Three cups of cheese (by Skylanda)

There's book going around these days, you might have heard of it, called Three Cups of Tea. It's by a guy named Greg Mortenson, who stumbled off of a failed assault on K2 'round about 1993 and into a small Pakistani village, where he promised to return the hospitality of those who helped him by building a school. He went home, he returned, and he built a bridge, and then a school. And then he made it his life's mission to build lots of schools, in one of the most contentious areas of a very contentious planet, at a fair amount of peril to self and soul.

Usually, do-gooder books by Americans (and other westerners) abroad do not sit well with me. Usually they are entirely too rife with the spoils of moral superiority, and entirely too charged with the self-important notion of one's own role in a moving scene largely too fast and furious for anyone but the self to take note of one blathering foreigner mucking up the landscape. The last foreigner who wrote a good tome about do-gooder'ing abroad was Paul Farmer - the Boston-based doctor who has spent about half his life establishing world-class community-based health care in Haiti - and even he has a few rare moments of such intense self-righteousness it makes the breeze blow backward.

But I digress.

So this Mortenson guy, he ain't all bad. Much of the gist of his book is that poverty is grist for the fundamentalist mill (he kinda glosses over the way that poverty is compounded in that region by the seasonal migration of the trekking crews, which juxtapose some of the planetary heroics of elitism over the sorest hot-spots of deprivation in the world, but hey, everyone's got a blind spot, right?), and that education is the key to opening up equality and quashing fundamentalism - and terrorism - before it even begins. This is pretty heady stuff. It was not a very popular notion right after 9/11; it's all kinds of trendy now, though in a fairly good way. Moreover, he emphasizes again and again the importance of educating girls; he didn't discover or pioneer the data on the effect of educating girls on improving standards of living in a community, but he champions this notion like nobody's business. Educating girls in some of the most conservative, fundamentalist regions of the world: tough stuff. Admirable, even. I kinda dug the book, western do-gooder-isms and all.

So I was fascinated to see the guy talk when he came through my town on his recent book tour. His talk didn't entirely disappoint; he does hammer some politics home, especially in his insistence that whatever Obama might get right, he's dead-on wrong if he thinks that what Afghanistan needs is another tens of thousands of American troops on its soils wreaking even more havoc than we've already wreaked over the last seven (count 'em, seven) years that we have already spent there.

But his talk is a lot more off-the-cuff than his book, and it's always a little disconcerting to see the disconnect between a controlled descent into a topic and a conversational parsing of opinion. First and foremost, he loses the gravity his own quest by delving into the sort of We Are the World feel-good rhetoric that is equal parts smarm and unadulterated schlock. Yeah, for anyone whose seen his talk, I know: his pre-teen kid helped write that cheeseball song (I'd link to it, but it's hard to find online...best I can do is the amazon page for the CD), it's not meant to appeal to adults. Problem is, once you stick it in your stock Power Point presentation, it becomes impolite for the adult audience not to cough a few times over it. Kids have the right to feel that they are doing great things by throwing pennies at poor people - that's part of being a kid who eventually grows into a compassionate maturity; adults who feel that way (gatherings of eighties pop stars entirely withstanding) generally are not nice people to be around, especially if you happen to be on the receiving end of those charitable pennies (and even moreso if you don't happen to show properly gracious humility for being the beneficiary of such enormous generosity as unwanted pennies thrown your way). I always find it awkward, then, to be asked to oooh and aaaah over what I largely consider to be an insult to people experiencing a whole lot of trouble in the world.

That personal bit aside though, he emphasizes the power of individuals to do great things, most often by using the stories of the Pennies for Peace campaign that engages children to gather up spare change for his school-building missions. That's all nice and good and all - I'm all for indoctrinating the young'uns as soon as you can get 'em - but in propping up that effort as a solution, it privileges charity over justice in that peculiar way that people do who want the world to look nicer while not giving up any of the privilege that caused the world to look sorta ugly in the first place. As if somehow wealthy white kids in Waldorf schools in Minnesota doing their holiday do-gooder project can ameliorate oppression...ya know, that kind of oppression that you can really only achieve from being batted around for thirty years between the Cold War super-powers and sundry warlording marauders gunning for control of the world's finest opium crop. Ya know, that kind of oppression. The kind that Mortenson demures from really delving into, because it really is more fun to talk about how the pennies in your pocket can save the world, when really, world save-age (to steal an apt phrase from the Whedonverse) is a whole lot more complicated than that. It doesn't take charity to save the world; it takes realizing that one nation using a quarter of the world's oil spells desolation for others that need those resources, or just don't need to lose a war whose main purpose is to see a pipeline run across a contested territory to feed the oil thirst of the west. It doesn't take pennies to save the world; it takes a mass down-ratcheting of our expectations of what kind of lifestyle some 300 millions Americans can reasonably sustain - how many SUVs we can drive, how many McMansions we can dwell in - to reasonably expect to house and maintain the world at large in a reasonable standard of living. It'll take a lot more than schools to save the world if those schools are routinely caught in the crossfire of trade made profitable purely on the prohibition of drugs in the western nations, a prohibition suspiciously profitable to large number of US corporations - especially those who sell high-tech police gadgetry and man high-tech prisons. To steal straight from Isabel Allende, it doesn't take charity, it takes justice. Justice for Afghanistanis, justice for every petty pot smoker picked up in a rather unjustified drug war. There's a lot of justice unmet out there, and pennies for schools in Pakistan are a small drop in a very large ocean of need - need that will be largely unmet as long as long as we rely on individual charity instead of systematic justice to prop up our sense of right and wrong.

Ninety percent of the US once supported George Bush during the era of his rush into Afghanistan; I wasn't among those people (if nothing else, I had too much to lose: immediate family in the line-up to the front), but you can't tell me that everyone who cheers on Greg Mortenson today when he yammers about pennies and peace was among the rarified ten percent that wasn't hooting and hollering for violence when the mood struck fancy. It's popular now to feel good about feeling good about the Muslim world; it hasn't yet become popular to do something besides throw the cast-offs of children at it.

Someday, maybe we'll get there. I'm not counting on the Greg Mortensons of the world to light our way.

Cross-posed from my blog at Loose Chicks Sink Ships.

Ethics and gender (by Suzie)

       The Associated Press reports on a survey by the Josephson Institute on lying, cheating and stealing among U.S. high school students.  

       Boys came out looking worse. By statistically significant margins, more boys agreed with these statements: "In the real world, successful people do what they have to do to win, even if others consider it cheating." "A person has to lie or cheat sometimes in order to succeed." "People who are willing to lie, cheat, or break the rules are more likely to succeed than people who are not." More girls thought: "Being a good person is more important than being rich." "It's not worth it to lie or cheat because it hurts your character." Yet, boys and girls scored pretty much the same when asked how they rated compared with other people they know.  

        The AP asked whether kids these days are worse than kids in the olden days. As usual, no one asked questions about gender differences, such as: Why do boys appear to be less ethical than girls? What implications does this have for girls in school, the workplace and their personal lives?  

        Think of politics, in which men still dominate the upper echelons. What may seem like playing the game to some people may seem unethical to others.  

The First Step Is To Admit You’ve Got A Problem by Anthony McCarthy

Maybe because of her long service on behalf of us as the first questioner at press conferences, Helen Thomas has take the bold step of using the dreaded “D” word. We are in a depression. The word itself is forbidden, using it is believed will make things worse. Well, when your economic prosperity was largely a matter of sustaining a fantasy life, determinedly ignoring the reality of the destroyed environment and enslavement of unseen people, the temptation is to keep up the pretense. I’ve said here recently that I believe people are always tempted to act as badly as they think they can get away with, children certainly tend to. Well, we can’t get away with it any more. The ruined environment, the inability of overseas wage slaves to subsist on less than the near to nothing they are allowed in today’s ultra-capitalism, and the financial piracy of the Bush years cannot be sustained. The patched up puppet show started falling apart some time ago. Just as in the 1920s, many of us have been living in a depression for some years now.

It’s the time to call this depression what it is. The dramatic impact of it, the possible short term damage is necessary to jolt the public and the aristocracy out of their delusion. Reality is real, you can’t improve things without facing the truth. Taking the pain of stating the truth will make changing the underlying policies possible. Without facing the awful situation the old policies and beliefs produced, we won’t get the change we need.

Just as FDR found it necessary to try things and to quickly change policies to match the gradual revelation of crises of the 1930s, Barack Obama will have policies that evolve and change radically. What policies we get will be very different than those we can guess at by looking at his early appointments. None of us, including them, know more than a part of the problems they have inherited. I’m hoping that Obama’s administration will be able to adapt to reality instead of holding fast to the old free market religion. They might since they will be working for him and not his predecessors. But they won’t have much time. They’re going to have to adapt fast. And they’re going to have no more than eight years to do it. If we are very unfortunate they might only get four years. The push back from the pirates who own the media will be enormous, it is already starting. There are still idiots working on their behalf who are trying to revise history to make the failures of Coolidge and Hoover into the failures of Franklin Roosevelt. As people of Helen Thomas’s generation die and the direct memory of that period fails, their deeper knowledge will pass away. And a large part of the population still want to believe in the fairy tale.

I am hoping that facing the truth, that unbridled materialism is unsustainable, will lead to the acceptance that equality, generosity, self-sacrifice and fairness are, in fact, what produces a better life. That was what saved the United States from the fascism that took hold in Europe and Japan during the Great Depression years. The foundations of fascism were present here, in Jim Crow and other forms of bigotry, they are still here. The fact is that it is was ever only the idealism of an effective majority that kept them from doing worse than they did. It could have been worse, it still could.

Now, at the beginning of his first term in office, Barack Obama has to start telling The People the truth, the whole truth as he learns it. He has to present what we have, what we can produce and to show people that it is being distributed fairly and according to the best of our natures. He has to make dramatic demonstrations that no matter how bad it gets that the pain will be distributed equally, that fairness and honesty win out over the contracted theft of the of liars and cheats.

He will be counseled to keep the bad news confidential, that The People aren’t mature enough to accept it. The would be ruling class believes nothing so fervently as that The People are too immature to face the truth. If Obama begins to tell the truth they will start talking about Jimmy Carter’s entirely true “Malaise” remark. Carter’s message wasn’t the problem, it was true. Things weren’t sufficiently bad and the reality of it could still be denied. Using the truth against Carter, the media sold us Ronald Reagan, George Bush I and after the interregnum of Bill Clinton George Bush’s lack luster son. Now the lie that sustained three of the worst presidents of our history is over, it is time to put them in the same box as the Republican presidents of the 1920s and bury their ideology. Let’s put a stake through its heart this time.

Obama is going to have to go over the heads of the discredited media, he is going to have to do so now and dramatically. The People won’t make the right decisions unless they know the truth, Barack Obama will not be able to convince the congress if The People continue buying the demagoguing lies that put Republicans in office over the past thirty years. I suspect that, in time, he will find that radical reorganization of broadcast and cable media are essential to The People governing themselves and producing a democracy. He doesn’t seem to know that yet, I believe he will.

Viola Uotila Sings and Plays Kantele

A comment on another blog last night reminded me of these You Tubes. The little girl is very talented. I have no idea what the words of the folk songs mean but the kid’s got real potential.

Pilvien paimen

Ruoho huojuu tuulessa


In looking for more information, it was odd how Google translation consistently called her “he”. I’d like an explaination, if one is available.

Posted by Anthony McCarthy.

Pursuing Happiness in All the Wrong Places by Anthony McCarthy

Decided to repost this piece from my defunct blog while putting the ads from Friday's paper in the recycling bin. It's a pretty disgusting waste of trees. And that's after the story of the sales clerk trampled to death at WalMart and the shooting in the toy store. What is so wrong is that it is a holiday alleged to celebrate the man who said you could serve either God or Mammon. Clearly America has chosen Mammon, well after it was warned.

The estimable columnist, Derrick Jackson, has a similar take on this subject.

You can find happiness in friendship, you find it in friendly encounters with strangers and in your family and friends. We need basic material security to be happy but it isn't happiness. Short of famine relief, happiness doesn't come by truck.

Useless buying and hoarding is a sign of fear, of families and communities failing. This covers everything from trying to buy respect to the exercise machine covered with clothes you can't wear. You aren't any better off than you started out but now you've got another payment to make. Enough turns to more than you want and that turns to more than you can ever use. You have to rent a storage unit to get it out of your house. If you didn't buy it to begin with you might be able to afford basic security and have time to enjoy life with other people.

The McMansion craze that is killing off what's left of the middle class and destroying open land is an attempt to escape the isolated anxiety that life has turned into. Families don't talk to each other in towns full of strangers who are suspicious of each other. And once you're locked in the big house everyone goes off to watch TV in their own rooms. That is until your mortgage rate gets adjusted and you're looking for somewhere you can afford.

Work is even worse than that. It is competitive, cynical and insecure. You are being used and used up. You might not even have the hope that your children can get an education that will give them a better life. They're doomed to even worse than you have it and they resent everything.

You won't find happiness in the package labeled American Dream and the standard alternatives are worse. Forget the myth of the rugged individualist. That is just as phony as the thing they are supposedly escaping. No one is more conformist than those often violent, insecure, tough guys. Look at what happens to one of them who practices real individualism. Their pack turns on them.

The happiness found in decent relations with other people can't be bought or sold, it can't be won by winning. You have to make friends with your family and your neighbors. You can't do that watching a giant TV or DVD. You have to abandon the debt ridden, competitive culture that those continually pitch at us. It's hard to do, especially with children, but it's a lot easier than building a sixteen room house that you'll never own. Debt is a taste of slavery.

When you get your life back you can get past pride. That's a desperate fill-in for self-respect. Self respect comes from getting outside yourself and doing something for someone else. Self-respect gives you the confidence to say no to the sales pitch. Without self-respect no one else is going to respect you, no matter how much stuff you own.

Gated communities (by Suzie)

            In a recent thread, someone talked about “gated communities” as synonymous with bastions of rich, racist whites. I’ve heard that a lot in the years that I’ve lived in gated communities.
            To those who say gated communities are elitist and exclusionary, I’d counter that expensive housing keeps poor people out of those neighborhoods, whether there’s a gate or not. I understand that gated communities may function in different ways around the world. In my county, however, they don’t appear to exclude people of color, or hinder people on foot or bicycles.

            In the United States, a lot of retirement centers and apartment complexes are gated, and some residents have low incomes. I live in a sprawling apartment complex separated from other sprawling apartment complexes by fences or small lakes, otherwise known as wetland areas or drainage ponds. Because my complex is near a university and three large hospitals, most of our residents are students or people who work at the university or the hospitals. I moved here because it’s close to the cancer center where I’m a patient. Because it’s a newer complex, the design was the most disability-friendly. Income varies here, and a lot of people have roommates. There are people of different ethnic backgrounds. None are rich, unless they’re anthropologists who have come to study us.
           My ZIP code includes poor neighborhoods with high crime. If people get enough money, they move to an apartment like mine. If a bag of money fell out of the sky onto my lap, I’d buy a house. Few people volunteer to live in high-crime neighborhoods just so they can build community spirit.
           The owners of apartment complexes may install walls, fences and gates in hopes of attracting people who fear crime. But they have many other reasons. In complexes with a lot of young people, for example, a gate can reduce the number of out-of-control parties.
           At my complex, people enter the gate either with a key card, or by calling a resident to buzz them in. Like many gated complexes in my county, our gate is open half the time, and there’s no guard sizing up people to see if they belong.
           Two weeks ago, our gate was broken once again, and young men with guns (such a bad combination!) accosted a woman in the parking lot, stealing her car. Some people say gates don’t provide any extra security, and that may be true. I haven’t examined the studies. Nevertheless, I'm glad the gate got fixed. 

How I feel (by Suzie)

Oh, no, the compulsory Christmas season has begun, even before we can finish our Thanksgiving leftovers. Neighbors already have put up their tree.

This is a photo of a crying Cassie Koehn, whose mother, Donna, blogged about how to keep Santa from terrifying your toddler. Doesn't this Santa look like Uncle Sam in the old recruitment posters?

Friday critter blogging (by Suzie)

 

          In July, I wrote:

Mark Derr says small dogs are stigmatized as women’s pets. Bigger dogs are associated with men and work, such as herding sheep or finding prey for hunters. But a Chihuahua? It's just a companion, and being a companion has little value in our society.

          In Barbara Walters' interview with the Obamas, Barack says he doesn't want a small "girly" lap dog. The family must have a "big, rambunctious dog." My Chihuahua and I are growling. 

More Nice Stuff

This video about snow in Helsinki brought back memories of going out late at night when I was the first creature to meet the new snow. Magical moments, those. (video link courtesy of Gilly Gonzales)



The Last Winter from Ilmari Aho on Vimeo.


And here's a fun website for cat lovers and others, too.

A Nice Picture

The world can be a beautiful place.


And Butterfly by Rajaton

Opposition Research

Here's a funny wingnut article for you to read:

The four-year ascent of Barack Obama from state senator to president marks not just the triumph of a man, but the coming of age of a movement.

That movement belongs to liberal (or "progressive") Democrats, who in less than a decade have remade themselves. Once respected only in academia and the news media, they have become a fighting force. They systemically digitized the means of political organization and strategy, with the ultimate goal of dominating the political system — "Crush their spirits!" was Daily Kos blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga's pre-election rallying cry.

The Left's online movement is consciously modeled after the Goldwater-and-Reagan-era conservative movement. To those trying to build the Left, the vast right-wing conspiracy was an object not of scorn, but of admiration. They studied the Right's network of think tanks, issue groups, and talk-show hosts, looking for clues on how to push a message with brutal efficiency. They took these lessons to heart and shaped them to fit the web. Ironically, today's Right has much to learn from them.

The Left has created not just a collection of unshaven bloggers but a machine that beat the Right at its own game.

And so on and so on. We get to meet the big unshaven blogger boyz of the left blogosphere and we get to learn their great secret: Give people news, not opinions about the news!

And I guess, don't shave!

Thousand Leaves Torte

My bravura baking number. Don't start it now for Thanksgiving. It requires more time than you probably have.

You need:

Cinnamon Pastry (recipe to follow)
Custard Filling (recipe to follow)
6 tbsps sugar
1 cup applesauce
1 tsp lemon juice
sliced almonds or grapes or chocolate buttons for top decoration (or all)

Cinnamon pastry:

3/4 cups butter
2 cups flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
3-4 tbsps cold water

Cut butter into flour, salt and cinnamon until the batter looks like little droppings. Sprinkle in water, a little at a time, and toss with a fork (or scrunch in your clean hand) until all flour is moistened and pastry almost cleans the sides of bowl. Add more water if this doesn't happen. Gather pastry into a ball. Chill it in the fridge for half an hour or more.

Custard Filling

1/4 cup sugar
1 tbsp corn starch
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup milk
1 egg, slightly beaten to make it all gooey
1 tsp vanilla (or use vanilla sugar as part of the 1/4 cup sugar)
1/2 cup chilled whipping cream

Mix sugar, cornstarch and salt in saucepan. Stir in milk slowly. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until it thickens and boils. Keep boiling and stirring for about a minute longer.

Stir at least half of the sauce slowly into the egg. Then reverse by stirring that mixture back into the saucepan. Let come to a boil and stir for about a minute. Remove from heat and add vanilla (if you use vanilla sugar you can add it here also).
Cover and let cool. Put into the fridge to get chilled. Beat the whipping cream until stiff and fold into the custard. Do the last part (with the cream) just before you are ready to decorate. The custard you can make up to a day earlier.

Apple sauce recipe (right before the decorating moment):

Open a jar of the apple butter, add the 1 tsp of lemon juice to it. Taste-test. Adjust if needed.

Putting it all together:

Heat the oven to 425 American degrees. Divide the cinnamon pastry into six equal parts. Roll each of these out into a round circle (about seven inches in diameter). Place on cookie sheets and prick the circles all over with a fork. Sprinkle each with one tablespoon of sugar. Bake until light golden brown (watch them, they burn fast). About 12-15 minutes. Cool on wire racks (or if you don't have them you are in for a hell of a struggle and lots of broken pieces but they taste as good broken). Note: Unless your oven is vaster than mine you have to do these in relays and it takes quite a lot of time. A day before the planned eating is best.

Decorating:

Get a nice cake stand (flat-bottomed) and put the ugliest of the pastry circles on it. Spread with 1/3 applesauce mix. Add a second layer. Spread with 1/2 cup of custard-cream mix. Continue this way until you have no more pastry to add to the stack. Use the remaining custard sauce to cover the top before decorating it with almonds or such. I also cover the sides because mine are always ragged. Refrigerate before eating at least two hours. This is important.

Serve and watch it disappear in one second. Weep because of the work involved. It's very rich, by the way, so slice into very thin slices.

Whose Children Are They Anyway?

Ruth Marcus has written a column in the Washington Post about the gendered division of labor in the Obama household. It sounds like many, many similar columns and books I've read about during my feminist years: It points out the problem and then sort of hides behind the back of the idea of general confusion felt by all women (read: all upper-middle class women who have careers) about how to balance family and work and the writer's great identification with women confused in that manner:

When Michelle Obama took to describing her new role as mom in chief, my first reaction was to wince at her words. My second reaction was to identify with them.

I was okay, actually, with what Obama said. But I worried: Did she have to say it out loud, quite so explicitly? Is it really good for the team -- the team here being working women -- to have the "mommy" stamp so firmly imprinted on her identity?

And most of all: What does it say about the condition of modern women that Obama, catapulted by her husband's election into the ranks of the most prominent, sounded so strangely retro -- more Jackie Kennedy than Hillary Clinton?

...

"My first job in all honesty is going to continue to be mom in chief," Obama told Ebony magazine, "making sure that in this transition, which will be even more of a transition for the girls . . . that they are settled and that they know they will continue to be the center of our universe."

Note the very beginning of this quote: It's not really possible for a female columnist in public just to say that she winced at Michelle Obama's words, because of what they meant from the wider angle of taking women's professional achievements seriously. She also has to say that she identifies with those concerns.

And of course she does. And if she did not, her column would be interpreted as an attack against all those women who struggle with the problem and who have solved it by cutting back on their own ambitions. So then Ruth Marcus had to add a bit about how she is facing the very same problem and appears to be ready to give in on her professional ambitions. That's what good women do, you know.

I understand the difficulty women have when writing about topics like this one. I even agree that the children should come first for Michelle Obama during the transition, because Barack certainly won't spend time with them. But it's really very unfortunate that these types of columns always shift around in this way, because we as readers end up discussing the question of how ambitious women can balance work and family, and then we fight over whether they should have careers at all and so on, when really what Marcus is talking about is this:

Obama seems comfortable, now, in the back seat, but that seeming serenity did not come easy. In "The Audacity of Hope," Barack Obama offers a glimpse of an earlier, more conflicted Michelle, whose "anger toward me seemed barely contained" as she struggled with the pull between work and family while her husband launched a run for Congress.

"No matter how liberated I liked to see myself as . . . the fact was that when children showed up, it was Michelle and not I who was expected to make the necessary adjustments," Barack Obama writes. "Sure, I helped, but it was always on my terms, on my schedule. Meanwhile, she was the one who had to put her career on hold."

Expected to -- by whom? Had to -- says who? I remember reading this passage two years ago, when the book came out, and thinking: Hey, buddy, she has to scale back only because you're not willing to.

And yet, Barack Obama could have been describing so many women today when he explained that, for Michelle, "two visions of herself were at war with each other -- the desire to be the woman her mother had been, solid, dependable, making a home and always there for her kids; and the desire to excel in her profession, to make her mark on the world and realize all those plans she'd had on the very first day that we met."

Marcus gets my admiration, actually, for daring to write on this topic at all. But still. See how that "Hey, buddy, she has to scale back only because you're not willing to" leads to a sudden escape back into putting the whole problem on the laps of women. I don't like it, because there's no way in hell women alone, without any change in the society or in the role of men can solve that problem. It. Cannot. Be. Done.

To pretend that it can be done only tells us that women can be a little more than the ever-hovering but silent and undemanding female angels traditionally assumed to take care of every successful man: they can also be the junior assistant office managers in the families of famous men.

Women can balance their own work, their partners' work, the children, the parents and grandparents, the Thanksgiving turkey, the birthday cards, the care of the sick, the need to look young and sexy, the dustbunnies under the beds, the school menus, the parental chauffeuring services. They can balance all that, somehow, while walking on the tightrope of cultural femininity, the demands of a labor market which still assumes that every worker has a little lady at home to give succor and psychological counseling and cleaning services. And then the woman-haters write how women don't have the same genius as men do, how no woman has ever invented something like the automobile or designed a great church, how women therefore are obviously biologically incapable of anything but -- well --- playing the role of Girl Fridays for famous men.

So I'm angry. How very awkward for me. But really, why can't we keep the limelight on the real question Ruth Marcus asked, for longer than one fleeting second: What can be done to make the sexual division of labor within families more egalitarian? And if we don't want to make those changes, how do we provide women with equal opportunities in other spheres of life? The answer must not focus on all the ways that women alone could somehow achieve that. Days are still only twenty-four hours long, even for us of the girly persuasion.

From The Diaries of Thad Tough. A Man About Town.

I just began my great novel. What do you think?
-----


As I exited the men's room at the night club, I enjoyed the shine of my shoes. They even reflected the diamonds in my cuff links. My eyes slid down my impeccable front: Leather, silk and linen covering a perfect body. Don't hate me just because I'm perfect, I muttered gruffly, while unbuttoning my jacket to show the admiring masses what they envied about me.

But what is that pink spot? There, further down my front?

It was the tip of my penis peeking out through the broken zipper of my pants, like a blind snake tasting the air.


------

It's a joke! Just a joke.

International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (by Suzie)

The United Nations chose today because it's the anniversary of the assassination of Patricia, Marie and Minerva Mirabal in 1960 in the Dominican Republic. (Photo taken from this site.) 

The sisters, known as the "Unforgettable Butterflies," became a symbol of the crisis of violence against women in Latin America. November 25th was the date chosen to commemorate their lives and promote global recognition of gender violence, and has been observed in Latin America since the 1980s.

For more information, go to the UNIFEM site.

More Silliness

I've been baking pies and having deadlines.

I Love This Picture

It's from Paul Krugman's blog at the New York Times, and shows the great merriment that was felt when the financial markets were finally liberated, yes, liberated from that horrible straight jacket of government regulation. To make the meaning more obvious, a chainsaw was used to cut through all that red tape.

Something for all of us to be grateful for, this Thanksgiving season, right?

Well, it gives us a few cynical lols. And a reminder that we must not lose our collective memory.

A Letter From Prison

By a woman who was initially sentenced to like four lifetimes for running errands and wiring money for her cousin's crack cocaine business:

Her cousin was dealing crack cocaine at the time. While she never sold drugs, Lomax wired money and ran errands for him. He was arrested, and Lomax was charged as a co-conspirator in the drug-selling operation. Around this time, she converted to Islam, choosing the name Hamedah ("one who praises") Hasan. Refusing an offer of a lighter sentence if she testified against her cousin, she was found guilty and given two life sentences, two 40-year sentences, two 20-year sentences, a five and a four year sentence—despite the fact that she was a first time non-violent offender. Federal Judge Richard Kopf stated publicly he would have given her a fraction of that time had he not been bound by harsh mandatory sentencing guidelines, which had been rushed through Congress in the 1980s.

Her sentence was reduced to 12 years, then increased on appeal by the government to 27 years. So that's what it is, right now. There are first-degree murderers who get away with a shorter sentence.

The lessons to learn from Hasan's story are many, of course. But note that bad laws tend to stick around for a very long time. It might be a good idea not to rush them through so very fast in the future.

Piglets At The Teats of the Government

Remember that phrase or something similar from the 1990s welfare debate? The poor were piglets sucking at the teats of the greatest mummy sow of them all: the federal government. That's how Bill Clinton ended up ending welfare for good and all that, after the Republicans took over the Congress and needed their own blood-red meal: the poor.

Except that welfare was never ended for the rich:

The U.S. government is prepared to provide more than $7.76 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers after guaranteeing $306 billion of Citigroup Inc. debt yesterday. The pledges, amounting to half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, are intended to rescue the financial system after the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.

Following the discussion about who deserves a bailout is fascinating, because Detroit and its car-makers don't deserve one, never mind that the industry is one of the largest employer in the country, but banks, those halls of marble and pillars, do deserve one, because they have us all by the short and curly. They are too big to fail! Or rather, their failures will hurt all the little gals and guys much more than it will hurt the rich, and that is how the rich got saved, once again.

I am not belittling the need to do something about the economic recession, because the financial industries do have us by the short and curly. I just want to point out that when we ended welfare for all times we added lots of stuff about the poor having to work to get welfare payments and lots of time limits on how long any one family could stay on welfare. And all this for an expense that was around one dollar out of each one hundred dollars the federal government spent then! Now we are willing to hand over brazillion dollars and ask nothing back in terms of good behavior. Indeed, we are not even demanding that those in charge would be demoted, because we want stability in the banks! Nobody worried about the stability of families on welfare in the great and roaring nineties.

If you don't think that power goes with money in this society you are probably not a member of this society. And yes, Larry Summers got a cushy job in the Obama administration. He's a good economist and perhaps the country needs him. But slurs about us wimminfolk still only cause a hickup on the career rises of our boyz.

Some Fun

This is Julia Nunes singing "Accidentally in Love". Note the use of a tissue box as a percussion instrument.