On Larry Craig

This was not a topic I planned to address. The problems with discussing politicians' private lives are many, and those private lives are largely none of our business. I said "largely" which means that there are some exceptions. The ones I view as valid is when the politicians engage in illegal activities, especially if those activities intertwine with their jobs as politicians, and the cases where a politician's private choices directly clash with his or her stated political ideals or opinions. The latter incongruence is useful to analyze because it gives us more information on how truthfully the stated political beliefs are held, for instance.

Now, the Larry Craig case (a conservative, "pro-family", anti-gay Senator apparently caught soliticing for gay sex in a public toilet) does fit those exceptions, assuming that what Craig did was illegal. So does the earlier case of Senator Vitter (Louisiana, married) admitting to using prostitutes, a crime in the jurisdiction he was at the time of the events. Senator Vitter also promoted "pro-life" policies, such as abstinence and marital fidelity, yet his own life choices revealed the difficulty of walking his own talk.

Given that the Craig case fits my exceptions rule, why was I not going to write about it? Because it is being used for gay bashing, mostly.

But now Republicans are trying to make him go away altogether, to appeal to the homophobic part of their base. Note that his resignation is called for by conservatives who found no need to call for the resignation of Senator Vitter. That the Vitter case was about heterosexual sex (with no dead girls) and the Craig case is about homosexual sex may be one cause for the different treatment. But a more important one is the fact that Craig would be replaced by another Republican Senator, whereas Vitter's state has a Democratic governor who might nominate a Democrat to take his seat.

So I got annoyed by the political exploitation and decided finally to jump in and join the fray. Heh. In any case, the focus on the discussions on Craig I've followed have been on predatory behavior in public toilets. This, in turn, is associated with homosexuality. Senator Vitter's case is somehow less serious because he contacted for the "massage services" by phone.

Perhaps. But predatory behavior is something many women have experience with and not only in same-sex contexts. Come to think of it, mostly not in same-sex contexts. That's why the toilets are traditionally the place one uses to escape too ardent propositioners.

Still, is it really true that openly gay men would regard public restrooms as the place to find sexual partners? I'm not sure, but I suspect that this behavior has much to do with being in the closet and therefore being unable to go to the places where sexual partners are usually found. If I'm correct in this, then what happened to Larry Craig is partly a consequence of the policies that his party pursues, policies which try to keep gays in closets and ashamed of their sexuality.
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This post has no links because I'm very lazy today and because I have a niggling headache which gets stronger whenever I think of doing some research.

Talking the Surge

One of my major handicaps in writing about politics is that I get into screaming hair-tearing fits when people go on and on about itty bitty details to discuss whether the surge is working, and not only minor details but details which have pretty much nothing to do with the question whether the surge can ever work or not.

Why? Because a) the people in power refuse to give us a practical and precise definition of what "surge is working" would actually mean. The definition flows like melting ice-cream. And because b) we have no way of judging who has the correct information that is needed to answer the question or even if anyone has it. All we have are various bits of propaganda, really. And finally, c) because it is not kosher to discuss the possible motives Bush might have in this case or the motives the poor generals might have to now refuse to take the blame if the surge doesn't work, after all.

Kabuki theater. There are probably very good reasons to engage in it but my nerves are wired all wrong for that.

Remembering Katrina

Two years later, and we have still not helped those who were hurt by a storm. New Orleans is a travesty of what it once was, and the Bush administration is not blamed for the disappearance of an American landmark, not to mention the deaths and dislocations of so many. Where is the famous conservative patriotism when it is needed?

An Unborn Child Found In A Sewer

This news story is a very odd one. I have bolded the bits that are attention-worthy:

Police are searching for the mother of a small fetus found by utility workers at a sewage pump station Monday in Morgantown, W.Va.

The fetus will be sent to the state medical examiner's office in Charleston for an autopsy to determine race, sex and age.

Morgantown police said a worker whose job it is to check screens at the pump station found the fetus during his daily routine Monday morning.

The fetus was so small that police don't yet know if a crime was committed or if the mother had a miscarriage.

...

It's likely the fetus was flushed down a toilet, Green said.

Authorities were trying to locate the mother of the unborn child to learn what happened.

The story doesn't tell us the actual size of the fetus, only that it was bigger than three-quarters of an inch and therefore stopped by the screens.

But note the language of the story. I couldn't stop thinking how in some future dystopia all women must prove monthly that they are not pregnant, and when something of this sort happens there will probably be pelvic examinations for all women who were found pregnant in the previous month.
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Link via halfdan on Eschaton threads.

The Paradoxes of Women and Sexuality

It's a very odd thing: On the one hand it is women who are traditionally expected to gate-keep (heterosexual) sex. On the other hand, it is women who are regulated and controlled and managed in the field of sex. It's as if women own sex but someone else owns women and tells them how to deliver it or not to deliver it.

Men are argued to have a stronger sexual instinct, an instinct that somehow cannot be controlled or managed by men on their own, an instinct which instead causes large markets to crop up to further incite desire and lust. Women are argued not to be that keen on sex, but still most societies traditionally make rules about how to limit women from having sex and how to ostracize and otherwise punish "loose" women. Women are both devilishly sexual and insatiable, what with all those multiple orgasms, and almost totally without sexual interests. A round-heeled woman is - well - round-heeled. A round-heeled man is a stud, an object of envy.

That is the first paradox, though perhaps a paradox only if we start from the assumption of no power imbalance between the sexes. The second paradox concerns the private-public definition of sex. Traditionally the women who have public sex have been separated from the women who have private sex. The former are hookers, whores, sluts, prostitutes or sex-workers, depending on the level of sophistication one wants to assume. The latter are ideally first virgins and then wives. In the private sector, a woman's sex is the property of one man. In the public sector,traditionally, a woman's sex is the property of all men, even if she is also managed by a pimp.

In a similar vein, women's naked bodies are viewed as either public or private property, to be revealed indiscriminately or to be hidden completely. Thus we get female newsreaders who are expected to show legs and breasts while reading news and thus we also get countries where nothing of women's bodies except the face can be shown on television. Often the paradoxes of private vs. public sex and the private vs. public ownership of women's bodies get confused with each other, and then we get those cross-cultural cases where some men from the Middle East think that all Western women are whores, say. But note that there is no real confusion about who is supposed to own the women's bodies or their sexuality in either case. At least when viewed traditionally and without feminist understanding.

The third paradox is linked to the first paradox I described but slightly different. It is the answer to the question: "Who is responsible for sex?" The traditional answer is almost always: "Women". Even when the woman in question has no real power to influence the events. This may be one reason why the victims of rape often feel so much guilt, wonder so incessantly about what they could have done differently, feel partly to blame even if they are not.

The radical clerics of this world want to control sexuality. And the way they want to control it is by forcing "modesty" on women. The way women dress is regarded as responsible for the way men might react. The burden of managing sexuality is put on women's shoulders. Hence it is women who become the guilty parties when sex escapes the role the society has limited it to.

The idea that women are responsible for men's sexuality is not just common among many Islamic mullahs but also among American fundamentalists. A recent "Modesty Survey" posted on an American website tells Christian ladies that they shouldn't wear sleeveless tops, fix their bra straps in public, wear bathing suits and so on. All this to "help their brothers in Christ to control lust".

The focus on women's modesty is the other side of the coin from the focus on women's immodesty. Both are desirable, actually, but in different places and by different women. This is where the whore vs. Madonna mythology is so handy. Women can be either bad women, available for sexual consumption by all and sundry, or good women, essentially asexual and bent on nothing but motherhood. That way sex is available when men want it but men can also have their own private property for procreation. But note that a "whore" can never say no and a "Madonna" surely is powerful enough to be responsible for all sexuality. It's a win-win for the patriarchy.

Machiavellian Thoughts On Rove's Departure

(This is a post I didn't put up when it was current. It's nice to be ornery)

Several recent opinion columns about Karl Rove's departure from the Bush administration have compared him to Niccolò Machiavelli, the author of The Prince, a sixteenth century how-to book about ruthless political leadership. These quips most likely play on the assertion that Rove was the architect of Bush's rise to power. They also describe some of the near-mythical qualities some attribute to Rove as a secret master-mind working coldly and quietly behind the scenes.

Whatever the truth of that matter might be, it is interesting that the ruthless leader Machiavelli most admired, Cesare Borgia, did not fare well in actual life. He began promisingly enough to be thought of as the model of Machiavelli's Prince:

Cesare also seized (1502) Piombino, Elba, Camerino, and the duchy of Urbino, and he crowned his achievements by artfully luring his chief enemies to the castle of Senigallia, where he had some of them strangled. By killing his enemies, packing the college of cardinals, pushing his conquests as fast as possible, and buying the loyalty of the Roman gentry, he had hoped to make his position independent of the papacy, or at least to insure that the election of any future pope would be to his liking.

But the end of his life was nowhere nearly as successful:

Cesare was struck in 1503 by the same poison (or illness) that suddenly killed his father. Cesare recovered; however, his political power had suffered a fatal blow. Pius III, after a short reign, was succeeded by Julius II, an implacable enemy of Cesare Borgia. Louis XII then turned against him. Julius demanded the immediate return of what territory remained to Cesare and had him temporarily arrested. Returning to Naples, Cesare was soon arrested by the Spanish governor there as the result of collusion between Julius II and the Spanish rulers, Ferdinand and Isabella. Sent to prison in Spain, he escaped and finally found refuge (1506) at the court of the king of Navarre. He died fighting for him at Viana.

Cesare Borgia was all of thirty-one years old at his death in 1507. His was not the long and powerful rule that Machiavelli's writings suggest the imaginary Prince would gain from the strategies his book proposes. There is a lesson to be learned from that.

SAT Scores Down

The horror! I woke up to the news that the SAT scores this year are the lowest since 1999! What is happening here?

The simplest answer is that more students are taking the test. Given its intended objective: to predict college performance in the first few years, those who have traditionally taken the test have been the ones most likely to plan to go to college. When the pool of test-takers increases for various reasons a larger percentage of them will consist of those who have not done that well at school and are likely to score lower.

The SAT tests have always been controversial. For instance, they predict college performance better for some ethnic groups than others and the way the questions have been framed or adjusted over time has been argued to favor certain social classes or one of the genders. Given this background, it is interesting that the new writing section in the SAT is called controversial because it increases the length of the test and causes more student fatigue. It also happens to be the one part of the tests which showed a significant difference in favor of female test-takers in 2006, the first year the test was included.
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Cross-posted at TAPPED.

Gray Mugging

Is there a gray area in muggings, an area where a mugging isn't really a mugging? Perhaps someone offered to lend you that diamond ring but then withdrew the offer so you took it anyway, using your fists in the process? Or perhaps the victim went out decked with stuff like a Christmas tree. Mugging someone like that is almost understandable. Let's just call it gray mugging.

This is all in relation to a recent Cosmopolitan magazine article about something called gray rape. Or rather, in relation to a post about the article. Some snippets from that post:

True story that I wrote in three minutes because that's exactly how much time I felt like dwelling on it: this one time about nine years ago I got locked out of my house and went home with some vaguely smarmy hair-product using type from my ex-boyfriend's frat. I had slept with maybe two or three guys prior to that -- it was the summer between sophomore and junior year of college -- so when he, after about a half hour of fooling around, put on a condom I was like, "Whooooah, what are you doing?" But I'd had two forties and I kept drifting in and out of consciousness -- my tolerance, obviously, wasn't what it is today -- and I woke up to find him sticking it in. I'd said 'no' a bunch of times and when I came to I just froze, stopped, turned over and slept. In the morning I chewed him out (by informing him I wasn't putting him on "my list" -- oh no she didn't!) and after that he kissed my ass so liberally I thought he might have learned from it.

But then in Israel I saw this other girl who used to hook up with him and she assured me he remains a douchebag, only now one that practices medicine in New York. Anyway, I sure hope he saves some lives, and I remember that sexual experience a little more vividly than most of the consensual sexual experiences I've undergone in a similar state of intoxication, but neither sentiment makes it RAPE, does it? It's something, "date rape" I guess, but it's not rape unless I say it was, right?

I feel terrible about discussing this, to be quite honest, because I think the post reveals something quite private. But it is the part about the man "remaining a douchebag" which made me decide to address the "gray rape" issue (also discussed very well by Shakes and by Ann at feministing.com). Because my interpretation of that sentence is that this man has continued raping women ever afterwards. Except that what he does is not seen as rape, as long as the victim is just too drunk to resist. Just douchebaggery.

There is no such thing as "gray rape". There are aggravating and extenuating circumstances to crimes, sure, and some rapes are more heinous than others. Some people who are raped are not as damaged by the rape as others are, also true. But rape, by definition, is nonconsensual sex of the penetrating kind. And someone unconscious or asleep cannot consent. It doesn't matter if the rapist is known to you. It doesn't matter that you don't feel harmed by the rape. It's still rape.

This whole discussion about "gray rape" sounds to me like an attempt to return to the era where a woman had to be pretty much killed to prove that she had been raped. Judges used to argue that the rapist's body must show violent marks from the raped person's resistance, for example. Otherwise it was just "bad sex". Of course fighting back may not be such a good idea when someone holds a knife on your throat, say.

Do we really want to go back to those times?

Some Reading

I have written a couple of geekier posts for the TAPPED blog. But the real reason I'm adding this post is to remind you to read Phila's Friday Hope Blogging regularly. It's an important antidote to the teeth-gritting, misery and moaning which is the style of so much political blogging. Our psychological health requires balance, so a dose of Phila at least once a week and some time with children, lovers, animals and nature is absolutely necessary.

And real books, of course. I'm not sure if I would still be alive without books. You can tell us what you are reading and which books have saved your life in the comments below. Also, which books are really funny, because laughter is one of those things we need, too. My humor reading has recently consisted of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, but things always change in that field.

What Are Political Blogs For?

Atrios has some ideas about this today:

One problem that the "netroots," whatever that is, has is that there's tendency by Democrats to see it as just another player in the interest group checklist politics game. So, sometimes "this will piss off the blogs" is a consideration, and a similar one to "this might piss of NARAL" or "this might piss off the Sierra Club." We're a noisy somewhat influential group to be placated somehow.

Now that's not how I see things as I think blogs should be seen more as an opportunity to influence media coverage and narratives, as well as helping to stitch together a broader-based political movement.

But it isn't very surprising the Democrats don't really understand how blogs work within the media, as they've long failed to understand how the media works generally. So it's difficult to communicate and explain the "good" the blogs can do when a lot of them just see us as a noisy sometimes-pain-in-the-ass. This isn't true of everyone in DC, of course, but one has to remember that of congressional staffers are often shockingly young and really can't be expected, no matter what their talents, to have a grip on all this stuff in a sophisticated way.

I agree that people who don't read blogs on a regular basis often have very weird ideas about what blogs are. This even includes some people in the traditional media, and many of the discussions on blogs I read there reveal more about the fear of blogs as a competitor for the financially troubled newspapers than about what blogs actually can do and can't do.

Blogs don't do actual reporting, or only in very few cases. Blogs can't replace a news office, or only in the very unlikely case that a blogger has independent sources of wealth. Blogs will not make newspapers obsolete, though the newspapers of the future will be on the Internet and most likely somewhat changed from their current form.

So what are political blogs for? To provide a conscience for mainstream journalists, sure. To be a whipping boy or girl when politicians need one, sure. To provide a way of creating mass movements or of nurturing them, sure. But to me the most important job of blogs is to turn silence into sound, to give those who are not listened to in the corridors of power some place to say what they want to say, to make the political conversations more inclusive and more thorough.

I only wish they had come up with some better name for these things than "blogs". It sounds like a hot potato in the back of your throat.

Good Night And Good Luck

I finally saw that movie, but I'm using the headline to refer to Alberto Gonzales's departure from the Department of Justice. I hope we now have better luck.

President Bush's reaction to the news shows very clearly that those who believe he simply hires friends are correct. George sees his pal Bertie as a totally innocent guy who was dragged to mud for political reasons.

Today's Deep Thoughts Picture

Yes, it's Barbie imitating me. Such a difficult knot of contradictory ideas. Heh.

Ladies, Start Your Vacuum Cleaners

(The picture doesn't really go but it was too funny not to include.)


This is the beginning of one popularization article about a health study. The study, which followed a large group of European women for six years, was about the effect of exercise on the prevention of endometrial cancer. It tried to include all forms of physical activity, not just what is usually regarded as exercise, but also activity at work and at home. This is how the results were summarized:

Premenopausal women who are very physically active --especially those who put in the most work around the house -- may be cutting their risk of developing cancer of the uterine lining.

Among 253,023 women followed for more than six years, those who had not yet reached menopause at the study's outset and were the most physically active were 34 percent less likely to develop endometrial cancer than their more sedentary peers. Three to four hours of household or recreational activity each day produced the greatest benefit.

"This amount and type of activity is achievable by many in the at-risk population," Dr. Christine Friedenreich of the Alberta Cancer Board in Calgary, Canada and her colleagues write in the International Journal of Cancer.

Three to four hours of household activity each day, achievable by many in the at-risk population????? Does Dr. Friedenreich plan to do that now herself? And what will she clean after the third day or so? I assume her children are all grown up, based on the picture of her I've seen.

The study itself may be perfectly fine. Or not. I have not read it, but the point it makes is a valid one: exercise and moving the body in general may prevent certain types of cancer. It suffers from the usual problem of these studies, which is that someone might do less exercise because of already suffering from early parts of the ailment or general ill health, and that the correlation one finds could be because of that and not because exercise has prevention benefits.

But the popularizations I have seen latch on to the household chores part of the study and never really let go. They also don't mention, on the whole, that post-menopausal women had no benefits from exercise at all. So you could pack your vacuum cleaner away when your periods stop, with no ill effects.

Why is any of this worth writing about, except for the discussion of the general benefits of exercise? Because Dr. Friedenreich's results are candy for the anti-feminists who think that women have a gene for vacuum-cleaning which men miss even though most machine genes are lodged inside the bulldog-shaped male heads (see post below). Now they can tell long-suffering women saddled with all household work on top of a paying job that it's for their own good.

The real difficulty is this: Any follow-up study of men and exercise will NOT find a beneficial effect from household chores simply because men don't do them to the tune of three or four hours of day. It's quite possible that this would benefit men, healthwise, but we will not establish it from a study looking at actual time use data. In that sense all these studies are deeply reactionary or at least non-feminist.

I found a column pointing out this, too. The writer notes:

Let's see. If I can leave the office at 5 today, I'll be home by 6 and I can do housework until 10! Oh, goody! I can't wait to get started. Do you think the boss might even let me leave early? I don't want those 250,000 European women in the study to beat me at this game. Ladies, start your vacuum cleaners!

There's just one problem. I hate housework. In fact, my entire philosophy of who should do housework can be summed up in one sentence: "There's a reason God invented teenage boys."

Just last night, I was lying on the couch reading when, in the midst of the leisurely act of turning the page, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a tumbleweed of dog hair roll gently by. "Somebody vacuum that up!" I yelled to my boys, and went back to reading.

Feel guilty? Who, me? Not a chance. I'm just trying to protect them from prostate cancer.

Mmm. Perhaps the writer doesn't have a husband around to protect from prostate cancer. But I have recently noticed these kinds of discussions once again avoiding any mention of the adult male partner in the household, as if women are afraid to make the point that actually needs to be made, which is that the household work is not hers alone by some divine obligation.

On Bulldog Snouts As Chick Magnets

Here's another absolutely hair-raisingly interesting popularization of yet another study, courtesy of Fox News:

Guys with bulldog-like faces have been chick magnets throughout human evolutionary history.

A recent study of the skulls of human ancestors and modern humans finds that women, and thereby evolution, selected for males with relatively short upper faces.

The region between the brow and the upper-lip is scrunched proportionately to the overall size of their heads.

Among the men who fit the bill: Will Smith and Brad Pitt.

Well, no. They did not FIND that women selected for males with relatively short upper faces. They just speculated that it might be so. If men indeed have relatively short upper faces now it may have a completely different explanation. Something to do with health, say.

Nobody now living was around to watch how those prehistoric chicks "selected for" men, assuming that they were allowed to make those choices themselves.

I'm really sick of this crap. Really sick. The most vomit-inducing sentence:

This facial development was also accompanied by a shrinking of guys' canine teeth, so men appeared less threatening to competitors, yet attractive to mates.

I'm trying to imagine all those prehistoric men with gigantic canines and loooong faces who never got any, while all those bulldog-faced teeny-teethed men had a long waiting line on their dance cards.

I'm Ba-a-ack!

Don't ask me how my vacation was, unless you'd like to order one just like that for your worst enemy.

Thank you, olvlzl, for serving the drinks and for sweeping the floors while I was doing whatever I was doing instead of having fun.

Plans for this weekend: See the post right below this one. More in a similar red vein will be forthcoming. A good knot of anger would be a terrible thing to waste.

Why Women See Red

Well, why this one does, after reading all the silly popularizations of a study which looked at the color preferences of men and women. This headline is fairly typical of the popularizations:

Girls prefer pink, or at least a redder shade of blue

I saw not a single headline based on another of the study's findings: that both sexes preferred blue over other colors, on average. Note that the "girls prefer pink" argument is usually brought to us in tandem with the "boys prefer blue" argument. But evidently that bit is not needed, just as long as we can say that women indeed prefer pink.

Now, who cares what colors people prefer? I don't actually, but I do care about the explanations for the findings:

"Although we expected to find sex differences, we were surprised at how robust they were, given the simplicity of our test," said Anya Hurlbert of Newcastle University, UK. In the test, young adult men and women were asked to select, as rapidly as possible, their preferred color from each of a series of paired, colored rectangles.

The universal favorite color for all people appears to be blue, they found. "On top of that, females have a preference for the red end of the red-green axis, and this shifts their color preference slightly away from blue towards red, which tends to make pinks and lilacs the most preferred colors in comparison with others," she said.

Overall, the differences between men and women were clear enough that the seasoned researchers can now usually predict the sex of a participant based on their favorite-color profile.

To begin to address whether sex differences in color preference depend more on biology or culture, the researchers tested a small group of Chinese people amongst the other 171 British Caucasian study participants. The results among the Chinese were similar, Hurlbert said, strengthening the idea that the sex differences might be biological. The explanation might go back to humans' hunter-gatherer days, when women—the primary gatherers--would have benefited from an ability to key in on ripe, red fruits.

"Evolution may have driven females to prefer reddish colors--reddish fruits, healthy, reddish faces," Hurlbert said. "Culture may exploit and compound this natural female preference."

So we introduce a small group of Chinese volunteers (37 of them, all of whom are immigrants to Britain, by the way) into the study. If these Chinese volunteers also show a similar gender difference then it must be due to biology, right? Well, as long as we won't bother checking what the cultural color biases in China might be, naturally. Then we get a graph like this one (from the actual study):





Notice the high points of the mountain shapes? That's where the average differences by gender are measured. Notice also how far away from each other the British men and women are and how close together the Chinese are. But then the Chinese have lived in Britain only between six months and three years.

And here comes the bit which made me not only see red but caused my jaw to freeze in the "cut-their-throats-position". It is this part: "Evolution may have driven females to prefer reddish colors--reddish fruits, healthy, reddish faces," Hurlbert said. "Culture may exploit and compound this natural female preference."

Now, this is pure speculation. We don't actually know if prehistoric women specialized in gathering fruit and vegetables, we just speculate so. Neither do we necessarily know what colors the edibles were that these hypothetical gatherers looked for.

Then there is the idea that only women would be attracted to reddish faces. What happened to all those theories about men looking for some young, healthy breeder-women with natural blush on their cheeks? Now they suddenly appear not to care about that but prefer sorta greenish shades in general.

Or reverse the explanation. If we use evolutionary stuff to explain women's color preferences, why not also use it to explain why men aren't that fond of reddish hues? What possible advantage would men gain from that? I'm sure that something could be invented here. For instance, men would not mind blood so much and wouldn't linger, after killing, to admire it, but would move faster to their next kill. Or ask yourselves why men might prefer greenish shades. Perhaps the ones who hid in the jungle because they liked it didn't get killed by those saber tooth tigers and so their sperm was passed on.

And finally there is the explanation offered for the universal preference for blue:

About the universal preference for blue, "I can only speculate," said Hurlbert. "I would favor evolutionary arguments again here. Going back to our 'savannah' days, we would have a natural preference for a clear blue sky, because it signaled good weather. Clear blue also signals a good water source."

Glad to see the word "speculate" used finally. But even this is quite silly. Why not use present-day explanations for the preference? People living today like clear blue because it's a way of knowing that the day will have good weather ahead.

What makes me angry about study popularizations like these is the extremely low standards the theories are held to. Some guesswork about some prehistoric times is quite adequate, thankyouverymuch. There's nothing in the popularizations about whether cultural explanations have in fact been eliminated in the results and nothing about alternative theories of why color preferences might have a biological basis (if they do). And the authors actually use Simon Baron-Cohen's term "the female brain", which is based on Simon Baron-Cohen's biased quiz or test, a test which uses leading questions to elicit the desired answers.

By the way, I have an evolutionary theory about why women clench their jaws more (never mind if they do): It's because asshat research has been poured down their gullets for so long that clenching is the only alternative not to go bonkers before one has had time to breed.
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Thanks to Judith for the original link and to jinny for the pdf file.

How Our Media Really Honors "The Troops", They Ignore Them Unless They Toe The LIEne Posted by olvlzl.

Here is a good look at how the corporate media really supports the troops. This piece by Steve Benson contrasts the media reception of the recent NYT op-ed by seven actual troops with the plaudits and exposure given to the two pro-war from the get go, Brookings shills from several weeks earlier.

Surely, given the vast coverage of the O’Hanlon/Pollack piece, the powerful perspective of these heroes would be immediately picked up everywhere, right? Wrong. Greg Sargent explained yesterday, that the op-ed “has been met with near-total silence.”

TPM intern Benjy Sarlin and I did an exhaustive hunt for coverage of this by the big news orgs. We only found one mention: CBS’ Bob Scheiffer brought it up in passing in an interview with John McCain yesterday. The only other news-org mentions came in Editor and Publisher, on MSNBC’s First Read blog, and on Time’s Swampland blog.

That’s all we could find. Nothing on CNN or any of the networks, no AP story, nothing on Reuters, nothing in any of the major papers. (If we missed anything, let us know at talk@talkingpointsmemo.com.) This is really staggering, particularly when you consider that this story has intense drama, too — one of the authors, the piece says, was “shot in the head” during preparation of the article and is being flown to a military hospital in the U.S. How the heck is this not newsworthy?

Notice this part too.

O’Hanlon and Pollack become media darlings, including benefiting from false assertions that they’re war “critics,” but seven members of the 82nd Airborne Division are derided — when they’re not ignored altogether

O'Hanlon and Pollack haven't been critics of the Iraq war, they've been supporters of it. For more on that read this post by Glenn Greenwald . With the corporate press, the lies chase the lies and the original lies are what are used to confirm themselves.

To read the experience of seven actual troops who saw what was happening in Iraq, here is the NYT op-ed.

Democracy Dies On a Diet of Lies Posted by olvlzl.

And So Do A Lot of Iraqis And American Soldiers

The TV stations in Maine are saturated with the pro-war propaganda commercials just now. Its in an effort to sway the votes of the “moderate” Republicans Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe as well as John Sununu who is not “moderate” but who has to run in the changed New Hampshire which is. The most shameful of these ads selling a lemon of a war is the one that uses the double amputee who says unless a lot more people get killed to prop up the mythological Iraqi “government” then his sacrifice will have been in vain. How bad is this piece of propaganda? It directly sells the old Bush lie about Iraq being tied to the September eleventh attacks. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to make a real connection between this all out, Republican propaganda effort with the scheduled Petraeus fraud in a few weeks. It’s all the same old kind of packaging, to extend the disastrous Bush war with temporary lies and Madison Avenue’s patented heart string tugs.

Will it be answered? Not effectively. The effect of court rulings granting corporations “speech rights”, making money equal to speech and the Reagan era destruction of the principle of fairness in broadcasting makes it certain that the corporate interests who support the Republicans in anything they do. No matter how much it damages the interests of the American People and hundreds of millions around the world can sell any lie to accomplish its purposes. Real speech in the world as it is means broadcast speech, something that is effectively non-existent for the anti-war side. Until the legal fiction of corporate personhood is destroyed, until the media is forced to serve the interest of the truth instead of its own profits, until the American People stop buying slick, cheap emotional appeals instead of the truth, there is no use in pretending that we are a free people living in a democracy. For those who are still chanting the "more speech" mantra, you are idiots and dupes pretending that we live in the print era.

Will it work? There is every reason to believe that it will give those Republicans in the house and Senate who could make the difference between sustaining Bush’s vetoes and beginning to end the most idiotic, mendacious, and criminal foreign adventure in the history of corrupt, inept administrations of the United States, the excuse and cover they need to keep his war going.

A Request

Anyone here have free access to a pdf of this article? I want to review it but don't want to pay thirty dollars for doing so.

Late August Revelation Posted by olvlzl.

Is there something about the end of August that motivates the decision to try new experiences? The implication of mortality or at least the end of youth? Or something as mundane as the old habit of optimism ingrained by the beginning of the school year? This August brings partial fulfillment of many years of intending to look into Paul Dukas’ Sonata for Piano. This month I’ve spent some time listening* while reading through the score. The Sonata, the only one of Dukas’ which survives, is well known as one of the monuments of the piano literature, often mentioned, seldom performed or recorded. I’ve also reread Debussy’s "Monsieur Croche" essay** about it, full of sharp, clarifying insight of the kind only a great composer can bring to the analysis of a great piece by another composer. I’m not going to compete with that example of critical genius. In hopes of motivating you to listen to this challenging music I’m posting his short critique of it complete, below.

As Debussy said, this is music that doesn’t give up its mysteries and profound insights on first hearing. Or the twentieth, I’ll add. It’s hard to see it ever being a crowd pleaser, though the third movement as a separate piece might be exciting. But it’s impossible for me to not recommend it as a great piece of music. I’ve been listening to the Naxos recording with Chantal Stigliani which quite affordable. She is excellent, though I would suggest you not try listening to the entire disc at one time. The very long sonata, it’s been called the French "Hammerklavier", is challenge enough for one sitting. The other long piece, the Variations, though less of a challenge than the Sonata are also worth listening to alone. There are only two short pieces in addition, including Dukas’ "Lament, from afar, of the Faun", which I seem to recall was written in memory of Debussy.

I also recommend the disc performed by Marc Andre Hamelin. Hamelin, the great intellectual virtuoso, is unable to give a bad performance. No matter how difficult the piece, how subtle the points of genius or obscure the unknown composer, he finds them and presents them in a fully convincing performance.

Dukas is famous for writing the Sorcerer’s Apprentice* and somewhat less famous for having destroyed most of his music fairly late in his life. He, like a small number of other composers who knowing they will not having a major career as a composer was unwilling to leave anything that was less than the best. It’s a brave decision, if one that carries regrets for future generations. I’m glad this music stood up to Dukas’ test.

* Dukas Complete Piano Music played by Chantal Stigliani Naxos: 8.557053
Also: Marc Andre Hamelin piano Hyperion: 67513

The score is available online, in the public domain. It’s a very long score so you might want to consider before printing it out.

** Reprinted in Three Classics In The Aesthetic of Music, Dover ISBN 0-486-20320-4

*** The subtle, even undemonstrative piano music is very different from that showpiece.

The Paul Dukas Sonata

By Claude Debussy, Posted by olvlzl.

Music, nowadays, tends to become more and more an accompaniment for sentimental or tragic incidents, and plays the ambiguous part of the showman at the door of a booth behind which is displayed the sinister form of “Mr. Nobody.”

True lovers of music seldom frequent fairs; though they merely have a piano and feverishly play a few pages over and over again; as sure a means of intoxication as “just, subtle and mighty opium,” and the least enervating way of spending happy hours. Paul Dukas seems to have such people in mind when writing his sonata. It breathes a kind of mystic emotion and presents a rigidly connected sequence of ideas which seem to compel a close and careful study. This compelling quality gives a peculiar stamp to nearly all the work of Paul Dukas, even when it is merely episodic. It is the result of the patient intensity with which he adjusts the several parts of his harmonic scheme. It is to be feared that such a work may prove difficult to follow on a concert platform. No reflection is thereby cast on either the beauty or the vision of the sonata. Although the mind conceiving this work unites a constructive purpose with an imaginative idea, there is no need to assume a desire for complexity; nothing could be more deliberately absurd.

Paul Dukas knows the potentialities of music; it is not merely a matter of brilliant tone playing upon the listener to the point of enervation, an easy thing to understand where several kinds of music which seem to be antagonistic are united without difficulty. For him music is an inexhaustible store of forms, of pregnant memories which allow him to mold his ideas to the limits of his imaginative world. He is the master of his emotion and knows how to keep it from noisy futility. That is why he never indulges in those parasitic developments which so often disfigure the most beautiful effects. When we consider the third movement of his sonata, we discover under the picturesque surface an energy that guides the rhythmic fantasy with the silent precision of steel mechanism. The same energy prevails in the last part, where the art of distributing emotion appears in its highest form; one might even call this emotion constructive, since it displays a beauty akin to perfect lines in architecture, lines that dissolve into and are keyed to the spatial color of air and sky, the whole being wedded in a complete and final harmony.

Claude Debussy, trans. B. N. Laughton Davies, 1928

We Stand To Lose More Than The Right To Choose Posted by olvlzl.

It is as close to a 100% certain prediction that a year from November the person elected President will be either a Democrat or a Republican and that the same will be true for control of the Senate and House. That choice, no matter what anyone thinks of it, is the choice we get in the political reality of the United States. Despite the often repeated mantra that it’s no choice at all that’s clearly not true. It’s true that our foreign policy establishment, and in few areas of life is the word “establishment” more fitting, will homogenize the administration that takes office. Though the last seven years have shown us again that the Republican Party is quite able to turn the government into a fleet of pirate ships, shamefully plundering for the country and the world for the profits of private corporations. If history is ever written truthfully, that will be noted as having been Rumsfeld’s and Cheney’s intention from the beginning of their various “reforms”. The foreign policy and military specialists being what they are, mostly hacks and shills, the chances are that those "reforms" won't be overturned soon by either party, though it's an even safer bet the Republicans won't ever reform the "reforms".

But it’s in personal life that the differences between the two parties are most clear. This year it’s pretty apparent. Mitt Romney, who will say anything and tell any lie to win an election, is appealing to those who would like to bring contraception back to the time when it was illegal.

But for those trained to hear the subtleties, Mr. Romney was acknowledging something more. He implied an opposition to the birth control pill and a willingness to join in their efforts to scale back access to contraception. There are code phrases to listen for - and for those keeping score, Mr. Romney nailed each one.

One code phrase is: "I fought to define life as beginning at conception rather than at the time of implantation." The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists defines pregnancy as starting at implantation, the first moment a pregnancy can be known. Anti-abortion advocates want pregnancy to start at the unknown moment sperm and egg meet: fertilization. They'd also like you to believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that the birth control pill prevents that fertilized egg from implanting in the womb.

A man who has gone from lying about his mother’s position on abortion in an attempt to win a senate seat in Massachusetts as pro-choice, to pandering to the anti-contraception wing of the Republican Party will not be appointing any Souters to the Supreme Court. There is literally no lie too shameful that Mitt Romney won't tell it.

And it’s not just Romney, Fred Thompson, the none-of-the-above candidate is also back peddling on his past on the issue.

It would be difficult to remember a Democratic candidate for president who was a clear danger to the right to avoid pregnancy. The Republicans, who have played politics with the most regressive and reactionary bigots and body snatchers in the country now find they need them to have a hope of winning the nomination. They have shown that they will pay those supporters off at the cost of our personal freedoms, the Roberts and Alito appointments were all about that.

And if you think this is a minor danger, look at this story from Colorado where the right to prevent pregnancy is under direct attack with the collusion of the national press.

So, as we are frustrated that the Democrats in the Congress can’t get a veto proof majority to end the war, as Trent Lott crows about their tactic of obstruction in both houses while their kept media slams Democrats for not being able to break the Republican lockstep, overlooking that there is Republican obstruction, remind yourself what the real choice is next year.

A Reposting: An Environmental Lament. Or: A New Cappuccino Bar

Cafe latte. Hold the caffeine. Wait in line. Sit at a postmodern table, take out your high-tech substitute of a newspaper and bury your nose in it. Time flies. Time is money. Money flies. The cups clink, the machines hiss, money changes hands. Nothing here has a simple name. Tall means small, grande a little bigger. The fire in the fireplace is a simulation. The clientele is also a simulation, all young, all affluent, all postmodern, with sharp edges and fuzzy middles. The bathrooms are clean and contain no reminders about the need to wash afterwards.

This place used to be an abandoned lot. Not a beautiful meadow, but a rough patch of ground where weeds battled for survival. In late summer it looked like a dead field. Every day an old man would come with an even older dog and slowly, majestically, the pair would part the reedy stems of the brown grasses to enter the field. Then she, the dowager queen of all dogs, would lower herself, arthritically, majestically, to rain over the parched soil; a goddess of grass being worshipped in an ancient ritual in her honor. Every day.

Now the rituals are different. The lot is sealed with asphalt, the space decorated with yellow lines, arrows and mystical signs worshipping a different god, a god of computers, sunglasses, cash registers and ears pierced seven times. The awkward weeds are gone. In their place stand rows of boxwoods, all perfect spheres.

It is possible to come here without seeing a single weed, a single poor face, a single wrinkled face. The whole world is available here if the world is sanitized, straightened out, converted into electronic impulses. It is possible, here, to pretend that death never comes, that food is born pristine, that life is clear and good. The whole lot is paved with asphalt, anything and everything can be removed from the cappuccino grande and it still remains cappuccino grande. The god of this place is the god of logic and cool goodness, god of clean bathrooms and everlasting life.

The old man is probably dead by now. The old dog certainly is. She has gone away to where old dogs go. The weeds are dead under the asphalt. The new rituals are winning: The lot is full of shining cars, their metal wings momentarily at rest. The tables under the plastic umbrellas are crowded with people who have good skin, expensive watches, silver-colored toenails. No-one uses the door marked "Exit" to enter. The new god is strong.

But at night doubts arise. The moon casts a different light. The parking lot is empty, the outside tables deserted. In the shadows the yellow lines seem to waver, the paving seems to crack, as if pushed from below. And, sometimes, fleetingly, one can see a furry paw, a phosphorescent eye, a glimpse of a slow, majestic movement of something sinking, lowering. Does the new god turn his head when he hears the night rain fall?

A Reposting: The Armpit Wars

A wingnut cartoon adventure story (read: incitement towards civil war) has the picture on the left about the horrible enemies of all right-thinking wingnuts: animal rights activists and I guess the animals they protect. They're coming to get you and your Bible!

But look at the stubble on the woman's legs. That is a signifier that she is a feminist, a feminazi, a woman who will probably eat her children. She's having leg hairs! Eek. She probably has hairy armpits, too. Pardon me while I vomit.

The history of the armpit wars is an interesting one. To understand why feminists focused on the womanly body hair requires first understanding how absolutely necessary it was deemed for a woman not to have hair except on her head and in her genital region. All other body hair was deemed as masculine and unnatural. Which is really weird, because women in fact grow hair on their legs and arms and in their armpits.

Now that I re-read the above paragraph I realize that the armpit wars are not at all over. Indeed, they have intensified, because now the only place where women can legitimately have hair is on their heads. The genital area is supposed to be waxed to look like that of a little girl or a porno star.

It is all very weird, because women do naturally grow hair on their legs and arms and in their armpits. The body does this, even in a good wingnut woman, and usually it is the wingnuts who argue that women are ___________ (insert some negative female characteristic here) naturally, biologically and unavoidably, and that the Bible decrees it so, too. But when it comes to the perfectly natural and possibly god-given body hair on women, these wingnuts and many other Americans go bonkers. Shave, you slut!, they screech. Because those who don't shave are Evil.

From a thinking angle the armpit wars are part of the war on accentuating sex differences. Women must somehow look more like women should look if women had been designed properly in the first place: bigger breasts and more torpedo-like breasts, more bare, smooth and hairless skin. And men are supposed to go to the other extreme with body-building work. There are even studies which show that women tend to use a higher voice in societies where femininity is prescribed, and of course we all know how a real man will not wear pink (in this culture and time period) or lace (in this culture and time period) or skirts (in this culture and time period).

Hence what is "feminine" has been socially decreed to include hairless legs and arms and empty armpits, even if Mother Nature disagrees. These things happen. But it is very fascinating that the societal decree is so often interpreted as the real truth, that somehow women indeed are hairless like little Easter eggs and that it is only the evil feminazis who manage to sprout hair everywhere.

Is this enough background to explain why the armpit hair became an issue in Serious Feminist Circles? Because women do naturally grow hair in the armpits and the society states that this should not happen, even though it does happen, and quite innocently, too? And that this is the reason why all woman are expected to spend money and creams and razors on themselves on a regular basis. To refuse to do any of that shaving was a statement that women are just fine as they come, that women don't need to be shaped into totally alien life forms to be acceptable, that even after all that reshaping and plastic surgery and shaving, shaving, shaving, women were still not acceptable in most places.

Besides, making the nonshaving statement cost something to the maker. Unpleasant attention, at a minimum. And this was a way of trying to change the society and to make a sacrifice. Then of course many women just liked the idea of cutting back on all that shaving.

I seem to be telling this story both in the past sense and in the present sense, and perhaps that is the correct way to tell the story. Here comes the twist to the story: The reactions to the armpit hair revolution were swift and of the expected type. The hairy armpit wearers were condemned as ugly (why not talk to Mother Nature about that?), as manly (ditto) and as unable to attract men and therefore giving up on the fight. But the hairy armpit wearers were also labeled as focused on a trivial matter, on something that has to do with body grooming, on something that was so silly as to endanger the whole feminist movement. You may have read the sort of thing I'm thinking about here: Someone writes about the horrible plight of women in some other country and then points out that all American feminists do is to stare into their armpits, and besides, armpit hairs are yucky.

And so this became one of my pet peeves: Because the gesture did not make the point it was supposed to make. Because women are still expected to reshape their bodies to be closer to some fictional (and extreme) ideal of womanliness. And because very few people point out how the whole concept of women's bodies as so faulty is the really ridiculous one and the one that we should discard. After that discarding has taken place, who cares if some women would still shave or not?

I would love to stop discussing the "to shave or not" topic in feminist circles and to start focusing more on what the ridiculing opposition is really saying. Just think about it for a few seconds. Their message is that it is not nature that defines what a woman is, but they, the namers and deciders. And they have decided that a woman in this culture should be without body hair but with very large and perky breasts and basically no hips. It is not some historical or theological concept of womanliness but a purely cultural one, and it is based on the accentuation of gender differences, with a few cultural quirks thrown in.

I see an analogical case in the discussion about cognitive differences between men and women. The anti-feminist point is always to try to make women and men into two quite different species, two "opposite sexes" as the saying goes, whereas the evidence I've studied and my life experiences all suggest that men and women are like two overlapping Venn diagrams in almost everything. Partly different and partly the same. This messiness, like armpit hairs on women, is unacceptable to the patriarchal mind.

Sadism As Commerce Posted By olvlzl.

By chance a few minutes ago, I was reading the story of the football player who pleaded guilty to being involved in dog fighting just as the BBC’s World Update was talking about Spanish National TV’s decision to drop the live broadcast of bull fighting. It being that particular BBC program, geared to what they imagine an American audience will accept, the only person I heard interviewed was the wife of a former star of the “sport” who had written seven books on the subject. Want to guess what her opinion was? Oddly, what is done to the bulls in the prolonged and particularly sadistic slaughter of them is barely mentioned in the general media. I haven’t checked anti-cruelty sources to see what they say. While I agree that the damage done to young children and adults, one might add, by watching premeditated, organized and commercial sadism the horrible suffering of the animals is certainly the central point.

I’ve heard fox hunting, dog fighting, cock fighting and a myriad of other forms of recreational cruelty explained as important “cultural practices” as is bull fighting in Spain. It is one of the worst features of human cultures that the infliction and viewing of suffering on sentient creatures is common. But no anthropological romanticism, which is a particularly pernicious form of condescension, should be allowed to mask what is really commercialized evil. In its worst form, as in fox hunting and bull fighting, the organized cruelty is sufficiently popular to be used as a political tool.

Traditionalists disagreed. "It is obvious that watching bullfights on the television does not traumatise children," protested Juan Manuel Albendea, of the conservative People's party.

The National Association of Bullfight Organisers has accused Luís Rodriguez Zapatero's government of using state television to perpetrate "a shameless, unjust attack on culture".

I'm sure that some people will agree with the matador's wife interviewed on the BBC that the solution for those who opposed carnage as entertainment is "to change the channel". Of course that doesn't mean your children won't have to deal with potential monsters who imbibed a lust for cruelty in their homes. I fully believe that people who are brought up enjoying the suffering of animals are more likely to enjoy the suffering of people and more likely to inflict such suffering. And while it might allow people to ignore what is being done, it does nothing to actually stop the suffering of animals by people who make money by inflicting it.

I've considered The Badger to be one of the most disturbing poems in the English language for quite a while.

The Badger

When midnight comes a host of dogs and men
Go out and track the badger to his den,
And put a sack within the hole and lie
Till the old grunting badger passes by.
He comes and hears - they let the strongest loose.
The old fox hears the noise and drops the goose.
The poacher shoots and hurries from the cry,
And the old hare half wounded buzzes by.
They get a forkéd stick to bear him down
And clap the dogs and take him to the town,
And bait him all the day with many dogs,
And laugh and shout and fright the scampering hogs.
He runs along and bites at all he meets:
They shout and hollo down the noisy streets.

He turns about to face the loud uproar
And drives the rebels to their very door.
The frequent stone is hurled where'er they go;
When badgers fight, then everyone's a foe.
The dogs are clapped and urged to join the fray;
The badger turns and drives them all away.
Though scarcely half as big, demure and small,
He fights with dogs for hours and beats them all.
The heavy mastiff, savage in the fray,
Lies down and licks his feet and turns away.
The bulldog knows his match and waxes cold
The badger grins and never leaves his hold.
He drives the crowd and follows at their heels
And bites them through - the drunkard swears and reels.

The frighted women take the boys away,
The blackguard laughs and hurries on the fray.
He tries to reach the woods, an awkward race,
But sticks and cudgels quickly stop the chase.
He turns again and drives the noisy crowd
And beats the many dogs in noises loud.
He drives away and beats them every one,
And then they loose them all and set them on.
He falls as dead and kicked by boys and men,
Then starts and grins and drives the crowd again;
Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies
And leaves his hold and cackles, groans and dies.

John Clare 1798 to 1864

The Rope To Hang Ourselves With Posted by olvlzl.

Note: This was posted at my blog last summer but I just found out that there is platform talk in the air already. Maybe there’s still time to head them off before they do too much damage this time.

Two of our local delegates to this weekend's Maine Democratic Convention gave independent confirmation of their frustration over the same issue. The platform presentation was over long, divisive and futile. Granted they've both heard me lather on about party platforms but it was interesting that was the first nonsense they reported back to us about.

The only use I've ever seen a platform put to was for our opponents to smash us over the head with planks they'd pulled out of it. If a candidate tries to stand on a platform they fall off. Most of ours aren't that stupid anymore but they always have to deal in some way with the useless thing. I challenge anyone to come up with instances where platform planks have made a bit of difference in legislation adopted or lives improved. A direct link from the adopted plank to the signing by the executive to its being made real by implementation. In best platform form, include a footnote giving the length of the fight, the bad blood spilled over the struggle for every last splinter and the problems it created for the candidate. No group has ever lost a thing in real life if they weren't mentioned in the entirely unreadable resulting document.

Platform committees too often become the tiny, little piece of turf of people who have little to say, who say it at great length and who do little else. They fight like mad over that turf using the weapon of competitive scruples, a weapon whose only use is to commit political hari keri. Anyone showing these tendencies should be diverted into something else. They should be put in charge of refreshments or some other innocuous detail that could benefit from their fussy gifts. Not entertainment or continuity, however. They've already shown a talent for wasting time, they don't need any more chances to practice on the innocent.

I suppose we must have a platform since if it is entirely absent the Republicans will make that into a campaign issue. It should be as short as possible. It should be something our candidates can run with and not run into. And to avoid future time wasted on platforms that could be better used in actually winning the election, it should be something that will be the real focus of all our efforts until it is really implemented. How about this.

Democrats believe that all People have rights just because they are people. They have their rights no matter what race, gender, ethnic group, etc. People have a right to nutrition, shelter, clothing, healthcare and education. They have a right to an environment that will sustain life. They have a right to just pay for their work and an opportunity to have a good job. We believe that government's only legitimate purpose is to help People enjoy their rights. The Democratic Party is dedicated to finding ways to provide this opportunity to everyone, to making those ways into law and to the full implementation of those laws to make peoples' lives better. We believe so completely in democracy that we will peacefully promote its expansion to the entire human race so everyone can enjoy the blessings of freedom. When we have fulfilled these planks we can discuss secondary issues.

If anyone can find anything that the Republicans can use to defeat our candidates in that, please remove it immediately.

Oh, Another “Debate”. Posted by olvlzl.

Any Democrats who are organizing one of these spectacles called "debates" should really ask themselves some hard questions. I’ll leave the purpose they’ll be put to aside, other than to point out that until now they have served as a means for the corporate media to chip away at the strongest candidates in preparation for their coronation of whatever Republican is nominated.

But, George Stephanopoulos “moderating”? A man who was mentored and made a someone by Democratic politicians only to go into the corporate media and use his position to drive a shiv into the same people? Another like Russert and Matthews, two others ill chosen as “moderators” by clueless Democrats of the past

There is no one, not a single person, in the commercial media who should be trusted to “moderate” a Democratic event of any kind. And that includes Lehrer. How many betrayals does it take for the kinds of Democrats who organize these things to learn that they are Republican shills? Anyone who has organized them into such a good position to damage our candidates should also be shunted aside for people who have a clue as to what our media is really all about. The star struck and their insider pals should have nothing to do with that part of a presidential campaign.

I haven’t chosen a candidate to support but if one of them refused to participate in one of these dog shows, answering questions from a known traitor to the Democratic Party, they’d have my full attention.

Poem of Opportunity

Posted by olvlzl

If
Billy Collins
never made

a




lanyard

or
had
a
dog,

would it

be Simic

on
the

radio now?

The Lessons of Katrina Drowned Out By Corporate Media Propaganda Posted by olvlzl.

The Boston Globe has been doing some great work on environmental issues lately, which is certainly not “balanced” by it’s also publishing the predictable, pro-pollution, propaganda of its in-house conservative Jeff Jacoby. Unfortunately, as print on paper and without the backing of corporate mega-money, it won’t have much of an impact.

Yesterday’s op-ed by Derrick Z. Jackson about the impact of continued corporate propaganda should be read. Coming in the middle of Jacoby’s distortion of the reports in Newsweek about the conspiracy to keep America stupid on global warming, it’s a good place to start.

The most important measure of the onslaught is American ambivalence. Even though 600 scientists from 40 countries concluded this year that global warming is "unequivocal," Newsweek pollsters found that still less than half of Americans -- 46 percent -- say climate change is being felt today. Less than half of Americans support requiring much more fuel and energy efficient vehicles and appliances. In the best dreams of the pooh-pooh lobby, 42 percent of Americans say "there is a lot of disagreement that human activities are a major cause of global warming."

In today’s paper is a piece by Beth Daley about how those old, dirty, sources of green house gasses aren’t being scrapped but are being given a second chance to destroy the biosphere in the third world.

From 4-ton trucks to 40-ton boilers, US vehicles and equipment are finding a second life in developing countries -- postponing meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by inefficiently using energy or directly emitting carbon dioxide.

A 1950s-era paper-making machine from the Curtis Paper mill in Adams is operating in Egypt. A 1992 school bus from Vermont's tiny North Hero Island is chugging along the roads of Costa Rica. A rock-crushing machine used to make talcum powder in West Windsor, Vt., has been dismantled and reassembled in Colombia.

"This clearly isn't what we want to happen," said Armond Cohen, executive director of the Boston-based Clean Air Task Force, a national advocacy group. "It's troubling that we'd be handing down the remnants of our industrial-era technology rather than helping these places with cleaner options."

This is recycling of the worst kind. It kind of also makes you wonder where the lead painted toys being recalled are ending up.

And also today in the Ideas section is a disturbing investigation by Drake Bennett into what the petroleum industry and - the governments it buys - have in mind when “alternative energy” comes from their lips. The answer is even dirtier forms of fossil fuels, extracted and used at even higher environmental cost, with government subsidies.

Environmentalists see this as a growing disaster. The oil in oil sands is not easily separated out, and the immense amounts of heat required are usually generated with natural gas, giving the oil-sands industry a greenhouse gas footprint much larger than the traditional oil business -- estimates range from 40 percent more to five times the emissions. The process also uses enormous amounts of water: a study by the Pembina Insitute, a Canadian environmental watchdog organization, found that, depending on the method of extraction, every barrel of oil produced requires 2.5 to 4 barrels of water, all of which is then rendered too polluted to return to the water supply. And most oil-sands operations are mines, not steam wells like the MacKay project, making them very disruptive to surrounding ecosystems.

The problem, though, starts with the ignorance of people here and around the world. Ignorant people can’t govern themselves, there is no getting around that most basic truth of life. Ignorant people are at the mercy of any self-interested lie that is put in front of them in an attractive format.

Freedom of the press, as has said here before, is a right given for a purpose higher than the ability of the press to make money. Information is the life blood of democracy and democracy is the only certain means of people to not become the serfs of those with more power. The electronic media, the media that really matters now, is in collusion with corporate interests to sell lies. In many cases, the corporate interests are the media. The electronic, and much print media profits by selling lies on behalf of corporations. Despite the absurd, soporific “more speech” slogans, the willful blindness of the legal system which puts the “rights” of corporations over the right of the people to govern themselves, the inertia of old and disproved habits of thought, the real lesson of the American media is that the clearest truth can’t compete with a well financed lie.

Derrick Jackson points out:

On global warming, which is predicted to pound our coasts with a higher percentage of Katrina-like storms, ExxonMobil pumped $19 million into conservative causes dedicated to pooh-poohing the science. Those causes paid tens of thousands of dollars to those who doubt climate change. In 2003, Republican Party consultant Frank Luntz wrote a memo saying, "You need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue."

If Katrina can’t teach the lesson and really wake up Americans, nothing will except to stop the lies and that really means, to keep the media from lying for profit. The alternative is to watch democracy die and the entire biosphere as well.

Even More Problems With Psychology Posted by olvlzl.

Many years ago, at a land grant university in New England, a callow young Freshman (not me, a friend) got into quite a bit of hot water by asking his Introductory Psych. teacher, in class, how a “study” which consisted of Yale students, back then all males in their late teens and early twenties, presumably unrepresentatively rich and white and weighted to those brought up in an upper class culture, could give us any relevant information about the population at large, as was implied by the supplemental reading. It immediately became clear that the student was not going to be getting an A in that class. Most of the “studies” in the class material used the men of the elite, single-sex universities of the time as subjects.

From the frontiers of the brave new psychology comes news of another “study” that correlates hand conformation with a lot more than what kind of winter gloves to buy.

In the August issue of British Journal of Psychology, a team of researchers led by psychologist Mark Brosnan of the University of Bath, England, have published findings that suggest women who are good at science and math have longer ring fingers than index fingers, which indicates a relatively high level of prenatal exposure to the male hormone testosterone. Conversely, longer index fingers indicate higher levels of the female hormone estrogen, according to the study, and a corresponding aptitude for verbal communication.

As Jody Kolodzey points out this is in keeping with an earlier study by another psychologist in California named Marc Breedlove correlating hands to sexual orientation.

Breedlove looked at relative finger length because it is influenced by androgen levels in the womb and thus is an approximate measure of fetal androgen levels.

"... this suggests that at least some lesbians were exposed to greater levels of fetal androgen than heterosexual women," Breedlove and his colleagues wrote.

And what were the rigorous methods that they used in these studies?

The study used standardized test scores of 75 British seven-year-old boys and girls and compared them to photocopies of the youngsters’ hands.

A gloriously generous sample of 75 photo copies of seven-year-olds' hands correlated with, perhaps, the first standardized test of its kind that they ever took. I wonder if they might have considered that if a few of the children out of the 75 had their performance inhibited by test anxiety their reliance on this test as an indication of life-long achievement could be, well, useless. It would also be interesting to know how good their teachers were and how many these seven-year-olds had benefited from. Did they all have the same teacher? My first grade math instruction was abysmal. I’d imagine we’d all have graded quite low on a standardized test given at age 7, even those of us who did well later in school.

Just on the sample size, the age of those whose well-ripened academic achievement is being correlated to photocopies of their hands and the possibility that an effective percentage of the children could have been sufficiently uncomfortable taking the standardized test in the first place, how many of you would take this seriously? As science? Which, I will guarantee you, will be taught in psychology classes as “science”. It’s clear that the media, including FOX was delighted to report this “science” breakthrough.

The earlier California study had a larger sample but, well, judge the data collection for yourself.

The Berkeley researchers based their conclusions on the hands of 720 volunteers they recruited at street fairs in San Francisco, volunteers who agreed to have their fingers measured and to answer a questionnaire about their birth order and sexual preferences, in exchange for a $1 lottery ticket.

Science, at a San Francisco street fair, with volunteers who were willing to trade their time for a lottery ticket. Just for starts, I wonder if a percentage of fair goers might have lied on the questionnaire for a lark. It was a carnival atmosphere, after all. Would you take science done under those conditions seriously? Just to come totally clean, I’ve got a real problem with self-reporting by volunteer subjects in science, just to start with.

How long will these be taken as seriously as the studies of Yalies mentioned in the beginning of this post? You can be certain that they will be taught as if they were science. That earlier study did figure in the reference material for at least one advanced psychology course as I discovered quite by accident last night. Just by chance, while researching this post, I browsed the Breedlove effort online and found it used in the supplementary course materials for Psychology 463 as taught by Kevin MacDonald Department of Psychology CSU-Long Beach Long Beach. As it happens, I’m familiar with MacDonald through reading about the infamous David Irving trial.*

You might want to think of the conclusions that might be reached about seeing the world through the lense of the Men of Yale or the neo-palmistry of seven-year-olds and consider the legs that this kind of “science” has in the media and in Psych. Courses around the world. Consider how it might be used. For it will be put to use. Either they should tighten their standards and throw out the junk or they should lose the prestige that comes with the title of "science". It has real life consequences.

* MacDonald was the major witness Irving (who, I should remind you conducted his own case) called on his behalf in the action he so infamously brought against Deborah Lipstadt. MacDonald tried to explain his motive in testifying for the Holocaust denier on the tired old saw of freedom to publish. Considering Irving’s ill-advised action clearly would have had the effect of suppressing Lipstadt’s book, "Denying the Holocaust", it’s hollow. In wondering about some other possible motives he might have been thought useful to Irving, you might want to think about MacDonald’s publications about the Jewish People which are widely regarded as anti-Semitic, his association with far-right racist groups.

You might want to read about the rather bizarre, even hysterical attempt to belatedly throw him out of the world of evolutionary psychology - including blaming him on just about every prominent opponent of that ideology - though MacDonald seems to be well entrenched in those circles. He's certainly published enough in the field. You can find him well represented on Wikipedia and on the web. I chose not to link to him

What I Did During My Summer Vacation, by Echidne

I have no idea for the rest of the essay yet, as my summer vacation begins approximately now. I will be back on Friday evening, in a week's time. In the meantime, you will be taken care of by olvlzl and perhaps some other guest bloggers. I might also put up some "Best of Echidne" reruns, the kinds that make you run screaming out of the room. We'll see.

In any case, I hope that you have a vacation, too, this year. Vacations are very important. Mwah.

How Green Was My Valley

The bad news from the Utah mine collapse continue. The owner of the mine, Bob Murray, has been the public face of much of the commentary, but no more:

Bob Murray, the outspoken owner of the Crandall Canyon Mine, did not appear at a news conference today to discuss the deaths of three rescue workers and the injuries of six others.

...

He has also been combative, sparring with seismologists over earthquakes and mine collapses, denouncing global warming, promoting the benefits of coal energy, blasting union "lackeys" and even calling out news reporters he said wrote or broadcast inaccurate statements. Since Thursday night's fatal cave-in, Murray has reportedly not left the Crandall Canyon Mine.

It is not for me to say what caused the mine collapse and the later blast which killed three rescue workers. But I doubt that Bob Murray is a neutral voice in these matters. He has an interest in the outcome of any investigation, for one thing. It is odd that he has been allowed to introduce union-bashing into the conversation and even odder that his earthquake theories are not subjected to greater scrutiny. I understand that the kind of mining that was carried on in this mine is very dangerous, because it removes the support structures as the miners retreat. Surely this is relevant, even if an earthquake was the original cause of the first collapse.

Friday Nature Blogging

The first three pictures are by Doug. The top one is a dove's nest inside a cactus:





This one is a mandala, created by opening cactus flowers:





And this one is pure beauty:





To finish off the series, here is FeralLiberal's Pippin exploring nature:

On Wall Street

So the Fed cut the rate and the markets are rallying. One of the first rules of government welfare and such is that when it helps the well-off it's not a problem. We shall see how all this affects the people whose mortgages are defaulting.

The embroidery is my view of Wall Street. Or of human follies. You can click on it to see the pencil markings and scruffy stitches.

Not Writing About Iraq

A funny thing happened to me today. I Googled the word "Iraq" looking for an old post of mine and found that I have that word in 523 posts on this blog. Yet quite a few of them mention that I don't write about Iraq very much because it's a horrible, horrible mess. What would writing about it a little more have looked like?

The other funny thing is that I seem to have had better predictive abilities when it comes to Iraq than the powers that be in the American government. Either that, or they wanted the actual outcome while pretending to aim at something quite different. Note that the word "funny" here is not used in the funny-ha-ha sense. I feel terrible about the suffering of the Iraqi people and also terrible about the new Iraq the women are likely to have to live in from now on. It's going to be an Islamic theocracy, at least outside the Kurdish areas.

The third funny thing I realized is that I used to have really good post titles. Interesting and silly and full of eccentric literary allusions. All gone now. Must spend more attention on the headlines.

Meanwhile, in Iraq

The emergency political summit president Jalal Talabani called has failed. The Sunnis are still outside the government. As Kevin Drum points out:

It's not exactly news or anything, just further confirmation of the obvious: the eventual fate of Iraq (outside the Kurdish north) is the establishment of a Shia theocracy closely aligned with Iran. As far as I can tell, no one has even a colorable argument that things are moving in any other direction, and equally, no colorable argument that there's anything we can do to stop it.

I wrote pretty much the same in my salad days as a blogger in 2004 when we were told how good the invasion was for the rights of Iraqi women. Even Dick Cheney in the 1990s knew that invading Iraq would lead to its destruction as a secular state:



Is the surge in Iraq succeeding? This discussion sometimes sounds like listening to a bad radio which picks up two stations at the same time. Mostly we hear the experts pontificating on the tactics and the definitions of words such as "surge", but in the background, faintly, we hear another program asking what the ultimate point of the exercise might be. What would a successful Iraq look like? Does it look like a theocracy? Or an American client-state with civil war somehow kept under wraps? And what is the price to be paid for such a success if it somehow could be achieved?


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Cross-posted on TAPPED.