On the Kavanaugh Nomination And Women's Reproductive Rights. Or Back to the Basics. Post One.

Over the last week I have started several posts on the Kavanaugh hearings and the various political reactions to the allegations that he sexually assaulted a fifteen-year-old girl when he himself was seventeen and a student at an all-male private school.

I didn't manage to complete any of those posts in one day (because of my still-frail health), but by the next day(s) so much new shit (1) would hit the online fans around this topic that a new post seemed faster than attempting to patch and darn the changes into the earlier draft.  Rinse and repeat. 

For these reasons I am going to do two fundamentals-posts on this topic: This first post begins by taking a few steps back, so as to achieve a wider view on the meaning of Kavanaugh's appointment and the allegations against him.  The second post will zoom in on certain details about the treatment of Kavanaugh's accuser.

Let's begin*.

Why Does My Pesto No Longer Love me? A Culinary Call For Help.

This flu is unusually severe.  Get your vaccinations this year if you have not in the past.  Or get the flu and  feel like something that's drawn through the wood chipper, repeatedly.

I'm slowly creating an actual post in my head, in the few available tiny spaces between the giant snot deposits.  But in the meantime, I have a culinary question for you:

What makes pesto taste worse than Trump's ideas?

I have made pesto for years, from all kinds of nuts and all kinds of herbs.  Some combinations are tastier than others, but all of them have been acceptable.  Except recently.

Five times I have had to throw large amounts of pesto down the sewer because of an extremely strong metallic (or bitter) aftertaste it gives*.  Changing the olive oil has not helped, guaranteeing the freshness of the herbs and the nuts has not helped.

So I suspect the garlic.  I am bigoted toward recent garlic.  In the olden days it was easy to peel, but now it takes me hours to peel enough cloves.  And the cloves seem often to be miniature cloves inside something that initially looks like a normal-sized clove.

Is it the garlic?  Or something else?

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*  I first tried doctoring it with more cheese or more herbs and so on.  Nothing made it edible.  And it's not the cheese that's at fault, because after the first mishap I tasted the mixture before cheese was added.

And the taste is there.  I don't quite know if it is bitter or metallic or salty.  It's a little of all those things, but whatever it is, the message to my taste buds is negative. 

The Trump Show. What's Happening Behind the Curtain?

I know that I'm back in Murka when this is how Our Dear Leader behaves en route to the Flight 93 September 11 Memorial Service in Shanksville, PA:

Actual photo of Trump on his way to  the Flight 93 memorial service. pic.twitter.com/0lNUYXLwBZ

— JΞSŦΞR ✪ ΔCŦUΔL³³º¹ (@th3j35t3r) September 11, 2018

In a sinister way that is reassuring:  He hasn't developed any significant behavioral changes in the last few weeks.  He's still without any empathy or social intelligence...

And what are the wizards behind the curtain doing while we watch The Trump Show?

1.  Well, Betsy DeVos is fixing the problems in how colleges handle allegations of sexual misconduct:

I Am Back, Partly

From my traditional summer trip.  It's not a vacation, but, nevertheless, a change, and it usually refills my writing reservoirs. 

This time, however, I had a long layover during which I was allowed the enervating experience of watching someone hack and hork their lungs out.  I sent a few quick messages to mount Olympus, asking the other deities to make sure that this particular passenger would be sent off in some other plane, to some other reality.

But Zeus, that goat-fucker, intercepted the message, and because he hates my guts (me belonging to the half-monster-type deities* with sharp, divided tongues), he seated that particular consumptive patient right behind me, in the same plane.

And so I'm only partly back, in a state of infirmity and fuzzy thinking.  That thinking suggests that I did, after all, have something to declare:  An infectious cough.

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* And no, Zeus certainly is not a sexist!  Just like Kavanaugh, he was born out of a female creature and just like Kavanaugh, he has daughters.  And so on.

Snakes And Stuff

I found this old embroidery while looking for something else.  It's supposed to be a fallen angel and an experiment in different kinds of embroidery stitches.

Apologies for the poor quality of the photo.

And here's a snake applique.  I have made a lot of them, for some weird reason.

 

Like this one:

The above two are humongous in size, but I have several small ones, too.

This one I use as my gravatar in social media:

The Benefits of Gender Integration At Work

Last March I wrote about a study which demonstrates the benefits of gender integration at work:  It reduces sexist prejudices and increases equality between men and women.

If that is true, then the opposite might also be true:  Gender segregation allows those types of prejudices to thrive.  From that angle the sexism in the tech industry would not be exactly unexpected, because women are a small minority in the field.

A Finnish Poetry Hour. With Music

First this one.  It's a poem by Kaarlo Sarkia and particularly important for everyone who feels gloomy and hopeless.

Then this one.  It's a poem by Marja-Leena Mikkola, about a dancing bear, life, art and love. Especially about love.

Both are set to music and I provide rough translations for both poems.

The Heart And Mind Of The Republican Party, Revisited.

Earlier I wrote a piece about how I see the Republican Party.  It's not based on research but on my own experiences and the opinions those inform.

I recently read that post again and still agree with most of it, except that the problems of the Trump base are putting several of the more traditional type free-market (free-money-for-some) Republican politicians in a real bind, and the same applies to the dilemma of how to accommodate (or not) the increasingly more explicit racism and sexism of the party's new base and of some inside the Trump administration.

Some Republican politicians appear to have made the Faustian bargain.  Paul Ryan might be one of those.*  What he and other free-market Republicans get from Trump is so good** that they are willing to wear blinders and ignore all the Trumpian outrages, Trump's penchant for dictatorship and his groveling adulation of one Vladimir Putin.

I cannot predict how the internal power struggles inside the Republican Party will develop.  But its extreme right wing fringe is currently dragging the party even further to the right, and the impact of such "thinkers" as Stephen Miller inside the Trump administration means that white supremacists/misogynists are emboldened in general.

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* Though he is retiring, in order to spend more time with his teenage children.  Right.  He  is probably retiring because he calculates that Trump, like Humpty-Dumpty, is going to have a great fall, and all the Republican congresscritters cannot put him back together again.  This means that Ryan must wait out the coming catastrophe, after which he can return to Washington as the golden money-boy.

** Like much lower taxes for the super-rich, many fewer regulations to protect the workers or the environment.

 

Statistics Can Be Sexy

As this post from 2014 demonstrates.  Well, perhaps not sexy, but very empowering.  If that post turns you on, I have a whole series about introductory statistics, mostly in the context of understanding opinion surveys.

The Economics of Women And Work. Some Snippets.

1.  Can we prove that sex discrimination exists in the labor markets?  I got asked that question once and this post gives my answer*.  There have been further studies since, but the basic arguments have not changed, which means that reading that post will be good for your weapons arsenal.

2.  Christina Hoff Sommers has argued, most recently on Twitter, that if women really want to close the gender gap in earnings they should change their college major from feminist dance therapy (heh) to electrical engineering.  That it wouldn't work quite like that is something I describe in this post.  And while you are there, read the rest of that series.

3.  I still haven't been able to find a good regression analysis which would allow us to study the interaction effects of sex and race on earnings and so on.  I'm sure that such studies exist, and if you know of one, please leave the link in the comments.  The reason why we need such a study is to see what the relative percentage effects of being black and being female might be on black women's earnings etc (to quantify the effects of intersectionality, if you like).  One study, on the increasing racial inequality on earnings,  suggests that the effect of being female is greater than the effect of being black, though both serve to reduce the earnings of black women, but it doesn't quite do the kinds of analyses I'd like to see.

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*  Similar proof exists for racial discrimination, as this meta-analysis of audit studies shows.  Some of its analyses control for gender and find it non-significant, but I'm not quite sure what that means in the context of comparing different studies, some of which had both male and female fictional applicants and some of which did not.  For a shorter summary, see here. 

The Role of the Media In The Trump Reich

Last September I wrote a post on the Harvard study which analyzed the role of online media in the 2016 presidential elections.  That study tells us what the role of the online media might have been in getting us so much closer to a dictatorship, and I still recommend reading my post for some background.

Whatever the sins, omissions and commissions of that media coverage might have been, currently the most serious problem the press faces is one Donald Trump and his views, expressed in several tweets, that the media is the enemy of the people.

This behavior is typical of dictators who close down any newspapers that criticize the government or even imprison journalists who are not sufficiently adulatory toward the dictator.  Our Dear Leader would love to join that elite group of autocrats!

And a plurality of Republicans seems to agree. A survey conducted by Ipsos and published in early August found that:

All told, 43 percent of self-identified Republicans said that they believed “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.” Only 36 percent disagreed with that statement. When asked if Trump should close down specific outlets, including CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, nearly a quarter of Republicans (23 percent) agreed and 49 percent disagreed.

Republicans were far more likely to take a negative view of the media. Forty-eight percent of them said they believed “the news media is the enemy of the American people” (just 28 percent disagreed) while nearly four out of every five (79 percent) said that they believed “the mainstream media treats President Trump unfairly.”

I wonder what those percentages would have been had Hillary Clinton been the president that those poll statements referred to.  Knowing that would allow us to assess if this new desire for the end of democracy is just the average win-at-any-cost tribalism or if, indeed, a sizable percentage of Americans wants democracy to end.*

While most mainstream newspapers are on Trump's Enemies List, one part of the US media does, however, have a very specific role in the Trump Reich.  Last January Matthew Gertz argued in Politico that Trump uses the conservative media, and, in particular, Fox News, as a source of information for presidenting!

Here’s what’s also shocking: A man with unparalleled access to the world’s most powerful information-gathering machine, with an intelligence budget estimated at $73 billion last year, prefers to rely on conservative cable news hosts to understand current events. 

Alternatively, Fox News now has the role a state-run media organization might have in dictatorships.

So it goes.

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*  Other answers in the survey give me hope that the latter is not the case:

And virtually everyone (85 percent of respondents) believed that “freedom of the press is essential for American democracy” (compared to 4 percent opposed to that statement).

Still, we are left with the dilemma that this belief contradicts the Republican plurality in the above post which would want Trump to have the authority to close down "badly behaving" news outlets.  Those would be the outlets which criticize him, after all, and the press cannot be free if it can be punished for criticizing the president.

And, of course, the continued survival of any kind of democracy also depends on safe election systems.  Right now the belief in their security is totally unwarranted.

Escape Reading. Terry Pratchett's Discworld.

I love re-reading Terry Pratchett as an escape from the Trump Reich and all the other problems of this world, but as this post from last year shows, some of those problems exist on Pratchett's Discworld, too.

This year I've been re-reading Pratchett's Tiffany Aching books.  They are meant for young adults, I think, but the Nac Mac Feegle (the wee free men) are funny enough at any age.

Gendered Coverage of American Politicians' Sins

I wrote about that in March, but the problems in coverage haven't since disappeared*.  It's always useful to make the thought experiment, when reading criticisms of some female politician, of asking if the criticisms would have been the same or of equal intensity had she been a male politician instead.

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* Much of this is caused by the right-wing press, because there are many more Democratic female politicians than there are Republican ones, and the right-wing press attacks Democrats and not Republicans.  But even so, I sense a difference in the intensity when the target of attack is female.

As an aside, the small numbers of Republican women in the Congress is probably caused by the same reasons as the tilted right-wing coverage against Democratic women.

On Combatting False Beliefs

"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."

The bottom section (after the embedded comment) of this post gives one example of the kind of research that is needed to even begin interpreting various Alt Right arguments or those that come from the manosphere.  I'm linking to it not because I would somehow be proud of the minimal research I did there, but because it's often the case that to refute lies (such as the ones Our Dear Leader spews out) takes digging time, digging energy and digging skills, and even then not every consumer of political news is willing to read through long explanations.

In other words, truth must button every single one of those small buttons in its hobnailed boots before it can start running after the lie.

Another example of the kind of painstaking work that is required in taking apart fake news can be found in the Harvard study about the impact of the media in the 2016 presidential elections.  It includes a detailed case study covering the media's treatment of the Clinton Foundation (from page 104 onward).  If you read it you will learn how the Clinton Foundation scandal was baked out of nothing but some slightly stale air, but still satisfied the appetites of many on the right.  Interestingly enough, the scandals about the Trump Foundation never achieved similar prominence.

Do 20% of Men "Get" 80% Of All Heterosexual Sex?

That's the kind of belief incel online sites spread:

“OK, we’ve all seen the statistic that in a competitive dating environment 20% of the guys are having 80% of the sex,” reads one post on r/TheRedPill, which goes on to claim, (emphasis theirs):

For every ten girls who are getting laid this week, eight of them are fucking just two guys.

If you’re not one of those two guys, there’s a 75% chance that you’re not getting laid at all. Only 20% of men fall into the category of “not alpha but still getting some”.

The haves and have-nots live in two different worlds. This is not a sliding scale situation where incremental improvement yields incremental returns. You either have more pussy than you know what to do with or you’re incel. There’s very little middle ground.

That’s what the 80/20 rule means. You really, really want to be one of the 20%.

That whole quote is so weird*.  Why does the second principle of the incel sites seem to always be this spreading of doom and gloom "statistics" which prove that nothing can be done, that no woman will ever fuck them, whatever they do?

The first principle, of course, is that the state of involuntary celibacy (being a male incel**) is caused by the disgusting shallowness, lookism and general perfidy of the whole womankind, all billions of us.

And that is the truly dangerous principle, but the second one also produces a lot of grief and suffering among men who probably wouldn't have to be incels if they realized that pussies are attached to real human beings who like to be viewed as people before pussies.  Instead, they are told that Everything  Is Hopeless.

So where did that 80/20 rule come from?  The linked article suggests that it applies the Pareto principle to sex:

One of the most repeated ideas on incel forums is a particular interpretation of the Pareto principle, which theorizes that in many cases, 80 percent of effects come from 20 percent of the causes. In economics, it’s often used to predict power structures (e.g., the richest 20 percent control 80 percent of the income). Replace money with sex, and you’ve essentially got the incel rallying cry.

But I have found no evidence that the Pareto distribution would fit human heterosexual behavior of the kind incels fret about.

And existing evidence on sexual behavior suggests that the reality is much less cruel toward the imaginary 80% of "non-alpha" males in the sexual supermarkets the incels also imagine to exist:

As Rebecca Goldin, a professor of mathematics at George Mason University and the director of STATS, noted, there really isn’t all that much data about who’s having sex with whom and how often. But, she said, “There is some limited data that refutes the poster’s claims, depending on interpretation.”

First off, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 56 percent of women and 59 percent of men have had sex by the time they finish high school. And, as Goldin pointed out, “If the sexually active teen women were choosing a largely overlapping set of young men to have sex with (eight women going with two guys), one would expect many fewer guys to have had sex than women.”

And if roughly the same number of heterosexual women and men are sexually active and you apply the Pareto principle, it would work out to eight women having sex with two men, yet also two women having sex with the other eight men. If it were true that most women were choosing just a few partners, the remaining women would need to have many partners.

“In other words, the statement, ‘If you’re not one of those two guys, there’s a 75 percent chance that you’re not getting laid at all. Only 20 percent of men fall into the category of ‘not alpha but still getting some,’ is not correct,” she said.

Bolds are mine.

Goldin goes on to note that men and women in long-term relationships, such as marriage, might well have more sex (when counted as times per week, say) than those men and women who are not in long-term relationships, partly, because it's much easier to arrange.  But in the incel world sex is sold in some weird supermarkets, not enjoyed in loving relationships.

And that is very sad.  The incels don't need the online sites where they gather***.  They need some real therapy which would allow them to see women as human beings.

That would be the win-win outcome, because it would enable the incels to find loving partners and because it would reduce the amount of online misogyny.


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* First is the question where that statistics comes from which the rest of this post addresses.

Second is the question of definitions:

 Two men (out of ten) are assumed to fuck eight women (out of ten) in one week, but the remaining two women are not assumed to fuck the remaining eight men in one week, but only one man each.  This is an asymmetry, probably because it's assumed that the 80/20 rule applies.  But it's unclear if sex is counted in numbers of partners or in numbers of intercourse (or whatever stands in its place)

Third, is the nutty idea that there are only two kinds of heterosexual men:  Those who have more pussy than you know what to do with (freeze and can, of course) and those who have zero pussy for the rest of their miserable lives.  This assumption clearly clashes with any kind of reality I have visited.

Fourth is the question what a "competitive" dating environment might be.  Some sort of a boxing ring? 

Fifth, and most importantly, the whole quote reeks of the view that women are not people but things, like slabs of beef, for sale in the dating supermarkets, and that those slabs of beef should be distributed more fairly among the consumers.

**  The online incels do not care about women, probably because they hate women, so they spend no time worrying about female incels.  As I have written before, women are probably much more likely to be involuntarily celibate than men, because women live longer and are more likely to outlive their partners.

***  As I have written before, the incel online sites resemble those anorexia sites where anorexics met to encourage each other not to eat.  In other words, visiting the incel sites will make the visitors more miserable and less mentally healthy.

Corporations As Luggage

This piece was written for a different purpose, but was never used.  So it wants to have its fifteen minutes of fame here:



Fans of Terry Pratchett's Discworld fantasies  know all about the magical suitcase with many small legs, the Luggage:

 It is a large chest made of sapient pearwood (a magical, intelligent plant which is nearly extinct, impervious to magic..). It can produce hundreds of little legs protruding from its underside and can move very fast if the need arises. It has been described as "half suitcase, half homicidal maniac" (Sourcery paperback p22).

The Luggage will follow its owner, even through brick walls.

This doesn't differ from today's large and mobile corporations.  The more legs governments have legally given them, the faster they can leave any given locality (town, city and even country) and the less they care about the mayhem caused.

Consider the death of a commercial light fixture plant in Sparta, Tennessee.  Esther Kaplan's prize-winning 2014 article  "Losing Sparta" tells us what happened when an old and  profitable plant, essential for the economic and cultural well-being of a small town, was taken over by Phillips, the multinational behemoth:

Then, one morning in November 2010, a Philips executive no one recognized drove up and walked into the plant, accompanied by a security guard wearing sunglasses and a sidearm. He summoned all the employees back to the shipping department and abruptly announced that the plant would be shut down. Though the workers didn’t know it at the time, most of their jobs would be offshored to Monterrey, Mexico. The two of them then walked out the door and drove off. “It was a shock, I’ll tell you,” Ricky Lack said more than two years later. Still brawny in his late fifties, he’d hired on at the plant in 1977, when he was nineteen years old. “My dad worked there,” he said. “Half the plant’s mom or dad or brother worked there. We still don’t know why they left.”

The consequences for Sparta were dire:  Older workers faced  long-term unemployed or part-time or minimum wage jobs.  Marriages failed, ill health increased, and the various levels of government earned less tax revenue and paid out more in unemployment benefits.  But none of this touched Phillips, the suitcase with many little legs. Off it went to Mexico.  Sparta could hardly follow.

In the past, corporations were more bound to a locality.  If they behaved badly, local reputations suffered. If they laid off too many workers, their local sales declined. If their management lived in nearby areas, the public services their families enjoyed would diminish.  If nothing else, the goodwill the firm possessed would diminish. 

Today, these ties are fraying, as we can see in Sparta, Tennessee. In international trade agreements multinational corporations now demand veto rights over the decisions of future national governments.

The  losses to others from what may be gains to multinational corporations don't affect only the workers when plants close or only the towns that join the American Rust Belt.

The 2007-2010 burst of the US housing bubble had many causes, among them the strengthened ability of firms to ignore local knowledge.  If a firm sold many mortgages, ground them up like sausage meat with the good and the bad risks  all mixed, and then sold the  new product in giant new sausage skins to far-distant places, who would ever be able to find the original culprits to the mortgage crisis?  They would not be the ones who ultimately bore the costs of granting too many bad mortgages. 

Compare that to past practices where the mortgage remained with the awarding institutions.  Still in the mid-199s mortgage negotiations with a bank resembled the Spanish inquisition in their thoroughness.  Yet soon after that date I heard of large mortgages given to people I knew couldn't pay them back.  The almost nonexistent regulation of financial markets, the general exuberance of investors, and many other factors played a role in creating the housing bubble,  but the firms' mobility mattered:

On Wall Street, where many of these loans were packaged into securities and sold to investors around the globe, a new term was coined: IBGYBG, “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone.”

It referred to deals that brought in big fees up front while risking much
larger losses in the future. And, for a long time, IBGYBG worked at every level.

Terry Pratchett's half-homicidal "Luggage" with many little feet is fantasy, but the scope for corporations to leave a place in ruins while following their owners is not.

What next?  Legal personhood for corporations?  Hmm.

Art For The Weekend

In 2011 I wrote a series of posts on four 19th to 20th century female Finnish painters.  I found it still interesting*.  Another Finnish painter of the olden times I like is Hugo Simberg, a symbolist painter.  Here is his Garden of Death, to set a happy tone for the weekend:

Doesn't that remind you of Death in Terry Pratchett's Discworld fantasies?

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*  The Finnish proverb goes:  Who would raise the dog's tail if not the dog himself?
Meaning that one must show self-confidence.  I think I will keep the male terminology in that proverb...

Trump's White Evangelical Base

A WaPo article (from last June) about the politics of various evangelical groups in the US points out something fascinating about the 2016 presidential elections:

...according to Election Day exit polls, 80 percent of white evangelicals supported Donald Trump. Among all other – nonevangelical — whites, 59 percent voted for Hillary Clinton.

I had not seen that difference put so clearly elsewhere.  What it means is that the white evangelicals are an important part of Trump's base. This should be hilarious, given that Trump is anything but a religious man, and because religious people are supposed to walk their talk.  But it could be the case that religion in this context is a tribal marker rather than as a confession of faith.

The linked article suggests that white evangelicals' vote for Trump was driven by their fear of losing racial and religious status.  This may also explain why rank-and-file white evangelicals approve of Trump's refugee policies and dislike immigration in general.

For my take on how that vote might also link to anxiety about gender, see this post.

The Gross Gender Earnings Gap Revisited

I have written about the gross and net earnings gaps* many, many times.  It's the latter which we want to use when looking for possible sex- or race-based (or both) discrimination in the labor market.

That's because the net earnings gap gets as close as observational data can to the ideal where we would compare two individuals, identical in all other characteristics except the one or the ones we study (say, sex, race, age etc.).

It's not exactly the same as that theoretical ideal, but it's loads better than the gross earnings gap which does not take into account differences in education, experience, and other things which affect how much people earn, on average.  In some forms it doesn't even take into account differences in hours, days or weeks worked.

But the net earnings gap does that.  More about it in this post and here.   And that's why the feminist left should not use the gross gap in earnings as the measure of labor market discrimination.

But the anti-feminist right does something worse when it argues that studies have conclusively shown that there is no gender gap in earnings after women's own free-and-voluntary choices are taken into account.   Good studies have shown no such thing, if they sample a proper cross-section of workers.

The studies the right decides to focus on are only about very young workers, just beginning their working lives or careers. Given that the Equal Pay Act of 1963 makes it illegal to pay men and women different wages for exactly the same work, and given that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act makes discrimination in hiring illegal, it's hard** for employers to discriminate against any particular group among brand-new workers.

It's the passage of time*** which allows any possible discriminatory motives to be satisfied.  For example, men and women can be promoted at different rates, irrespective of their productivity and other characteristics, or on-the-job training can be offered to one group but not to the other group etc.

This post discusses one study that has been very popular among the anti-feminists.  You probably notice by now that because it fails to standardize for education it's comparing apples to oranges, even if the results were only applied to the group of young, single, metropolitan workers.  But they have been applied much more widely than that.

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* The gross gap between, say, women and men would be calculated by dividing the earnings of an average woman by the earnings of an average man, preferably both expressed in earnings per hour, week and so on.

The net gap corrects the gross gap for hours worked, education, experience and other relevant factors which affect how much someone works and are mostly viewed as non-discriminatory.  The net gap is what still remains after those calculations are carried out.

**  Not impossible, given that earnings information is usually kept hidden in the US, but harder than it would be without those laws. As an aside, the UK right spreads the same propaganda about the wage gap not existing after women's "voluntary" choices are taken into account.


***   The right-wing argument is that the earnings differences accruing over time are due to women's choices to focus more on their children and less on their careers.  But note that we cannot conclude anything of the sort from the data, because discriminatory effects also accrue over time.

Paper Ballots. The Best Answer For Secure Voting Systems.

First, these hilarious news about hacking voting machines:

This weekend saw the 26th annual DEFCON gathering. It was the second time the convention had featured a Voting Village, where organizers set up decommissioned election equipment and watch hackers find creative and alarming ways to break in.  

...

In a room set aside for kid hackers, an 11-year-old girl hacked a replica of the Florida secretary of state’s website within 10 minutes — and changed the results.