Instead Of A Proper Post

I want to write piffle, trifle, fluff.  That means All About Echidne And Her Puny Problems.

I have three erudite posts (one may be stillborn) in the oven (NOT piffle, trifle or fluff).  They clog up the works by demanding too much work, too much checking, too much the kind of stuff which you don't have to worry about when writing piffle, trifle or fluff.  Some types of posts are so much easier to write than other types of posts (use yourself as the data!).  What's fun is that those are also the  popular posts to read.  So why would anyone want to do the more work-demanding long epistles in the first place?

What has brought all this on?  I think it's a tweet I saw last week:  Blogs Are Dead.  Dead as a doornail.  Stinking dead.  Dead as in no longer read by anybody whomsoever.  And long-form writing is also terminally ill.

If blogs are dead, how come do I still write one?

Because I'm always too far behind (or too far ahead of?) the trends.  Because I really don't care about branding, don't care about the kinds of marketing things I should care about, don't use this site to convert the whole world to the One True Belief (though that would be good).  Also because I'm  stick-in-the-mud boring (never in the avant garde).

So what is the piffle, trifle and fluff (all those f's!) I want to write about?

1.  Perhaps the oddest compliment I received recently, at the dentist's office:  That I have unusually beautiful and healthy gums.  It made me think of ways I could show those gums more easily, so as to gather more compliments on their beauty (use toothpicks to pin my lips back?  make very wide grins?).  But only dental people would find them beautiful.  Sigh.

2.  Then there's my book project.  It's going well, if each rejection I get means that I'm one step closer to finding a publisher for it.   That's the proper analysis, by the way.

3.  How to treat feelings in political debate and writing.

This isn't an easy question, not one I could answer while also chewing gum.  It's a giant hornet's nest question, and how you view it depends very much on whether you are inside the nest, outside it, a hornet or not.  But a small sliver of that question is really what I have pondered over (while tearing off my hair and kicking the poor garage door), and that is the question of the proper role of emotions in my own writing.

I'm a fierce goddess.  Given that, it's my duty to rope in my emotions, to swallow my anger, to wall away my grief, to moderate my joy, to invite fewer people to my pity parties.  In short, I try not to let my emotions dance over the words I write, because the posts shouldn't be about me and because not all my emotions are relevant.

I also believe that distancing those emotions helps the conversations, that it's better to stand on some firm floor of evidence and facts (or at least fact-seeming objects), before we join in the polka of anger or joy.

But am I going too far in the other direction?  Do I fail to show compassion, empathy, righteous anger?  Those are, after all, the fuel which drives much of my writing (that sick sense of humor drives the rest).

As an example, I'm thinking of the Chris Christie debacle and all the different emotions it seems to have elicited among those who follow it, from the glee caused by a good political scandal (only missing sex to be perfect) through schadenfreude from Christie's political opponents of various types to the anger and outrage people feel if it indeed is true that the traffic jams were created by someone in Christie's office explicitly to punish his political opponents while utterly ignoring the actual duties and responsibilities of that office.

Not all those emotions are equally important.  That Christie has been accused of being a bully matters less to me than the possibility that he or someone in his office might use political power for private revenge.  That political power ultimately belongs to all the voters in New Jersey.  It's not intended as a private bonanza that can be used in any way Christie's office desires.

It is that possible breach of trust which matters most to me.

These musings are even more difficult when I write about women's issues, because there I am surrounded by hornets' nests on all sides and even inside me.  When we feel threatened, we react, when someone pulls the scab off our wounds we hurt, and whatever the actual occasion for this, however justified or unjustified the accusations or counter-accusations, the emotions that are elicited are extremely painful.  How to deal with them in writing?  I don't have any good answers.

OK.  That wasn't piffle, trifle or fluff.  I have trouble sticking to the topic I assigned myself, even when it's me.





 

Rubio's Message To The Poor: Get Married!

The Republican politician Marco Rubio has figured out how to lift "families and children" out of poverty:

Republican Senator Marco Rubio has discovered “the greatest tool to lift children and families from poverty,” which he shared in a speech on Wednesday: “It’s called marriage.”

So much for the GOP’s much-hyped pivot to poverty backed by bold new policy specifics. Speaking at the Capitol, Rubio took the fiftieth anniversary of the War on Poverty as an opportunity to assail the tyranny of the federal government, and to call for a dismantling of the safety net in exchange for a fuller embrace of “the American free enterprise system.”

Matthew Yglesias partly agrees and (sorta) gives us examples of the benefits of resource pooling and the economies of scale*  from marriage.  Or from having a roommate.  Or from cohabitation, actually:

If you look up the Federal Poverty Guidelines you'll see that the way it works is that one person is poor if he or she earns less than $11,490. But due to household economies of scale, the FPG says that for two people to be non-poor they need to make $15,510 not $22,980. Indeed, the poverty line for a family of three is only $19,530—less than double the poverty line for one. Basically poverty is $11,490 for the first person plus $4,020 for each additional person.
So imagine a single mom earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour and working 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. She's got $14,500 a year in income which leaves herself and her daughter below the poverty line. Now she meets another single mom who's in the exact same financial situation. The two of them fall in love, and since they live in an enlightened state they are able to get married. Now instead of  two separate 2-person households each earning $14,500 and being poor we have a single 4-person household earning $29,000 which is well above the poverty line for four. They could even adopt a fifth child and still not be poor. Which is to say that marriage "lifts" families out of poverty not by increasing their incomes but by reducing what the federal government assumes their expenses to be.

Did you notice that the reasons why marrying or cohabiting or having roommates could lift people from poverty isn't about stuff like conservative family values or the conservative desire to have the traditional male breadwinner model of families?

It's about the savings one gets by being able to share apartments, heating and lighting costs, Internet costs and so on.  Food costs might rise less rapidly than the number of people one feeds because of the savings from bulk buying and the like.  Or they might not if the "new member" of the household is an expensive eater.

Even a purely economic calculus about marriage and poverty is complicated, by the way.  For example, suppose a man and a woman, both earning the minimum wage while working full time decide to get married.  The immediate effect of this decision is to lift them out of poverty, as Yglesias points out.

But what if they then decide to have a child?  Is there affordable daycare for that child, and if not, will the couple now become a single-earner family?  In that case they would be in worse poverty than initially.  Or what happens if this couple has a child, both continue working their minimum wage jobs but then get divorced?   Add to all this the impact of greater threat of unemployment** on low-pay workers and the findings of a recent study:

Williams writes, "A nationally representative study of more than 7,000 women found that approximately 64 percent of the single mothers who married were divorced by the time they reached age 35-44. More importantly, single mothers who marry and later divorce are worse off economically than single mothers who never marry."

In the report, Williams says a reason for this has a lot to do with environment, writing, "The pool of potential marriage partners for single mothers in impoverished communities does not include many men with good prospects for becoming stable and helpful partners."

The way social welfare support is determined may also affect the likelihood that couples marry or not.  But even the most basic economic calculations about marriage as the miraculous elevator which lifts families out of poverty hints that the causality is more likely to run from poverty to the prevalence of marriage rather than the other way round.   
 

-----
*What these mean is that the cost per person drops as the number of people living together rises, up to a certain limit.  This is because even a person living alone must pay basic rent, heating, lighting and so on.  If that person gets married and the new spouse moves in some of those basic costs (rent ) will not rise but now there are two people sharing them, so the per person cost goes down.

Other costs might rise (say, electricity use) but they could still show economies of scale.  Suppose that two individuals, living apart, each spend $35 a month on electricity.  Once they move together, their electricity bill is $50, which means $25 per person.

Economies of scale exist as long as the average costs of keep going down as we increase the scale of some activity (here the number of individuals who move together).  That's not going to go on forever, of course.  At some point the rental apartment will be too small, say, and the couple/roommates/cohabitors/family need to pay more for more housing.


**As an aside, Bruenig misinterprets some marriage data from other countries in that article. Those data are not strictly comparable to the US situation, because cohabitation without marriage has risen as culturally acceptable form of family formation in some countries.  Thus, it's not quite correct to assume that marriage statistics for, say, the Scandinavian countries completely reflect long-term partnerships.  Put in simpler terms, fewer Scandinavian families are single-parent families than the marriage data would suggest.

Appropriate Dress For Muslim Women And Other Gender Issues. The Pew Report.

I saw references to this yesterday.  Today several people have written about it.  Olga Khazan explains what the study did:

Wearing some form of head covering in public is an important sign of Islamic identity in many Muslim-majority countries, but there is considerable variation in the extent to which women are expected (and sometimes mandated) to cover up. 
A recent Pew report, based on a survey conducted by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research from 2011 to 2013 in seven majority-Muslim nations, reveals just how widely opinions about female attire differ in the region.
The researchers asked the respondents in each country, “Which one of these women is dressed most appropriately for public places?” while showing them this panel:

The panel is the top part of this (click to make it bigger) table, and the participating countries and their preferences are listed in the table below it:

The pictures  can be viewed as showing decreasing demand for women to cover up as we move to the right in the top row, though the first two options (the burqa and the niqab) are roughly the same.
 
The original survey(pdf) points out that the  preferences about women's head coverings do not correlate with the country's economic level of development but with its gender equality and social freedoms.

I  think they correlate most with the kind of Islam the country has adopted, the country's own cultural and social traditions and perhaps the current political meaning of a woman wearing the hijab or not wearing it.  Moreover, 27% of the Lebanese respondents defined themselves as Christians and that may explain why the Lebanese results pick the uncovered head as the most preferred alternative.

I was surprised by the Turkish results, as an aside, given the long reign of secularism in that country. The particular question doesn't actually seem to define the woman whose dress is to be judged as a believing Muslim.  It simply asks "Which one of these women is dressed most appropriately for
public places?"

The survey also asks whether women themselves should be allowed to decide on how they dress.  The responses to that question are shown in the graph below:

It's hard to know what to make of some of those answers, because part of all this is missing, and that would be what the consequences are if a woman chooses to dress in a way that is different from what the majority regards as appropriate for her.  It is those consequences which matter.

The overall survey (pdf) includes several additional questions about gender relations.  As examples, the majority of respondents in all the countries strongly disagree or disagree with the statement that it is acceptable for a man to have more than one wife.  Those percentages vary from 93% in Turkey to 51% in Saudi Arabia.

On the other hand, the vast majority of the respondents in all the countries agree or strongly agree with the statement that a wife must always obey her husband.  That percentage varies from the high of 95% in Egypt to the low of 62% in Lebanon.

The majority of respondents in all the countries would also give jobs to men over women in a tight labor market (when jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women), and the majorities in all the countries surveyed agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that men make better political leaders than women do. 

But only in Saudi Arabia does the majority agree that university education is more important for boys than it is for girls.

It is these other responses which I find more meaningful for judging the role of women in those countries than the question of Muslim dress for women, though the various responses obviously are related to each other.

One such connection is Islam and the most common interpretations about various hadiths (the sayings of the prophet Muhammad) and what they mean for women's rights.  As an example, it has been argued that the hadith " A people which has a woman as a leader will never prosper" means that women should not be political leaders or even participate in politics.  Other interpretations are possible.

The wider question these answers elicit in me has to do with what the best way forward would be for those who are concerned about gender and women's rights within Islam.  Is it Islamic feminism?  Is it a focus on human rights?  Or can these be combined?
-----
Added later:  I wrote an earlier post about a different survey which addresses some questions this one does not.  It includes more break-downs of respondents' answers by their gender, too.

Speed Blogging, 1/8/14. Three Posts: Governor Christie, Internet Harassment and Income Inequality

1.  This story is pretty shocking if true:

Private messages between Governor’s Christie’s deputy chief of staff and two of his top executives at the Port Authority reveal a vindictive effort to create “traffic problems in Fort Lee” by shutting lanes to the George Washington Bridge and apparent pleasure at the resulting gridlock.
....

In one exchange of text messages on the second day of the lane closures, Wildstein alludes to messages the Fort Lee mayor had left complaining that school buses were having trouble getting through the traffic.
“Is it wrong that I’m smiling,” the recipient of the text message responded to Wildstein. The person’s identity is not clear because the documents are partially redacted for unknown reasons.
“No,” Wildstein wrote in response.
“I feel badly about the kids,” the person replied to Wildstein. “I guess.”
“They are the children of Buono voters,” Wildstein wrote, making a reference to Barbara Buono, the Democratic candidate for governor, who lost to Christie in a landslide in November.
- See more at: http://www.northjersey.com/news/christie_kelly_bridge_lane_closures_emails.html#sthash.cm95yRd6.dpuf

Private messages between Governor’s Christie’s deputy chief of staff and two of his top executives at the Port Authority reveal a vindictive effort to create “traffic problems in Fort Lee” by shutting lanes to the George Washington Bridge and apparent pleasure at the resulting gridlock. - See more at: http://www.northjersey.com/news/christie_kelly_bridge_lane_closures_emails.html#sthash.cm95yRd6.dpuf

 In one exchange of text messages on the second day of the lane closures, Wildstein alludes to messages the Fort Lee mayor had left complaining that school buses were having trouble getting through the traffic.
“Is it wrong that I’m smiling,” the recipient of the text message responded to Wildstein. The person’s identity is not clear because the documents are partially redacted for unknown reasons.
“No,” Wildstein wrote in response.
“I feel badly about the kids,” the person replied to Wildstein. “I guess.”
“They are the children of Buono voters,” Wildstein wrote, making a reference to Barbara Buono, the Democratic candidate for governor, who lost to Christie in a landslide in November.

Doesn't sound very mature to me.

2.  Amanda Hess has written an article about the  hatred and threats that women who write on certain topics  face on the net.  She also covers the problems of law enforcement in the new field of Internet threats.  The police passes the puck to the administrators of social media etc. and those administrators pass the puck right back to the police.  Though this may be slowly changing.

For an example (not safe for work) of what goes on, have a look at some messages comedian Natasha Leggero received in response to a denture joke she made about WWII veterans. 

And this piece, by Conor Friedersdorf, explains that the harassment women face on the net indeed is different from the general Internet trolling that anybody might face, both in quantity and in quality. That quality difference is because of the added misogyny.

3.  Paul Krugman writes about the history of the war on poverty.  He suggests that the American political right is living in the past in how it understands the causes of the current poverty:

The trouble is that the American right is still living in the 1970s, or actually a Reaganite fantasy of the 1970s; its notion of an anti-poverty agenda is still all about getting those layabouts to go to work and stop living off welfare. The reality that lower-end jobs, even if you can get one, don’t pay enough to lift you out of poverty just hasn’t sunk in. And the idea of helping the poor by actually helping them remains anathema.

I read that right after learning what Kathleen Parker thinks about this all, in a column which is, funnily enough, about distorting political speech.  She writes:

This may be one of the most brilliant turns of phrase yet. Not one single American, gun to head (figuratively speaking), would say, “I’m for inequality” or “inequality is good.” But is inequality what we’re really talking about?

When you step back and examine the concept closely, what becomes clear is that roughly 99.9 percent of Americans — perhaps even North Korea’s favorite son Dennis Rodman — actually like income inequality. This is because we value merit, talent and hard work, and all people aspire to be commensurately rewarded. What, after all, is the opposite of income inequality? Income equality.

Pretty nifty, don't you think?  Parker makes at least two giant leaps in that quote. 

First, she ignores the fact that we don't just have two discrete qualitative terms: income equality and income inequality. The amount of income inequality in a country can vary greatly, and although most people might prefer to have some income inequality (based on one survey Americans like the Swedish levels), it doesn't follow that any amount of income inequality (say, one person owning everything in the country) is something 99.9% of Americans would support over income equality.

Second, she simply assumes that those who have more income or wealth are commensurately rewarded, because they have more merit, talent or because they work harder. 

That rules out all the less salutary reasons why some people have a lot of money, and it also assumes that those who are poor don't work hard, don't have merit and don't have talent.  In reality the relationship between all sorts of wonderful individual characteristics and financial outcomes is mediated by several different variables, including good or bad luck, inheritance, illness, lack of opportunities in education and so on.




 

Private messages between Governor’s Christie’s deputy chief of staff and two of his top executives at the Port Authority reveal a vindictive effort to create “traffic problems in Fort Lee” by shutting lanes to the George Washington Bridge and apparent pleasure at the resulting gridlock. - See more at: http://www.northjersey.com/news/christie_kelly_bridge_lane_closures_emails.html#sthash.cm95yRd6.dpuf

Private messages between Governor’s Christie’s deputy chief of staff and two of his top executives at the Port Authority reveal a vindictive effort to create “traffic problems in Fort Lee” by shutting lanes to the George Washington Bridge and apparent pleasure at the resulting gridlock. - See more at: http://www.northjersey.com/news/christie_kelly_bridge_lane_closures_emails.html#sthash.cm95yRd6.dpuf

Private messages between Governor’s Christie’s deputy chief of staff and two of his top executives at the Port Authority reveal a vindictive effort to create “traffic problems in Fort Lee” by shutting lanes to the George Washington Bridge and apparent pleasure at the resulting gridlock. - See more at: http://www.northjersey.com/news/christie_kelly_bridge_lane_closures_emails.html#sthash.cm95yRd6.dpuf

Private messages between Governor’s Christie’s deputy chief of staff and two of his top executives at the Port Authority reveal a vindictive effort to create “traffic problems in Fort Lee” by shutting lanes to the George Washington Bridge and apparent pleasure at the resulting gridlock. - See more at: http://www.northjersey.com/news/christie_kelly_bridge_lane_closures_emails.html#sthash.cm95yRd6.dpuf

Private messages between Governor’s Christie’s deputy chief of staff and two of his top executives at the Port Authority reveal a vindictive effort to create “traffic problems in Fort Lee” by shutting lanes to the George Washington Bridge and apparent pleasure at the resulting gridlock. - See more at: http://www.northjersey.com/news/christie_kelly_bridge_lane_closures_emails.html#sthash.cm95yRd6.dpuf

Private messages between Governor’s Christie’s deputy chief of staff and two of his top executives at the Port Authority reveal a vindictive effort to create “traffic problems in Fort Lee” by shutting lanes to the George Washington Bridge and apparent pleasure at the resulting gridlock. - See more at: http://www.northjersey.com/news/christie_kelly_bridge_lane_closures_emails.html#sthash.cm95yRd6.dpuf

Private messages between Governor’s Christie’s deputy chief of staff and two of his top executives at the Port Authority reveal a vindictive effort to create “traffic problems in Fort Lee” by shutting lanes to the George Washington Bridge and apparent pleasure at the resulting gridlock. - See more at: http://www.northjersey.com/news/christie_kelly_bridge_lane_closures_emails.html#sthash.cm95yRd6.dpuf

Private messages between Governor’s Christie’s deputy chief of staff and two of his top executives at the Port Authority reveal a vindictive effort to create “traffic problems in Fort Lee” by shutting lanes to the George Washington Bridge and apparent pleasure at the resulting gridlock. - See more at: http://www.northjersey.com/news/christie_kelly_bridge_lane_closures_emails.html#sthash.cm95yRd6.dpuf

Private messages between Governor’s Christie’s deputy chief of staff and two of his top executives at the Port Authority reveal a vindictive effort to create “traffic problems in Fort Lee” by shutting lanes to the George Washington Bridge and apparent pleasure at the resulting gridlock. - See more at: http://www.northjersey.com/news/christie_kelly_bridge_lane_closures_emails.html#sthash.cm95yRd6.dpuf

Private messages between Governor’s Christie’s deputy chief of staff and two of his top executives at the Port Authority reveal a vindictive effort to create “traffic problems in Fort Lee” by shutting lanes to the George Washington Bridge and apparent pleasure at the resulting gridlock. - See more at: http://www.northjersey.com/news/christie_kelly_bridge_lane_closures_emails.html#sthash.cm95yRd6.dpuf

Private messages between Governor’s Christie’s deputy chief of staff and two of his top executives at the Port Authority reveal a vindictive effort to create “traffic problems in Fort Lee” by shutting lanes to the George Washington Bridge and apparent pleasure at the resulting gridlock. - See more at: http://www.northjersey.com/news/christie_kelly_bridge_lane_closures_emails.html#sthash.cm95yRd6.dpuf

US Arrest Rates By Race and Gender

Edited later to fix the problem that I read "excluding arrests for minor traffic violations" as "including arrests for minor traffic violations" in my notes.

A new study looks at this.  From the abstract:

In this study, we examine race, sex, and self-reported arrest histories (excluding arrests for minor traffic violations) from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97; N = 7,335) for the period 1997 through 2008 covering cumulative arrest histories through ages 18 and 23. The analysis produces three key findings: (a) males have higher cumulative prevalence of arrest than females and (b) there are important race differences in the probability of arrest for males but not for females. Assuming that the missing cases are missing at random (MAR), about 30% of Black males have experienced at least one arrest by age 18 (vs. about 22% for White males); by age 23 about 49% of Black males have been arrested (vs. about 38% for White males). Earlier research using the NLSY97 showed that the risk of arrest by age 23 was 30%, with nonresponse bounds [25.3%, 41.4%]. This study indicates that the risk of arrest is not evenly distributed across the population. Future research should focus on the identification and management of collateral risks that often accompany arrest experiences.

A few things are worth noting about that: 


First, the overall arrest rates by age twenty-three are pretty high for all the groups the study analyzes.  They are the highest for black men (49%), but the rates are pretty high for all men and I, at least, found the women's rates surprisingly high, too.  From another writeup of the study:

According to the study, the arrest rate for American males increases significantly from age 18 to age 23. Their study examined different racial groups and found:
    •    30 percent of non-Hispanic black males had been arrested by age 18. That figure jumped to 49 percent by age 23.
    •    26 percent of Hispanic males had been arrested by age 18. That jumped to 44 percent by age 23.
    •    22 percent of non-black, non-Hispanic (white) males had been arrested by age 18. That jumped to 38 percent by age 23.

And for women:

Although the study supports a marked difference between arrests young males by race, there was little significant difference between female racial groups.
According to researchers, white females had the highest arrest rate of all female racial groups at age 18 (12 percent), with Hispanic and black females trailing by less than a percentage point.
And while the prevalence of arrest did increase by age for young females in all racial groups, even at age 23, the highest arrest percentage was 20 percent (for white females).

Second, the study is based on self-reporting.  If memory problems and response biases differ by race and/or gender the results may not lend themselves to direct comparisons, though I don't see any apriori reason why that would be the case.

I really should acquire the paper and read it (but don't have immediate access to it), because it might answer some of the questions all this provokes:

Why do we see a racial pattern for men but not for women?  What proportion of all arrests are repeat ones in each race/gender grouping?  How do location characteristics (such as the racial composition of an area or the average income of an area) affect arrest rates?

----
If you read an earlier version of this blog post, note that I misread the bit about the minor traffic violations.  This version has fixed that.  My apologies.  Thanks to Blue in the comments for pointing that out. 

Addendum:  This piece offers further criticisms of the study, including the way it handles missing cases (though all ways of handling them have their own problems). I agree that this can be problematic.  On the other hand, I don't think that the sub-samples in the study were necessarily too small for the analysis.

Weird Stuff: Tiger Moms, the Koch Brothers And Makeup As The Cause Of Molestation of Women

This is like speed blogging on weird topics.  Some topics are truly weird, others are not weird but we are not supposed to notice them. 

First, the so-called Tiger Mom, Amy Chua,  has written a book with her husband, Jed Rubenfeld about which culture does the best child-rearing.  

Whether Jed Rubenfeld is a roaring Tiger Dad or just part of the decoration of the living-room is unclear from the preview of the book I've seen.  By all that I mean the age-old question whether fathers are to do anything more than open their wallets.

The book, Triple Package, is not out yet, so what I write about here is what one review argues the book tells us.  The review may be mistaken, in which case I'm going to have to apologize!

In any case, this is what the review tells:

In “The Triple Package,” Chua and her husband, co-author Jed Rubenfeld, gather some specious stats and anecdotal evidence to argue that some groups are just superior to others and everyone else is contributing to the downfall of America.
Unsurprisingly, the Chinese Chua and the Jewish Rubenfeld belong to two of the eight groups they deem exceptional. In no seeming order of importance, they are:
    •    Jewish
    •    Indian
    •    Chinese
    •    Iranian
    •    Lebanese-Americans
    •    Nigerians
    •    Cuban exiles
    •    Mormons
These groups — “cultural,” mind you, never “ethnic” or “racial” or “religious” — all possess, in the authors’ estimation, three qualities that they’ve identified as guarantors of wealth and power: superiority, insecurity and impulse control.

I wonder what those statistics could be.  If they have to do with income and education, say, it's important to remember that some recent immigrant groups to the US tend to have a lot more educational and other capital, on average, than some recent immigrant groups not included in that list.

For instance, it's very very difficult for an Indian family to get a work visa to this country unless at least one of the adults has a university degree or two, preferably a doctorate.  Similar arguments can be made about the recently immigrated Chinese, say.  And the Cubans, I have read, have on average been wealthier and more educated than other Latino immigrant groups on their arrival to the US.

Such differences probably account for at least some of the later differences in statistics measuring economic success here, whatever the parenting skills of various groups might be.

As a complete aside, my early upbringing consisted mostly of getting told not to get a big head.  I still got a big head.  So. 

Second, the financial reach of various wealthy conservatives looks to be enormous.  Digby writes about the Koch brothers' wallets in American politics.   And an article from last December summarizes a study which tried to find out the sources of funding for the climate change counter-movement.  Many of the sources are now hidden because they can be (yeah!), but the Koch Brothers have been busy in that field, too.

The role of money in American politics is one of those things which really should be written about a lot more, but it's not, because the people with the money are so powerful, and they are not going to fund anything which disses them.

Third, one survey in Saudi Arabia about the "molestation of females" gives us this:

Saudi men believe women are to blame for the rising cases involving molestation of females on the grounds they are seduced by women’s excessive make up.
The findings were included in a survey conducted by the Riyadh-based King Abdul Aziz Centre for National Dialogue and involved 992 males and females.
The survey, carried by Saudi newspapers, found that 86.5 per cent of the men polled believe that women’s exaggeration in wearing make-up is the main cause of the rise in molestation cases in public places in the conservative Gulf Kingdom.

No way of knowing if the survey is any good in terms of being representative. But those findings do echo other types of statements we have heard. 

Just as sexual molestation can be "caused" by wearing short skirts and tight tops, it seems that it can also be "caused" by wearing eye makeup with a niqab.  Taken to the extreme, this thinking boils down to women causing all molestation by just being there. 

Today's Bowl of Gender Research Granola

This is one of those studies which we will not see spread over the front pages of newspapers anywhere in the world:

Carothers and Harry Reis, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, analyzed data from 13 sex-difference studies over the past few decades. The studies included data from more than 13,000 research volunteers, most of them college students. They also examined studies of adolescents and mature adults.
The pair analyzed 122 different qualities such as preferences over how to spend their free time: golfing or scrap booking? Bath or boxing? They also looked at the so-called Big Five psychological traits: extraversion (sociability and enthusiasm); agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and intellect. Other analyses examined how men and women chose sexual partners and mates.
Instead of scores falling along neat lines between males and females, like height or physical strength differences -- psychological indicators fell on a spectrum for both genders.

There are average differences, but they are not large enough to classify men and women as consistently separate gender categories. Reis said that their statistical analysis shows that it's hard to tell men and women apart, even when it comes to sexuality.
"Many people act as if men and women are different species," Reis said. "The message to me is that these qualities don't belong to one sex, these are human differences and any given individual can have more or less than any of them."

I haven't looked at the original study for the purposes of criticism.  I will do it when it's discussed as widely as these kinds of studies.

That's the granola in your bowl.  Let's add some raisins (though I detest raisins, you are to regard these as yummy ones):  An analysis of the earnings of male and female economists, fresh out of the PhD oven, suggests that those who are partnered fare differently based on their gender:

Marriage, the research finds, benefits men and hurts women – if one judges by salary. Men who are married at the time they earn their doctorates see a 15 percent salary boost during the first five years of employment, compared to single men. And men who get married during that period see a 25 percent boost.
The picture is different for women. For them, getting married is associated with a 23 percent penalty in salary growth, compared to single women. The paper speculates that this reflects “compromises incurred in a two-career search.”

(Note that the comparison here is not between men and women, but between partnered and not-partnered (heterosexual?) individuals within each gender, and the percentages are not about salaries themselves but about differences in how they grow.) 

It's possible that the two-career job search explains this if men's careers are prioritized, but for that we would have to know what that other partner is doing.  For example, are the married male economists here mostly married to someone who isn't having a career (as opposed to a job)  or isn't having a paid job?  Without analyzing the data I can't tell if the other possible explanation is taken into account here.  That would be having children and how that affects men and women differently.

Finally, some honey or sugar on all that (and milk or cream, but I only have three stories): One study suggests that greater flexibility in working hours could reduce the gender wage gap in earnings:

Goldin was seeking to explain why 25 to 69 year old women working fulltime made 77 percent of what men earned. The median pay gap expands with age and differs by occupation, yet it's smaller than it once was as women have become more educated and worked more, she said on Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in Philadelphia.
The pay gap in industries with more flexible work schedules, such as technology, science and health, is smaller than in those with more rigid workdays, including financial and legal professions, the study found.

Once again, I should warn you that I have not looked at the original study, so I can't tell if the study controls for all the other relevant variables.  But if it does, it would be interesting to know to what extent the rigid workdays in some industries are truly necessary and to what extent they are a simple inheritance from times when the stereotypical worker was assumed to be a man with a functioning support system at home.

From another point of view the greater need for flexible working hours for women can also be seen as a direct consequence of the gendered division of labor at home:  It's the women who are expected to need that flexibility for childcare and for the care of the elderly.  Which is to remind us that the total paid working hours are not the same thing as the total working hours.

Speed Blogging, 1/6/14. From daycare, abortion policies and rape to progressive economic policies and the Neanderthals.

1.  An interesting piece on daycare in Quebec, because it also addresses the economic framework.

A snippet:

Even limited spaces, though, have allowed Quebec to meet one major goal: to get moms working and lift families out of poverty. And that’s gone a long way toward paying for the system itself.
In 1997, women 25 to 44 in Quebec were less likely to be in the labour force than those of any province outside Atlantic Canada. Ten years later, their participation was among the highest in the nation – an about-face especially notable among those with children under 12.
The number of mothers with jobs went up across the country. But unlike places such as Newfoundland, where oil was fuelling some of those hires, Quebec employment rates aren’t tied to an obvious change in the job market. Quebec economists, such as Pierre Fortin, a professor at the University du Québec à Montréal, ascribe the boost to childcare. According to Dr. Fortin’s work, in 2008 alone, the program accounted for 70,000 newly employed moms.

2.  Content warning:  Horrible sexual violence

In India, protests erupt as the police still has trouble with how to handle rape cases.  Those protests are a good thing, showing change.  If we look far back in the history, the police has probably never taken most rape cases very seriously in most countries.  Recent US examples exist, too. 

3.  Texas and its abortion policies.  Lindsay Beyerstein did research on what is going on.

In somewhat related news,  Marlise Munoz lies brain dead in a Texas hospital.  Her husband, Erick Munoz,  is not allowed to take her body off life support because she is nineteen weeks pregnant, even though he states that this would have been her preference and is his preference.  This is because of a Texas law, according to some experts.  Others state that the law doesn't cover brain dead individuals.

4.  Jesse Myerson plays the bad cop in the good-cop-bad-cop setup of getting political change done by offering a rather extreme progressive list of economic changes that young people should support. That list includes guaranteed jobs for everyone with living wages and a universal basic income for everybody, whether working or not.  The latter is like being able to retire the minute you are out of the school system.

Well, I think Myerson intends to play the bad cop here, but I could be completely wrong.  Still, it's good not to always play defense when it comes to economic policies.

5.  The Neanderthal genome is finally mapped, we are told.  Interesting stuff, but always remember how small the samples are that researchers must be working with when it comes to ancient species.  This article is good at reminding us about that when it talks about the possible incest stuff:  Finding that one specific individuals was probably the result of what we would call incest does not mean that that's what all Neanderthals practiced, everywhere. 

But more generally, if you had the time to go back and see how earlier findings have been reported you would come away with a firm new year's promise to always take all new results with a small pinch of salt, not because they are necessarily wrong but because the next set of new results could be quite different or at least change our understanding again.

We Are Number One!

The "we" would be the Nordic countries, and what the winning is about is coffee consumption.  Here's the pic*:

What's the reason?  Probably the cold and the dark.

Added later:  The traditional Finnish way of serving coffee at parties was with seven different types of cookies and/or cakes.  You had to have seven types or more.


-----
*hat tip to Quentin Compson

On Wars And Resources

Yesterday I got depressed by checking out all the parts of this world where wars and violence are prevalent right now.  Syria, Iraq, South Sudan, just to list the three that first cropped up on my Google news. 

The reasons for wars are always complicated, but many seem to ignite when access to resources changes in a way which leaves one group in greater poverty or when groups disagree about how to share newly-found resources.  That those wars also have other explanations, including long-held grievances between tribal or religious or ethnic groups or between countries, say, doesn't change the possibility that a war might have been averted without a particular resource problem cropping up. 

Even the problems in Egypt are partly caused by the great discrepancy between the amount of arable land in that country and the traditional (and still recent) large size of the farming population, the combination of which has placed a large percentage of the population into poverty, and the antecedents to the Syrian situation point out the reduced resources (possibly caused by global climate change)  as an important cause.  The Israel-Palestine hostilities are also partly based on access to resources, such as access to water for farming.

All this is obvious.  But when a war breaks out somewhere, the peace initiatives tend not to focus on the resource/population question to the extent they perhaps should.  We might get peace faster if that was done?  Could wars be prevented by an international economic policy approach?  Is there a willingness to address such issues?

Then there are the wider links to global climate change and its impact on available resources, the unequal distribution of resources on the worldwide level, with its Western domination,  and the question of what human population size is sustainable in a world where all individuals should be able to enjoy a fair standard of living while leaving some nature for the other species.

You Never Guess What I Found Today!

The Upworthy trick in making linkable posts by using certain headlines!  Check out this slide show, especially slide number 7.  I saw that yesterday and today I've spotted the Upworthy trick all over the Internets!

To be quite honest, I have sometimes used the reverse trick to make sure that a post I write isn't easily found by trolls:  A long-and-boring headline.

Still, it's funny how easily I've been manipulated.

Speed Blogging, 1/2/2014. Assorted Topics.

1. This New England Journal of Medicine article is useful reading.  It is about how anti-abortion legislation affects what is expected of physicians.

2. This is the  kind of piece about gender differences in the brain which doesn't get pulled out and dissected under the glaring lights of the popular media.  When certain studies are ignored and others pushed we get a false impression of what it is that research actually is establishing.  My New Year's promise is to try to cover stuff more fairly.

3. A piece which reminds us about certain oddities in federal voting behavior by state.  The red (Republican flavor) states are more likely to be net recipients of federal aid, the blue (Democratic flavor) states are more likely to be net donors.  It's not the direction of the transfers which matters here but the way the voting patterns go in its reverse.

4. Rhode Island did something good:

With the new year came the implementation of a new bill: Rhode Island’s paid family leave legislation, passed in July, is now in effect. That means that three states have paid family leave programs in place, as Rhode Island joins California, whose law went into effect in 2004, and New Jersey, which started its program in 2009.
Rhode Island’s law expands its previous Temporary Disability Insurance program, which only covered those who needed time off for work-related illnesses or injuries. Temporary Caregiver Insurance will now offer paid family leave, covering about 80 percent of the state’s workforce. Workers can now pay into into the program through a payroll deduction, which would cost someone who makes $43,000 a year 83 cents a week. They can then take up to four weeks of paid leave, although that number will climb to six weeks next year and eight weeks by 2015. The minimum weekly payment someone could receive is $72, while the maximum is $752.

As I've written before, American workers need proper annual paid vacations and proper parental and related leaves.  Many other countries have them already and manage to compete in the international markets.  Besides, well-rested and less stressed workers are healthier and more efficient workers.

5.  On the Ani DiFranco debacle.  This is the gist of what happened:

Singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco has officially canceled her four-day “righteous feminist songwriting retreat” after fans and non-fans alike rightfully took issue with the event’s location — the Nottoway Plantation, one of the largest former slave plantations in the South. DiFranco posted a lengthy message on her Facebook page announcing the cancelation and offered a pretty weak explanation for why the retreat was ever scheduled at such a historically problematic location in the first place.

DiFranco has offered a second apology, the one that should have been her first apology.

For more views on this (also on Ani's Facebook page), check here, here, and here, and, for the sake of covering all views, here. 

Living Off Tips

This piece and the attached video are worth thinking about.  The federal tipped minimum wage, the wage restaurant servers get before earning any tips, is $2.13 an hour in direct wages.  Here's how it's supposed to work:

An employer of a tipped employee is only required to pay $2.13 an hour in direct wages if that amount plus the tips received equals at least the federal minimum wage, the employee retains all tips and the employee customarily and regularly receives more than $30 a month in tips. If an employee's tips combined with the employer's direct wages of at least $2.13 an hour do not equal the federal minimum hourly wage, the employer must make up the difference.

Many states have higher tipped minimum wages.  But note that the federal tipped minimum wage (that two bucks and thirteen cents) was set in 1991 and this Wikipedia article suggests that sixteen states are still using it as the basis of server compensation packages.

The linked Crooks&Liars piece suggests that employers might not make up the difference when the minimum wage and the tips fail to come up to the federal minimum hourly wage.  But even if they do,  the labor contract here  tilts the usual ideas we have about the entrepreneurs being rewarded for risk-bearing and the workers being protected from it by earning fixed wages:

If I understand this right, the employer will never have to pay more to the wait staff than whatever the relevant hourly (state or federal) minimum wage might be.  If the business is booming and the servers make enough in tips to earn the relevant hourly minimum wage or more, the employer only needs to pay that tipped minimum wage (say, $2.13 an hour in some states).  If the business is not booming, the employer will end up having to pay all of the federal or state minimum wage rate.  But that's it!

The servers, on the other hand, cannot predict their overall earnings that easily, because they depend mostly on the tips, and though there are conventions about what the right amount for a tip should be, a customer who simply refuses to pay for the work of a server cannot be made to do so.  In a sense, it is the servers who are the risk-takers here, and that can make life hard for low-income workers who try to schedule the payment of rent and utilities.

The push, as I understand it, is for a higher federal tipped minimum wage, given that the current one was set in 1991, probably before the birth of many who work today as servers.

Other countries might have something to offer here, too.  In some the tip is routinely included as a certain percentage of the total invoice.  Tipping above and beyond that is only for some extraordinary services.  This practice doesn't completely isolate the serving staff from the business risks of the restaurants but reduces the ability of a customer to walk away without paying.

Communication Thoughts

This will all be silly stuff as I'm not wearing my Echidne helmet today.  First, Leonardo da Vinci's Michelangelo's grocery list for his servant who may not have been able to read.

How we communicate depends on the context.  And every context is fraught with dangerous possibilities of misunderstanding.  The context itself can be interpreted that way.  Michelangelo is privileged (he can write), his servant, less so.  Or perhaps not, because we don't truly know what their lives were like, and because most people then were  illiterate, so communication, as such, wasn't based on the ability to write.

Then there's communication with other species of animals.  Humans tend to regard that as happening when the other animal species are taught to understand human language.  Think of the cue cards for chimpanzees or how we teach our dogs and cats commands.

The reverse way of looking that is for us to learn the language of other animal species.  I speak very little dog, for example, but what I do understand came from the patient teaching of my dogs.  Still, I speak a lot more dog than most people who put, say, what's supposed to be an angry dog into a movie, and then we hear a dog happily barking a welcome to someone but are expected to understand that the dog is angry.  A double translation!

Internet communication.  That is a very different kettle of fish from face-to-face communication, partly because we cannot see facial expressions and we cannot hear the tone of voice and also because it is very easy indeed to forget that the other participants are living, breathing human beings.  Even if they appear to be utterly wrong and misguided in their arguments.  (That part was a joke).

Then there's that 140-character limit on the Twitter.  Too bad that few complicated issues can be properly and precisely distilled into 140 characters.  Twitter does better with emotions and jokes than with substantive discussions.

All this led me back to this piece:








It is both a joke (on many levels, note that the pianist doesn't play at all) and a comment on Wittgenstein's theory.  But it's also true about many debates, not because the terms didn't have a meaning one could communicate, but because the meaning of those terms is quite different for people with other frameworks of life.  And unless we are willing to take time to clarify what we mean and to understand the frameworks different people mean the chances of increased clarity from communication are minimal.  Indeed, sometimes silence is more conducive to real understanding.

Not that I will necessarily shut up now, sorry.

Happy New Year!

May 2014 be good one for you and yours.

I have no talent for end-of-year retrospective assessments, because, as my car mirrors tell me, the objects in the mirror are closer than they seem.  Spotting patterns takes more time for me.  Note that I said "patterns."  Every year has its own major news items and major events, but whether they are evidence of some permanent change takes longer to spot.

Watching the new year in:

On US Beliefs About Evolution

Pew Research Center has a new survey out on that (n=1983 adults).  It has been written up in various ways, but the major result people talk about is the finding that those who believe humans were created exactly as they are now are more likely to be Republicans now than in 2009:

There also are sizable differences by party affiliation in beliefs about evolution, and the gap between Republicans and Democrats has grown. In 2009, 54% of Republicans and 64% of Democrats said humans have evolved over time, a difference of 10 percentage points. Today, 43% of Republicans and 67% of Democrats say humans have evolved, a 24-point gap.

The researchers looked at a lot of stuff to account for the change, but couldn't completely do that:

Differences in the racial and ethnic composition of Democrats and Republicans or differences in their levels of religious commitment do not wholly explain partisan differences in beliefs about evolution. Indeed, the partisan differences remain even when taking these other characteristics into account.

That's weird.  My first guess for an explanation would have been that Republican Party is now more religious than it was in 2009, in the sense of having more fundamentalists in it.  Perhaps "differences in their levels of religious commitment" doesn't account for that aspect?  On the other hand, the change from 2009 could be just getting a non-representative sample by accident, either that year or now.

Sex And Personal Responsibility For Orgasms

Blow jobs. I bet you never thought you'd read something like this on my priggish blog!  And this is definitely not safe for viewing in public.

By "this" I mean an interview about how a woman can learn to teach herself to orgasm while giving BJs, even while deep throating (work on that gag reflex, you irresponsible woman!).  The trick is to work on your thoughts, to learn sexual meditation and then --- presto! --- you can orgasm while doing something completely different!  It's your responsibility to get in touch with what your body wants, after all.

If you work on it, you can orgasm while giving BJs.  Or while scrubbing the floor.  Or while you vacuum.  There's an interesting aside in that piece to how hard the work of BJs is on your knees:

Prioritizing your comfort also might mean avoiding the typical kneel-and-worship approach to blow jobs. “One of the hard things about being on your knees is there’s only so long that that’s comfortable,” says Van Vleck.

There's nothing much wrong with that piece if it's one in a series where the next one teaches all the same skills to people who do cunnilingus on someone else.  If that's not the case, my impression is that the piece contributes to the currently common narrative that sex is defined by what heterosexual men like (from porn, say) and that this is what we all should learn to truly enjoy.

I'm not ridiculing the obvious fact that one can enjoy giving pleasure to a loved one in sex, that the so-called foreplay aspects of sex can be enjoyable in themselves.  I'm not even saying that a woman couldn't orgasm from giving BJs or from peeling potatoes or whatever.  But there's something inherently tilted in Van Vleck's idea that personal responsibility for one's orgasms means something like nobody else having to do anything for you.

What Happens When You Say Something Bigoted in Public?

The confluence of events sometimes teaches us  what might happen.  First, take the case of Justine Sacco:

Roxane Gay writes about it:

PR executive Justine Sacco wrote an offensive tweet before boarding a flight from London to Cape Town, South Africa. “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” she said. Between the time Sacco tweeted and when she landed in South Africa twelve hours later, the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet trended worldwide. A great many of the tweets including the hashtag were downright hilarious. Even Donald Trump, a paragon of ignorance, chastised Sacco on Twitter, saying, “Justine, what the hell are you doing, are you crazy? Not nice or fair! I will support @AidforAfrica. Justine is FIRED!” 

Internet sleuths figured out which flight Sacco was on and when she would land. Her work and cell phone numbers were uncovered. Her entire online footprint was revealed. She had made inappropriate tweets before. She had Instagram and Facebook accounts. These have all been deleted but nothing on the Internet really disappears. The digital echoes of her mistakes will endure. Sacco’s former employer, InterActiveCorp, immediately distanced themselves, condemned her words and she was fired. During her flight, Sacco gained thousands of Twitter followers, an audience raptly waiting, somewhat gleefully, to see what would happen next. Justine Sacco unwittingly scripted a gripping, real-life soap opera and she wasn’t even there to watch it unfold. 

Here was instant comeuppance for someone who said something terrible. Here was comeuppance for a white person generalizing shallowly about Africa, the continent, as if it were one large country with only one story to tell. Here was a woman reveling in her whiteness and assuming that her whiteness was some kind of shield against a disease that does not discriminate. I was amused by the spectacle. I followed along even though something in my stomach twisted as the hours passed. It was a bit surreal, knowing this drama was playing out while Sacco was at 38,000 feet.

Sacco's tweet was racist and stupid.  What happened next?  This:

At first the discussion around her tweet was relatively trivial, with people wondering if Ms. Sacco’s account had been hacked. Yet as soon as it was clear that she had made similar comments in the past, the Internet turned into a voracious and vengeful mob. Ms. Sacco was tried and judged guilty in a public square of millions and soon attacked in a way that seemed worse than her original statement.
Within hours, people threatened to rape, shoot, kill and torture her. The mob found her Facebook and Instagram accounts and began threatening the same perils on photos she had posted of friends and family.* Not satisfied, people began threatening her family directly. The incident was a trending topic on Twitter and a huge forum thread on Reddit.

That was Justine Sacco.  Now compare this to the case of Phil Robertson, the patriarch of "Duck Dynasty," cable television's largest show.  Robertson has expressed opinions which many would call bigoted.  For instance, in a recent interview he states:

“Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men," Robertson said before paraphrasing a Bible verse. "Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”
Though he's worried about the state of this country, Robertson seemed even more concerned about non-Christian cultures.
"All you have to do is look at any society where there is no Jesus. I’ll give you four: Nazis, no Jesus. Look at their record. Uh, Shintos? They started this thing in Pearl Harbor. Any Jesus among them? None. Communists? None. Islamists? Zero," Robertson explained. "That’s eighty years of ideologies that have popped up where no Jesus was allowed among those four groups. Just look at the records as far as murder goes among those four groups.”

And:

As a devout member of the Church of Christ, Robertson has been a frequent speaker and preacher around the country, especially since gaining fame from the highest-rated nonfiction series in cable TV history. Anyone who takes the time to watch those videos will find plenty of things to discuss and debate.
Check out these nuggets:

....

A good woman is "hard to find. Mainly because these boys are waiting until they get to be about 20 years old before they marry 'em. Look, you wait till they get to be about 20 years old, they only picking that's going to take place is your pocket. You gotta marry these girls when they're 15 or 16, they'll pick your ducks. You need to check with mom and dad about that, of course." -- Speaking at Sportsmen's Ministry in Georgia in 2009.

And:

In a recent interview with GQ, Robertson made anti-gay comments that sparked his indefinite suspension from “Duck Dynasty” by A&E. In the same article, in remarks that haven’t gotten as much attention, Robertson also talked about growing up in Louisiana before the blossoming of the civil rights movement, saying  “I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field…. They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”

That indefinite suspension Robertson got?  It's already over:

A&E announced Friday that it will "resume filming" the hit reality television show "Duck Dynasty" with star Phil Robertson following his indefinite suspension from the network last week for comments he made in an interview with GQ Magazine about gays, non-Christians, and African Americans. The network also promised it would work with Robertson to promote "unity, tolerance and acceptance among all people." A&E announced the decision to end Robertson's suspension with a statement provided to the Hollywood Reporter.
"Duck Dynasty is not a show about one man's views. It resonates with a large audience because it is a show about family… a family that America has come to love. As you might have seen in many episodes, they come together to reflect and pray for unity, tolerance and forgiveness. These are three values that we at A+E Networks also feel strongly about," the statement said. "So after discussions with the Robertson family, as well as consulting with numerous advocacy groups, A&E has decided to resume filming Duck Dynasty later this spring with the entire Robertson family."

I have no deep conclusions to draw from this comparison, and I am not implying that there's some conspiracy that would explain why the two cases, somewhat similar, resulted in such very different outcomes. 

Money matters in the Robertson case ("there's no such thing as bad publicity"), but it's also true that social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, have broken through the brick wall which we used to imagine was erected between the public and the private sphere. That brick wall is still around those who exist in the public mainstream (commercial) space, but not in the social media more generally.   
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*A different example of unrelated individuals getting harassed is given here:

In October, after an Ohio University woman was photographed receiving oral sex in public and later filed a report saying she was assaulted, “men’s rights” supporters attempted to harass the women in question. They incorrectly identified her as a different Ohio University student, and posted that student’s contact information online. After she was flooded with messages calling her a liar, she withdrew from her classes and was afraid to leave her home.

The Christmas Scrooge. Wal-Mart.

The honorary Scrooge of this year's Christmas is  probably Wal-Mart:

U.S. companies, forbidden to give money directly to political action committees, are taking advantage of controversial federal rules allowing them to ask employees to do it for them in exchange for matching charitable donations.
It’s legal and gives businesses from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to Coca-Cola (KO) Co. to Hewlett-Packard Co. a way to fund their PACs, which direct money to political candidates. The matching contributions provide an incentive for employees, most of them managers, to contribute to the PAC.

Got it?  So Wal-Mart management-level employees give money to pro-business political candidates (of both major parties) while Wal-Mart reimburses them by giving to charities on their behalf.  But wait!  There's more:

Employees receive no tax deduction for the donations, as they do by giving to a charity directly. When soliciting employee contributions to PACs in exchange for charitable donations, companies typically say they want to increase voluntary participation in the political process and support pro-business candidates. Many companies offer a one-for-one match and donate the money to a charity of the employee’s choosing. Coca-Cola and HP both do this.
Wal-Mart goes further. It offers a two-for-one match, and the contribution must go to the Associates in Critical Need Trust, or ACNT, a charity the company started in 2001 to help its own store workers facing financial distress. Wal-Mart gave the ACNT about $3.6 million in double-matching funds in the year that ended January 31, according to an audit of the charity’s financial filings.
“It’s rare for a corporate PAC’s charitable match program to be restricted to a charity that the corporation wholly controls and finances,” Laurence E. Gold, an attorney at Trister, Ross, Schadler & Gold, a Washington law firm that handles campaign-finance issues, said in an e-mail.

Bolds are mine.

All that sounds stinky to me.  The problem?  Employees are persuaded to both support certain candidates which might be better for Wal-Mart than for a particular employee and then they are persuaded to make up the shortfall in the wages Wal-Mart pays its floor-level workers.  A win-win for Wal-Mart.

Micro-Posts for Boxing Day 2013

1.  Two Pussy Riot members have been freed which is good news.  But read about their experiences in prison.

2.  Why the Republican Party has a tiny problem with  women:  Their main pundits find women really yucky people unless properly controlled.  The question why those are the main pundits deserves a much deeper post than this but you can figure the answer for yerselves.  Also check out what Fox News thinks of the frightening wussification of America, because that, too, is linked to the Republican war against womenfolks.

3.  Contents:  Violence.
This series of pictures on mass killings at USAToday earlier in December is informative.  But one of the pictures (the second under "suspects") and the attached text are utterly weird.  The picture tells us the percentages of mass killing suspects who are men (94%) and the percentages of mass killing suspects who are women (4%). Yet the text goes: "While both men and women commit mass killings, their choices of weapons and the outcomes of their cases are different."

That is truly weak tea, to ignore the difference in the percentages.  An occupational field with those percentages would be regarded as almost totally sex-segregated, for instance, and there could be something we can learn from that gender difference, and that something could help in reducing mass killings more generally (better social support for men in trouble?  less access to guns which kill quickly and easily? different ideas about what masculinity means?)

4.  On economic inequality:  Is that the greatest economic challenge of our time?  That's the debate which took place during December 2013.  Brad Plumer threw a pebble into the churning waters by writing about the various theories explaining how inequality could hurt economic growth and the fact that research hasn't been able to decisively prove those hurts.  Ezra Klein argued that unemployment is the real challenge today, not economic inequality.  Paul Krugman and Kathleen Geier vote for inequality as the most urgent underlying problem.

I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this debate, only that the impact of increasing economic inequality on our political outcomes shouldn't be ignored in it.  Given the way the US political system is financed, rising inequality is likely to a) increase the relative power of the 1% over the 99% and of firms over workers, and b) to the extent people want their own interests to be considered when they donate money, the political outcomes are going to produce more inequality, not less, because the higher the inequality in wealth and income becomes, the more the concerns of the wealthy and the less wealthy will diverge.  Or that would be my guess.