common received wisdom perhaps they might want to notice something else.

Despite the reservations I’ve expressed here about polling and, even more so, the reporting of polls and surveys I do know one thing with absolute certainty. The methods of polling today are much, much more reliable than those of the Pleistocene period, the period about which the stories like the one at the top of this piece, are told with such confidence by biological determinists. We have no idea at all if our early ancestors were swingers, none. If men today, most of whom seem to be able to count, at least on their hands, are unsure about how many women they have had sex with, why would men at the dawn of humanity be more credible? Maybe cavemen were liars and it is the propensity to lie about such things to people like pollsters (and other interviewers) which is the actual heritage we have from them. At least we know with some confidence that the lie is real.

In the end of Ms. Kolata’s article is this:

Ronald Graham, a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California, San Diego, agreed with Gale. After all, on average, men would have to have three more partners than women, raising the question of where all those extra partners might be.

"Some might be imaginary," Graham said. "Maybe two are in the man's mind and one really exists."

Maybe the stories of evolutionary psychology need to be subjected to similar levels of scrutiny.

Men Banned From Homemaking Classes

This is our brethren at the Southern Baptist seminary. They have gotten rid of the last female professor who - gasp! - taught men. Now they are introducing classes on homemaking at the seminary. But only women can take them:

The Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary offers coursework in Greek and Hebrew, in archaeology, in the philosophy of religion and – starting this fall – in how to cook and sew.

Southwestern Baptist, one of the nation's largest Southern Baptist seminaries, is introducing a new academic program in homemaking as part of an effort to establish what its president calls biblical family and gender roles.

It will offer a bachelor of arts in humanities degree with a 23-hour concentration in homemaking. The program is only open to women.

The article presents two very fascinating rationales for these classes. There is Terry Stoval, the dean of women's programs, trying to make something else than a sow's ear out of the sow's ear she has been given. Then there is the seminary president, Paige Patterson, who is telling us the real reasons for these new programs:

Seminary President Paige Patterson, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, which has its executive committee headquarters in Nashville, said wives of seminary students asked for the homemaking courses. The program was approved by seminary trustees in the fall.

"We are moving against the tide in order to establish family and gender roles as described in God's word for the home and the family," Patterson said at the denomination's annual meeting in June. "If we do not do something to salvage the future of the home, both our denomination and our nation will be destroyed."

Wow! I need a long drink after reading that last paragraph. I also need to go out to breathe a little.

The nation itself will be destroyed if women don't stay at home studying clothing patterns and planning unusual treatments for the dining-room walls. Of course Patterson has always been of the opinion that this nation has been built on the backs of the women and if the women get off that crouching position, well, the nation will tip. That's why he has worked for the proper subjugation of women for many years:

Patterson took a leading role in the 1980s in a successful campaign to oust moderates from leadership posts in the Southern Baptist convention. While he was president of the convention from 1998 to 2000, Southern Baptists issued a statement that women should not be pastors and that wives should "graciously submit" to their husbands.

I feel as if my chest is being squeezed when I read stories like these where the plot is how to make women behave in the properly submissive way. In this particular case, my concern is not with the idea that homemaking is taught, but with the idea that it is taught only to women and in the context of a college-level degree. Someone must be paying money for those courses. Yet when reality strikes and the women who took these courses need to find a job they are not qualified for the better jobs. Patterson is trying to ensure that women go home and that they have to stay there because they have no real alternatives. How godly is this behavior?

How godly is it in general to argue that the fate of a denomination or a country depends on the brainwashing and subjugation of half of humanity? Note that when Patterson refers to his fear that the nation will be destroyed if women don't follow his behavioral rules he must have in mind a wider group of women than just the Southern Baptists. There are not enough of them to save the country by proper wifely behavior. No, Mr. Patterson wants all American women back to the kitchens full time. Let's be honest. He wants male dominance in the society. And he wants all women to stay at home and work for bread and board.

Saturday Hope Blogging

As usual, obtained by stealing Phila's Friday Hope Blogging. Enjoy.

I've Arrived!

The first time I've been called a political hack! Yeah!

Have some chocolate to celebrate. You can tell your grandchildren that you were present at this crucial point. And yes, I know that I should write about the liquidity crisis in the financial markets and the bursting of the bubble that was based on subprime mortgage lending. But us hacks don't.

Friday Family Photo Blogging

This is a picture made for an advertisement in the 1930s, although only the top half was to be used, naturally. I find it very funny. You can click on the picture to see it bigger.

Added later: Come to think of it, all sorts of comparisons crop to mind between this and the photo-touching of models' faces and bodies these days. The way myths are maintained.
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Added even later: Hint: Look at the man's feet.

Wherein Tweety Extols the Fine Neoconservative Mind of George Bush

You can watch for yourself at Think Progress. But this is the gist:

Immediately following President Bush's press conference today, MSNBC's Chris Matthews spent three unbroken minutes fawning over the president's "powerful rendition" of his "philosophy" without uttering a single critical word. "I thought in listening to the president, I was listening to one of the great neoconservative minds," gushed Matthews.

I wonder what color the sky is in Tweety's world.

Electoral Politics Made Simple

By Chris Matthews, as usual. Tweety does hear a different drummer from the rest of us. He thinks that the value of politicians can be measured by how big or beefy they are:

But, you know, I do see a lot of really good second-tier candidates here, but I don't see a big, beefy alternative to Hillary Clinton -- a big guy. You know what I mean? An all -- an every-way big guy. I don't see one out there. I see a lot of slight, skinny, second- and third-rate candidates.

Wouldn't it be great if it was that easy? We could just go to the store and by three pounds of ground Evangelical fundamentalist or a nice rack of Liberal ribs. Pun intended.

Baseball and Barry Bonds

Baseball is not one of the guy sports I watch much, but I roughly know the rules and can follow a game and even admire certain stunts. On the other hand, baseball fascinates me as a parable about the American culture (including its male focus).

There is Babe Ruth and the curse he supposedly put on Red Sox and the 1920s betting scandal and its later repeats. There is the whole interesting history of racial integration as it was reflected in the integration in professional baseball, including the advantages and disadvantages of it for black players, white players and the owners in general. Then there is baseball's many equivalents of the American desire to have lone heroes, combined with the frank admission that lone heroes are nothing without the team, though even then the team is usually mythologized into one manager or a small number of players.

Professional baseball used to practice something which is quite illegal in ordinary jobs: players could be indentured and could not leave the team if they wanted to do so. The "free agent" aspect is a diluted form of this indenture. On the other hand, the owners of the teams can in some ways act as the sole seller of a product (televised games) and also as the sole buyer of the best players' services (though they still face competition from each other). This gives them some monopoly and some monopsony power. The combination of the two means that the players might at the same time look oppressed by the owners' power and also earn very large salaries.

These economic aspects are also part of the American baseball mythology. But most fans prefer the other mythological stories, the ones about individual heroes, team spirit, modesty and great achievements against all odds. And the ones about records and racial fairness and baseball as the unifying thread which weaves all Americans into one patriotic community. Or even the more scandalous stories about Ted Williams' mean temper or the larger-than-life egos of many team owners.

What I find fascinating about this all is not just the stories which are often quite good but the way baseball serves as a mirror which shows Americans as either better than they might be or sometimes much more horrible, but in either case somewhat caricaturized. Even the players' wives are caricaturized in the media, often in an almost "Stepford Wives" way. They become nothing but supportive wives, waiting.

Those long ramblings (why on earth am I writing about baseball???) are to explain how I react to Barry Bonds' recent breaking of the old home run record and to the discussions about his possible drug use, his race and the whole question whether records from different eras are comparable in any meaningful sense. I see these stories as reactions to various baseball myths, perhaps also as attempts to tug the myths to certain new directions.

But baseball may no longer be the American myth of the younger generation. Of course it never was the most applicable myth for many, many Americans.

On Breast Implants and Suicide

The correlation between the two has been in the news recently:

Women who get cosmetic breast implants are nearly three times as likely to commit suicide as other women, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.

The study, published in the Annals of Plastic Surgery, reinforces several others that have shown women who have breast enlargements have higher suicide risks.

Loren Lipworth of the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Tennessee and colleagues followed up on 3,527 Swedish women who had cosmetic breast implant surgery between 1965 and 1993. They looked at death certificates to analyze causes of death among women with breast implants.

Only 24 of the women had committed suicide after an average of 19 years, but this worked out to triple the risk compared to the average population, they reported. Doctors who perform cosmetic breast surgery may want to monitor patients closely or screen them for suicide risk, Lipworth said.

Correlation is a neat little statistical measure, which reflects the extent to which two phenomena appear to move in some connected ways. We call the correlation positive if the phenomena move in the same direction. For example, when one goes up, so does the other, on average. Negative correlation means that when one phenomenon goes up the other one tends to go down.

Now, correlation doesn't necessarily mean that one phenomenon causes the other. This could be the case, but many other explanations are possible. This study is a good example of the kind of study where the correlation is unlikely to be the same as causation. Unless we find something in the implant materials that makes people more suicidal, the best guess for this correlation is that there are some women who elect to have breast surgery for psychological reasons and that these same reasons may also later contribute to suicides. Depression and low self-esteem are examples that crop to mind as such underlying psychological reasons.

The article I link to makes this point clearly, and that is good. But it's always useful to remind readers that correlation doesn't always mean causality.

Types of Writing

I'm tired of writing nutritionally balanced posts which taste like bran and untreated tofu; where the particles dangle like iron pills mixed into the food in the dog's bowl. I want to write deliriously delicious posts, silver spoonfuls of angel-food cake but with wicked drops of dark chocolate hidden in the fluffy cloud. I want to write a post which makes you fat and happy and post-orgasmically satiated.

Alas, it's not to be, right now.

Have a celery stick.

On Autistic Girls

The New York Times has an interesting article by Emily Bazelon on that topic. I have a few reservations about it, though. First, whenever someone has a plan to write a piece on how the sexes differ, well, the piece tends to focus on that and not on how the sexes are the same. In most cases, we are not given any information about the relative magnitudes of the differences vis-a-vis the similarities. Because nobody ever writes articles on how the sexes don't differ, we mostly go away with the idea that the differences are humongous.

Second, a very common aspect of much of the writing on sex roles and so on is the implicit assumption that the sex roles in the American society are the natural sex roles. It isn't just the Americans who do this, but because American writing in this area is predominant, a lot of the psychological and sociological research in this area has to do with American college students (because so many studies use college students as cheap subjects). I sensed this bias in the autism piece in the sense that what was assumed to be "natural" for girls is what the American culture regards as natural.

Third, the article mentions Simon Baron-Cohen as an expert on gender and autism, but fails to mention that much of his work is controversial. I have written about the problems with his test for systematizing vs. empathizing behavior earlier on this blog, and I have also written about the fairly obvious gender bias in his book The Essential Difference .

But mostly I have trouble with the basic argument of the piece which is that girls suffer more than boys from autism because social interaction is more important for girls than boys, and because autism makes social interaction so difficult. Yet, at the same time the article quotes one expert as saying that perhaps we see fewer high-functioning autistic girls because girls are better at social interaction and that this serves to hide them from the autistic label. The article tries to explain how both of these arguments could be true at the same time:

But based on their clinical experience, Lainhart and also Skuse see autism as a heterogeneous disorder. Its profile may change and expand as more is understood about girls, whose autism, they worry, often goes undiagnosed. That is partly, Skuse posits, because girls' general aptitude for communication and their social competence helps some Asperger's girls "pass" — they pick up on their difference and carefully mask it by mimicking other girls' speech and manner and dress. In a sense, their femaleness allows some girls to seem less autistic. It is as if they start off with a social advantage — Skuse sees this as a 20-point bonus on a scale of 100 — that helps counter the disorder. This idea isn't necessarily at odds with the findings that show girls to be more seriously affected by autism, Skuse says, because the girls who succeed in masking their deficit wouldn't be included in studies. And so they are missing from the picture. "There is no doubt in my mind that the way we have defined autism currently biases our assessments strongly in the direction of identifying a male stereotype," he says. The C.D.C. agrees and says that as a result the estimate for the number of girls with autism and normal intelligence may be low.

I'm not convinced. It's as if we are saying that autism hurts girls because they can't satisfy the cultural expectations of being good at social interactions, but on the other hand girls are good at social interactions which hides their autism. I guess it could be true, but shouldn't we then find the average level of autism in the girls who are diagnosed to be much, much higher than the average level in boys?

Meanwhile, in the U.S. Air Force

When you hear a story where a woman reports that she was raped and then subsequently has to go to court accused of "indecent acts", what country comes to your mind? Some place with the shariah law, probably, given that there are countries which interpret that law in the context of rape in a very narrow way: If you can't prove that you were raped then you were guilty of indecent acts and need to be punished.

I always felt that the real purpose of all this was to keep women from reporting rapes. After all, if the punishment for an unproven rape is that the victim herself will be flogged or stoned or hanged, well, that tends to have an inhibitive effect on rape reporting.

But the country I have in mind this time is not Saudi Arabia or Iran; it's the good ol' U.S. of A.. The Air Force, to be more exact. A female airman reported that she was raped but later refused to testify. Then things got surreal: She is going to be court-martialed for underage drinking and "indecent acts":

She says she was attacked in another airman's barracks room on the night of May 12-13, 2006. The charges against her allege that she performed an indecent act on one of the men she accused while the other two watched, the defense says.

In her letter, the woman said she reported the attack and was given a medical examination. The three men were charged with rape, but the charges were dropped after she refused to testify, she said.

"The pressure of the judicial process was too much for me, and I felt like no one was looking out for my interests," the woman wrote.

The men received nonjudicial punishments and have been granted immunity for their testimony in the woman's trial, according to documents the defense provided.

It sounds very odd that the men received only nonjudicial punishments. Were they not participants in at least the "indecent acts" if not a rape? Why is she going to be court-martialed, while they are given immunity? Immunity from what? Rape charges?

This will certainly make rape reporting rarer in the military. I hope that wasn't the intention, all along. But it may well be.

Mad Or Sad?

A recent study by Victoria Brescoll suggests that women in management might do better if they don't show anger. This is what she did in the study:

She conducted three tests in which men and women recruited randomly watched videos of a job interview and were asked to rate the applicant's status and assign them a salary.

The people in the job interview were either male or female but followed the same script. Each of them expressed either anger or sadness over losing an account due to a colleague being late for a meeting.






According to Brescoll, anger gave the men higher status and higher salary estimates. The reverse was true for women. It seems that it's better to be a sad CEO than a mad CEO if you are of the girly persuasion.

The usual popularized take on this study seems to be that anger helps men get ahead but keeps women back. Strictly speaking, this is not quite what the study found, as the study compared anger not to, say, general pleasantness, but to sadness as a possible reaction to one particular type of event (the loss of an account).

I couldn't get hold of the actual study which limits my ability to judge how reliable the findings are. As an example of the kind of data I'd love to see is the number of subjects who were asked to rate the videos. But supposing, for the time being, that there are no hidden bugs in the study, what do the results mean?

Brescoll herself says that angry women are seen as "out of control". This is fascinating, because the proper antonym for that in this context might not be "in control" but "under control". If anger is viewed as a legitimate reaction by someone who is entitled to dominate others (as the article from which I quote suggests), then those who are not seen as entitled to dominate others would indeed be "out of control" when expressing anger. This doesn't apply only to women who have traditionally not been allowed to show much anger, but to almost anyone in a subordinate position.

That sadness works better for women than anger fits into that framework pretty well. Besides, sadness is not directed to anyone outside the person. It is non-threatening. On the other hand, women are not supposed to be sad in public if they have power, because crying is seen as a sign of weakness. A Catch-22 indeed.

I was astonished by the salaries men and women were assigned in this study. Men were awarded much higher salaries than women (remember, the applicants were objectively identical), and the resulting differences are much larger than the actual average differences in full-time pay by gender. Both male and female reviewers assigned women lower earnings, and I have seen similar results from other studies.

One interpretation would be that the study subjects are trying to guess what a person with particular characteristics would earn in the real world, and assign sums accordingly, thus taking into account their knowledge that women, on average, earn less. Another one is that people in general are a lot more sexist than we perhaps have thought and rate and rank women lower than men on that basis.

On the Utah Mining Accident

May the six trapped miners be found soon and healthy or at least alive.

An earlier post I wrote after the Sago accident touches on some of the safety concerns which have cropped up in this case, too. Mining safety is too crucial to be left to the vagaries of the marketplace.

Blogging Advice

Jane Hamsher includes some in a recent post:

...you have to post regularly about the topics that news junkies are interested in and you have to find a way to write your issues into those. It is difficult to get people to care about pro-choice, my personal signature issue. I found a way to write it into the Alito story, the Joe Lieberman story, the NARAL story, in a way that the blogosphere got interested in because I took the time to figure out how things worked and how you could catch the wave. I also took a lot of time building relationships with other bloggers, reading what they had to say, linking back to them, going out of my way to meet them in person when I could (no matter how big or little the blog) and being in conversation with other bloggers rather than sitting there carping about how they never linked to me.

I thought about this a lot last night while brushing my fangs the required five minutes. Then I thought about it some more. The advice she gives is quite good, but I have not taken it. So I went through all those rounds in the spiral of thinking, from feeling annoyed at myself for not doing all those things that well, to feeling annoyed that such marketing acts (as I see them) are required to sell certain topics (often feminist ones) to a wider audience (consisting of what type of people?), then veering back into asking what all this means for the definition of blogging as an enterprise (a commercial one?) as compared to simple acts of writing or communication, and finally deciding that I will never arrive at some ice-clear conclusion on any of this. Better just write it all down.

So I did.

The Liberal Washington Post

Has hired Ramesh Ponnuru:

In 2006, National Review columnist Ramesh Ponnuru appeared on Fox News and claimed that the "journalistic elite was a functional ally of the party of death."

This week, Ponnuru officially joins the "party of death" himself, signing on with the "journalistic elites" at the Washington Post.

At the Post, he will lead a new Discussion Group on "the future of conservatism" entitled Right Matters. One of the issues Ponnuru will focus on is "the state's role in enforcing morality."

Where's my Discussion Group, by the way?

Doesn't that reference to "the state's role in enforcing morality" remind you of something? Like those Taliban police officers who checked that women's shoes didn't make a noise. Brothers under the skin and all that.

Where the White Boys Are

That's pretty much the summary of this Washington Post article by Jose Antonio Vargas, about the lack of diversity at the Yearly Kos conference which has just ended in Chicago. I wasn't able to make the conference this year, but the absence of one snake goddess is not what Vargas bemoans:

It's Sunday, day 4 of Yearly Kos, the major conference for progressive bloggers, and Gina Cooper, the confab's organizer-in-chief, surveys the ballroom of the massive McCormick Place Convention Center. A few hundred remaining conventioneers are having brunch, dining on eggs, bagels and sausage.

Seven of the eight Democratic presidential candidates have paid their respects this weekend, and some 200 members of the credentialed press have filed their stories. A mere curiosity just two years ago, the progressive blogosphere has gone mainstream. But Cooper sees a problem.
"It's mostly white. More male than female," says the former high school math and science teacher turned activist. "It's not very diverse."

There goes the open secret of the netroots, or those who make up the community of the Internet grass-roots movement.

For all the talk about the increasing influence of this growing group -- "We are a community . . . a movement . . . an institution," Cooper said in a speech Saturday night -- what gets scant attention is its demography. While the Huffington Post and Fire Dog Lake, both founded by women, are two of the most widely read blogs, the rock stars are mostly men, and many women bloggers complain of sexism and harassment in the blogosphere.

Walking around McCormick Place during the weekend, it became clear that only a handful of the 1,500 conventioneers -- bloggers, policy experts, party activists -- are African American, Latino or Asian. Of about 100 scheduled panels and workshops, less than a half-dozen dealt directly with women or minority issues.

Sigh. Diversity. You know, I have never really liked that term. It was snuck in at some time in the eighties or nineties to make fairness more palatable to those who don't think there is anything unfair in the good-ole-boy networks. "Diversity" sounds like face paint to me, even though I know that it's not intended that way. And somehow it's a lot easier to ignore demands for diversity than it is to point out that white guys don't always bring up exactly the same issues as black guys or brown guys or gals of all colors or that a grass-root movement of nothing but white guys isn't exactly grass-root. That would be green guys, I guess.

That's not the only reason I'm sighing here. Some of you may have read me long enough to know that the "where are the women?" topic crops up all the time in the blogosphere and I'm tired of writing the same observations each time.

So instead of doing that, let me just summarize: Those who see no problems argue that nobody on the Internet knows if you are a dog (just don't call yourself Spotty), that the system is gender-blind and color-blind and the result therefore either optimal or at least not amenable to any easy change. Those who see problems argue that "birds of a feather fly together", that guy bloggers link to guy bloggers, that certain topics are viewed as important and others as "identity politics" and divisive, and that institutional support is most likely to accrue to those whose views are seen as not being all about "identity politics." Yet for most practical purposes the lives of women and minorities might evolve around the very topics which are labeled as divisive.

Sigh, one more time. What is the solution, then, for increasing diversity at conferences such as the Yearly Kos? Note that the diversity of bloggers themselves is much greater, it seems to me, and even if it is not a real rainbow of views and individuals it is slowly turning towards that direction. The real question the article poses for me is how to get the money and support for all the different types of bloggers to attend these conferences and how to get them on the panels, too. Once there, the bloggers can speak for themselves. This problem seems quite amenable to a financial solution and some logical outreach efforts, don't you think?

Today's Deep Thought

From a piece by Robert Dallek in the Washington Post:

Polls showing President Bush's approval ratings in the 20s and 30s and a New York Times survey last month reporting that people across the country are eager for an end to the current administration suggest that this nation has a problem it's going to have to live with for the next 17 months -- a failed presidency that won't reestablish its credibility with a national majority.

The political argument against Bush's continuing tenure is not frivolous. There are good reasons to see him as a failed president whose remaining time in office will be unproductive at best and destructive to the country's well-being at worst. But given the constitutional rules by which the presidency operates, there is no serious prospect of removing him from office.

Some Suggested Voices To Use When Reading Harry Potter Aloud.

Posted by olvlzl

Well, it’s done. I’ve read the entire series to by nieces, some of the books more than twice. If you should ever be in a position to have to read them aloud, and are living in North America without the right accents, here are a few ideas for voices that I’ve used.

Draco Malfoy: Byron York
Lucius Malfoy: Wm. F.Buckley
Snape: the late Jeanne Kirkpatrick
Prof. Lockheart: Steven Pinker
Hagrid: Onslow, you know, Hyacinth’s brother in law.
Prof. Umbridge: James Sensenbrenner
Uncle Vernon: who else, Rush Limbaugh. Though Tim Russert might do.
Petunia: Phyllis Schalfly
Dudley: Chris Matthews
Belatrix: Ann Coulter
Voldermort: George Gilder through a helium balloon.

What voices do you hear when you read them?

Diversity As A Disaster? This is something we need to start working on now.

Posted by olvlzl

In the Boston Globe’s Idea section today is an article about some seemingly disturbing and discouraging findings from extensive studies of cities with diverse and less diverse populations. The upshot is that the study done by Robert Putnam (author of “Bowling Alone”) shows that cities with greater diversity have less community involvement by individuals, more suspicion of their neighbors and even lower voting rates.

You just know that this study, done by a pretty solid liberal, is sweet to the ears of conservatives, from the near right to David Duke. Duke is already featuring the study on his website, to Putnam's distress. Before long it will be making its way into the writings of pop-social science writers and from there the call for , in effect, segregation will become mainstream in what passes as the liberal media from the NYT to The News Hour.

Some conservatives are snorting and huffing because Putnam thinks this is something that we should be looking at in terms of cause and remedy

"You're just supposed to tell your peers what you found," says John Leo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. "I don't expect academics to fret about these matters."

Conservatives apparently value civic well-being less than they do having the political issue of ethnic resentment and division. Are they are looking at how to use this study to promote the closed boarder policy that seems their great white hope in the coming election? I suspect that so. This is the "Southern strategy" with kid gloves.

Since we are a diverse country and every indication seems to show that we are going to become more so, a reputable study showing that:

"People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to 'hunker down' -- that is, to pull in like a turtle," (Putnam)

... is pretty alarming. Anyone interested in having a civil civic life should be looking for ways to promote social and community life across ethnic barriers.

Odd, in the article, that the role of TV as a possible factor in this situation isn’t mentioned. Considering Putnam’s most famous work to date, that seems doubly odd. The role of TV in setting the national attitudes about ethnicity, risk from diversity, the climate of danger and similar vectors that would certainly impinge on the habit of fearful cocooning is, I believe, more pervasive than education or personal experience. The image of non-whites on TV has certainly been studied and been found to promote negative stereotypes. The amount of time Americans watch and absorb the messages of TV has to make it one of the most influential teaching methods today. To ignore the role played by it, and, perhaps, to some extent, radio, in an article like this is a fatal flaw to understanding the full range of explanations.

TV is mentioned once but as the end of the problem, not a source of it:

"distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television."

People more interested in livable cities than promoting racial strife for political gain had better take the role of the mass media into account.

Perhaps it would be good to have some replication of Putnam’s study, though in a sample of the size he took it’s likely to be a long time coming. Until it is, possibly, discounted I’m afraid that the “disaster of diversity” is likely to be the predominant line in any discussion. The conservative-Republican bias of the media almost assures us it will remain in currency for many years to come. But anyone who is more interested in civic peace than in radio-talk show division will have to take seriously the need to pressure the electronic media to stop promoting racism through fear.

Irresponsible Corporate Media Makes Responsible Government Impossible

Posted by olvlzl

Note: I was going to write a followup to this piece in light of this weeks bridge disaster and the soon to be laid aside interest in bridge inspection and repair. However, that wasn't possible. The reason the matter, clearly a matter of saving lives this week, will be laid aside is due to the collusion of conservative politicians and the media which supports them. It is the "tax and spend" chanters who have brought us to this. While it is profitable for their campaign supporters to build an enormous and complex infrastructure, it costs money to do do it right in the first place and to maintain and eventually replace a superannuated structure. That's when the howls of the right wing begin and responsible voices are silenced.

The Boston Globe had a column by David Luberoff last year which clearly explains the origins of the emerging Big Dig disaster. He points out that the project, originally funded through the federal highway system, lost a lot of its federal support half-way through. Instead of facing that reality, the politicians in Massachusetts didn't make up the difference with state and local taxes and tolls. One of the truest things in life is that while you often don't get what you pay for, you never get what you don't pay for. You know that's true when you are dealing with a large corporation like Bechtel with armies of bean counters making sure that they get maximum profits from their projects.

What went wrong in the face of warnings by people who knew what they were talking about - Massachusetts has probably the highest percentage of those on the continent- is just beginning to be studied. While they are looking at that I hope someone will look into the more general political atmosphere that led to the bad decisions. I don't only mean the steady stream of Republican governors during most of the Big Dig.

Given their refusal to monitor themselves for accuracy and responsibility, we won't get the media's role in promoting gross irresponsibility in politicians. At least not from them. But it really does largely fall on the media. Through call-in shows, wise-guy on-air personalities, connected owners and those who have created today's media sewer, anyone who steps up and tells the truth, "You want this done, you are going to have to pay for it," gets their head handed to them. They make lying and dereliction of duty requirements for retaining a political office or civil service job. Reporting with enough time or column space to really explain an issue costs more while the truths uncovered are insufficiently entertaining to maximize profits. And some of those truths might be most unwelcome at the club.

The Republican Party, who used to pride themselves on responsibility, now specialize in this kind of winning through lying. With the media fully in support they tell lies designed to win elections. Most people have a weakness for believing what they want to hear. The busy public, without the technical knowledge or time to look at the details buys the lies until reality strikes and they can't ignore it any longer. How else do you think Bush I lost to Bill Clinton despite the insane press adulation following Bush War I and the war they waged against Clinton as soon as it was clear he had a chance to win?

But if you want good government, safe and effective civil engineering projects, the rest of the benefits that only government can deliver, then we can't wait for the disaster to deliver the real news. The cost in lives, time and remedial action are multiplied many times by the lies and propaganda spread by the media.

The often repeated line, "Good, fast or cheap. Pick two." sums up the current political climate that this irresponsibility has produced. But as the Big Dig is beginning to prove, good is the only way to get faster and cheaper. Maybe the same applies to news media getting it right. But getting it right isn't what today's profit-driven and cynically self-interested media is all about.

The Globe had an article in which Michael Dukakis defends his administration's role in the Big Dig. Having read about the project from its beginning, he makes a good case. But Dukakis is just a boring detail guy the press rejected two decades ago.

On the Duggars

I happened to come across a piece which celebrates the birth of the seventeenth child into the Duggars family. Now, the number of children this family wants to have may be their own business (though that could be debated from an environmental angle, say, and also if they cannot afford to feed all of those children), but the announcement made me think how differently the choice to have lots of children is viewed from the choice to have a few children and work outside the home.

The latter choice is viewed as wrong by a sizeable number of Americans, though naturally only in the case of mothers who are employed. Fathers are quite free to be employed, never mind how many children they have. But mothers who have jobs outside the home are suspected of child neglect or even worse. Yet having seventeen children is not treated in a similar manner. But think about it: How could Michelle Duggars possibly spend the amount of attention on each and every one of them that many of those motherhood experts specify? (Jim Bob, the father is obviously not expected to spend time with the children.)

My guess is that it is the older siblings who pretty much bring up the younger ones. This may not be bad, but surely it would be regarded as horrible if it was a consequence of the mother having a job and therefore delegating child-minding to someone else.

Or think about how this case is viewed in comparison, say, to all those stories about welfare queens who have more children supposedly only because it gives them more money. The Duggars are not criticized for having more children than they can afford to support properly.

What is the difference in these kinds of comparisons? The Duggars tell a story which both shocks us (seventeen children!) and also supports very old patriarchal norms about what a good mother is. She stays at home and has lots of children, basically. That this might not be good for the children is ignored, because the other myth is more powerful.

Friday Cat Blogging

This is fourlegs' Maddie. Fourlegs takes great kitten pictures.

What is the point of sudden photographs of animals on political blogs? I think they are an important change of pace and a reminder to be in touch with all things which fundamentally matter: the trees, the animals the rocks, the rain, the sun. We are animals ourselves, whatever the wingnuts wish for, and we need to stay grounded. Besides, the pictures are calming and cheering and often funny. And a way to signal that the weekend is coming.

Speaking about the weekend, this weekend I'm going to post a couple of things sent in by some of you lovely and talented readers. If there is interest in doing more of these kinds of posts we may continue doing it during the times when I need to participate in such divine acts as sleep.

The Yearly Kos

I'm not in attendance at that conference, myself, and if you are not there, either, you can follow several of the events electronically (though right now they are off the air). I've heard that there are even events in the Second Life game. Or you can read what bloggers such as Atrios or the people at TAPPED say about the conference speeches and events. Or of course go to the Daily Kos and follow links from there.

On Minimum Wage and Kama Sutra Chocolates

I have written a longer piece on how the recent federal raise was passed. I meant to write a piece on the theories behind the minimum wage but my dog got sick and making economic theory into luscious tidbits of sheer funniness took more than I had to give.

If you are not too keen on that topic, how about chocolates shaped like acts of love? Trish Wilson shows you a picture of one. I think these could turn out to be very popular.

Preventing Disasters

The Minnesota bridge collapse may have absolutely nothing to do with the topic of this post but it made me think again about the particular problems the political system creates in attempts to prevent similar disasters. For example, consider an elected politician who notices that the area's infrastructure is in poor shape and who works to repair it. These repairs require higher taxes, let's say. Suppose that the roads and bridges are then all fixed and new elections come around.

What do you think this politician's competition will run on? Probably on how the government has been spending too much and taxing too high, and how it is time for a lean-and-mean new government (which, of course, doesn't need to fix the infrastructure now, either). And these arguments might very well win the day.

Now suppose the initial politician in my story had instead neglected the infrastructure problems until some major accident occurred in which people died. Suppose that only then would this person rise up and start fixing bridges and roads everywhere, while also turning up at every patriotic rally. All this patching up could cost more than a thorough maintenance program might have cost. But the politician is now a hero, and in a much better position to get re-elected.

When is a leader a good leader? The first type appears preferable on logical grounds, but the second one is more likely to be viewed as a good leader. Yet people had to die for change to come about. Well, in my story at least.
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Cross-posted on TAPPED.

Off Tune

President Bush was not the great communicator today when addressing the Minnesota bridge collapse:

THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. I just finished a Cabinet meeting. One of the things we discussed was the terrible situation there in Minneapolis. We talked about the fact that the bridge collapsed, and that we in the federal government must respond and respond robustly to help the people there not only recover, but to make sure that lifeline of activity, that bridge, gets rebuilt as quickly as possible.

To that end, Secretary Peters is in Minneapolis, as well as Federal Highway Administrator Capka. I spoke to Governor Pawlenty and Mayor Rybak this morning. I told them that the Secretary would be there. I told them we would help with rescue efforts, but I also told them how much we are in prayer for those who suffered. And I thank my fellow citizens for holding up those who are suffering right now in prayer.

We also talked about -- in the Cabinet meeting talked about the status of important pieces of legislation before the Congress. We spent a fair amount of time talking about the fact that how disappointed we are that Congress hasn't sent any spending bills to my desk. By the end of this week, members are going to be leaving for their month-long August recess. And by the time they will return, there will be less than a month before the end of the fiscal year on September the 30th, and yet they haven't passed one of the 12 spending bills that they're required to pass. If Congress doesn't pass the spending bills by the end of the fiscal year, Cabinet Secretaries report that their departments may be unable to move forward with urgent priorities for our country.

This doesn't have to be this way. The Democrats won last year's election fair and square, and now they control the calendar for bringing up bills in Congress. They need to pass each of these spending bills individually, on time, and in a fiscally responsible way.

The first two paragraphs were tagged on and the transition is very bumpy.
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Via Best of Both Worlds.

Just Say No

President Bush is planning to do lots of vetoing in the near future. He has threatened to veto the long-awaited legislation to shore up hurricane protection along the Gulf coast. And he has threatened to veto the Lilly Ledbetter legislation which would extend the time frame for employees to sue a firm on the basis of wage discrimination. And he has also threatened to veto legislation to broaden the State Children's Health Insurance Program so that it would cover the health insurance needs of more children. So it goes.


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Cross-posted on Eschaton

Some YouTube Fun

It's not really the Republican presidential candidates talking about their stance on abortion but it could be.

Meanwhile, in Ohio

The patriarchs of the far right have proposed a bill which would make it compulsory for the "father of the fetus" (should be embryo) to give permission for a woman's abortion. If he doesn't give permission she can't have an abortion. The only cases where a woman is left in complete authority over her own body are when the pregnancy was caused by rape or incest, as documented by the police (or by DNA test in the case of incest) and when the woman's health or life is at risk.

What is the point of this proposed bill? It is obviously an anti-abortion bill and perhaps a fathers' right bill, too. But it doesn't work for many fathers' rights people who actually would like to see the reverse put into a bill, i.e., a requirement that a woman can't give birth without the prospective father's approval. That has to do with child maintenance payments.

I got the link through feministing.com and the discussion there has veered to a debate over the rights of men not to become fathers. This bill is all about the right of men to become fathers even if it means that the woman is forced into motherhood. A different thing altogether. I have written about this dilemma earlier, and in general I think neither men nor women have the "right" to become parents (because such a "right" would ultimately imply forcing someone else to be the other parent), but that both women and men should have the right not to become parents.

What complicates that argument in a way which makes full equality tricky is that pregnancy takes place in the woman's body. If we had fetal incubators I'd be happy to argue that both the woman who gave her egg and the man who gave his sperm should have equal rights to decide on the pregnancy. But as long as the pregnancy takes place in the woman's body it is she who should have the final say on whether to continue it or not. This does mean that a man doesn't have the same rights to decide on the termination or the continuance of a pregnancy as a woman does. Until those fetal incubators step out of the science-fiction novels we need better contraceptives for men and better education for boys so that they understand the inherent risks in every act of intercourse. Girls are taught that fairly well in many families, though not all.

On Engagement Rings and Loans For Weddings

How much should an engagement ring cost? Three times the man's monthly salary? Ten times? What is the reason behind a very expensive engagement ring? Why not put a down payment on a house instead?

I have been looking at the way the wedding industry has changed this one rite-of-passage into something that costs more than your average university education, and even quite poor families are expected to come up with that sort of money. And the work that goes into the planning! At least a year's worth of invitation cards and guest presents and arguments about the bridesmaids' dresses!

Ok. I'm a curmudgeony and non-romantic goddess, probably. But I think this whole wedding bidness has gone haywire. Do your parents really have to use their retirement savings for your wedding to prove that they love you? Because that is what I have seen happen in some families. The wedding fever looks like a disease: previously quite sane women suddenly demand ten wedding showers, with the same aluminum pots appearing as presents in each of them. They also demand a set of twelve little engraved glass dishes for the sugared almonds that they will never serve later on. And the cost of those wedding dresses! A family of four could camp for a year with the price.

Oh my, how sourpuss that all sounds. Let's try something more understanding. There is a romance in a lovely wedding, and for many this is the one time when women can star in a major role. It's also fun to have big bash to celebrate the love and the promise to stay together, and perhaps an expensive engagement ring does signal love very well, given that to buy it the man must abstain from other forms of consumption. A trial of the will, in some ways, but I still think it is a cruel custom, on the whole. And yes, you could put a down payment on a house with the cost of the average wedding in this country.

Does the wedding fever have something to do with the pretty high likelihood that the marriage will end in a divorce? Is it like a form of magic which should make the ties bind for good? I'm not sure. I have a feeling that I miss on some fundamental appeal of the expensive wedding. If so, I'm sure that you will let me know in the comments.

Many of the current wedding customs are traces of the old ones, of course. The shower gifts, for instance, used to consist of various household linens that the friends of the bride made for her, because she would have no time for that later on, what with the children and the cows and the sheep and all the other chores of a farm wife. Likewise, the gifts at the wedding were to equip the young couple for their future lives together. Maybe some of them were a type of dowry, something to give the bride who would from the wedding day onwards work for room and board in the groom's family. It was the wealth that she was bringing in.

Weddings have also always been a way of advertising wealth, and this is probably one of the reasons for the current lavish weddings. Nothing wrong with that, for those who can easily afford such weddings, but there is real hardship for those parents who don't actually have the money.

What is the feminist angle to the booming wedding industry? Is there one? Well, many of the old traditions are based on patriarchal norms. Even the assumption that it is the bride's parents who pay for everything has its roots in the kind of world where a very young girl is married off from her parents' house. She has had no time to accumulate money herself, and her work in the future will accrue value to the groom and his family. It would make sense, then, for her parents to equip her as best they can.

But this custom looks odd when the bride is, say, thirty, and has been working for years and when the parents are nearing their own retirement and have already paid for her college education. Even the custom of the groom buying the wedding ring looks a little odd, given the current society. Of course old customs can be nice and quaint, but some of them do look a little silly to me.

It isn't really the hullabaloo around a wedding that I'm criticizing here, but the idea that the value of wedding is directly related to how much it costs. Love need not be all about money.

And Even More on Ledbetter

The bill passed in the House. Next is Senate. And then Bush will veto it, because women, minorities, the disabled and so on do not deserve equal treatment in the labor markets.

Laura Ingraham Gets Media Attention

Via Atrios, I learn that:

Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham revealed on her nationally syndicated radio program that CNN has offered her a one-week guest-host gig for the 8pm ET slot.

Laura Ingraham has the honor of writing the worst book I've ever read. It's about Hillary Clinton, and there is a chapter on New Age spirituality which starts by Ingraham saying that if Clinton was a New Age spiritualist this is what would be wrong with it and then just goes on pretending that Clinton is one. The whole books is like that. I couldn't believe my snake-eyes, but then it was all quite cheering, because it can't be too hard to get into print in this country. So there's hope for me and my book about cannibal neocons on a weird planet. Isn't there?

Bill O'Reilly's Wars

He is a weird one, even for a wingnut pundit. His most recent venture is to "destroy" the Daily Kos website by urging firms not to support the Yearly Kos conference and by sending stern letters to Democratic politicians who plan to participate in the Yearly Kos. You must admit that this is an odd thing for someone who runs a television show to do. He sounds a little obsessive-compulsive to me.

O'Reilly has accused the Daily Kos of being a hate site and really left wing. I wonder what O'Reilly would do should he ever meet a real live communist? There are not many of those in this country, and much of what goes under the title of "the left" here would be regarded as moderately conservative in most European countries. Maybe this is why I find O'Reilly's campaign a little hilarious.

Another reason for that is the very tame nature of most commentary on Daily Kos. Most Kossacks sound to me like movement Democrats, and there's a fairly large handful of somewhat conservative people there, too. Not to mention anti-feminists and also the usual number of crazy trolls. Sure, something stupid can certainly be found on a website that gets like a zillion visits a week. But O'Reilly's own website gives a good share of hateful comments, too.

And More on Ledbetter

The bill will be voted on tonight. What bill? The one trying to correct the Ledbetter case which this conservative Supreme Court decided to mean that nobody can sue for wage discrimination after a few short months. From an e-mail from ACLU:

H.R. 2831 would fix the Supreme Court's decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, in which they ruled that workers have only 180 days from the initial discriminatory pay decision to file a wage discrimination claim. This bill, 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 a pay decision, but that each paycheck represents a continuing violation by the employer.

You could call your representatives to shore up support for the bill. Though Bush has already promised to veto it. Because W stands for women?

The Dangers of Opinionating

Are there any? I'm thinking of the concrete dangers here, such as becoming disrespected as an authority if you get something badly wrong. Or losing your well-paying perch at some major news organization because you were talking out of your ass. Or at least not getting invited back to the O'Reilly Show or Hardball because you got your facts wrong. Do such frightening consequences exist?

I doubt it. The blogger Culture of Truth posted some pundit quotes about the Iraq war last night on Eschaton threads, and I looked for some more, to see what happens to people who get something very, very wrong. My conclusion is that they get rewarded for it.

FAIR has a long list of quotes which should make the people who made them blush a little, at a minimum. For instance, here is Christopher Hitchens in 2003 on the idea of invading Iraq:

"This will be no war -- there will be a fairly brief and ruthless military intervention.... The president will give an order. [The attack] will be rapid, accurate and dazzling.... It will be greeted by the majority of the Iraqi people as an emancipation. And I say, bring it on."

And here is David Carr in the New York Times also in 2003:

"This has been a tough war for commentators on the American left. To hope for defeat meant cheering for Saddam Hussein. To hope for victory meant cheering for President Bush. The toppling of Mr. Hussein, or at least a statue of him, has made their arguments even harder to defend. Liberal writers for ideologically driven magazines like The Nation and for less overtly political ones like The New Yorker did not predict a defeat, but the terrible consequences many warned of have not happened. Now liberal commentators must address the victory at hand and confront an ascendant conservative juggernaut that asserts United States might can set the world right."

I'm imagining all the statements we ever make dangling behind us on long strings ending in little cartoonish thought bubbles. As we move along the path of life some bubbles get loose and float off like balloons, never to be seen again, but other bubbles stick to us as if glued. To us ordinary folks, at least.

But I think pundits own Magic Scissors which they use to cut off those threads so that nothing they ever said in the past really matters for their present credibility. That's the joy of punditry, really: It's all about being outrageously original, and this is a bit easier if you can be outrageously wrong at the same time.

On Ledbetter

Remember that case in the Supreme Court? The one where they decided that you only have a few months to sue for wage discrimination? The House is debating a bill to make the period during which you can sue longer. Will see what the Republicans do with that. Vote should be tonight.

Back in the U.S...., Back in the U.S...., Back in the U.S.S.R.

That is about all I have to say on this bit of news:

A surgeon general's report in 2006 that called on Americans to help tackle global health problems has been kept from the public by a Bush political appointee without any background or expertise in medicine or public health, chiefly because the report did not promote the administration's policy accomplishments, according to current and former public health officials.

The report described the link between poverty and poor health, urged the U.S. government to help combat widespread diseases as a key aim of its foreign policy, and called on corporations to help improve health conditions in the countries where they operate. A copy of the report was obtained by The Washington Post.

Three people directly involved in its preparation said its publication was blocked by William R. Steiger, a specialist in education and a scholar of Latin American history whose family has long ties to President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Since 2001, Steiger has run the Office of Global Health Affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services.

Well, I do have a little bit more to say about this. One important role for the government is the provision of accurate, helpful information of the kinds that the market has no incentive to produce. Even conservative scholars agree on this role. But the Bush administration does not.

A Garden Story

Bleeding Hearts

The white form of dicentra spectabilis, the common bleeding heart, is a lesson in pure elegance. It grows happily in quite deep shade which it relieves with the fresh green of its filigreed leaves and the heart-shaped ivory pendants of its inflorescences. Combined with hostas and pulmonarias, it offers just the right touch of lightness, like the finely wrought lace on the otherwise stern dress of an Elizabethan gentleman.

Gardeners love the bleeding heart for its kind-natured temperament. It is easy to grow (although the white form somewhat less so than its pink sibling), starts flowering early enough to be used with tulips in the same colors for an unbeatable combination, yet continues, at least in northern gardens, for several more weeks after the tulips have packed it in. Its only character flaw is its penchant for early dormancy. In my garden it goes underground by the end of July, leaving its absence as notable as its presence was earlier.

This can be avoided by choosing some other form of dicentra, such as dicentra eximia. But the romantic in me prefers the common bleeding heart. The Finns call it the broken heart, and this is how I always think of the plant; a sufferer from unrequited love, true, but one which valiantly tries to go on, producing love offering after love offering in the shape of small hearts for all to admire. Yet each and every one of them emerges broken.

At last it simply can't tolerate this any longer. Like so many unhappy young lovers in books, plays and operas, it chooses an early death over a loveless existence.

So sad, don't you think? But also so right, somehow, if we wish our gardens to reflect all life, not just its happy hours.