Being A Dude Is Hard

Are you familiar with the Good Men Project? I wasn't until one particular post on the website got some publicity. Its title is "Being A Dude Is A Good Thing." That made my hair crawl a bit because its obvious corollary would be "Being A Non-Dude Is Not A Good Thing." Though of course I know that it is not intended to be that way. But still: I never go around muttering to myself "Being A Goddess Is A Good Thing."

The real reason for that title seems to be that the writer of the post believes men are blamed for everything (and, as an obvious corollary, women are blamed for nothing):

As the founder of the Good Men Project, I am the butt of my share of jokes. Guys in high places love to take pot shots at me, laughing at my silly little obsession.

...


I’ve been doing my own soul-searching during this last week as a series of articles broke out on our site about the end of men, gender war, and whether or not men have made enough progress collectively to be considered “good” (that’s not exactly how others defined it but that’s how I think about the issue underneath it all).
Amidst all this comes the question of blame.
Why do men get blamed for everything? 

Emphasis mine.

It's hard to continue the analysis after that bolded bit, because men, as a class, are not actually blamed for everything.* In some parts of the world men, as a class, are blamed for very little.

Now, I could go on writing about the things women, as a class, are blamed for. But that's not for everything! And still I think it's for many more things than men, as a class, are blamed for, especially if we limit the blame to the class of uppity women**.

The reason for all those italics is that you gotta be careful about generalizing. The writer generalizes to an extreme extent. He also implies that everyone blames men for everything.

Then there's that reference to the end of men. I wrote about that silly article earlier (first post here, second here), but men are not ending so you can stop worrying about that possibility. Even male dominance is not ending. It's very healthy on the global level (Egypt and so on) and even in the US the number of female presidents is still a perfectly round number.

Onwards and downwards. In the blog post, I mean. Here's what has happened and what caused it:

One close friend jokes, “When speaking to my wife I always make sure to look at the ground in deference. And I make sure not to make any sudden movements.” I’ve watched him. He loves his wife.
He’s a very competent human being. But with her he’s decided the only way to survive is to submit. The female view is the right view. The male view just gets you into trouble.
So where does the blame come from?
My unscientific theory is from a fundamental disconnect between men and women at the micro level. Men know women are different. They think differently, they express emotion differently, they are motivated by different things, they think about sex differently, and they use a very different vocabulary.
Why can’t women accept men for who they really are? Is a good man more like a woman or more truly masculine?

There is "the female view" and then "the male view". The individuals are no longer individuals. They are randomly drawn from two boxes, one pink and one blue, and they can't speak the same language! So they speak the female language and the man submits. There is no human language.

Let's see. Individual differences are unimportant and the idea that people do, in fact, communicate across that chasm of gender is unimportant. The ultimate explanation is biological, of the men-are-from-Mars-and-women-from-Venus type. Sadly, the writer never tells us how men really are. Does masculinity mean dominance over women, for instance? I would really like to know.

I'm not criticizing the kind of angst this post reflects. It must be hard to know what the dude rules are, these days. But there's a tremendous problem whenever "masculinity" is defined as "what women are not" because the next stage often means embellishing it with adjectives such as brave, honest, assertive and so on. Then those adjectives become part of "what women are not."

Having said all that, I quite agree that the popular culture representations of men as beer-guzzling idiots are nasty and I also agree that both boys and girls should be encouraged to get as good an education as they can. I have never met a feminist who wouldn't agree with me on these issues.


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* The real danger of the Internet sites where like-minded people gather is that shared concerns become validated and reinforced, even when they might not be realistic concerns. This may not matter in many cases, but it does matter when it comes to some hate sites (not referring to the site I link to here).

**Off the top of my hat, women are blamed (by some or by many) for bad mothering outcomes, bad parenting outcomes, working for pay when they should be at home, wasting their human resources if they stay at home with their children, having children just to get on welfare, not being able to negotiate a good salary, not having the drive to succeed, not having the skills needed to do mathematical or technical work, not having enough testosterone to succeed in financial jobs. Some groups blame women (though not usually men) for having sex outside marriage and for not being a strict enough gatekeeper when it comes to sex. Women are also still argued to be ruled by emotions rather than intellect, while men are assumed to be ruled by cold logic only. Feminists have been blamed, by some, for the end of the Western culture, for the death of the white race, for the end of men, for the end of family, for latchkey children, juvenile delinquency, alcoholism among women, the unhappiness of women and on and on and on.

A Thursday Fluff Post

Yesterday was all about vulvas and today is all about income inequality. Which just proves that goddesses can multi-task (though there is an ultimate societal belief connection between those topics, oh yes).

I'm thinking of starting a "mean gifts" list for public persons. Just as a joke.

For instance, Martial Arts for Dummies might fit into the president's Christmas stocking, and Mr. Gingrich might consider a chastity belt or two.

This was the custom in my school when I was but a tiny goddess. Each teacher got a book recommendation from us students. It taught us the value of literature and the difficulty of irony and sarcasm as forms of writing.

Income Inequality Revisited

There are days when I'm strongly in the tar-and-pitchforks group of thinkers. Note the word thinkers there. Like all benevolent divinities, I refrain from directing thunder storms and painful boils of the bottom to those who deserve them.

But still. Here is the reaction of one economist to the news that the income share of the top one percent fell from 23% in 2007 to 17% in 2009, largely because so much of the income in that group comes from stock market investments which haven't been doing well during the recession:

“It’s very interesting that this has become such a big topic now when the numbers are back to where they were in the 1990s,” said Steven Kaplan, an economist at the University of Chicago’s business school. “People didn’t seem to be complaining about it then.”

What's the message in that last sentence? If you let us rob you poor in the past, why complain now? Just kidding.

But picking a particular non-recession year to compare with a recession year is not terribly meaningful, as the linked article points out:

In 2009 the average income of the top 1 percent, adjusted for inflation, fell below its 1998 level, but remained well above where it was in 1990: $662,000. While the protests follow the worst downturn since the Great Depression, inequality has been growing for three decades, driven by economic and political forces. Globalization created larger markets for those with scarce talents but hurt less educated workers by pitting them against cheap foreign labor. New technology also hurt unskilled workers, by replacing many with machines.
Unions declined, eroding blue-collar bargaining power. The financial industry grew, with paydays heavily weighted toward the top. Corporate culture accepted the growing gap between the executive suite and the factory floor.
Falling tax rates on the highest earners added to the net income divide, by allowing top earners to keep more of their pay and increasing their incentive to maximize it.
In the decades after World War II, by contrast, the average income of the top 1 percent grew only marginally faster than inflation and significantly slower than middle-class incomes. That combination caused inequality to decline throughout much of the 1950, ’60s and early ’70s.
As recently as 1980, only about one-tenth of the nation’s pretax income went to the top 1 percent. By 2000, that share had grown to about 22 percent. It slumped to about 18 percent in 2003, after a market crash, only to rebound by 2007 to levels not achieved since the Roaring ’20s.

And what the share of the top one percent is of today's income is not known.

But here's the bit that made me grind my fangs:

Pointing to the recent declines at the top, Mr. Kaplan argues the Occupy protesters have accused the wrong villain by focusing on inequality, which he called an inevitable byproduct of growth. “If you want to reduce inequality, all you need to do is put the economy in a recession,” he said. “If you want the economy to do well, as all of us do, then you’ll get more inequality.”

What does it mean for the "economy to do well" in that statement? Something like this?

About 97.3 million Americans fall into a low-income category, commonly defined as those earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level, based on a new supplemental measure by the Census Bureau that is designed to provide a fuller picture of poverty. Together with the 49.1 million who fall below the poverty line and are counted as poor, they number 146.4 million, or 48 percent of the U.S. population. That's up by 4 million from 2009, the earliest numbers for the newly developed poverty measure.
The new measure of poverty takes into account medical, commuting and other living costs. Doing that helped push the number of people below 200 percent of the poverty level up from 104 million, or 1 in 3 Americans, that was officially reported in September.
Broken down by age, children were most likely to be poor or low-income — about 57 percent — followed by seniors over 65. By race and ethnicity, Hispanics topped the list at 73 percent, followed by blacks, Asians and non-Hispanic whites.
Even by traditional measures, many working families are hurting.

The point is, of course, that the economy is NOT doing well if the majority of people are not doing well. It's quite possible for an economy to grow and for all that growth to fall into the laps of a tiny minority. Besides, to argue that inequality is an inevitable byproduct of growth does not explain how the United States managed such impressive growth rates with reduced inequality in the past.

Public Sector Layoffs and Unemployment: The Case of Black Women

This is a useful article on public sector layoffs and their disproportionate impact not only on all women but especially on black women. And note that when jobs are outsourced in this way it is pretty likely that the employee who will then work that job will have lower pay and might not have health insurance or retirement benefits at all.

From the piece:

Women, meanwhile, have suffered a disproportionate majority--nearly 66 percent--of the public sector job losses. For black women--who have higher overall levels of unemployment and rely on public sector jobs as their second-biggest source of employment--outsourcing is particularly harmful, according to Steven Pitts, a labor policy specialist at University of California, Berkeley.
From 2008 through 2010, a black woman was 22 percent more likely to be employed in the public sector than a non-black woman, Pitts found in an April 2011 research brief on black workers and the public sector.
Pitts says questions of race and gender haven't factored into the national dialogue of public sector cuts and who they are most likely to affect.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics provides data on unemployment by gender, race/ethnicity, age and marital status. Following the numbers over time can be instructive. I don't think the public sector layoffs are yet completely visible in those numbers.

Newt on Economic Liberty: It Means No Annual Vacations For American Workers

My eyes bulged when I read what Newt Gingrich just wrote:

I opened the chapter on “Work” in my book A Nation Like No Other with this anecdote because I believe it cuts to the core of what makes America exceptional. While other countries have enshrined 35-hour work weeks and 60 days’ paid vacation in their laws, America remains one of the few developed nations that have declined to restrict these economic liberties. Here, we value hard work and free enterprise as the substance of opportunity.

I don't know which country Newt has in mind in that quote (probably France), but it is indeed true that the United States is about the only industrialized country which does not legislate annual vacation time for its workforce.

But to turn that into an economic liberty! Whose liberty, exactly? And how can Europe ever compete with this country, given that it not only regulates overtime and offers annual paid (!) vacations but also provides paid parental leave?

No, it's not the economic liberty of the workers Newt has in mind here; it's the economic liberty of the capitalists. American workers are not loudly protesting at Occupy Vacation Time sites, scornfully flinging off the presumption that they might ever want to have some time off to get acquainted with those other people who share the same address. Neither are they demanding that they should be allowed to work Thanksgiving, Independence Day and Christmas Day, without any extra pay! They are not marching against the idea of family leave.

What's so nasty about this drivel is that Newt equates not being a robot with laziness, that only those who are willing to work and work and work are somehow looking towards a better future! What will they do in that better future? Finally take some time off if they haven't dropped from a heart attack first?

Newt then goes on to tell us again about the advisability of child labor, though mostly for poor children:

Eleven or twelve year old children, and especially those in the poorest areas, should have the chance to learn the value of hard work, part time and in the safe environment of their schools. Strong evidence suggests the benefits of starting to work at an early age, and there are dozens of tasks they could be paid real money to do: working in the cafeteria, clerking in the front office, straightening up classrooms, and cleaning bathrooms. Not strenuous labor. Not dangerous work. Exactly the type of things that many parents ask their children to contribute at home.  

It won’t solve the whole problem, but it would go a little way towards helping America’s poorest children learn the habits that can make them successful.

 
Mmm. And do the children of the richer parents just watch all this work happening? What are the lessons they would learn from that? That work is for the peons?

Newt is an asshat. The government is supposed to be for the benefit of the people who live in it. It is not supposed to be a tool to increase the productivity of the labor input for the firms. People are not robots, and there are better ways to teach work ethics than turning the children of the poor into the servants of the school system and possibly other children.

The hilarious ending to Newt's piece warns us about the ominous shadow of France. That, my friends, might be the alternative if Newt's advice is not followed. Like good food and wine and such. And summer vacations to the beach with the whole family! For weeks and weeks!

The Bald Vulva

It sounds like the national bird (of the US, that is), doesn't it?

The Atlantic has an article about women shaving off all their pubic hair or getting Brazilian waxes down there or even having the pubic hair permanently zapped with laser treatment. I recommend reading the whole piece from the beginning to the end to note how the actual reasons for this trend are subsumed in all sorts of dead-end theories about why young women, quite suddenly as history goes, have decided that a bald vulva is a necessary fashion or health accessory. Nothing replaces that reading as an exercise in learning how smoke is blown into our eyes when it comes to political issues about women. And this IS a political issue.

I'm not really blaming the writer who does do the necessary work of discussing the real reasons. But all the fluff around that real reason, about low-slung pants requiring the shaving of pubic hair (what about men?) to the age-old argument that women are smelly by nature are trotted out, and so is the idea that femininity means hairlessness (even if biology disagrees).

And this bit is really hilarious:

So what does it all mean? Is pubic hair removal a symbol of feminine pride, something that Gloria Steinem might be proud of? Or does it signify submission to a domineering male agenda?
"It's all in how people deal with it," Herbenick says. As she's seen in her lecture-hall encounters, the hairless vulva isn't always analogous to the clenched fist of female solidarity; just as often, it's a telltale sign of oppression or forced conformity.
But, she says, uncovered, demystified genitalia can just as easily be a symbol of empowerment. "Many women have started to feel a sense of ownership over their bodies -- an autonomy," she says. "If they want to take it off, they take it off. If they want to grow it back, they grow it back. If they want to shave it into a heart, they shave it into a heart. But they're doing it because they want to."

They are doing it because they want to? No wider societal influences there? Why don't we have lots of women completely shaving off their eyebrows? They are hair, after all, and unfeminine, and they might smell when you are sweaty after a workout or sex.

The reason, of course is in p*rnography (which so far isn't that interested in eyebrows). It became widely available, in forms which did not require a man to walk into a crummy shop to buy a magazine, about twenty years ago. We now may have a generation of heterosexual men who formed their first ideas about how naked women look by watching p*rn. And women in those depictions do not have pubic hair. This is so that one can see all the dangly bits and the jingly bits better, of course.

Imagine such a man having first-time sex with a woman who actually has pubic hair! Might he not express shock or disgust at this horror? Might she not then feel that she, too, must shave her vulva bald?

That explanation suffices. All the other stories told in the article are either dead-ends or tales about the roads this influence took to get into the popular culture in general. But the direct route works really well, too:

Herbenick recalls one encounter in which a popular, well-liked college student in a class she taught openly professed that he had never hooked up with a girl who had pubic hair, and would frankly be disgusted to undress a woman and discover a veil of genital fur.
"Some girls talked to me and wrote in their papers that they had always had pubic hair, and in a couple cases never did anything to their pubic hair," she said. "They never thought it was a problem. But when he said that, they went home and changed it. They really started to feel ashamed about their bodies."
Fitzpatrick, similarly, finds himself in a collegiate scene full of young women far too obsessed with the hair down there. "It becomes a compulsion," he says.
Fitzpatrick's female friends, especially those who confess to not having waxed in a while, have added a distinct new routine to their social calendars: weekend-evening freak-outs. "When they go out on a Friday night to the bar, if they think they might be having sex with somebody later, they're like, 'Is he gonna judge me? What is he gonna think?'" Fitzpatrick says. Other non-waxed coeds simply skip the bar altogether.
Pinto, too, admits that she gets nervous about having sex toward the third or fourth week after getting a wax. "If I haven't waxed and I suddenly end up hooking up with someone, I'm like, Oh, God. No, no!" she says.
And it's true, says Fitzpatrick: Guys can be, and often are, "absolutely brutal." It's not uncommon for a college-aged man to "go out of his way" to make fun of a girl's pubic grooming habits with his buddies after he's hooked up with her -- even if he's never expressed a preference one way or the other, he says. "Then all of a sudden, instead of just being a girl who's had a fun night with her respective guy, she becomes that girl who has weird pubic hair. And nobody wants that label."

"Weird pubic hair." There you have it!

Two important points about this post: First, do a gender reversal on the arguments. All the arguments for a bald vulva seem to me to equally apply to men's pubic hair. The skin would be softer, the experience of intercourse would be more powerful, with less hairy padding, and so on. But do women shame men into shaving down there? And of course the real point about this first point is the absence of articles like this about men's pubic hair.

Second, and this is very important for any reader I have angered by downplaying "choice" here. We obviously have a choice about how much hair we want on our vulvas or around our penises. But those kinds of choices are never made in a vacuum. As I wrote in an earlier post, the women in this picture look very much alike, because their clothing was influenced by the culture they lived in:

Yet I'm pretty sure if we could have asked them about their choice of hairdo (the "Gibson Girl" of the early 20th century) or the dresses they would have given us individual choice explanations.

We are all affected by the culture we live in, and different choices carry different societal benefits and sanctions. This post is to point out why one particular "choice" has become more common and what drives its popularity.

Softer Than A Baby's Bottom: Vagisoft

This is a hilarious name for a blanket: Vagisoft. According to the softometer in the advertising picture, the only thing softer would be the womb of a marshmallow mermaid!

Marshmallow mermaids would melt in the ocean. And the texture of vaginas is not exactly what most of us have in mind when wanting a soft blanket. You don't want the blanket to sorta slide off you, right? Or feel slightly moist?

If we lived in a reality-based advertising world, the kind where it would have been men who ride side-saddle, this blanket would have been named penisoft. The skin of the penis is extremely soft. That's all I meant. Err.

Von Spakovsky On Home Schooling

He writes in the National Review, a conservative publication. While home schooling is done by people with all sorts of political opinions or none, a sizable chunk of home-schoolers are religious conservatives.

Von Spakovsky:

Educators and liberals always seem surprised when faced with evidence of the high quality of the education that home-schoolers get, particularly when compared with the politically correct assembly-line instruction that passes for an education in so many public schools these days.
Both my brothers and their wives home-school their children (and my wife is now home-schooling our youngest daughter). All of their children are well-read, disciplined, polite, creative, and full of information that I find lacking in many children their age. One of my 15-year-old nephews was recently assigned to read Lives by Plutarch, about Greece and Rome, and to write a short essay summarizing their society, identifying what they valued most highly and arguing whether or not each was a good and virtuous society. Can anyone imagine a 15-year-old getting a similar assignment in a public school in today’s America?

The whole post makes the mistake of comparing children from Spakovsky's extended family to some imaginary grungy public school outcome in general. If, as is likely, Spakovsky's brothers and sisters-in-law are educated and affluent, the proper comparison is to the children of equally educated and affluent parents who go to a public school.

Likewise, any real comparison would require knowing how many home-schooling parents assign Lives by Plutarch to their children and whether the concept of a "good and virtuous" society is at least challenged in that teaching.

Not that reading Plutarch has any greater value than reading many much more recent books. It just has the sniff of High Educamation to those who envy the nineteenth century British upper class for their governesses and stern fathers with excellent libraries.

As a purely personal aside, Plutarch compares only the lives of famous men, not women, because women did not easily become famous in those days.

As a purely personal second aside, I wonder how many conservative men would be such strong advocates of home schooling if the consensus was that it had to be done by fathers. They might suddenly note that one parent's income has dried out and that one parent's future career prospects have been severely limited. These are the major costs of the home-schooling option, not the acquisition of books and teaching materials and so on.
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This post is not intended as an attack against the concept of home-schooling which has both obvious advantages and disadvantages, just as public schooling does. Much depends on the specific circumstances and so on.

What I criticize is von Spakovsky's one-sided treatment of the topic and his implicit assumption (or so it seems to me) that there should be no publicly funded schools or any improvement in those schools because people obviously can just educate their children at home. And that is simply not practical for the vast majority of American families.

Today's Political Lesson: The Pennsylvania Shale-Gas Industry and Conservative Beliefs

A YouTube comment attached to this video about millionaires who would like to pay more taxes gives such a good example of the vast problems when one tries to communicate across the political aisle (more of a chasm than aisle):

The reason we're in the crapper is because of a century of socialist government policies, government involvement in the free markets and cancerous relationships that involvement spawns. Due to unconstitutional "subsidies" paid with money stolen through taxes, we don't know the real price of anything.

Yeah, it's YouTube comments, the place one goes to find the very worst stupidity and misogyny and so on on this planet. But the statement is not that different from others I have read on the net. It has the magico-religious term "free markets" and the usual argument that what the US government has done in the last hundred years is "socialist" and it argues that taxes are theft.

The best way to interpret that quote is as something do with a religion. It does not lend itself to any kind of logical arguments, because the term "free markets" is not an economic one and because the term "socialist" is clearly used in quite a different sense than its dictionary definitions. But once one sees this as a religious assertion, the conversation stops right there as I well know. One cannot debate religion with facts.

This came to mind when I read the article about the Pennsylvania shale-gas industry that Atrios linked to. The quote he gives is worth giving here, too:

In what is shaping up as a key victory for the shale-gas industry, Gov. Corbett and the legislature appear close to stripping municipalities of the power to impose tough local restrictions on wells and pipelines. Under a pending measure, wells and pipelines would be permitted in every zoning district - even residential ones - statewide.
And the industry isn't stopping there.
Two pipeline companies are seeking the clout of eminent domain. While the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission has yet to rule, it signaled this year that it was leaning toward giving firms condemnation power to gain rights-of-way for their pipelines.

The saga of the shale-gas industry in Pennsylvania is about much more than the pipelines. It is about jobs, about profits, about possible environmental degradation and possible polluted waters. But this particular quote is an odd reversal of the argument made in that YouTube quote:

Here are the markets! They appear to be damn free to do whatever they wish! But they still have that cancerous relationship with the state government! Talk about subsidies! The government is simply giving in to them, so we will never know "the real price" of the gas. Theft? Did anyone mention theft and the government?

I bet that is not what the YouTube commentator meant, however. And note that the so-called "free markets" here are ONE FIRM negotiating (or extorting) one state government. That is not the definition of a competitive industry.

The Pennsylvania problem is an interesting one from a conservative angle. What should the state of Pennsylvania do? If it courts only the firm (and the jobs) it will do what it seems to be doing.

But by doing that it takes away property from voters who just might vote Republican. A house someone bought in an expensive residential area with good schools some years ago will now have a humongous pipeline under the backyard where children play. The house will sell for less. Will every house owner get an exactly calculated sum of money from the firm to compensate for the financial and other losses?

In the actual fracking areas the landscape might look like shit. The water might be polluted. Those rich enough can move, of course, or at least buy clean water to drink, and I guess that most of the really nasty stuff will ultimately be located in the poorer communities, because that's how power works.

My point here is not to analyze the Pennsylvania events in any great detail. I haven't followed them well enough to do that. Instead, I wanted to bring a realistic example of how an industry and a government can get into a "cancerous relationship," and this with Republicans in power. I also wanted to point out that there is no such thing in reality as the magico-religious free market. In this particular case there is one very powerful firm fighting municipalities. Finally, all large projects of this type have winners and losers. If power is allowed to prevail, the winners will decide all the rules and nobody will compensate the losers.

Hollaback

If you are not familiar with this organization, you should be. It's all about fighting sexual harassment on the streets and elsewhere, and it is spreading to many countries across the world. Which is great, because of that "the right to go out" thing.

More Laura Nyro

To celebrate her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Today's Cute Video

Of a baby bat.

The Benevolent Patriarch

Rebecca Traister has written an excellent piece on what the recent teenagers-and-Plan-B debacle tells us about the president:

“As the father of two daughters,” Obama told reporters, “I think it is important for us to make sure that we apply some common sense to various rules when it comes to over-the-counter medicine.”

Traister then tells us why that statement is facile.

Obama comes across as a benevolent patriarch. In the context of minor children this will appeal to many voters who also don't want their young daughters to have sex. But when this attitude spreads to those oh-so-endearingly-silly wives?

In 2010, while appearing on “The View,” Obama made a creaky Take-My-Wife-Please joke about how he wanted to appear on “a show that Michelle actually watched” as opposed to the news shows she usually flips past. The joke being that his missus, the one he met when she mentored him at a high-powered law firm, just doesn’t have a head for news delivered by anyone other than Elisabeth Hasselbeck.

Mmm. Read through Traister's whole article and it almost defines benevolent patriarchy of the 1950s style.

What is really sad is that this attitude still works. It works well in the Plan B case because it appeals to the parental desire for control, and it works in the implied silly-wife/henpecked husband jokes because those still permeate the popular culture and serve to create ties to other husbands. And it works so well because women don't demand anything better.

But mostly it works, because the alternative is not some kind of equality but malevolent patriarchy Republican style. Benevolent patriarchs are, by definition, to be preferred over malevolent patriarchs, because the former will deliver some good things. The latter will not.

Avastin: The Pursuit of Last False Hopes, Extinguished (by Skylanda)

In the past month, the Food and Drug Administration yanked its formal stamp of approval on Avastin – a chemotherapy drug designed to starve tumors of their blood supply – for the advanced stages of breast cancer. Because the drug still carries approval for other indications (especially late-stage colon cancer), patients can still obtain the drug by prescription for off-label use. But because it will lack formal indications for breast cancer, insurers are highly unlikely to continue paying for it. And at an estimated $100,000 per year for sustained use, Avastin is one of the most expensive drugs ever to hit the pharmaceutical market; it is very unlikely that few if any breast cancer patients will be paying for it on their own.

The outcry was immediate and predictable. Breast cancer advocates of some stripes decried the decision as a crime against women’s health – a travesty against hope. The opposition notes that the costs come with desperately little proven benefit, and that the drain on health care resource might go to uses that better suit both breast cancer patients and others who desperately need a slice of the health care pie. (A notably contrary voice in the debate has been the always-stalwart Breast Cancer Action, which applauded the FDA for revoking approval of Avastin, and implored the FDA to “uphold stringent drug approval standards over hasty access without legitimate clinical benefit”). Either way, one can bet the FDA did not tackle this bombshell topic lightly.

On the technical side, the FDA’s role is to protect and promote health, and they may be doing just that by revoking this specific indication for Avastin: in defense of women’s health, the risks of Avastin – risks like heart failure, internal hemorrhage, and intestinal perforation – come with little to no extension of life in the face of metastatic disease.

On the political side, the enemy of Avastin access is not necessarily the FDA: the FDA did not remove access to Avastin – the functional result of the decision was simply that Avastin will likely not be paid for by insurance because it no longer has an official indication for breast cancer specifically. (Off-label prescribing is allowed for most medications on the market with some rare exceptions – as long as a medications is FDA-approved, doctors can prescribe it for just about any indication, though insurance is less likely to cover expensive medications for unapproved uses.) If the medication were reasonably priced, this would not be an issue; instead, continuous use of the medication costs more than a mortgage on a split-level two-car garage house in most midwestern cities. But there is little outcry against Roche/Genentech, the makers of the drug, for their outrageous price gouging – an implicit collusion between the activist voice and the profit-makers that suspiciously mimics the dynamic between a hostage-taker and the sufferer of an obtuse form of Stockholm syndrome. While breast cancer activism has largely aimed its wrath at the FDA, few outside of Breast Cancer Action have squared off against Roche/Genentech for their rapacious pricing scheme that truly forms the barrier between patients and last-ditch use of the drug.

Avastin is not the first or last drug to land in the middle of such controversy over end-of-life access to drugs with potentially sweeping effects on both disease and remaining normal tissue. The compassionate use movement did not start with antiretroviral drugs – the revolutionary compounds developed in the early 1990s to combat AIDS – but that’s where the move to expedite trials and allow dying adults the right to off-label use outside of regulated trials got a foothold. And perhaps rightly so: during the worst of the AIDS epidemic, the rapid mortality rate far outstripped the ability of formal trials to absorb the number of people who could benefit from them – people who had nothing at all to lose. There is likely no way now to know for sure now, but some AIDS patients probably died faster from unproven and ultimately harmful experimental drugs. Some got the miracles they sought, miracles that are now go by routine names like nevirapine and abacavir, Combivir and Kaletra. This is the legacy that Avastin was born into when it was approved in 2004, and this is the environment that Roche/Genentech banks on when it faces down the FDA with a cadre of its own medico-legal experts backed by an army of breast cancer patients and family girded to fight the battle for a drug that annual nets the pharmaceutical conglomerate some several billion dollars – a sum that will take a large hit in the wake of the FDA’s recent decision. (Bizarrely, one line of this activism invokes a strain of libertarian reasoning that is equally circular as it is paranoid: that Avastin’s revocation by the FDA as a secret victory for ObamaCare socialist cost-control measures – in the same sentence decrying that Medicare will no longer cover the drug without FDA coverage, without ever wondering why Avastin costs so damn much in the first place. Government hands off my Medicare? Indeed.)

So to answer to the real root of whether Avastin should be available to women with stage-four breast cancer – whether the FDA was acting in the best interest of women at large and women with this horrific disease in particular – one also must now ask some tough questions beyond evidence and cost-effectiveness: Is it enough to rely on the internal narrative of the breast cancer patient – the first-person ethnographic voice that drives much of activism in the internet age – when this narrative may conflict openly with medical evidence? Can we rely on patient self-advocacy, when that patient self-advocacy movement had been so intentionally and powerfully tainted by the pharmaceutical manufacturers whose profits rely on the very lucrative and politically powerful business of breast cancer activism?

Every terminally ill person dreams of this age of miracles that AIDS sufferers received in the 1990s – a last-minute Lazarus reprieve that stays the executioner’s bell of their disease. Every pharmaceutical company knows this, and none have shown any moral restraint in invoking this sentiment and this desperation to their advantage, while twisting the knife of a substantial price tag into the backs of sick and dying consumers. As profit-generating entities, this is, after all, their raison d’etre. Pharmaceutical companies are like your distant acquaintance that shows up with supper when you’re sick, only to seduce your husband behind your back: they appear with cheery illusions of comfort. But they are not your friend.

Reasonable solutions are possible, but are unlikely to be invoked. Roche/Genentech could provide the few breast cancer patients who have actually responded to Avastin with supplies of the drug at cost – a true invocation of the phrase “compassionate use” – until this generation of patients fades out; with over a billion dollars a year in profits, this isn’t an unreasonable request. Insurers could also look at these few with some exception in mind. Moreover, research needs to be done (and probably already is) to understand and ultimately predict those exceptional Avastin responders – much as we understand why some breast cancers respond to tamoxifen and Herceptin, and others do not – and tailor chemotherapy regimens specifically for use specifically for people most likely to benefit from Avastin.

Until then, however, the FDA decision stands. Will the decision ultimately save or harm the lives of women with end-stage breast cancer? That remains to be seen.

Cross-posted from my newly relocated and relaunched blog, America, Love it or Heal It.

On Cleaning

I'm cleaning house. This is an important announcement, because I haven't got to it very much in the recent months.

My biggest cleaning problem is that I like to clean seams in appliances with a toothpick when I get going and seriously think about unscrewing the plates around light switches so that I could clean behind them, so nothing ever gets finished to my satisfaction. Or rather the Snakepit Inc. is on a pendulum between two cleaning extremities.

Speaking of cleaning, why isn't ease of cleaning a design requirement? Or if it is, who lets through all those non-cleanable gadgets? In my bitter moments I think this is caused by the gadget designers never having cleaned anything at all, not even their own ears. Because they can't hear the complaints.

Or are people not complaining? We should be.

Today's Cartoon

Via Erin PDX, can be found here.

Brush Me Pretty, Please

This is a fun site. It lets you toggle between a picture as it was initially taken and the airbrushed version which probably was used for publication. What percentage of all published photos are airbrushed? Does anyone know?

Perhaps we will know in the future:

Two Dartmouth computer scientists, though, created a program that can test how much a picture has been photoshopped. Their program accurately predicts how much humans think an image has been altered from its original. And for those of us who are still not aware how pervasive airbrushing is — and how drastic the changes can be — they included a nifty and mesmerizing tool that allows you to toggle between the original and final versions of pictures of celebrities and stock photos. It’s pretty shocking how much they all change.
This program has some real potential: imagine if advertisers and magazine photographers had to label every photoshopped image with its score. That would not only curb the excesses of airbrushing, but would show how unrealistic modern advertisements are — people could see just how many changes a typical image undergoes.

I have written about airbrushing before, given that one of its major uses is to make female fashion models and celebrities look slimmer and smoother. That creates, over time, the impression that unachievable perfection is actually not unachievable, but quite common, and that you, poor thing, are the only one with wrinkles or zits or fat or whatever.

The health concerns of airbrushing are mostly about eating disorders. From that point of view this is noteworthy: The Swedish fashion giant, H&M, now uses computer generated standard bodies for its models, with only the heads being interchangeable. And the skin color. That standard body is this:

The body stays constant, diversity is an add-on feature. The company spokesperson stated that the computer-generated body gives them one standard body to show the clothes on. Which is true. But why that particular body?

It is not a common shape, statistically speaking, and that is where the fear of eating disorders rears its ugly head. If a very slim body is presented as the common type in fashion magazines and on clothing websites, how do we tell young girls that other body shapes are, in fact, more common and equally acceptable? That they might be healthier for your particular frame and genetics?

I don't think the perception of what is desirable in women's bodies is just a problem among young girls, say. It's a societal judgment, these days. If you travel on the net as much as I do you will find this to be true. Just read the comments attached to any YouTube song by Adele, say.

More on Newt Gingrich And The Forced Birthers

He forgot to obey the wingnut definitions in the context of abortion but swiftly changed his mind. Good boy, Newtie, good boy! Have another wife.

Here's the summary:

Newt Gingrich has moved quickly to repair any potential fallout from his remarks last Friday to ABC's Jake Tapper in which he said that life begins at the "successful implantation" of a fertilized egg, rather than at conception. 
That is heresy to the pro-life movement, and had the potential to complicate Gingrich's rise in the Republican presidential polls, especially in crucial states like Iowa and South Carolina, whose early caucuses and primary are dominated by conservative Christian voters. 
"As I have stated many times throughout the course of my public life, I believe that human life begins at conception," Gingrich said in a statement posted Saturday on his campaign's website and sent to Joshua Mercer at CatholicVote.org, a conservative political site that had first called attention to -- and sharply criticized -- Gingrich's statement.

Too bad Newt is not a woman. Then he could walk his talk. For instance, if he happened to get a ruptured ectopic pregnancy, he could just let himself die rather than have the fertilized egg removed. But even as a man he could start a giant movement to have all those frozen fertilized eggs in fertility clinics implanted in forced birthers.

So the viper tongue part of me got the upper hand this morning. It happens, my friends. After too much stupidity in my reading menu.

This Is Neat

Millionaires saying: "Tax me!" And they are not masochists.





Added later: But some of the comments are utterly hilarious. A few wingnuts there don't seem to have a functioning brain at all. One commenter threatened anyone coming after his/her money (less than 50,000 dollars a year) for more taxes.

Given that the video is about millionaires, getting that interpretation from it is extremely odd. But probably a consequence of the non-stop Fox propaganda which aims to make the less well-off think of themselves as the well-off.

Laura Nyro

Was finally inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame! I'm happy. But not everyone is:

With the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, you just never really know.
Even when an induction seems like a sure thing it isn't, and maybe that's why the honor perennially raises more questions than it answers with its list of inductees.
The 2012 inductees, announced yesterday, are no different.
Would anyone have expected '60s singer-songwriter Laura Nyro to have garnered more support from the Hall's voters than Joan Jett or Heart -- who were also on the nomination short list?

On the other hand, others get the reason why I find her a genius:

The late Nyro had only three minor hit singles, the biggest being her cover of "Up On The Roof," which reached No. 92 in 1970. But her own compositions yielded classic pop hits for the likes of Barbra Streisand ("Stoney End"), Blood Sweat and Tears ("And When I Die"), The 5th Dimension ("Wedding Bell Blues," "Blowin' Away," "Stoned Soul Picnic," and "Sweet Blindness") and Three Dog Night ("Eli's Coming").
Still, Nyro would likely have been overlooked as a faceless songwriter had she not also evolved into a true album artist, pioneering a mix of jazz and r&b influences and singing in a gutwrenching voice that likewise mixed gospel and the street. There was nothing like her before or after, and The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's nominating committee and voters are to be commended for recognizing and honoring her enormous gifts and influence.

In a weird way, being too much of a cat who walks alone can hamstring you. It opens up arguments that Nyro doesn't fit into a narrowly defined hall of fame because her talent went all over the place.

As to that Joan Jett argument: Laura Nyro died over ten years ago, and I see her induction as overdue. Yes, it's bad that letting her in leaves other deserving candidates out. But last year Nyro was nominated and didn't get inducted, which is Jett's situation this year.

Sexist rant from Alec Baldwin (by Suzie)

After American Airlines kicked Alec Baldwin off a flight Tuesday, he tweeted that the company was one "where Catholic school gym teachers from the 1950's find jobs as flight attendants." In a Huffington Post column, he bemoaned the lack of elegance in air travel post-9/11.

I'm guessing he doesn't like older women who won't put up with his nonsense. Sue Sylvester needs to kick his butt. In addition to the comment being sexist and ageist, it's also anti-union. Gone are the elegant days when airlines could fire flight attendants for being too old. (I've written before about Baldwin's sexism.)

The airline's Facebook page has this account:

Since an extremely vocal customer has publicly identified himself as being removed from an American Airlines flight on Tuesday, Dec. 6, we have elected to provide the actual facts of the matter as well as the FAA regulations which American, and all airlines, must enforce. Cell phones and electronic devices are allowed to be used while the aircraft is at the gate and the door is open for boarding. When the door is closed for departure and the seat belt light is turned on, all cell phones and electronic devices must be turned off for taxi-out and take-off. This passenger declined to turn off his cell phone when asked to do so at the appropriate time. The passenger ultimately stood up (with the seat belt light still on for departure) and took his phone into the plane’s lavatory. He slammed the lavatory door so hard, the cockpit crew heard it and became alarmed, even with the cockpit door closed and locked. They immediately contacted the cabin crew to check on the situation. The passenger was extremely rude to the crew, calling them inappropriate names and using offensive language. Given the facts above, the passenger was removed from the flight and denied boarding.

Apparently, most of his wrath was directed at a flight attendant in first class. I'm betting his rude and offensive language included sexist slurs. He's lucky that he's just a misogynist. If he had used religious or racial slurs, he might actually face some consequences.

Plan B Stays Prescription Only For Young Teenagers

Via Rheality Check, I hear about this:

For the first time ever, the Health and Human Services secretary publicly overruled the Food and Drug Administration, refusing Wednesday to allow emergency contraceptives to be sold over the counter, including to young teenagers. The decision avoided what could have been a bruising political battle over parental control and contraception during a presidential election season.
The contraceptive pill, called Plan B One-Step, has been available without a prescription to women 17 and older, but those 16 and younger have needed a prescription — and they still will because of the decision by the health secretary, Kathleen Sebelius. If taken soon after unprotected sex, the pill halves the chances of a pregnancy.
Although Ms. Sebelius had the legal authority to overrule the F.D.A., no health secretary had ever publicly done so, an F.D.A. spokeswoman said. Nor had such a disagreement been the subject of such extraordinary dueling press statements. Dr. Margaret Hamburg, the F.D.A.’s commissioner, issued a lengthy statement saying it was safe to sell Plan B over the counter, while Ms. Sebelius countered that the drug’s manufacturer had failed to study whether girls as young as 11 years old could safely use Plan B.

"Whether girls as young as 11 years old could safely use Plan B?" Are we then going to study whether girls as young as 11 years old can safely get pregnant, bring the pregnancy to term and deliver a child?

I understand what Sebelius is saying, though the quoted article points out that some drugs currently available over-the-counter are quite harmful to children and nobody has tried to turn them into prescription-only. I also understand that Plan B might in theory be worse for very young girls than a surgical abortion. I understand all those considerations and could write about them.

But because this whole thing is about politics the only proper way to discuss it is also a political one. Hence the importance of these sentences in the above quote:

For the first time ever, the Health and Human Services secretary publicly overruled the Food and Drug Administration, refusing Wednesday to allow emergency contraceptives to be sold over the counter, including to young teenagers. The decision avoided what could have been a bruising political battle over parental control and contraception during a presidential election season.

And this is what we should be thinking about! The first time EVER the Health and Human Services secretary publicly overruled the FDA! And it was about the question whether girls even have reproductive rights. Similar arguments have dominated the airwaves when it came to vaccinating young girls against the human papilloma virus.

All this is grounds for a bruising political battle which Obama wants to avoid. Making Sebelius do the overruling allows him to stay above the political fights in the place he prefers to be.

Today's Shallow Thought: Austerity for Some, Xmas Bonuses and Golden Parachutes for Others

That's a short summary of the obvious difficulties in promoting an austerity policy all over the world when one sees the promoters step out of limousines in their $5000 tailored suits and better haircuts than I have!

If we really mean to promote austerity, we should bring everyone down to that level. That means gigantic drops for the wealthy one percent. Austerity for so many others is already the wolf knocking on the door at the end of each month when they paycheck has been spent. Even for many nominally in the middle classes.

Here's my Christmas suggestion: I want to hear all the powers that be tell us in public what they are giving up for this austerity lent. Their private airplanes? Weekly pedicures? Third homes in Aspen?

This is a shallow thought but it is based on real outrage, the kind that burns cold and pure inside my warped mind. If you are telling other people that they have been but naughty children and must now suffer (whether they did anything wrong or not), the least you can do is to show the way to that land of suffering by your own behavior.

What Are Taxes Good For? The Case of User Fees in Fire Fighting.

Who needs public services funded by taxes? Let's see:

A Tennessee couple helplessly watched their home burn to the ground, along with all of their possessions, because they did not pay a $75 annual fee to the local fire department.

Vicky Bell told the NBC affiliate WPSD-TV that she called 911 when her mobile home in Obion County caught fire. Firefighters arrived on the scene but as the fire raged, they simply stood by and did nothing.

...

South Fulton Mayor David Crocker defended the fire department, saying that if firefighters responded to non-subscribers, no one would have an incentive to pay the fee. Residents in the city of South Fulton receive the service automatically, but it is not extended to those living in the greater county-wide area.

So it goes. The markets won't provide if you don't pay for the service. The reason the firefighters came at all is probably to be ready to stop the fire from spreading to those properties whose owners had paid the extra fee.

The market alternative (which the local government was using here outside the city limits) has its drawbacks. The most obvious one is that it increases the likelihood of larger fire damages for everyone.

Suppose that you pay for the firefighting services but neither your left-hand or right-hand neighbor does nor do the people living in the house behind yours. In theory, all those three houses could be on fire and the firefighters would wait and see if they need to protect your house. By the time the fire crosses your property line it might be crossing from three directions.

At the same time, the quoted argument about the necessity of not fighting the fire if the owners didn't pay the fees is a valid one. If you get the service without paying for it, why pay at all?

Hence the superiority of tax-funded services in cases like this one. Because taxes are obligatory.

This story reminded me of a historical incident I read about. One community in Finland, several centuries ago, created an early fire fighting unit by promising to pay certain farmers a fee, collected from the community, for each fire they put down. This progressive idea ran into some problems the next time harvests failed, because one group of farmers had a second potential source of income. So many farms suddenly lost barns to inexplicable fires.

What these two stories share is the importance of incentives and the lesson that some things really are better funded using non-market alternatives. In the case of fire fighting that means either tax funding of permanent employees or the use of volunteer fire fighters.

Head: Meet Desk. Desk: Meet Head

Would banging your head really hard against your desk change your basic beliefs?

Because logical arguments, careful data and sophisticated writing don't seem to do that in cases where the beliefs come from that murky back brain, perhaps created by a frightening incident in early childhood.

This is about political arguments, naturally, given that I'm writing a political blog, and it is that blog and my general journeys debating all over the Internet that have taught me how sticky basic beliefs are, how often the argument starts from the conclusions and then works backwards.

I'm not exempt from that. But I swear to you that I visit my basic beliefs (carefully opening the cage door and tossing some bloody meat in first) to interrogate their honesty, truthfulness and overall sobriety.

The feminist example of this has to do with the basic beliefs of some innatists: that women are naturally suited to coyness, inability to understand numbers and a desire to marry monogamously for money, whereas men are naturally suited to spraying their sperm around indiscriminately, while carelessly tossing off fundamental theories about the nature of the universe, and then going home to multiple nubile Barbie wives.

If one set of arguments doesn't support the conclusions, another set of data will be created but the conclusions will not change. We are now several such spirals down the road when it comes to gender roles. It's a fun exercise to see all this worked out from the early 1970s to the present day. The conclusions do not change; only the arguments about how to reach them do, and always in the sense that new arguments will be created to reach the unchanging conclusion.

I can create similar examples from other topics in politics. The belief in the essential evil of governments is one I see clearly because I do not share it. Or at least I do not share the parallel belief which usually goes with it: that markets are sunny grandmothers who treat us all with great justice.

Given the essentially non-logical nature of so many basic beliefs, how do we debate them? Are we limited in this to only those whose basic beliefs are yet unformed on a particular topic?

What President Gingrich Would Do For Women

What do you think?:





Pay special attention to his use of the term "males" for men. I have found it fairly often to be MRA code for "men." After all, the term "male" refers to all male animals, not just human males. To use it in this context seems highly correlated with the assumption that gender differences are all biological, that traditional gender roles are unavoidable and so on.

In any case, Newt is not worried about women earning less, not at all. From his past:

A January 19, 1995, New York Times article reported on concerns about women in military combat roles that Gingrich had raised while teaching a history course at Georgia's Reinhardt College. The Times reported that Gingrich told his students that "females have biological problems staying in a ditch for 30 days because they get infections, and they don't have upper body strength," and added that men "are basically little piglets; you drop them in a ditch, they roll around in it."

Gingrich reportedly further said that if being in combat "means being on an Aegis class cruiser managing the computer controls for 12 ships and their rockets, a female again may be dramatically better than a male who gets very, very frustrated sitting in a chair all the time because males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes."

Hahahaaa!

A PR strategy for fighting rape accusations (by Suzie)

Accused rapist and men's rights activist Julian Assange got permission today to delay justice longer. (Please stay with me -- the issue is broader than Assange.)

Two high-court judges in London, who ruled earlier that he should be sent to Sweden, will let him raise an issue with Britain's Supreme Court. Assange contends that police and prosecutors should not be allowed to issue European arrest warrants. The judges disagreed, but said they felt "constrained" to let him proceed. Why? Perhaps because he has rich and powerful backers.

Wired reports:

Assange has 14 days to submit a written petition to the Supreme Court. If the court refuses to hear his appeal, he has no more avenue for redress and will be extradited to Sweden. If he is granted an appeal hearing, that appeal will likely take place at the Supreme Court around May next year.

The longer he fights, the longer his two accusers live in limbo. Of course, they are not the only women who have accused a man of sexual assault, only to have hatred heaped on them while they wait for justice. Assange and his outraged fanboys have smeared them, and details of their private lives have been published on the Internet. They have kept a low profile, in part, I'm guessing, for their own safety.

He has crowdsourced witness intimidation.

I have seen no evidence that any media in the U.S. or U.K. has tried to interview them or their attorney, with the exception of a few sentences from the lawyer now and then. Instead, Assange and his global team of lawyers frame the case in their own way. In fact, he has just hired a PR firm in Sweden to handle the media there.

In Sweden, his case will be a test of men's rights to women's bodies, as in the frat-boy chant of "no means yes, yes means anal." His lawyers have argued that, if a woman agrees to sex with a condom, it isn't a crime if the man has unprotected sex with her without her consent. His lawyers also have said it's no crime for a man to use physical force to try to penetrate a woman if she quits struggling and goes along with it. British courts have disagreed.

Earlier, one of his former British attorneys said Assange wasn't wanted for rape, but rather "sex by surprise," a minor charge found nowhere but Sweden. That wasn't true, but it did plenty of damage. Did the lawyer intend to mislead the public, or was he unable to contact his counterpart in Sweden and ascertain the truth?

If/when Assange finally goes to Sweden, I hope courts will consider the credibility of someone that acclaimed journalist Nick Davies called "extraordinarily dishonest."

Although he and his flock have viciously attacked former colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg for writing a book on WikiLeaks, I haven't heard anyone dispute D-B's assertion that he and Assange "grotesquely exaggerated" how many volunteers WL had, wrote under different pseudonyms to make it seem like more people were involved, and misled people on the extent of their technology. D-B said this was done to intimidate enemies as well as gain support from potential allies. It also may have led whistleblowers to think that WL really could protect them.

In the early days, D-B writes, Assange was very interested in marketing WL. "From the media we tried to learn how to manipulate public opinion. ... For us, the important thing was not how something really was, but how one sold it."

Here's a rundown of Assange's misinformation campaign against the sex-crime allegations:

When the accusations were leaked in August 2010, Assange said he didn't know who the women were. That was not true, of course. He suggested elsewhere that the Pentagon was playing dirty tricks. Holocaust denier Israel Shamir, who has been paid by WikiLeaks, published a story suggesting one accuser worked for the CIA. Assange's British lawyer called the case a honeytrap.

Then the spin changed. The lawyer said he had been misquoted, and WL Central said Assange never suggested his accusers did anything wrong. My best guess is that this was done to avoid a libel suit.

But it also fits with a common marketing strategy: A company unveils a sexist ad, or the ad gets "leaked" to YouTube. Feminists and others are outraged. The company pulls the ad, apologizes and says it never meant to offend or the ad wasn't authorized. Meanwhile, the company gets a lot of publicity with a targeted audience -- men who like to put women down.

Some people don't like victim blaming. So, Assange assures them he isn't doing that. Meanwhile, many of his fans continue to bash the women, and we are supposed to believe that he cannot stop them.

I bet he starts attacking the women's credibility again once he's in Sweden, which has much more liberal laws on libel. By then, he may give up his bizarre contention that Sweden is more of a banana republic than a civilized country. (His former lawyer in Sweden, Bjorn Hurtig, said recently that the Swedish judicial system "generally holds a very high standard.")

Assange once thought so highly of Sweden that he sought permission to live and work there. Two days later, two women went to police, who determined that their statements amounted to sexual molestation and rape. A prosecutor dismissed the idea of rape, but Assange was still under investigation for molestation. The women's attorney, Claes Borgstrom, appealed to a higher-ranking prosecutor, Marianne Ny, who put rape back into the mix.

Assange has insisted that this was improper. But both Swedish and British law lets higher-ranking prosecutors overrule subordinates, said Senior District Judge Howard Riddle in his rejection of Assange's appeal in February 2011. (Cryptome has a transcript.)

After Ny took the case Sept. 1, Hurtig claimed, she made no attempt to interview Assange before he left for London at the end of September. Actually, Ny had contacted Hurtig, who later said he couldn't find Assange. Riddle said Hurtig corrected his evidence at the last minute, but in such a low-key way as to be misleading:

I do not accept that this was a genuine mistake. It cannot have slipped his mind. For over a week he was attempting (he says without success) to contact a very important client about a very important matter. The statement was a deliberate attempt to mislead the court.

Later, the Swedish Bar Association issued a warning to Hurtig, who Assange has since replaced.

There was discussion that Assange might return to Sweden in October. Instead, he released the Iraq documents -- some say prematurely. A Swedish court issued an arrest warrant for him in November, and Assange then released the U.S. diplomatic cables. He sold himself as a freedom-of-information martyr.

By claiming falsely that Swedish prosecutors had not tried to interview him earlier, Assange made it appear that they had little interest in the sex-crime allegations until he released sensational documents.

This also lent more credence to his claim that Sweden was trying to extradite him so that he could be turned over to U.S. authorities, who would imprison him in Guantanamo, torture and execute him.

But his lawyers never presented any evidence, and his own defense witness -- a former Chief District Prosecutor in Stockholm -- said that scenario couldn't happen. Riddle noted that it's easier to extradite someone from the U.K. to the U.S., and that, if Assange is extradited to Sweden, and the U.S. then wants him, Sweden would not only have to approve the extradition, but it also would need the approval of the British Secretary of State.

His lawyers complained that Assange hasn't been formally charged with any crime; they haven't seen all the evidence against him; if he returned to Sweden, he would languish incommunicado in jail; the trial would be held behind closed doors; and he would not be tried by a jury of his peers.

After listening to testimony disputing this, Riddle said he believed that Sweden intends to prosecute Assange, but that Ny is required to interview Assange and finish her investigation before bringing formal charges. Prosecutors are not required to give the defense all of their evidence beforehand. In jail, Assange might not be allowed communication with the outside world. But once someone is jailed pending trial in Sweden, the trial follows quickly, usually in two weeks. In sex-crime cases, accusers can choose to have testimony heard in private. Cases are decided by judges and those they appoint as lay judges.

Assange may not like the Swedish system, but it's similar to procedures in other European countries, Riddle said.

"TRUTH WILL OUT!" screams a hoodie peddled on a WL site to raise money. We can only hope.

The Gates Foundation and ALEC

ALEC stands for The American Legislative Exchange Council. Here's what it is:

The most important group, I’m pretty sure, is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which was founded in 1973 by Henry Hyde, Lou Barnett, and (surprise, surprise) Paul Weyrich. Its goal for the past forty years has been to draft “model bills” that conservative legislators can introduce in the 50 states. Its website claims that in each legislative cycle, its members introduce 1000 pieces of legislation based on its work, and claims that roughly 18% of these bills are enacted into law. (Among them was the controversial 2010 anti-immigrant law in Arizona.)

If you’re as impressed by these numbers as I am, I’m hoping you’ll agree with me that it may be time to start paying more attention to ALEC and the bills its seeks to promote.

...

Becoming a Member of ALEC: Not So Easy to Do

How do you become a member? Simple. Two ways. You can be an elected Republican legislator who, after being individually vetted, pays a token fee of roughly $100 per biennium to join. Here’s the membership brochure to use if you meet this criterion:
http://www.alec.org/AM/pdf/2011_legislative_brochure.pdf
What if you’re not a Republican elected official? Not to worry. You can apply to join ALEC as a “private sector” member by paying at least a few thousand dollars depending on which legislative domains most interest you. Here’s the membership brochure if you meet this criterion:
http://www.alec.org/am/pdf/Corporate_Brochure.pdf
Then again, even if most of us had this kind of money to contribute to ALEC, I have a feeling that membership might not necessarily be open to just anyone who is willing to pay the fee. But maybe I’m being cynical here.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has just awarded ALEC a grant:

American Legislative Exchange Council
Date: November 2011
Purpose: to educate and engage its membership on more efficient state budget approaches to drive greater student outcomes, as well as educate them on beneficial ways to recruit, retain, evaluate and compensate effective teaching based upon merit and achievement
Amount: $376,635
Term: 1 year and 10 months
Topic: Advocacy & Public Policy
Region Served: Global, North America
Program: United States
Grantee Location: Washington, District of Columbia
Grantee Web site: http://www.alec.org

I'm somewhat confused about the purpose of this grant. ALEC is supposed to educate its membership only? And that consists of Republican politicians and people able to afford the steep membership fee? That doesn't sound like a group which would need charitable help in the first place. Neither does it sound like a group which would stay uninformed without such a grant.

Then there are all those code words in the purpose statement which refer to getting rid of teachers' unions.
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For more on this topic, check out Karoli at Crooks&Liars.

Interesting

This twitter message. It shows a picture of a woman, with this text:

A woman from Jeddah in 1873, before 'Saudi' Arabia was created. No black robes, gloves, or face veils.

Single old pictures cannot tell us anything about what was common for women during that era, because a single old picture is just that. What it can tell us, of course, is that at least one woman let herself be photographed in an outfit which today would be regarded as completely unacceptable.

The whole tweet is about a question I've thought of often: We don't really know how the women in the past dressed.

When an extreme Islamist argues that "modesty" for women means head-to-toe black, face veils and gloves, he bases it on a constructed view of what "modesty" might have meant during the era of the prophet Muhammad. But we don't know how women then dressed. We don't know what "modesty" meant in that context, and the Koran does not, in fact, mention head or face veils at all.

It argues that both men and women should dress modestly and that women should cover their bosoms. Everything else is someone else's interpretation, most of which seems to forget that the command also applies to men.

As far as I understand it, the argument for certain type of veiling is based on a reported saying by Muhammad, who told a woman that she should leave uncovered only that which is acceptable to be seen. But what were those body parts in that era? Is it really possible that they amounted to only one eye per woman? And how did the poor women do their farm work dressed like that?