The "Election Threat"

As we have all heard from our dearly beloved John Ashcroft, the terrorists are already here, among our midst, plotting to cause widespread death and havoc. The information is very credible, he says, but, as always, it does not include what, where and when. Just that something really horrible is in the planning stages, perhaps a plague or radiation sickness or a smallish nuclear war. Be very, very afraid. You are powerless, a fly trapped in the spider's web just waiting for the moment when the poison strikes you. But do not worry: all is in the good hands of the administration.

I am doing my utmost to pray to all powers, whether real or not, that nothing of the sort will happen. I don't want people to die for any reason at all, and especially not for someone's delirious nightmare views of a war between what some misguided people call civilizations. Or for someone's desires to have unlimited power. We really need to put adults in charge of this world, and that goes for both sides of this so-called war.

Just consider this interpretation of the terrorists' plans:

That information dovetails with other intelligence "chatter" suggesting that al-Qaida operatives are pleased with the change in government resulting from the March 11 terrorist bombings in Spain and may want to affect elections in the United States and other countries.
"They saw that an attack of that nature can have economic and political consequences and have some impact on the electoral process," said one federal official with access to counterterrorism intelligence.

That's why the purportedly planned attack has been coined the "election threat": we are to view it as an attempt to change how we vote: If there is a terrorist attack this summer, then the terrorists have won if Americans vote for Kerry. On the other hand, if there isn't one, then Americans should vote for Bush as he kept the country safe. Get it? There's only one acceptable conclusion: Americans must vote for Bush.

But that's what Al Qaeida wants, too, of course. They can have no more suitable enemy in their desire to set all of Islam against all of Christianity than George W. Bush. He's reacting exactly as they wish him to do, and no way would anybody in Al Qaeida want an adult in control on the other side. That would ruin their games completely.

If we had adults in power, Al Qaeida would be regarded as the criminal gang they are. They would not be given the kind of status they get today. Instead, they would be hunted down by the police forces, arrested and punished as their crimes deserve. Ordinary innocent people on both sides of the religious divide would be allowed to live their lives peacefully and with dignity. But then adults are not in power, and I am only a minor goddess not all interested in world domination.

------------------------

I knew someone who went to work one day and never came home. That day was September 11, 2001. He is still dead. Countless others know someone who went out or went to sleep and is now also prematurely dead, either on that date or on other dates before and after, and all these loved ones and missed ones are still dead. These senseless deaths are not to please any God. The very earth cries when such things happen, and the only creatures who receive sustenance from violent death, fear and suffering are very sick souls who never grew up. They should not have the power to kill, and that they do have this power is to the eternal shame of all of us.

On Aprons and Sin

An interesting snippet of news:

Women legislators in California staged a protest on Monday over remarks that it was "sinful" for them to leave their children at home while they served in the state legislature. The sexist remark came from Pastor Ralph Drollinger, president of the evangelical Capitol Ministries, who leads a weekly Bible study session with lawmakers and staff members. According to the Tri-Valley Herald, he wrote in a Bible lesson that "It is one thing for a mother to work out of her home while her children are in school. It is quite another matter to have children in the home and live away in Sacramento four days a week … [T]he latter is sinful." The Bible lesson was about the different roles of women and men in parenting – "Man's is, primarily, to be a breadwinner, and woman's is to be at home nurturing their children," said Drollinger, according to the Herald.

A dozen women legislators protested the remarks by arriving to the Capitol on Monday wearing 1950s-style dresses and aprons, and the state Senate Majority Leader, John Burton, showed his support by tying on a floral apron over his suit, the Contra Costa Times reports. The women's caucus later asked the Rules Committee to clarify which groups should be allowed to meet in the Capitol, saying that groups that encourage sexist beliefs should not be allowed, the Times reports.

Actually, the Bible doesn't say anything about men being the breadwinners or about women having to stay at home nurturing their children. That is something Pastor Ralph Drollinger says. It's just more convenient for him to insert the same message into God's mouth, or maybe he thinks that he has full diplomatic powers of representation.

That Damned Liberal Media

Here we go again. Instapundit notes the following in his blog:

Those convinced that liberals make up a disproportionate share of newsroom workers have long relied on Pew Research Center surveys to confirm this view, and they will not be disappointed by the results of Pew's latest study released today. . . .
At national organizations (which includes print, TV and radio), the numbers break down like this: 34% liberal, 7% conservative. At local outlets: 23% liberal, 12% conservative. At Web sites: 27% call themselves liberals, 13% conservatives.
This contrasts with the self-assessment of the general public: 20% liberal, 33% conservative. . . .
While it's important to remember that most journalists in this survey continue to call themselves moderate, the ranks of self-described liberals have grown in recent years, according to Pew. For example, since 1995, Pew found at national outlets that the liberal segment has climbed from 22% to 34% while conservatives have only inched up from 5% to 7%.
The survey also notes a dramatic "values gap" on issues like gay marriage and belief in God. But : "Of course, no one would ever expect this to impact the way news is covered."
Though, the war and the Second Amendment aside, my views are probably closer to those of the press than the general public, I have to agree with those who find this troubling. If despite aspirations toward objectivity, reporters' gender and ethnicity is as influential on the news as newsroom diversity advocates tell us, then surely reporters' views are even more significant. So where's the move toward greater diversity there?

You tell me, instapundit. How come do we have a hundred Rush Limbaugh wannabees on every radio station? How come are nine out of ten political commentators so right wing that I often find myself muttering Molly Ivins' unforgettable words: It was better in the original German.

So instapundit finds the number of liberal journalists troubling. I wonder if he finds the number of conservative media owners troubling, or if he loses any sleep over the fact that Rupert Murdoch, a well-known arch-conservative, will soon own most of the news sources in this country. It is very odd that a capitalist would simply assume that the workers in a firm make the decisions and that the owners just meekly stand by. Yet this is what right-wing commentators always assume about the media.

They also conveniently forget that the number of pundits who are right-wingers completely swamps the very few and almost invisible left-wing pundits (can you mention any?) in mainstream media, and it hardly ever occurs to them to point out that the whole Fox News is explicitly and extremely conservative in its coverage. So is much of the rest of the so-called liberal media. In fact, the conservative assault on the presumed liberal dominance of the media has been so successful that many media outlets bend over backwards to not seem too lefty. The result is that the observable bias in the media is considerably more conservative than liberal. Read Eric Alterman's book What Liberal Media? to get the facts, or at least some countervailing bias. Even the New York Times, which was mentioned by twenty per cent of the surveyed journalists as liberal, has David Brooks as its columnist. Where do such great writers as Molly Ivins find employment? In the left fringes of the media, that's where.

In fact, my reading of the various pundits has convinced me that there is affirmative action of an unusual sort going on in the media world: if you're a rabid conservative, you'll be snapped up in no time by some major newspaper or tv station, and you'll be given your very own column or show, even if your writing is on the fourth grade level or if your screen presence is that of a vulture who never cleans its teeth.

There! Now that I have gotten all that off my chest I wish to return to my austere goddess-of-scientific-argument role and point out that the journalists interviewed in the Pew study differ from the general population much more in one yet unmentioned characteristic than in their political views. That is their education level. Only five per cent of those surveyed lacked a college degree. Now, if you made me guess I'd surmise that the political views of these journalists look a lot like those of other people who have college degrees. Sadly, I was unable to unearth any clear statistical data on political views of the college educated, but I'm willing to go out on a limb here and propose that the media professionals are not that different from most educated people. Instapundit might agree with me here, but would probably argue that this just shows the horrible results of our lefty university professors having brainwashed people over the last three decades. An alternative, and saner view, is that college education does make one think differently about some issues, even without any foaming-in-the-mouth liberal professors. Education is supposed to open the student's mind to new ways of thinking, after all.

The 'value gap' in beliefs in God that instapundit refers to might be a good example of this effect. According to the Pew study, sixty per cent of the general public surveyed stated that people who don't believe in God can't be truly moral. In contrast, the vast majority of the surveyed media workers believed that atheists can be moral. I would argue that the media views are the correct ones here, and I have considerable evidence on that. Sometimes not reflecting the views of the general public is like being the one lemming who doesn't think that a nice suicide would be just the thing on a lovely spring day. Sometimes the one lemming is right.

So what determines how liberal or conservative the news presentation of the media will be? This is the real question in the debate, and the conservatives argue that it is determined by the political affiliation of the workers in the system. Most liberals argue that the ownership of the media outlets should be of at least equal, if not greater concern, just as the owners of the firm have the final say in how they operate. Liberals also point out to studies which demonstrate a preponderance of dependence on right-wing think tanks in the expert opinions sought by the media, the visibility of right-wing talk show hosts and the large hordes of loud conservative pundits everywhere in the mainstream media. Where would you go to read or view or listen to a left-wing pundit? How often is Noam Chomsky on the Fox News? Who owns the system?

A related question is whether media professionals can do their work in a neutral manner, despite any political views of their own that might conflict with such an approach. My belief is that this is possible to some extent, but that no human being is a completely neutral observer of this planet. Some bias is unavoidable, and this means that it is indeed a good thing to have all the different biases represented in the media. The right-wingers ignore all but one possible cause of bias, and wish that this one and only bias against them be removed. This would not make the media objective; it would make it thoroughly conservative: a world full of Rupert Murdoch clones.

Bush Spoke, They Listened

These are the reactions of people from various parts of the U.S. to Bush's Monday night speech.

From a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts:

For Goldberg, 66, an investment manager, the sadness stems from what he believes is the failure of a war he once reluctantly supported, hoping it would make the world safer from terrorism.
"I don't see how we can pull off a smooth transition," Goldberg said, shaking his head.
He is particularly wary of Islamic fundamentalism, but he was not hopeful about the president's assurances on Iraq's future, and believes the U.S. will hand authority to the U.N. as quickly as possible and pull out.
"Should we leave the country, it will be a colossal victory for the jihadist movement," said Goldberg, who voted for Bush in 2000 but said he's likely to vote against him this year.
McElaney, 38, a medical salesman, said the speech did nothing to ease his anger. "I don't feel we should have been there in the first place," he said.
As for the handover, "I don't really see it happening by the end of June," he said. "I think Spain made the right decision getting out when they did."
A third man at the counter, who wouldn't give his name, said America must accept that the Sept. 11 terror attacks were a declaration of war against the country, and America must be prepared to respond forcefully.
"I'm confused, but not so confused that I'm ready to leave Iraq," he said. "When they flew those planes into the buildings, they started a war."

From Dearborn, Michigan, a major center of Iraqis in the U.S.:

"I believe that the country will get the elections," 24-year-old Nasser Nasser said while watching Bush's speech broadcast and translated over an Arabic television station.
"He says he's going to give this and that, but I'm worried that this is all for votes," Nasser couldn't help but add, as he munched on a kabob wrapped in pita. Even so, he said the United States should remain after a new government is in place because he believes an early exit could lead to civil war.
At the Karbalaa Islamic Center, many were happy with Bush's pledges. But not all.
As the day's final call to prayer echoed in the mosque, Hadi Hadi pounded his chest in disgust, too distrustful to even watch the speech.
"Anything he says is a lie," said Hadi Hadi, 43, who had just arrived back from a visit to Baghdad. "The Americans are using means that don't rely on Iraqis. They're beginning to use the Ba'athists, those criminals, and this is a big mistake."

And from Wadesville, Indiana, the mother of a soldier stationed in Iraq:

"The ordinary Iraqi citizens will maybe in time say no to these factions or help us in a way," Arnold said. "It's not going to be an instant thing. I don't think any of this is instant. It's going to take time."
She wonders if the troops really will be out of Iraq by 2005. Still, she was pleased to hear that President Bush was talking about training more Iraqi troops.
"I think that's the only way they're going to learn to take care of themselves," Arnold said.
Arnold was Bush supporter before, and that hasn't changed.
He is "making a statement we're not there to take over the country, to replace Saddam," Arnold said. "We're there to help the people. That's what America is about, the freedoms."

These are not meant to be representative views, of course, but they're interesting nevertheless. For example, people seem to hear what they are already convinced about.
It's all sort of depressing, especially that one comment above which bears repeating:

"I'm confused, but not so confused that I'm ready to leave Iraq," he said. "When they flew those planes into the buildings, they started a war."

Yep. He sure is confused. Sigh.

What Ails the Health Care Markets?

Many on the political right believe that the U.S. health care system should be operated as an unregulated market system, without government intervention. (If this sounds alien to you, replace the word 'unregulated' with the word 'free'. The term 'free markets' has gained such religious overtones among some pro-market groups that it no longer has a clear economic meaning. I prefer to call such markets unregulated.)

Totally unregulated markets in health care will not work for reasons that have to do with the basic characteristics of medical care. For simplicity, compare some medical care commodity, say, the provision of an appendectomy to that of some more ordinary consumption good, say, bread. Then consider the differences between the two commodities:

1. Feeling hungry is an adequate reason for a person to decide to buy bread. In contrast, all a patient who will end up having appendectomy knows is that something hurts a lot. Thus, we know our own needs when buying bread, but we are unsure about whether we even need an appendectomy. The level of information is very different in the two cases; in the latter case we as consumers lack most of the necessary information.

There are no such people as specialists who tell us when we should buy bread. But we do have exactly such specialists in health care, usually physicians, who diagnose and inform us about our condition and the best products and services to buy for it. This creates an unusual situation, as the person advising us about these needs is also in most cases the person who is going to sell us the products and services, and is therefore directly going to benefit from our purchases. Just think what would happen if bakers were allowed to decide how much bread we 'need'.

This dependency on professional advice leaves patients quite vulnerable. An unregulated health care market would not stop ruthless providers from exploiting the most desperate and/or wealthiest consumers. One reason why physicians traditionally did not advertize lies in this very fact: such advertizing can never be guaranteed to be objective, given the self-interests of providers and the lack of information most consumers possess.

2. Hunger is quite predictable, and if a person likes bread she or he can plan its purchases long in advance. Much of health care use is very unpredictable. With the exception of routine checkups and preventive care, health care consumption can't be planned in advance. Illness and accidents are uncertain events, and this fact makes health care use also an event which we can't predict with certainty. This is the basis for health care insurance. Insurance solves the problem of unpredictability and the need to keep large sums of money at hand for any major expenses. Instead, insured consumers can pay a fixed smaller sum every month (or have their employers pay it on their behalf).

While having insurance is a good thing, on the whole, insured patients behave differently from those who have no insurance. Just think what you would do if you had insurance for bread eating with no cash down needed. You would probably buy more expensive types of bread and more bread in general. This is what happens in health care markets, too. As a consequence, prices don't have their usual ability to affect consumer purchases. What most people take into account in their calculations is the actual amount of money needed (for example any deductibles and copayments), not the total bill of the treatment. Yet it is this total which is counted in the overall costs of medical care.

3. Quality assessment by patients is extremely difficult. In contrast, most of us can tell when bread is stale, and it usually takes just a small sample to find if we like the taste. Taking small samples of health care services may not be practical. It can even be extremely dangerous. That's one of the reasons why patients employ providers as advisers on the type and quantity of care needed. It's also the reason why pharmaceuticals and hospitals are so rigorously regulated, and why the system of malpractice suits exists.

Quality or effectiveness of health care is not completely known even to its providers. Many treatments are routinely carried out that might have only minor impact on the disease they aim to treat. New technologies are sometimes developed on the basis of nothing much more than a hunch, and they often spread widely before any research can be carried out about their appropriateness.

4. Whether I consume bread or not should have no direct impact on others' welfare (though it may affect others indirectly if I'm very poor and others would like me to have more bread). Whether I get treated for an infectious disease or not is of obvious direct interest to others: If I don't get treated, I am going to be a risk in the community. This means that the society as a whole, usually seen as reflected in the government, has an interest in assuring that infectious diseases and other general health problems are tackled. Markets tend to underprovide such services. Why? Because firms don't have the ability to charge other people for the benefits they receive when someone else's infectious disease is treated. These benefits are not then taken into account in market decisions; only the private demand of those infected will be satisfied by the market forces.

All these differences between bread and various types of medical care explain why markets perform poorly in health care and well in the bakery industry. Competitive behavior in most markets drives prices down, keeps quality up and offers variety to the consumers. But in health care prices may not go down with competition because consumers can't always judge what they are getting in quality, which makes per unit prices meaningless, and because insured patients are not taking the whole price into account in making decisions. Quality may not increase through competition if consumers are truly unable to judge quality, or if they use wrong signals to measure the inherently unknown quality. As an example, think about hospitals offering intricate technological services. Competition between hospitals might make them all acquire the latest gadgets, and consumers might think that a well equipped hospital is a high-quality one. But in reality, such competition may mean that none of the hospitals gets enough patients that actually need these services. The personnel operating the technology may not then get enough practice to remain skilled. And, as noted above, markets will underprovide those medical care services which have strong effects on the well-being of others than the patient under treatment.

For these reasons health care costs keep on rising year after year, despite our best attempts to control them, competition seems to have no real impact on keeping prices low, malpractice suits remain common and government regulation an important aspect of health care. The markets for bread, on the other hand, are doing pretty well with minimal intervention.

Those who advocate unregulated health care markets seem to assume that medical care is no different from bread, and that just getting rid of the government role in health care markets would make an appendectomy as affordable, bland and safe as sliced bread. I hope that this post shows why they are wrong.

A Deep Thought for the Day

By Justice Antonin Scalia, U.S. Supreme Court:

"I think all Americans would love their country if they had to live abroad for a while," Scalia said.

Are foreign ducks trickier to catch?


My apologies for having the word 'deep' in two consecutive headlines. 'Profound' doesn't quite work here. I bet you never thought how bloggers have to fret over minor details like that one!

Deep Observations

I have spent the whole day being grumpy. It's surprisingly pleasant! Not to have to be polite to anybody, not to clean up after myself, not to do as people ask; everybody should have a grumpy day once and a while.

I have been kicking paper balls made out of nasty newspaper articles around the house. I also painted my eyelids with a red lipstick to see how I would look like as a vampire. Pretty impressive. But the stuff doesn't come off very easily, and now I look like I have been crying for hours. Actually, it goes with being grumpy quite well.

Tomorrow I'm going to be back to my usual sunny divineness, but I must remember the clear advantages of grumpiness as a sort of instant-results therapy. Like those "lose-twenty-pounds-a-day" diets, grumpiness makes me feel as if I'm making important headway with all sorts of interesting psychological processes.

And the reason for my grumpiness? Too many people telling me to have a nice day! Even goddesses can't control the quality of days and nights.

Some Organizing and House-Cleaning

I am finally going to redo my links to reflect the current status. How do you find the proposal to list them in subcategories, such as politics, feminism, etc.? Would that be helpful?

Also, are there any readers who read me only through news aggregators? How important is it to have this option? I currently offer two RSS feeds, but I have no idea if anybody reads me through these, as my statistics count only those who link on the blog itself.

Finally, are there any other kinds of links that you would find useful? I'm thinking of news sources and books and stuff like that.

Any other suggestions are welcome.

That Old Time Religion

If we are picky here, worshipping me is a lot more ancient than many of the mainline religions. But nobody calls the worship of Echidne of the snakes an old time religion, what they are referring to are the current large-number religions. I'm not so happy right now with some aspects of these religions. At some point (after me) religion took a wrong turn. What we got are all these competing morality plays, each with its own dank underbelly where the prophets hid all the stuff that is not-so-nice, so that it, too, now has the authority of morality.

For example, consider the fourth commandment in Christianity, according to most ways of counting the order: Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the LORD your God gives you. It tells the believers to treat their parents well. If they do, long life and success is promised. Very nice. But there is something slightly mercenary about the promise of good things for those who obey this commandment, something that smacks of a two-sided contract, and it doesn't work well as an empirically verifiable hypothesis: a most cursory check tells me that many people thrived exceedingly well without having been at all nice to their mum and dad and that others had short and miserable lives despite honoring their parents.

This commandment is often interpreted as a general order to obey and respect those who are older and/or in positions of authority. It is interesting that no corresponding commandment exists about honoring ones children, or people who are younger and/or below us in the pecking order. Why is this commandment missing? I suspect that it is missing on purpose. If a religion is to be acceptable to the rulers of an era, its tenets must not contradict their powers, and if a religion is to be acceptable to a large number of believers, its tenets must not deviate too much from too many of the existing social norms. Understanding this little practical fact makes it much easier to see why the big religions reflect the societal biases of the times when they were written down. Of course, it doesn't make it any easier to comprehend why everybody can't see this.

Oops! I was almost beginning to rave about fundamentalists again. They are not allowed into this post which is to be all about the wonders of religion, the joy of spirituality and the need for a brand new 'Old Time Religion': Echidneism. Yes, I have decided that the snakes are only a part-time job for a goddess still in her prime, and I could easily handle a few thousand human franchises, too. This is a very religious era, so the marketing of me should go fairly smoothly. But first I need to write down what the religion requires from the true believer, and there I got stuck. Hence the beginning of this post, about the difficulties inherent in making moral prescriptions.

I'm tempted to suggest that anything but harming others or the planet will be acceptable for an echidneite, but that wouldn't sell. People want to give something up, to do penance, to fast and so on. I have decided that no echidneite can ever eat a steak-and-kidney pie, and that kidneys, in all forms, are never to be ingested. Something truly horrible will happen to anybody who violates this commandment, but I haven't yet figured out what it might be.

Then there will be the positive commandments: "Thou shalt dance and sing at the smallest opportunity." "Thou shalt hug thy neighbor and thy neighbor's dog." "Thou shalt listen to the trees and the stones." "Thou shalt treasure love as a divine gift to be celebrated." And so on and so on. These are much more fun to make up.

That's about how far I am with my work in creating this religion, though I have also given some thought to its external symbols. I kind of like the idea of a little snake, tattooed just below one corner of the eye, but this might be dangerous during any future religious purges. Something removable is probably better. Perhaps a snake-shaped nose-ring?

What do you think? Echidneism would definitely qualify as a religion, even in Texas where they require religions to have one or more gods/goddesses. That I'm on the internet is just an extra bonus.

Meanwhile, in Iran...

Iran's current reformist parliament, which will be replaced with conservatives this month, approved a bill that grants women equal inheritance rights to men. The proposed law states that a woman is entitled to all of her husband's estate if there are no other heirs.

Under the current law in Iran, a widow receives only one-eighth to one-fourth of her husband's possessions. According to BBC News, the reformist parliament will not have much success persuading the hard-line Guardian Council to approve the bill because the Council has rejected most of the reforms proposed in the past.

The Iranian women's movement is an active one. It recently demonstrated against a miniseries run by the state-controlled television. This series is said to depict women as second-class citizens and polygamy as normal. Did the hard-line Guardian Council approve this program? I suppose so.

Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

GEORGE W BUSH: We don't really care why the chicken crossed the road.
We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road or not.
The chicken is either against us or for us. There is no middle ground
here.


COLIN POWELL: Now to the left of the screen, you can clearly see the
satellite image of the chicken crossing the road.


HANS BLIX: We have reason to believe there is a chicken, but we have
not yet been allowed to have access to the other side of the road.


JOHN KERRY: Although I voted to let the chicken cross the road I am
now against it!


RALPH NADER: The chicken's habitat on the other side of the road had
been polluted by unchecked industrial greed. The chicken did not reach
the unspoiled habitat on the other side of the road because it was
crushed by the wheels of a gas-guzzling SUV.


PAT BUCHANAN: To steal the job of a decent, hard-working American.


RUSH LIMBAUGH: I don't know why the chicken crossed the road, but
I'll bet it was getting a government grant to cross the road, and I'll
bet that somebody out there is already forming a support group to help
chickens with crossing-the-road syndrome. Can you believe this? How
much more of this can real Americans take? Chickens crossing the road
paid for by their tax dollars. And when I say tax dollars, I'm talking
about your money, money the government took from you to build a road
for chickens to cross.


MARTHA STEWART: No one called me to warn me which way that chicken
was going. I had a standing order at the Farmer's Market to sell my
eggs when the price dropped to a certain level. No little bird gave me
any insider information.


JERRY FALWELL: Because the chicken was gay --- isn't it obvious?
Can't you people see the plain truth in front of your face? The
chicken was going to the 'other side'. That's what they call it the
other side. Yes, my friends, that chicken is gay. And if you eat that
chicken, you will become gay too. I say we boycott all chickens until
we sort out this abomination that the liberal media whitewashes with
seemingly harmless phrases like "the other side."


DR SEUSS: Did the chicken cross the road? Did he cross it with a
toad? Yes, the chicken crossed the road, but why it crossed I've not
been told.


ERNEST HEMINGWAY: To die in the rain. Alone.


MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR: I envision a world where all chickens will be
free to cross roads without having their motives called into question.


GRANDPA: In my day, we didn't ask why the chicken crossed the road.
Somebody told us the chicken crossed the road, and that was good
enough.


BARBARA WALTERS: Isn't that interesting? In a few moments, we will be
listening to the chicken tell, for the first time, the heart-warming
story of how it experienced a serious case of molting, and went on to
accomplish its life long dream of crossing the road.


JOHN LENNON: Imagine all the chickens in the world crossing roads
together - in peace.


ARISTOTLE: It is the nature of chickens to cross the road.


KARL MARX: It was an historic inevitability.


RONALD REAGAN: What chicken?


CAPTAIN KIRK: To boldly go where no chicken has ever gone before.


SIGMUND FREUD: The fact that you are at all concerned that the
chicken crossed the road reveals your underlying sexual insecurity.


BILL GATES: I have just witnessed eChicken2003, which will not only
cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents, and
balance your checkbook, - and internet explorer is an integral part of
the Chicken.


ALBERT EINSTEIN: Did the chicken really cross the road, or did the
road move beneath the chicken?


BILL CLINTON: I did not cross the road with THAT chicken. What is
your definition of chicken?


COLONEL SANDERS Did I miss one?


AL GORE I invented the chicken!


THE BIBLE And God came down from Heaven, and he said unto the chicken,
"THOU SHALT CROSS THE ROAD." And the chicken didst cross the road, and
there was much rejoicing.


----------
Courtesy of heini

The Third Eye

The third eye is the energy gate between your eyes. It is also the title of a book by Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, a Tibetan priest. In the book Rampa tells us how his third eye was opened: by drilling through the skull and by wedging it open for two weeks with a piece of wood! Do not try this at home. It's not necessary, anyway. There are much gentler methods for those who want to pursue such esoteric hobbies.

Here's what Rampa says about his first experience of wearing a Western suit:

Oh that suit! Tight tubes of cloth that gripped my legs, so tight that I was afraid to bend. Now I knew why the Westerners could not sit in the Lotus attitude: their clothes were too tight. Certainly I thought that I was "ruined for life" by these tight tubes. They put a white shroud on me, and around my neck they tied a thick ribbon and pulled it tight as if they were going to strangle me. Over that they fitted a short piece of cloth with patches and holes behind, in which, they said, the Westerners kept things - instead of in a robe as we did. But the worst was yet to come. They put thick and heavy "gloves" on my feet and pulled them tight with black strings with metal ends....A black inverted bowl with an edge around it was put on my head, and I was told that I was dressed as a "Western gentleman of leisure". It seemed to me that they would have to have leisure as surely they could not be expected to do any work dressed up like this!

This is why I love books: unexpected treasures in the most unlikely places!


And THIS is why I really love books: It turns out that the whole book is a hoax, written by one Cyril Henry Hoskins... Thanks for the anonymous in the comments-section. Though it was clear from the drilling-through-the-skull stuff to me that the story wasn't intended to be a real one, I thought that it was a Tibetan hoax, not a Devon one.

W is for Women!

This is where one should add that internet abbreviation LOL. If George W. Bush is for women, I'm Rush Limbaugh.

He isn't for girls, either, and this makes me very angry; exploiting the vulnerable always does that. On the other hand, George definitely is for the right-wing fundamentalists (maybe 'W' stands for weirdos?), and this group wants to reinstate single-sex education to keep the evil sex away from young minds, to carefully guide the genders into their proper god-appointed roles and otherwise to follow in the footsteps of the Taliban.

Thus, there is a new proposal to 'reinterpret' Title IX, the federal rule that bans sex discrimination in education. The Bush administration wants to make it much easier for schools to provide single-sex classes and even to turn whole schools into schools for one sex only. The way to 'reinterpretation' consists essentially of dispensing with the annoying parts of Title IX, the ones that go on and on about 'equality of educational opportunity' and other such boring stuff. For example, the administration proposes that a school district could start a separate school for one gender without giving any reason whatsoever for doing so and without being required to offer the same access to single-sex education to the other gender! Also, schools could start single-sex classes for only boys or only girls in many subjects, and the only justification they would need is something as weak as 'parental interest in such classes'. The other sex doesn't have to be offered anything new at all. And most interestingly, the schools wouldn't even have to prove that the learning opportunities are equal for both boys and girls; rather it would be perfectly ok to show that they are 'substantially' equal. You know, in the ballpark. The Supreme Court of course rejected the 'substantially' equal interpretation of Title IX in its decision about VMI over a decade ago. Never mind, maybe the new Supreme Court after Bush's re-election will think differently about this.

In a nutshell, our current administration is proposing, softly, softly, behind the stage, to start the dismantling of Title IX. Title IX has had an enormous impact on girls' education in this country, and most observers view that as a positive development. Not so our current administration; for them Title IX is just that much more bureaucratic regulation that should be flushed down the toilet. In fact, the 'reinterpretation' proposal essentially says as much when it implies that sex discrimination may have been a worthwhile thing to worry about in the past, but now such worries just keep us from providing our children with the best education we can.

If this is true, how come would it be acceptable to provide some children, either boys or girls, this supposedly best education at a single-sex setting, and then to leave the other children, either girls or boys, without the same opportunities? Isn't that in itself discriminatory? Suppose that a family has two children, a boy and a girl who are fraternal twins. The new proposal would offer one of these children two choices (single-sex or coed classes or schools) and the other one only one choice (coed classes or schools). This is blatantly wrong.

It's wrong whether girls or boys would suffer from the arrangement, but my bets are on plans for having the girls suffer. This accords better with the traditional views that girls don't really need an education, and many fundamentalists hold these sorts of views. It is also the likely outcome given the current concern about boys' supposed decline* in school achievement measures. The single-sex programs are really introduced so that more attention can be given to boys, I suspect. Which is all good as long as it doesn't mean less attention for girls, but I see no safeguards in the administration's proposal against this possibility. In fact, one single-class experiment discussed in a radio program revealed itself to be an experiment in giving boys smaller class sizes and better teachers. If this is really where the benefits are, they can only be achieved in a financially strapped school district by allocating fewer resources to the remaining students; in this case girls. I find the idea that improving the education of boys should come at the expense of girls extremely distasteful, as I also find the reverse idea. This distaste doesn't seem to be shared by the Bush administration.

Is single-sex education really better, then, or at least worthy of the sort of encouragement that the relaxation of Title IX requirements would suggest? The answer is that no well-done study comparing the benefits and disadvantages of single-sex and coed education yet exists, although one is supposed to be finished in 2006. None of the existing studies correctly control for all the other determinants of educational success. We simply don't have the required statistical information, yet the government is galloping on as if it already knew the answers. In any case, should single-sex education turn out to be the superior form for some odd reason, why isn't it then offered to both genders?

I'm not a supporter of single-sex education in general, though I can see it as the right choice for some individuals. My resistance is based on the difficulty of seeing how gender-segregated education would prepare men and women to work together in a gender-integrated world (and no, boys and girls getting together after school does not teach this), and my disbelief on the facile sexual stereotypes that 'all girls learn best cooperatively' and 'all boys learn best competitively', thus the sexes should be educated separately. This assumes no individual variation in learning styles within a gender, and that is rubbish. I'm also not satisfied that 'separate' can ever really be 'equal'.

And what about the benefits of coed education? Doesn't it have benefits, too? Granted, economic considerations will keep the single-sex option a relatively rare one even if the new proposal of 'reinterpreting' Title IX is accepted. But it's important to remember that we just celebrated the famous court decision of Brown vs. Board of Education which banned racial segregation in schools, because segregation in itself was found to be discriminatory. Integration of schools by gender is not the same thing, you might say, girls and boys are different and have different needs. Maybe. But children from different ethnic backgrounds and different income classes also have different needs, Jane Smith has different needs than Sheila Jones and so on. What we are really suggesting here is that the differences by gender are so fundamental and so enormous that integration will not work; that all girls are the same as other girls and quite different from all boys who are also the same as other boys. This is simply untrue.
___________
A report on the Bush administration proposal and many legal arguments against it can be downloaded as a pdf file from National Women' Law Center. Thanks for feministing.com for the link.
___________
*In fact, a careful perusal of statistical data shows that it is not boys in general who are doing poorly: it is boys from minority backgrounds. This suggests a much more complicated reason for the poor performance; perhaps it is a combined consequence of economic deprivation, racial discrimination and cultural factors relating to how masculinity is defined in various subgroup. If this is the case, single-sex schooling in itself wouldn't do very much for these boys.

Hope

Hope is a thing with feathers
It perches in the soul
And sings its song without a word
And never stops at all.

This is not the best poem Emily Dickinson wrote, and perhaps not even correctly given here as I typed it from memory. But it speaks to me today, and I wonder if Emily was right. What decides when we feel hopeful? Hope is a fickle thing for me. There are sometimes weeks, even months when it falls silent, as if feeling hope had become an unbearable luxury amongst all the sufferings of this world.

What is the price of hope today?

Some find hope easily; it is always about, ready to sing, even when there is in reality no possibility of a happy ending. For others hope is like the dodo bird, dead before they were born, and yet for others hope sings if there is enough to feed it: something concrete, real, or at least the promise of better things to come.

Can hope be infectuous?

Can you 'catch' it? If only it were possible. We need hope badly today, perhaps more than ever before in our lives if we are to put this world back to order. Are there ways to do this, to trap the bird that sings without a single word? Or rather, to lure it back home, to prepare a nice little perch for it, to invite it to sing again?

Left Behind?

The trouble with fanatics is that it's impossible to debate them unless you share the same fanaticism. For everybody else they might as well belong to a totally different species, one that is wired in ways unfathomable to the rest of us.

This is the conclusion I have reached after several millennia of trying to approach fanatics of all types from Alexander the Great onwards. They can't compromise: it would negate their fanaticism, and this means that it's a total waste of time to try to argue issues with them. They already know the answer: it's written in a book somewhere, from Mao's little red one to the Koran or the Bible. The only reason why fanatics have brains is so that there is some weight inside the skull to stop the whole appendix from floating upwards.

Our most recent fanatics in the news do want to float upwards. I'm naturally speaking about the Millennarian Christians in the United States, the evangelical fundamentalists. According to Sadri and Sadri, there are seventeen million hard-core fundamentalist Christians in this country, and another seventy million are closely affiliated with this way of thinking. They share several religious views, including the belief in the natural hierarchy of men over women, which makes me view them with somewhat of a jaundiced eye. But even for those who don't feel as strongly about general equality as I do, some of the fundamentalist views should come across as shocking, and the one about floating upwards especially.

Many of these people believe in the immanence of armageddon; the end of the world as we know it:

An important aspect of fundamentalist resurgence in America is its belief in divine deliverance at the hands of an avenging messiah. A set of beliefs, known as "Bible prophecies," based on a relatively recent interpretation of the New Testament's Book of Revelations, predicts a chain of events leading to a bloody end of the world and the second coming of Jesus Christ. To gauge the reach of this creed one need only note that the works of two of its advocates, Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins, enjoy a staggering circulation of more than 20 million copies in the US.
Why should the rest of us care about religious views of a few million Christians in America? Because Bible prophecy may very well become self-fulfilling prophecy. Religious predictions of the end of the world are not exclusive to Christianity; nor are they always self-fulfilling - or else we wouldn't be here to question them. Only under certain conditions are such beliefs likely to affect the actual course of history.
The danger is that those conditions obtain in the case of American millenarians. Millions of politically organized and single-minded believers have come to expect that the world will end in a devastating global war within their lifetime. They do not merely attempt to read political developments around the world as signs of the fulfillment of their end-of-time scenario. They also try to stir these events in the direction of their chiliastic scenario of an impending Armageddon using their considerable political influence in US. Hence there is cause to fear that eager and resourceful "end-of-timers" may, indeed, "will" worldwide strife into existence.

As noted in this quote, the popular expression of this belief in the end of the world is in the Left Behind -series of popular books by Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins (Jenkins does the writing if you can call it that). To date, these have sold sixty-two million copies, almost solely in the American South. The average reader is a middle-aged, white married woman with children. If you are not an eager reader of this series, you can get an idea of the storyline from this short summary:

The first volume, "Left Behind" (1995), kicks off with the Rapture—the sudden snatching up of millions of the faithful into heaven—and subsequent volumes follow airline pilot Rayford Steele and journalist Buck Williams, left behind to tough it out down here on earth through the seven-year Tribulation and the rule of the Antichrist. The 12th and final installment (not counting a planned sequel and prequel), called "Glorious Appearing," has the return of Jesus, the battle of Armageddon and the Judgment.

...

The many critics of the series see a resonance between its apocalyptic scenario and the born-again President Bush's apocalyptic rhetoric and confrontational Mideast policies. And they see LaHaye's far-right political agenda behind having fetuses Raptured from pregnant women's wombs, and making the Antichrist the secretary-general of the United Nations. Roman Catholics aren't happy that the Antichrist's assistant is the pope, and while "Left Behind" shows the common evangelical sympathy for Jews, they exist to be converted and to fulfill Christian prophecy. (For Jenkins and LaHaye, of course, so does everyone else.) And minorities may find the books' attempts at multiculturalism condescending. "I ain't seen no Bible for years," says one character, a "heavyset Latina." "What got me was that it wasn't fancy, wasn't hard to understand ... All them Scriptures sounded true to me, 'bout being a sinner."

Fetuses snatched to heaven from their mothers' tummies! The head of the United Nations as the Antichrist with the Pope as a helpmeet! Rapture! The description makes me salivate with excitement; I really want to read these books. Unfortunately I have read enough of them to know that the writing is dreadful and the social values what one would expect from fanatics. The only good women are housewives, for example.

The important question about the Left Behind -series is naturally whether its popularity means anything more than the popularity of, say, the Harry Potter -series. We all like to escape this world once and a while, and it doesn't usually mean that we believe in the alternative world that we just visited to relax. I don't know the answer to this question, but my experiences in reading the various comments-sections on the internet suggest that there are quite a few people who have taken these books as a real world prediction, and are now active in exhorting the rest of us to keep our bags packed lest we miss the use-by-date of Rapture.

Except, of course, that no Rapture would lift a snake goddess up into the blue. Rather the reverse, I suspect. I would probably be in cahoots with the head of the U.N. and the Pope, as one of the Axis of Evil. And the Rapturers must leave their worldly goods behind. They are going to be lifted naked, so if you suddenly see piles of rather conservative underwear by the roadside, you may be witnessing the Rapture from the wrong side of the fence. Or perhaps just glimpsing some of the secret conservative underbelly...

I'm making a very serious mistake so far, by making fun of the fundamentalists who believe in armageddon in our day. It's not that I find them that funny, to be honest. They are actually very scary people. But when things are scary I tend to laugh. Can't help it. Still, there is a very serious side to this whole phenomenom, and that is the fact that there are millions of people in our very midst who eagerly hope for the war that will cause Jesus to come back, and some of these people, at least, are not averse to pushing things along a little to speed them up towards their gorgeous conclusion. Now this is frightening, especially if the Rapture is actually planned for the year 4378. What do you think Jesus will say when he's pulled down to earth in the middle of his lazy Sunday breakfast or something, and all because of a few million lunatics who have destroyed this earth? I wouldn't hang around to hear that.

This particular group of fanatics is very organized (aren't all fanatics organized nowadays?), and they use their organizations to influence the United States policies, including our foreign policy towards the Israel-Palestine conflict. A recent Village Voice article recounts in terrifying detail how this influence-mongering is done. (Read it when you're not all alone in the house.) The fundamentalist voice doesn't preach for the Two Countries -solution, because the Bible doesn't mention anything beyond Israel in that part of the world. And that's the part of the world where the fundamentalists want the final war to take place so that Jesus will be forced to come back. Think of the Christian values that are revealed by this view! Some of these fundamentalist are in for a real shocker when they trudge towards St. Peter at the gate.

But if they succeed in hastening the date of armageddon it doesn't really help us very much that they'll face their rightful comeuppance in the hereafter. It is here and now that we should be concerned with, and the most urgent problem we (the normal, sane people) have to tackle is the fight against fanaticism. Some of us may want to try to talk to the fanatics, to spread peace and understanding that way. Far be it from me to deny them this approach, though it will not work. Others might want to get politically active so that there are more discerning people in important places. Write to your political representatives and the press! Ask who owns the Washington Times and what else this man controls in this country. Ask who gets weekly access to the President of the United States and who doesn't hear from him ever. Involve all the sane Christians and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists in the great ecumenical movement against idiocy. Act!

The world sometimes seems totally overtaken by fanatics of one ilk or another: we have the militant Islamists, the Christian fundamentalists, the Orthodox Jewish extremists, the Hindu nationalist extremists and even a few smatterings of the old-fashioned extreme Stalinists. Yet in actual numbers us wishy-washy and mind-your-own-business people are by far more important, and if we could only get off our collective butts and open our mouths for something else than Coke and French Fries, we could still fix this world to its usual not-so-great state. The alternative should not make us feel too rapturous. So act!

Courtesy of Michelle Shocked

And in preparation for a post on the topic:

"Knock, knock!"
"Who's there?"
"Armageddon."
"Armageddon who?"
"Armageddon outa here!"

Some Bad Science

Or quasi-science. I came across two examples today. The first was in a Women's Magazine! I bought it for a study I'm doing of magazines intended for women and men, respectively, and tomorrow I'm going to buy some more mags. What should I get, by the way? I have Elle, and I'm planning to buy a few others of similar nature plus something like GQ or Maxim's? I'm a babe in the woods in this field.

Anyway, this study in Elle was about gender differences in people's views about internet sex and pornography. It argued that though the percentage of men who have used internet porn is much higher (around 80% of respondents) the number of women who have also done so is unexpectedly high (around 60% of respondents). The problem with this study is that it is utterly meaningless: it is not based on random sampling. To be admitted into the study, you need to take the initiative. This means that only people who a) care enough to answer and b) have spare time on their hands will participate. Also, one needs to be a reader of the magazines who carried out the study. The results can't be generalized into anything at all, so they're of no real interest. Just as an idea of the problems, note that only 25% of the respondents were female.

Of course, most people probably are aware of the uselessness of these sorts of studies. What is a lot more dangerous is the spread of some factoids from old, poorly done academic studies. I came across one today in an NPR program about the Bush administration Marriage Initiative (not for gays or lesbians, of course). The program described one of the religious courses on marital preparation that we as taxpayers support, and one of the participants in this course stated that she was so worried to find out that people who cohabit before marriage have higher divorce rates, as she and her husband had done so.

I sat there listening to this stuff that my taxes finance, and steam rose out of my ears. I happen to remember the study from which this horrible factoid sprung: it was published in the 1980's and is a very good example of very bad research.
In a nutshell, the study found out that average divorce rates were higher in the group of couples who had cohabited before marriage than in the group of couples who had not done so (or admitted to it). No problem yet. But here comes the problem: the researcher then went on to argue that living together causes higher divorce rates! There is no evidence for this argument, and much evidence against it. The most likely real reason for the observed correlation is that people who are opposed to living together before marriage are also opposed to divorce. The results say nothing about how good or bad these marriages are, and it's inane to argue that knowing your future spouse better before marriage would make you more likely to get divorced than not knowing about the smelly feet or the snoring before you stand in front of the Justice of Peace or priest or minister.

Yet obviously this is what is being fed to prospective marriage partners as 'scientific findings'. And not only fed to them, but at the taxpayers' expense. I shouldn't be surprised by anything this administration does anymore, yet the fact that I do feel some new outrage shows how terribly naive I have been. A naive goddess! Whoever heard of such a thing?

Damn it!

I'm not all sweetness and light. When I get angry, I get very angry and want to call the cause of anger terrible things. Sometimes my anger leaves me speechless, not because I don't have plenty to say, but because the English language doesn't give me the tools for proper wrathful self-expression. Anna in Cairo, an insightful commenter on this blog and elsewhere, complained about the same thing, and provided the idea for this post. We both want to know what to call a man who deserves the worst words can give.

And therein lies the problem: The epiteths and slurs that are supposed to hurt a man the most actually attack him in a roundabout way. Think of calling someone 'the son of bitch' or even a 'motherf**ker' (see, Ashcroft, what you have wrought!). These are insults, yes, but they insult the man's mother every bit as much as the man himself.

Of course we could also call him an idiot or a chimp or a faggot or something else that compares him to a group some hold in contempt. Almost all ways of cursing someone out in English use this comparison-trick; degrade the person by implying that he or she is no better than members of some other, routinely denigrated, group. But these comparisons are quite far-fetched in most cases. Sexual slurs hit much closer to home, especially because they're so much harder to disprove.

Consider 'cocks**ker' and its many variations: hints about needing kneepads and so on. All these are regarded as hateful, because they imply that the person takes a submissive position in sexual encounters. Who usually is viewed as taking such a position? Certain gays and women, that's who. Thus, the denigrating comparison here is to either submissive gays or to women.

The new development of calling men, too, bitches, sluts and whores ties sexuality into insults even more openly. This may or may not be a more egalitarian development, but it's interesting that the sources of slurworthy sexuality are all found in the ways that some women behave. We are poorly provided when it comes to good, juicy insults concerning the male sexuality. Poorly indeed.

Of course, men are routinely denigrated by comparing them to women. Evidently, being a woman or a girl is a really despicable thing to be in some people's minds. Examples of this abound: sissy, 'you throw like a girl', 'make them cry like schoolgirls' are just a few I've heard or read in the last few days, and a good feminist male friend recently accused me of 'thinking like a girl'. Like that would be a bad thing.

On the other side of the fence, the grass is very much greener and lusher: Women can be called whores, bitches, sluts, slits, gashes and so on and so on. Men have very few counterparts for these expressions, even the time-honored prick doesn't let itself for such general indiscriminate use.

A necessary next step in linguistic evolution of the English language is the development of good sexual insults for all those people who deserve to have them flung into their faces, men included. We need to put on our thinking caps and contribute new expressions to this language. Otherwise it will wither away with the withering of the American empire.

Congratulations!

To all those new happy couples in Massachusetts!

Gone to the Dogs

(Editor's commentary: The following post is by a chocolate Labrador retriever called Hank. Her opinions are not necessarily those of the blogowner or the Snakepit Inc.)


Hiya everybody!

Hank here! Good day today, put the fear of God into a lot of squirrels. Them terrarists deserve everything they get if you ask me. Then I had a fight with Her High and Mightiness, Henrietta the Bitch. She's one of them libral elites and she hates Murica! Me, I like it real well! Yessir! Country, God and kitchens! And can openers!

Now, I'm a good-looking God-fearing dog and I know what I know. Nobody can tell me nothing, not Henrietta in any case. She's a dirty commie and the only reason she beats me in fights is because of some horrible terrarist plot somewhere. When Bush gets re-elected me and George will sort her out: all-day squirrel hunting for us and barbeques and we can abuse any cat we want and no Geneevah conventions allowed.

We know what we know, yep. Got any spare biscuits, by chance? I feel kinda peckish.
See ya later!


Yours in Christ
Hank Hankerton the Seventh (put that there to piss off Henrietta!)

Brown vs. Board of Education - Fifty Years Later

Brown vs. Board of Education is the title for the court case which racially desegregated America's public schools. In it, the justices decided that 'separate but equal', the older judicial standard for treating the races 'fairly', can never be truly equal. Never mind the fact that the African-American school districts seldom had the same resources or teacher salaries than the Caucasian ones, the U.S. Supreme Court argued that even if economic equality could have been guaranteed, the very fact of segregation had such harmful psychological effects on minority children that it could not be allowed to continue as government policy.

For fifty years, then, we have had an integrated public school system. At least on paper. In reality, schools are as segregated today as they were in 1971, and Latino students, for example, have become more segregated from white non-Latino students every year from 1970's to 1990's (and possibly even later). In the late 1990's two-thirds of all African-American and Latino children attended schools where the majority of students belong to minority groups.

So what are we to celebrate on the fiftieth anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education? The end of racial segregation? Sure, it is no longer legal to segregate the school systems on purpose, and that's a good thing. But while dejure segregation may be over, defacto segregation is well and thriving. Maybe the two dozen white supremacists who marched near the school featured in the Brown vs.Board of Education are right: maybe the segregationists have indeed won.

And if they have would it matter? The answer depends on what we want from school integration. If it is only better schools for minority children, then racial segregation might not matter that much as long as the schools are getting better. There is a certain comfort in a segregated world: birds of a feather and all that. Shared norms, religions and traditions may thrive, and nobody becomes the victim of racial bigotry. Neither is anyone's racial bigotry challenged by this arrangement.

And there lies the problem. A segregated school system does not serve an integrated world, does not increase our understanding of people from other ethnic and social groups, does not reduce the 'Othering' that ultimately lies at the very bottom of every misogynist or racist thought or act. For this reason I lament the failure of school integration.

There is a second reason for my lament, and that is the fact that racially segregated schools are almost by definition going to be unequal schools for minority children. This is because schools are largely funded from local property taxes, and predominantly African-American or Latino areas are, on average, poorer than predominantly Caucasian non-Latino areas. Until we are willing to equalize the spending by child for all school districts in this country, those children who go to poorer schools will have fewer books, fewer computers and teachers who get paid less.

Why has integration failed? There are many reasons, but the most important one is that Americans tend to live in ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods. To achieve real school integration requires then that some children at least are transported to schools far outside their home neighborhood, and parents don't like this at all, even when the pill is made more palatable by making the target school a magnet school: one with better resources than other available schools.

Another reason for the failure of integration can be found in private schools. It is mainly the Caucasian non-Latino families who send their children to private schools. This often leaves the public schools of even a racially integrated area with a predominantly minority population of children. Once this happens, the parents of children in the private schools are going to be a lot less willing to vote for more tax funded public education (it's not helping their children, after all). The quality of public schools will then drop which causes a further flight to private schools by those who can afford it, and so on. No wonder that our public schools are in crisis.

What will President Bush say in his speech on Monday, to be given at the same school where the white supremacists were marching? Will he say anything like the message of this post? I doubt it. I doubt it very much.

Echidnegate

The title is to tease one of the smart commenters on this blog! I'm going to build a gate to my garden. Proposals as to its shape are eagerly desired. Right now I'm vacillating between a Chinese moon gate and a simple solid gate with eyeballs painted on it. The eyeballs are to stare at any invaders and send them shrieking back to their lairs. Of course they will have no magic in them at all, but the repetition of many eyeballs should make them seem magical, if the repetition of political Bushisms makes us believe in them.

A snakegate would be nice, too, but that would require metalwork and I want to use my tablesaw skills on this gate.

On Monsters, Princesses and Cruella DeVille

They are sometimes all the same, as in the case of one Lynndie England, the poster-girl for everything that has gone wrong with the U.S. military in Iraq. The photographs of her leading a naked Iraqi detainee on a leash received frontpage coverage in all the best papers. What's the world coming to, the message seems to be. How can women abuse people? And how can the same women then get pregnant? Where did we go wrong?

As Richard Goldstein points out in the Village Voice, England is the symbol of the Torturegate even though the vast majority of those accused of torturing the detainees were male for the very reason that many don't associate women with the ability to commit violent acts. It's the man-bites-dog view of what's newsworthy, or as Goldstein expresses it: the bitch-bites-man.

The overall reaction to the women in Torturegate is naturally sexist in the sense that it is based on the assumptions that violent acts are not something the group 'women' engages in and that all women act the same in this respect. But there is also a subtler kind of sexism in some of the articles about England: that women should know better, given that women so often are the victims of sexual abuse. This is sexism because it implies that men would not have such moral prior knowledge.

What does the media make of the fact that some women played an integral role as torturers at Abu Ghraib? You can probably guess that it depends on the political slant of the writers: the right-wingers see in this the evidence of what eight years of Clinton administration and the don't ask - don't tell policy have wrought. Feminists are widely blamed for now celebrating the utter humiliation of men by women. George Neumayr in the Spectator goes on a wild and totally illogical rant about the whole escapade being a science-fiction movie created by Betty Friedan, and Elaine Donnelly, that little girl who doesn't want any other little girl to play with her guns, is quite sure that some feminists in the academia are salivating over the England pictures. I have not found a single feminist source for such celebrations, and I doubt that Friedan had anything to do with the Iraq war in general. But this doesn't matter in the wingnut world.

In fact, evidence in general doesn't matter there: the earlier right-wing argument against having women in the military at all was based on women's inability to act violently. Yet when the reverse seems to have been proved, it is this very reverse which is attacked as proof of the earlier argument. I guess that's why they are called wingnuts. It's the conclusion that matters, not how to get there, and the conclusion is always that women should not be in the military, but if this cannot be avoided they should be totally segregated from men. Otherwise the evil spectre of sex will appear somewhere in the forces, and we all know what comes from that: detainees on leashes, pregnancies and rapes. This point was repeatedly brought up by Deborah Simmons in Washington Times and Gary Aldrich at the townhall.com. Never mind that the military has always somehow obtained access to women for sexual purposes, just consider the prostitutes around the Philippine bases for an example, and never mind that abuse and torture of military prisoners has been common for centuries; ruling out unisex military forces would miraculously cure all these problems.

The left-wing writers don't arrive at the same conclusion, of course. But neither are they totally able to stay away from the question of gender and torture: Goldstein's article argues that the pictures of women as torturers allow the readers to engage in homo-sadistic enjoyment while somehow transforming this into seemingly heterosexual musings. He also links the pictures to the idea of the evil dominatrix, the Cruella deVille, if you like. Ta-Nehisi Coates believes that the Torturegate is bad news for women in the military, because it allows people like Linda Chavez to argue that women don't improve the tone of the military at all and that unisex troops were a big mistake. But Coates also wonders if women shouldn't have known better, given their victim status in the sexual field, and suggests that maybe the masculine ethos of the military makes women act much tougher than they otherwise would, just to be accepted as 'one of the guys'. One of the experts interviewed in this article thinks that women might be inherently less likely to torture than men, though no evidence is brought to support this claim.

Why is it that we can't focus on the torture as a whole, whether committed by men or women or both? What is it about Lynndey England and the other women accused of torture that pricks our curiosity so much? I don't think that the man-bites-dog explanation is adequate alone. I suggest a slightly wider reading of the whole phenomenom: a certain mythology of the genders which is well and flourishing in the extreme political right, but which also has subtler effects on all of us through tradition and popular culture.

This mythology assumes that women and men are defined by a small set of simple and extremely dualistic characteristics. While reality is, I believe, complicated, messy and full of exceptions and overlaps, the sex mythology doesn't allow for these. Rather, it defines a man by what is defined as 'not-woman' and vice versa. The easiest way to describe the relevant myths are by looking at what the extreme right believes to be true about men and women, as it is there that the myths have been retained in their purest forms. Their support bases are two: fundamentalist Christianity and a sort of quasi-scientific theory of evolutionary psychology. Somewhat astonishingly, these result in the same convenient view of the purpose of men and women in this world:

-men are protectors and providers, women are birth-givers and nurturers
-men are meant to be dominant over women, and women are meant to be submissive to men
-men are naturally more sexual than women
-men can't control their sexuality; thus, women must do it for men

I call these myths because of their power on the believers, and because of their extremist either-or formulation. Whether there is any scientific truth in any of them, in terms of tendencies, is clearly an empirical question almost impossible to answer given the simultaneous influence of culture, environment and any biological basis for behavior. What can be safely said, though, is that none of these dual classifications is true as a general unchanging rule.

Consider now the questions of women as torturers and of a unisex military force in the light of these myths: If women are supposed to give birth and nurture, how can a woman abuse someone? It's not nurturing. And how on earth can she then get pregnant? Moreover, what does it do to our definition of men if women act as protectors? (An abuser is a protector gone wrong, after all.) Also, if men are meant to dominate women, what does a picture of a woman leading a naked man on a leash do to us? Where does this woman belong in our classification? Either the classification falls apart, which is very painful for the believers in the mythology, or the woman must be labelled as a pervert, a deviant, a 'not-woman'.

And if men are naturally more sexual than women, yet can't control this sexuality, what will happen when women and men serve together in the military? The men will 'naturally' attack the women all the time. It is up to the women to refuse this, somehow, and if they can't then the idea of a unisex force has failed. Moreover, it is the women's fault that it failed.

I think that these ideas are in the air when people discuss Lynndey England and the other women involved in Torturegate. They explain most of the right-wing articles I have read and even some of the left-wing views. They explain why women's ability in the military is all the time questioned: women can't be good providers and protectors, because this is not in the mythology, and should they actually prove to be good at the job this will affect the definition of masculinity, take away the basis on which 'a man' is defined. Either way, the news are bad for those who believe in the myths.

The news are also bad for the women in the military. Practically everything they do, whether actually a success or not, will fail the mythology and provide grounds for getting rid of them or at least for isolating them from the 'real military'. They'll all be seen as monsters who torture men or as princesses incapable of hurting a fly, yet far too delicious to be let out alone.


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Thanks for the links to feministing.com (a good new blog) and mousewords (also a good new feminist blog).

How Bush Chose Stupidity

This post is supposed to suffice while I work on something much longer and more boring to harass you with. But it's interesting, full of deep educational and psychological dilemmas:

Bush may not have been born stupid, but he has
>achieved stupidity, and now he wears it as a badge of honor. What makes
>mocking this president fair as well as funny is that Bush is, or at least
>once was, capable of learning, reading, and thinking. We know he has
>discipline and can work hard (at least when the goal is reducing his time
>for a three-mile run). Instead he chose to coast, for most of his life, on
>name, charm, good looks, and the easy access to capital afforded by family
>connections. The most obvious expression of Bush's choice of ignorance is
>that, at the age of 57, he knows nothing about policy or history. After
>years of working as his dad's spear-chucker in Washington, he didn't
>understand the difference between Medicare and Medicaid, the second- and
>third-largest federal programs. Well into his plans for invading Iraq, Bush
>still couldn't get down the distinction between Sunni and Shiite Muslims,
>the key religious divide in a country he was about to occupy. Though he
>sometimes carries books for show, he either does not read them or doesn't
>absorb anything from them. Bush's ignorance is so transparent that many of
>his intimates do not bother to dispute it even in public.

Read the whole thing here.

We might disagree about the good looks, of course. But I am concerned that he couldn't tell Medicare from Medicaid (the first funds certain types of health care for people 65 and over, the latter funds nursing care for the elderly poor and health care in general for poor families), especially as one is a federal government program and the other is based on states. I suspect he carries books to work on his arm muscles. I prefer to put them on top of my head for posture improvement purposes.

A Very Important Post

Which ice-cream flavor do you like best? This is the time of the year to start seriously considering this fundamental existential question. Your answer will reveal your innermost secrets to all and sundry, so think carefully.

Strawberry ice-cream is for people who are unaware of the true taste of a virgin strawberry, straight from the fields. This may indicate a general tendency to be oblivious.

Vanilla is not as bland as it is painted in some nearby fields of enjoyment, though the flavor must come from real vanilla pods. Still, unless you only dip into it occasionally, you might be a little predictable.

Chocolate. I bet you think I'd choose this one, but I don't, and the reason is that a chocolate ice-cream is not chocolatey enough for me, yet it's too far from the generic flavor of ice-cream. If you choose chocolate, you might be yet undecided about your life values. Or you might have found a better version of the ice-cream than I have.

Peach, banana etcetera: See above for comments on strawberry. I don't like bits of fruit in other foods, so I'm prejudiced of course.

Licorice ice-cream: not generally available but I've had it once. If this is your choice, you are an adventurer or come from a foreign country where people routinely snack on licorice.

Garlic: it does exist. Anyone who prefers this is certainly a loner.

Mint with chocolate chips. This is my darling amongst all the flavors. If you pick this one you're a god or a goddess for sure.

Any real ice-cream lover is always ready for new flavor experiments, though. What are your favorites?

F*cked by the F*CC by Jeff Jarvis

Howard Stern is suffering in the claws of the FCC for the use of offensive language in the media. Jeff Jarvis in a recent Nation article argues that Democrats should take Stern's side in this row because a) censorship is wrong, b) Stern could deliver as many as eight million angry white male viewers to the Democratic Party and c) Jarvis likes to listen to Stern's shows.

All this is perfectly ok, even part c). We all have our little peccadilloes, though we usually don't advertize them in public. But Jarvis can't stop when the going is good; no, he has to try to prove to the reader that Stern is actually a really nice guy:

Let's be honest: We don't all talk like Hallmark cards and human resources directors. When we sit in the bar with friends, we gossip about people we hate; we joke about sex. And on our couches, when we watch the news, we think thoughts we won't admit. Stern admits them. Is he sexist? By many definitions, sure. But unlike many a wolf in sensitive-man clothing, he's straightforward about it. Is he racist? No. He has racists on the show, and he ridicules them because idiots are entertaining. Admit it: When you watch reality shows, you love to make fun of the fools on them, and that's not necessarily something to be proud of--but making fun of racist bozos is. Stern gives us credit for knowing they're offensive; he doesn't have to explain that to us or protect us from it. The nannies and the PC police only insult our intelligence when they think they need to save us.

Yep. Howard is a very nice guy. He's a sexist, ok, but at least he isn't a closet sexist: a pretend-sensitive new age guy. Howard's stuff hangs out in the open. And he isn't a racist, either. If you think so you are not very smart, not as smart as Jarvis is. And what a relief to know that the nannies and the PC police don't have to save "us". If only I knew who the "us" in the article might be: women? minorities?

Nope. I'm not going to lead a liberation army for Howard Stern, however many voters he might be able to deliver. Even if I was the Lady Liberty herself, Howard would only want to know about my cup size.

The Gifts of Cyberspace

So much to be thankful for! Here are some of my favorite things about participating in the cybercommunity:

1. I have met wonderful people, people whose road would never cross mine in real life.
2. I have also found out that some people are truly, truly crazy, which is also interesting.
3. I have learned zillions of new facts without paying for this learning or without having to go back to boring university or college.
4. I have learned that there are people who know nothing, and are proud of that.
5. Many people in the cyberspace have excellent manners: I get the courtesy and worshipping that a goddess expects.
6. Someone just called me a moron on another blog. It's fun to be called something totally new after all these centuries.
7. There are proper-thinking lefties in the cyberspace: a big, happy family!
8. There are also horrible meanie righties out there: it's good to know your enemy.
9. Cyberspace is a great excuse to procrastinate from life's boring aspects (work, vacuuming, talking to your in-laws).
10.It also reminds me of how nice real life can be: after hours of staring at the screen I lift my eyes up and see trees in full flower, hear birds singing and feel the slithering of hungry snakes clamoring for attention. We have lots of senses (especially us divines), and cyberspace only feeds a few of them.

Anti-feminist News of the Day

I've put on my bright-red two-piece suit with a very short skirt and I'm ready to be a media pundit. Imagine a big red mouth and very sharp white teeth, too.

Here we go: According to FAIR, the March for Women's Lives in 2004 wasn't worthy of the same coverage in the news as the Promisekeepers' March in 1997, despite the fact that the more recent march had many more participants:

A Nexis search of the week surrounding the women's march found a total of eight stories from the broadcast networks (not counting incidental mentions of the march): ABC, CBS, and NBC all ran two stories the day of the march; CBS also ran two stories the next morning. CNN, as a 24-hour cable news outlet, gave more extensive coverage to the event, running several reports on Sunday. But even CNN failed to treat the march as the historic occasion that it was, running just a small handful of brief march-related stories on Saturday and Monday.

Other cable news outlets focused not on the march itself but on abortion opponents, a few hundred of whom held a counter-protest at the march. Of three Fox News stories found on Nexis related to the march, two focused on anti-abortion activists (Special Report with Brit Hume, Hannity & Colmes, 4/22/04). Special Report examined anti-abortion opposition to the National Education Association's endorsement of the march-- a story that MSNBC also covered in that network's only march report found in the Nexis database. (Fox and MSNBC do not transcribe their news coverage as thoroughly as CNN does, so the amount of coverage on the three cable channels cannot be compared.)

To put the women's march coverage in perspective, FAIR conducted a similar Nexis search of the week surrounding the Promise Keepers march in 1997. The Promise Keepers, an evangelical men's organization that has been widely accused of promoting misogyny and homophobia, drew an estimated 480,000-750,000 demonstrators to Washington-- roughly three-quarters the size of the women's march. Despite its somewhat smaller size, the Promise Keepers received much more media attention: Stories began appearing on network news three days before the march and continued for two days afterward, with a total of 26 stories between the three broadcast networks-- more than three times the coverage the networks devoted to the women's march. Was the Promise Keepers march three times more newsworthy than the March for Women's Lives?

Was the Promise Keepers' march three times more newsworthy than the March for Women's Lives? But of course. What a silly question from FAIR. The Promise Keepers are for traditional values: the supremacy of men in the family, and traditional values are much more newsworthy (I initially wrote mewsworthy) than anything to do with those nasty dirty feminists. Who is it that owns the news networks, may I ask? Right, and this country is founded on ownership. Sheesh!

And in any case, according to Kathleen Parker all those women marching were so unladylike: why did they have to yell and scream when a suitably timed whisper in the right ear would have gotten better results and in a more traditional way? Sorry, Kathleen. We'll do better next time: the Ladies' Powder Puff and Whisper Convention next year, and Kathleen can lead us all. Now that'll guarantee us the necessary news coverage.

Elsewhere in the anti-feminist news, Spain is going to the dogs as we all well know. Not only are the Spaniards bowing to the terrorists and doing their bidding, but they're also quota queens! Think of this, half of the new cabinet consists of women, and the Prime Minister of Spain has vouched that his government will finally crack down on domestic abuse. Poor Kathleen Parker, will she get any sleep now?

Well, it's perfectly obvious what's going on in Spain: white Christian males are being oppressed, and nobody there lifts a finger. Domestic abuse is a private matter between consenting adults, and in any case families are sacred institutions and not to be tampered by outsiders. But then we all knew that this would follow after the Spaniards pulled out if Iraq.

I'm sure glad that I live in a country where truth still gets freely expressed. Like here in our very own anti-feminist news. And now a word from our sponsors: the Promise Keepers on how to get the checkbook away from the little wife...

Courtesy of TheaLogie

This is an interesting article about the spread of global warming abstinence in sex:

A group of US virgins and an evangelist are urging British teenagers to abstain from sex before marriage.
The Silver Ring Thing encourages young people to buy a silver ring and pledge to remain celibate.
The scheme has sold 20,000 of the $12 rings to US teenagers and is planning a British tour, preaching the beliefs and selling the rings for £10 each.
It is funded partly by the Bush administration, which is a strong supporter of abstinence.

But I was disappointed to read that the rings are to be worn on the fingers...

On Torture

Is torturing detainees un-American? Are those that torture just a few bad apples that ruin the whole barrel? Is the recently revealed torture in Iraq and Afghanistan some new perversion that has only now infected the armed forces of the United States and Great Britain?

Yes and no, naturally. It wouldn't be surprising if torture has become more common in the last few years, given the tenor of the war on terror and the simplified messages we have been fed about the responsibility for the 9/11 atrocities, and it's probably true that the worst cases of torture shown all over the newspages and television screen are not representative of the whole armed forces. In that sense torture may indeed be seen as traditionally un-American or un-Western.

But. Human beings have the capability to torture other human beings and animals as we well know. If a situation is carefully constructed to induce torture, that's what we will observe. Consider the Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971. It picked a group of young male students, carefully vetted for good mental health and 'normality', and it then randomly assigned some of them to be prisoners and some of them to be guards. The prisoners were expected to participate in the experiment for its whole duration of two weeks, while the guards worked eight hour shifts.

The prisoners were housed in rooms made to look like a real prison, they were arrested by real police officers and taken to real police stations. They were searched, stripped and deliced before being committed.

The guards were told that it was their duty to maintain prison order but that they should not use violence.

The experiment had to be discontinued after only six days, because the prisoners (who first had revolted) had become depressed and the guards cruel. In particular, the night shift engaged in gratuitous abuse of the prisoners. This was the shift with no oversight by the experiment's creators.

The Stanford Prison Experiment is well known, both for its findings about the fragility of what we regard as 'civilized' behavior and as an example of the ethical problems inherent in this type of research (four of the participants suffered mental breakdowns). What it tells us is that torture can be induced, and quite rapidly, if the circumstances are correct: dehumanization of the other side, anonymity and strict hierarchical structures all increase the likelihood of abusive behavior.

This is not meant to serve as an apology for those who torture, but to point out, as the creator of the Stanford Prison Study did, that it might be the barrels that ruin good apples. Maybe almost all of us are capable of torture under the right circumstances?

And what would those circumstances be? I suspect that a war far away from home in a totally different culture might contribute to the necessary feelings of alienation, especially as it is combined with continuous attacks by the other side and an implicit justification of the whole campaing as a revenge for even worse butchery three years ago. Maybe some people can go out and kill others logically, coolly and rationally, and then simply remove all the necessary instincts like a uniform that needs laundering. Maybe. I doubt that this is very common, however.

What is likely to be much more common is exactly what we are now observing: a real life repetition of the Stanford Prison Study.

Nicer Greetings from the East Coast

Sorry for my outburst last night. I was tired. This post will serve to make partial restitution for it by telling about some of the interesting things to do in Philadelphia and New Jersey.

Philadelphia Museum of Arts has wonderful collections, including the best collection of Pennsylvania Dutch taufscheins and frakturs. These were baptismal and marriage certificates painted by local schoolteachers and ministers as well as itinerant painters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Pennsylvania. They burst with color and weird birds, flowers and monsters. The Pennsylvania Dutch were of course really of German origin (Dutch comes from 'Deutsch').

You can also see Rodin's The Kiss there. If you have seen it only in photographs, its small size will astonish you. The combination of power and diminutiveness is a good reminder not to trip over stereotypes in general.

It's just a few hours drive from Philadelphia to the seashore. Cape May diamonds are very affordable and have no link to wars, terrorism or the use of slave labor. They are quite lovely, or you can just pick up the pebbles as they come from the ocean. Cape May also has a fantastic bird sanctuary. It serves as a half-way resort for migrating birds, and in one day it's possible to see more different birds than some of us see in a lifetime.

And then there is the sea. The mother of us all. If you are lucky you can see the dolphins dancing their mystical messages in the far horizon. I wish I could understand what they are saying.

Greetings from Joisey

I've been to New Jersey. Now I'm totally fulfilled. I also saw Philadelphia. Lots of people there, and the food is not good, but I like the name. The city was named after Filip Adolph, a poorly known Swedish prisoner who was sent to the newly discovered continent to populate it along with other Swedish prisoners and prostitutes. Actually, I made this up but it could be true, one never knows. The Swedes did send prisoners and prostitutes to the area, though probably not all the way to Philadelphia.

That's the nice thing about history: whoever gets to print something first is regarded as a valid source.

I took the little snakes to see the sea. They liked the sand, but not the water. We collected lots of interesting pebbles with good vibrations, and had a very good time. Except for the fact that there are no real coffee beans in the state of New Jersey, or if they exist, they are kept carefully guarded from tourists. The snakes didn't mind the absence of coffee as they gorged on taffy, which meant that I had a bunch of extremely sticky snakes to take home with me. The smog from the factories stained them dark gray. The combination is less than fetching.

They're in the bathtub right now. The snakes, I mean. Now, tell me where the garden state is. I missed it somehow. But I did see lots of churches advertizing themselves as "independent, fundamental". How's that for a paradox?

Don't mind me, especially if you live in New Jersey or Philadelphia. I write equally nastily about every single place I visit, especially when I'm tired, dirty and coffee-deprived. I'm an equal-opportunity hater! Tomorrow I'll write about all the nice things that I saw and experienced!