Snow

It is snowing today in large parts of the U.S.. Snow is lovely stuff, especially if you have proper snow tires for your car and someone else to shovel the driveway. Then you can concentrate on enjoying snow.

I like to put on my cross-country skis and go and harass the neighborhood. One year I got a group of drunks running after me, but of course I was on skis so they never had a chance. Skating is fun, too, if there is a frozen lake nearby, though you want to let someone else go first to test how hard the ice is. Or you need to learn the rules about how to drag yourself back onto hard ice. An icepick is a good implement for this, or a long rope tied to a tree on the shore before you venture out.

You can also give all your rugs a wonderful cleaning by putting them on freshly fallen snow with the good side down. After ten minutes or so, you can gently beat the back of the rug. When you pick it up you will find, to your great astonishment, a horribly black rugshaped patch on the snow. Or at least I do. This works even with hand-made oriental rugs, and it saves you lots of money in cleaning fees.

And then you can make snow lanterns. I have already given instructions for these on the Eschaton threads and maybe even here last year, but they are so beautiful that the instructions are worth repeating. They only work if the snow balls up, though.

Make about nine snowballs and arrange them in a circle (outside!) so that the balls touch each other. Make the second layer above the first with seven snowballs so that they make a slightly smaller circle, then use five snowballs and so on. The idea is to make a pyramid out of snow. Before you close it off with one snowball on top, insert a lit candle, one of the sturdy fat ones preferably. When it gets dark you have this magical little lantern by your doorway. Better still, make a row of them along your front path.

Then you can run into the house and have a large hot drink with a very clear conscience!

Daniel Schorr

I like NPR's Daniel Schorr's gravely voice and his carefully expressed but blunt opinions. He's an old-time journalist, which means that he actually studies the topics on which he speaks, and that is so refreshing. So far he's said pretty much everything according to my dictates, so he must be a very competent guy!

Here is Schorr on the U.S. media:

Washington these days feels a little like Moscow in Soviet times when the government routinely dispensed information to the public and the public routinely didn't believe it. The two main newspapers were the Communist Party organ, Pravda, (Truth) and the Soviet government organ, Izvestiya (News). People used to say, "There is no Izvestiya in Pravda and no Pravda in Izvestiya."
...
...who can believe TV news reports when they may turn out to be government-financed videos? Have you ever seen the report on the drug benefits of the Bush Medicare act that ran on 40 local TV stations, complete with the "out-cue": "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting"? The Department of Health and Human Services paid her to play the role of reporter. Or, did you see the report on the antidrug campaign produced by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, narrated by nonjournalist Mike Morris?

He also mentions the nonexistent WMDs and the Armstrong Williams scandal which isn't a scandal because he is on the side of the Washington Pravda and Izvestiya. And that is the real scandal.

I know, I was supposed to blog only cheerful stuff today. Well, Schorr is a small source of cheerfulness in this post.

Some Good News From Iran (or Not)

My new promise is to try to blog on positive developments on the weekends, if at all possible. That way my dear readers don't have to take antacids nonstop. Here is a positive development: Women in Iran have been judged as capable of running for the president of the country:

"If they posses the necessary qualifications, women can also run for president," the television quoted Guardian Council spokesman Gholamhossein Elham as saying.

The announcement clears up ambiguities within the constitution about whether only men can hold the post. Under Iran's constitution, the president must be elected from among political "rijal." Rijal is an Arabic word that can be interpreted as men or simply political personalities regardless of their gender.

For the last quarter century, "rijal" has been interpreted to mean a man. Of course what this will mean in practise is not so clear. The "necessary qualifications" could be manipulated in various ways, but at least this is a step forwards. This is good.

Or is it? Thanks to Kait in the comments of this post for alerting me to this:

Iran has denied allowing women to take part in this year's presidential elections.
...
However Elham told a state-run news agency, ISNA, "I have not changed the meaning of the word rejal".

"I never had an interview on such a subject on television, and the article published is not correct", he said.

Hmmm. Someone must have given Elham a phone call.

Friday's Gingerbread Blogging

Gingerbread Castle 

Here it is! My wonderful gingerbread castle. You can't see the details very well here, but it's properly crenellated. I'm going to feed it to the squirrels tomorrow as it's getting a little bit dusty. The trees add a nice realistic dimension, don't they? I wanted to put a snake banner on top, but I broke one of the walls like five times and gave up on any attempt to touch the damned thing again.

Theocracy Beginning?

At the National Prayer Service today Bill Graham, the man who is said to have converted Bush to fervent Christianity, said this:

Offering one prayer, the Rev. Billy Graham said he believed God had a hand in Bush's re-election.

"Their next four years are hidden from us, but they are not hidden from you," said the 86-year-old evangelist, whom Bush credits with inspiring him to reaffirm his faith and give up drinking at age 40. "You know the challenges and opportunities they will face. Give them a clear mind, a warm heart, calmness in the midst of turmoil, reassurance in times of discouragement and your presence always."

So God had a hand in Bush's re-election! I wonder what form that took. Perhaps meddling with the voting machines? But that's blasphemy! Naughty me.

But apparently not naughty Bill Graham.

I feel like we are all sitting in a train driven by some lunatic who doesn't know how to stop the damn thing.

Whose Voice Is It That Bush Heard From Beyond the Stars?

The Norwegians have been aghast at the behavior of the U.S. First Family:

You see, the sign shown in this picture is the way to greet Satan in Norway and maybe even more widely:

President Bush's "Hook 'em, 'horns" salute got lost in translation in Norway, where shocked people interpreted his hand gesture during his inauguration as a salute to Satan.

That's what it means in the Nordics when you throw up the right hand with the index and pinky fingers raised, a gesture popular among heavy metal groups and their fans in the region.

Which just goes to show that religion is hard to interpret literally. Or...?

Today's Action Alert

Today's Action comes from MoveOn:

The New York Times disclosed on Sunday that the Bush administration is using the Social Security Administration to mislead the American public and sell Social Security privatization. Documents obtained by The New York Times show that Bush's plan is to insert "propaganda" into Social Security publications -- using the apparatus of this huge government agency -- and the trust millions place in it -- to sell their privatization scheme that would cut Social Security benefits.

We need your help to make it clear that the Social Security Administration is not another propaganda tool of the White House. Please take one minute to send a message. Call the Social Security Administration at the number below. Tell them you oppose Social Security privatization and you expect them to deliver straight facts -- not White House spin -- to the American people.

Call: 1-800-772-1213

After the greeting, dial 1 for English or 2 for Spanish.
Then press 3.
Then press 0 to speak to a representative.

Thanks for taking today's action.

The Other Side of the Nine Balls

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Original link from here.

We Are All Republicans Now

Or so it appears:

For an occasion draped in historical fanfare, and for television talking heads who have filled the programming day discussing history again and again, there's been glaringly little attention paid to one momentous fact: President Bush's historically low approval ratings. Bush is struggling to hit even the 50 percent mark. The latest New York Times/CBS poll out today puts Bush's rating at 49 percent, marking his standing the flimsiest for any president on Inauguration Day, at least since modern presidential polling began nearly 80 years ago. But shhhh, don't tell the Beltway talking heads.

Forced to fill up hour after hour of dead air leading up to Bush's actual swearing in, anchors, reporters, guests and analysts on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and MSNBC all politely shied away from the topic of Bush's dismal ratings. Over the course of four hours of continuous inauguration coverage from 8 a.m. to noon (collectively, that's 24 hours among the six outlets), the topic of the president's (historically poor) approval ratings came up exactly four times, according to TVEyes.com, the continuous television monitoring service.

It's like a wedding, isn't it? Nobody ever says that the happy couple is probably going to be divorced in a year or that the groom had a big red pimple smack at the tip of his nose or that the bride was flat-footed. Or maybe like a funeral: only good things are said when someone dies. I hope the next four years doesn't finish this country off. Then we would have a real funeral.

What Neutrality in the Media Means

It means that the Fox News used seventeen conservative/Republican commentators and six Democratic/progressive commentators in its inaugural coverage today between the hours of 7 a.m. and 5 p.m., EST. It means that during the same time period CNN used ten conservative/Republican commentators to exactly ONE Democratic/progressive commentator. It means that MSNBC used thirteen conservative/Republican commentators to two Democratic/progressive commentators during the same time. Could this biased distribution be because the president who is being inaugurated is a wingnut, so that mostly only wingnuts are allowed to comment? But isn't he supposed to be the president of everyone? He said so, himself, quite recently.

About 81% of all commentators were wingnuts today. Even some of the so-called Democrats/progressives are nothing but wingnuts. And still we hear that this not enough, that this is the liberal media! Gag me with a spoon.

----
Via Atrios.

Flirting Instructions from the Religious Right

This is from a teenage magazine intended for girls, and it tells them how to snare a good Godly man:

Be Genuine . . . Be You!
Guys don't like a tease. They hate to be led on. But they do like a good game of chase. Knowing how to be pursued, protected by personal convictions, centered in an awesome relationship with Jesus Christ, will provide the energy and motivation for you to keep living a life that pleases God.

So when that guy from across the room sets his sights on you, be sure that you're a moving target. And always be moving in a spirit of love and concern, ever closer to God

Who needs feminism?
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Link courtesy of Biblio

Having Fun in Washington, D.C.

From Roxanne:

Check the top link for more pictures.

Mine! All Mine!

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Link courtesy of watertiger

What To Do on a Boring Day

A thread on the Eschaton was full of wonderful sayings by Dorothy Parker, the woman with a sandpaper tongue. She's one of mine, of course, as are all viper tongues. You could read her and other vinegary writers. Here's something to get you started:


Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song.
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
and I am Marie of Roumania.

(from Enough Rope (1926))


Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

(from Enough Rope (1926))


If you prefer something more thoughtful from Ms. Parker, think about these:


Ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.

(from John Keats' You Might As Well Live (1970))


The nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters....Obscenity is too valuable a commodity to chuck around all over the place; it should be taken out of the safe on special occasions only.

(from Esquire (1957))


Then you could look for other writers that suit the tenor of the day.

Or you could take up knitting. It was hugely successful among those who watched the guillotine executions in the French Revolution, or so we are told by most likely biased sources. Good knitters can easily knit and watch executions at the same time. It's one of those fine motor skills that work independently of the brain. I am a sporadic knitter myself, though a very advanced one. I knit about once a decade, but then I equip all the snakes with sweaters which have roughly two hundred colors in each. I have lots of wool in storage for knitting, but writing the blog uses similar fine motor skills (you should see my fingers run!) so I haven't done anything interesting for a long time.

Woodworking is another nice thing to do when you are bored. Just make sure you have plenty of insurance and learn to think of three fingers per hand as a sign of pride.
I'm making some shelves to put up behind my computer. They have been in the same state of half-readiness for months now, because I can't decide how to fix them to the wall. I want something fancy.

You could begin by building a miniature gallows. You could then knit the rope for it and make little stuffed figures of any particular person you want to see hanged.

Or you could just drown your boredom in fancy lovemaking and nectar-sipping.

Here We Go

I was wondering when all this would start:

The woman once known as "Jane Roe" has asked the supreme court to overturn its landmark decision that legalised abortion 32 years ago.

Norma McCorvey, whose protest against the abortion ban in Texas led to the 1973 ruling, now contends in a petition to the court that the case should be heard again in light of evidence that the procedure may harm women.

"Now we know so much more, and I plead with the court to listen for witnesses and re-evaluate Roe v Wade," said McCorvey, who says she regrets her role in the case.

The procedure may indeed harm women. So does giving birth, and, unfortunately for the argument "Jane Roe" presents here, the potential harm of giving birth is much greater than that involved in medically performed abortions.

This has nothing to do with worries about harming women, of course. If anything, the reverse is the intention. Listen to this:

...in a strongly worded concurrence, the 5th US circuit court of appeals judge Edith Jones criticised the abortion ruling and said new medical evidence may well show undue harm to a mother and her foetus.

Bolds mine.

Do you think that she was trying to be funny? This judge is a religious wingnut, unless I'm conflating two different Edith Joneses here. But I don't think so. Here is an excerpt from a speech an Edith Jones gave last year:

Jones criticized the United States Supreme Court during the Chief Justice Earl Warren era for its lack of prudence, citing cases that created, what Bickel called, a "web of subjectivity" and led to a "national litigation explosion." Jones added that, while America is still the most religious society in the western world, it has been forced to deal with the unrepresentative secularity of the Supreme Court over the years. Still, the Supreme Court has acted prudently in certain cases, and the struggle to maintain judicial prudence is an ongoing fight where victory is elusive, Jones allowed.

Bolds mine.

I'm sure that judge Jones would just love to balance out all that unrepresentative secularity with some proper Bible-thumping. Too bad about the Constitution.

How to Commemorate the Coronation Tomorrow

This is really fertile ground. There are so many good ideas all across the sane blogosphere, and lots of are absolutely perfect. The most popular one is the not-one-dime-day: don't spend any money tomorrow, don't buy groceries, don't buy gas, don't buy anything whatsoever. Just a little reminder of the economic power of us unwashed masses, a nudge in the well-padded side of the corporate America and a reminder that we won't help them if they spit on us. Also, for certain types of people only money speaks.

This wouldn't conflict with the idea I posted earlier on the blog: that of donating money to an organization which funds abortions for poor women. You could always donate tonight or first thing Friday morning if you feel that you must remain pure on Thursday.

Then you could always go to Washington, D.C., and cast a gloomy pall over all the festivities, but if that's what you're doing you don't need me to tell you anything about it. Though think about a man who has nine balls! Sounds like some sort of compensation to me, and, yes, I know that this joke is in very bad taste but then I have a bad taste in my mouth all the time nowadays.

Another affirmative idea is to get together with others who feel the same way about the coronation and to arrange your own alternative orgies. Check your local listings; there might be something fun going on. Some bloggers cover their blogs in black tomorrow, as a sign of acknowledging the importance of the day, but I'm not going to do that, though I probably won't obsessively describe the dresses of the party-goers either.

Whatever you do, remember that you are not alone and that you are sane.

Women in Bush's Social Security Plan

Bill Thomas, the Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has ideas about women. Specifically, he airs the idea that women's Social Security benefits should be altered:

The Ways and Means chairman said the entry of more women into the workforce and the narrowing of the gap between men's and women's salaries — at a time when the gap between women's and men's longevity is increasing — meant that Congress should consider whether men and women should get equal Social Security benefits. He did not say whether women's benefits should be adjusted up or down.

"At some point, somebody might want to suggest that we need to take a look at the question of whether or not actuarially we ought to adjust who gets what, when, and how," Thomas said

This is one of those cases which causes statistical discrimination whatever one does. The problem is that men, on average, die earlier than women. If men and women are paid the same benefits per person per year, then women will collect more money as a group because more women will live to older ages. If, on the other hand, we changed the system in the way Thomas suggests, women would get less money each year than men, and as groups women and men would collect equal amounts. But then all the men who live longer than the average man would be getting "extra" benefits, whereas the women who die earlier than the average woman would never get their "fair" share.

I'm pretty sure that the Supreme Court has ruled against Thomas' plan as discriminatory in the past. The justification was that individual discrimination is worse than unequal group outcomes. But this is a new era with a new Supreme Court so one never knows. Or, rather, one does know, of course; even if one would rather not. If you get my meaning. I'm very glad that I'm a goddess right now so that I don't have to try to eke a meager survival on my reduced Social Security checks in extreme old age.

And, as someone suggested on Eschaton, why not use the same argument to cut the annual benefits of whites? Whites also have a longer life expectancy than blacks.

This is Fun

Sara sent me an e-mail about a little rewriting she had done on a post about feminists that she found on a misogynistic website. She altered the word "feminist" to "conservative" and so on, and this is what she produced:

"Cult of Victimization"

Echidne of the Snakes states in her book, /Conservatives and Domination:
Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression/, that "Conservative
consciousness is the consciousness of victimization...to come to see
oneself as a victim" (pg 15). Nowhere is this assumption of ideological
victimization stronger than on college campuses. The self-definition of
victimhood, in all of its myriad forms, is a foundation in the majority
of College Republican chapters -- where it is actively encouraged and
nurtured.

We feel that the "victim" mindset has no place in your college
education.

Simply stated, victimhood -- in any manifestation-- is dysfunctional.
Remember "dysfunctional" literally means: It doesn't work. When it
comes
to finding a strategy, you want something that works to prevent you from
having a poor college education. Victimhood justifies your actions after
you have failed this first task.

By starting out with the assumption that a conservative student is a
victim, right-wing activists create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead
of encouraging healthy change, (e.g. assertiveness as opposed to
critical thought, social skills instead of anger, personal
responsibility as opposed to blame and empathy instead of emphasis on
self) such claptrap often enable the tenets of victimhood and combines
them with anger, self-righteousness and an intellectually vapid learning
experience. Complaining about “liberal bias” encourages existing
dysfunctional, uncritical and selfish behaviors in conservative students
by giving them confidence that their intellectual skills will protect
them from the backlash of said behaviors. We will go so far to say that
these programs seek to create a "super-victim" who is seeking revenge
--
not prevention.

What you get is /not an effective or functional way to obtain a sound
education./

In fact, the resulting over-confidence, absence of critical thought and
lack of social skills put the conservative students more at risk. Not
only will they be stigmatized by the majority of thinking people, but
they are now risking infuriating a truly intelligent and hostile
liberal. Such a liberal might not just stop at critiquing their
arguments. He or she is, in fact, more likely to engage in mocking them
and subverting their language. Unfortunately, conservative students’
banishment from the mainstream of society will more than likely put them
into a "fringe social area" -- where this kind of predators lurks!

In our minds, the ideology of victimization is a dead end street. It is
predicated on the assumption that you have already lost and have no
power. You the reader must make a decision right now, and that is: Are
you willing to take responsibility for your actions and, by
acknowledging that you do have a degree of power and control over what
happens to you, prevent yourself from receiving a poor education?

Believe us when we say this is not the kind of question you will hear in
most chapters of the College Republicans.

I think it's nice!

Today's Action Alert

Today's Action:

Write a letter to your Senators and ask them not to confirm Condalezza Rice as Secretary of State. As demonstrated by Rice's unresponsive answers to Barbara Boxer's questions, Rice is not qualified to be Secretary of State. Tell your Senators that we can do better.

Thanks for taking today's action.

Why There are So Few Women in the Hard Sciences: Part III

In this post the story of disecting the provoking thoughts of Lawrence Summers continues. As you may remember, he offered three hypotheses for the reasons why there are few women in hard sciences:

1. The eighty-hour workweek expected
2. That women might be biologically less able to do hard sciences than men
and
3. Discrimination against women.

I have discussed the second one quite extensively in my previous post in this series, and here I wish to tackle the first and second suggestions of our Lawrence.

First, why would the eighty-hour workweek in hard sciences keep women back? What is the average workweek in the soft sciences or in the humanities, where there are more women, relatively speaking (though not by the amounts that the so-called biological studies of female superiority in writing skills would suggest...)? As far as I can tell, the average expected workweek is pretty long for all Ivy League professors and scholars, but this appears to have less effect on women outside the hard sciences.

Second, why would women react differently to a long workweek than men? This is the hidden agenda in this suggestion: it has to do with who is going to take care of the children. So it's very simple, really: according to this hypothesis, women are not in the hard sciences because they need to have more time for family life. Men appear not to want to have a family life to the same extent. Why would this be the case? Here, once again, opinions differ. Some argue that women have a biological imperative to spend more time chauffeuring their children to hockey meets than men do. Others argue that the upbringing we are all subjected to convinces both girls and boys of the necessity for such tasks to belong to women. Or perhaps both of these reasons apply at the same time.

Third, given this sexual division of labor in many families, why are eighty-hour workweeks so necessary? Here the answer appears to be that the quality of research would diminish if the scientists could go home, once in a while, or even take the white coat off for a day every week. I disagree with this. There is no evidence proving that this long workweeks would be good for creativity and productivity in general. In fact, there is a pretty good counterargument, based on the likelihood that we get less productive the longer the time we have already worked. Besides, eighty-hour weeks translate to zero hours with children except during the weekends, and I don't care what sex you are; if you are a parent this is crap.

Talking about the "eighty-hour week" is a shorthand way of pointing out that so many things in the academia assume that the scholars have a well-equipped home base to which they return only to sleep. The scholars are certainly not expected to give birth to children, for example, though change in this has taken place in the last few decades. But hard sciences may not look like very hospitable places to a lot of women for reasons of this sort.

Then consider being the only woman in a department, or one of very few. Consider a lab where people talk about what internet pornsites they visit and so on. And consider that some of your colleagues might very well be thinking all the time that women are by nature less able to do science. It takes a very specific type of person to wade through all this towards the great enjoyment that hard sciences can offer.

Things are not this bad or bad at all in every department, but these departments-from-hell still exist. Most of us don't want to be the symbolic pathbreakers who get beaten to a pulp in the process, and it's not difficult to see why hard sciences might not look that attractive to a woman perfectly capable of practising them.

And this brings me to Dr. Summers' third hypothesis, the one about discrimination against women. Here is the place where Dr. Summers reveals his true beliefs:

Summers' third point was about discrimination. Referencing a well-known concept in economics, he said that if discrimination was the main factor limiting the advancement of women in science and engineering, then a school that does not discriminate would gain an advantage by hiring away the top women who were discriminated against elsewhere.

Because that doesn't seem to be a widespread phenomenon, Summers said, ''the real issue is the overall size of the pool, and it's less clear how much the size of the pool was held down by discrimination."

This little conclusion is from a very early book on discrimination by Gary Becker. If you think about what is being said here for a while, you realize that if Dr. Summers is correct, then there has never been any discrimination at all! All those blacks and women who sued Wal-Mart for discrimination were wrong!

Sadly, this is not the correct conclusion. Becker derived this result in a simple model of the world where he assumed that only employers wanted to discriminate. Both coworkers (colleagues) and consumers were assumed to be totally fair and unbiased. But in reality we cannot assume that neither coworkers nor consumers would be totally fair and unbiased. In fact, when Becker introduced the possibility that discrimination might not be something that only bosses do his conclusion no longer applied.

Also, the conclusion is derived from a model which assumes that there is no ignorance about workers' true abilities, that everybody knows everything relevant. Once we allow for the actual amount of uncertainty and ignorance in the real world, the result would fail to follow even if only bosses were bigots. In fact, some alternative models show just the opposite in this case: that even actually unbiased bosses might discriminate if they expect that this strategy is, on average, rewarded by the overall market.

That Summers served one of the earliest and very partial conclusion from the whole rich field of the economics of discrimination shows what he really thinks. For this is the one piece that is always trotted out by those who never believed in any of that discrimination bullshit in the first place. He could have at least mentioned the many alternative theories of discrimination and the fact that they lead to very different conclusions. Or he could have mentioned the many empirical studies that show gender discrimination exists.

Instead of giving you a long lecture on these theories or evidence, I'm going to assume that you trust me enough to believe that they exist. Thus, Summers' argument fails to say anything very useful about the possible extent of discrimination against women in the hard sciences, even if we define discrimination as only taking place on the level of the relevant university. Then there is the whole issue of steering by teachers and career counselors on school level and the general societal expectations... Really, there is a lot of material here, and Summers' statement is a little bit inane.

Which brings me to my conclusions. Whether women and men have the same average ability to do hard sciences or not, shouldn't we clear out all the other obstacles women in the hard sciences meet before we decide to throw up our hands and agree that it's-just-the-way-things-are? Especially as it might not be the way things are, after all.
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If you are interested in real-world descriptions of sex discrimination, you might want to read through this thread in the Democratic Underground.