And Mueller Spoke

The other day.  He gave a short summary of the findings discussed in much more detail in the report his team wrote.*  There was nothing new in his spoken report, just a repetition of that weird exercise which sounds like something from an elementary logic class:

If Mueller's team had been able to prove that Trump was innocent of obstruction of justice, they would have said so.  But they didn't say so.  And therefore?

I haven't been able to decide if such an odd phrasing seemed necessary for some weird legal reasons or if Mueller tried to minimize the number of people who got it that Trump is clearly guilty as hell of obstruction of justice.   After all, whatever the rectitude of the guy, he is a Republican.


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* My take on the two parts of the report can be read here and here.

Thank you

A thousand thanks to all who donated funds for this blog and also a thousand thanks to all who read here.

Fifth and Final Fundraising Post, 2019. On Fifteen Years of Blogging.

This is my final fundraising post!  You can donate all through the year, of course, but this would be a great time to do so and then you wouldn't have to feel that gnawing guilt about the poor, feeble and frail Echidne typing away in eternal snow while clad in rags and surviving on potato peelings.

For extra incentive, add to these comments any topics you would dearly want me to address in the near future, and I promise to give them serious consideration.

Then to this post.  It's grumpy and gloomy, sorry.  (Must be how weak I am from hunger that makes my humorous vein dry out...)

You've Come A Long Way, Baby

When I Was Little. A Trivial Story For Friday.

When I was little, my grandmother owned a very ramshackle farm where she lived with one aunt and two uncles of mine.  The place was a haven for inquisitive children:  pastures, woods and hills for play, horses, cows and pigs to tend and pet,  and then those very interesting falling barns we were sternly told not to enter.

Which made them the most intriguing targets for me.  One barn was a tall building, built into the side of the hill so that it was three floors high on one side but only one floor high on the other side.  The top floor had been a large hen house at one time, but now stood empty.  I could see the little gates in the wall, high above the pigsty, for the chickens to come out and descend to the pigsty area.  Right below those gates, all closed with wooden shutters, were the chicken ladders:  Long pieces of wood with many short cross-pieces nailed to it so as to make a stairway for them.

And I so very much wanted to climb down those ladders!  That this was forbidden fruit made it so much juicier.

One day, after carefully scouting the area for any adults, I got into the old hen house.  It was a wonderful place, empty, silent, with dust floating in the air, visibly dancing where the gaps in the roof let the sunlight in.  I crossed the floor on tiptoes, in case the building collapsed, and managed to get to one of the tiny gates which I opened.

I was small then and fit into the gate opening with a little squeezing. It was the perfect perch, offering me quite distant views from a new angle, but even at that age I could see that the chicken ladder would not be safe for me to attempt.  So I just sat there for a while, enjoying the sun and the mild breeze and the beauty of summer.

My uncles' two horses were pastured in an area which could not be seen from the farmhouse or from the yard or from the road that led to the farm, but where I sat I could see the pasture and the horses.  They, however, did not see me.

As I sat there, watching them eat grass, one horse suddenly walked to the other horse, they put their heads together, as if having a conversation.  They then turned and moved, together, to the gate opening to the pasture, which was blocked by only one steel wire, stretched across the gap at their chest level.

They proceeded to bite through the steel wire, which allowed them to leave the pasture.  They sedately, side by side,  walked down the road away from the farm, turned right on the main road, and disappeared from my view.

This put me into a dilemma.  I knew that I had to tell some adult the horses had escaped, but doing that would reveal my rules violation.  I did the right thing, anyway, found one of my uncles and told him what I had seen.

He refused to believe me, because the pasture wasn't visible from most parts of the farm.

Only when a neighbor called him and told that the horses were in his cabbage patch, having a succulent dinner, did he rise to action.

***

I remember this incident so vividly, because even today the best explanation for what I saw is that the horses planned the escape and then carried their plan out, and that they did this because they thought they were not overlooked.  Other explanations are more likely, but I treasure that one. 

Elizabeth Warren Earned A Lot? The Horror!

Don't you just love the way Washington Post chose to write about Elizabeth Warren's past legal work?  I can't stop laughing.

Here's the headline to the story:

While teaching, Elizabeth Warren worked on more than 50 legal matters, charging as much as $675 an hour



You have to scroll to the seventh paragraph in the story to find this statement:

Warren’s $675-per-hour rate of compensation to consult on several asbestos-related cases, described in court documents, was at or below market rate for her level of experience and was less than what some law firm partners charged to work on the same matters.

Bolds are mine.

So it goes.  The authors of the piece justify their analysis of Warren's work by stating that "outside income has become a campaign issue for candidates such as Warren who have positioned themselves as crusaders for the working class."

I'm still laughing.  This whole shit is utterly hilarious (1).  For instance, because Trump campaigned for the crook class, the size of his income and the way it was acquired is nobody's business, right? 

But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should live on the streets and not in a luxury apartment because she has made housing affordability one of her issues.

And Elizabeth Warren should have earned a lot less than men with similar training and experience in her field.  Indeed, she probably shouldn't have earned anything at all, because the acceptable scale of payments is different for female politicians.

This story reminds me of the 2016 furor over Hillary Clinton's high speaking fees (2) and the fact that she gave speeches to Wall Street capitalists.

To put that into some kind of perspective, last October Joe Biden gave a speech in support of a Republican politician in Michigan and got 200,000 smackers for it.  That sum included 50,000 dollars as a travel allowance (3).   The linked article (from last January) notes that

If Mr. Biden were to have charged a similar range of fees for all his comparable speeches since leaving office, he would most likely have collected between $4 million and $5 million through speeches over the last two years.

Biden did get some flack for that October speech, but nothing on the Hillary Clinton level.  We shall see if his past is scrutinized in the Washington Post with the same microscopic attention as Warren's now has been.

If that's the case I'm willing to admit that this particular piece wasn't quite as sexist as it now seems to me.
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(1) It isn't, but I need my gallows humor.

(2)  Her fees were (or are) high compared to what other female speakers charge, but they are not the highest among all political speakers. In fact, it appears that the highest fee for a speech went for Donald Trump in 2005, possibly around $400,000, but Trump boasts that the fee was $1.5 million.

As an aside, scrutinizing Warren's hourly fees without considering the context is dangerous.  Fees are high for lawyers on her level of training and skill, and they are high in places such as Boston for all professional services.

But an additional context that matters here is linking this discussion to the one about why women don't get raises at work.  One reason is that they don't ask.  But once it becomes common knowledge that women work for less money, then each of those refusals to ask will have a small effect on the likely earnings of other women in the future.

So there's a wider feminist argument which says that women should make sure they are not being underpaid, compared to the men with equal qualifications and experience, even if they themselves for some weird reason won't mind earning less. 

(3)  I'm imagining him riding across the United States, like a medieval king with an entourage: 150 faithful courtiers in feathered velvet hats  riding on milk-white horses  followed by 200 wagons of wine, spices, fruit and smoked hams, all surrounded by a troop of stern soldiers on large black stallions waving their spears at all bystanders.  That's what I would have bought for 50,000 dollars.

 

 

 

Competition in Amazon Warehouses

Amazon is using the economic theory of tournaments in its warehouses!   That theory bases compensation on the relative productivity ranking of firm's workers. The "tournament" name tells us that competition between workers is actively encouraged, and how much someone ends up earning depends on how many other workers they can beat.  The winner, ideally, gets quite a bit more than all those losers.

I was taught that the tournaments model might be used for compensation when it's expensive to measure the actual output of individual workers but easy to rank them according to some related measure. Among the problematic aspects of this form of compensation is that someone can win by not only outperforming others but also by sabotaging the ability of others to perform well.*

But Amazon doesn't justify its new gaming environment in such a manner.  Rather, playing a game is supposed to make boring work more interesting:

But they aren’t whiling the time away playing Fortnite and Minecraft. Rather, they’re racing to fill customer orders, their progress reflected in a video game format that is part of an experiment by the e-commerce giant to help reduce the tedium of its physically demanding jobs. And if it helps improve the efficiency of work like plucking items from or stowing products on shelves for 10 hours a day or more, all the better.

....

Developed by Amazon, the games are displayed on small screens at employees’ workstations. As robots wheel giant shelves up to each workstation, lights or screens indicate which item the worker needs to pluck to put into a bin. The games simultaneously register the completion of the task, which is tracked by scanning devices, and can pit individuals, teams or entire floors against one another to be fastest, simply by picking or stowing real Lego sets, cellphone cases or dish soap. Game-playing employees are rewarded with points, virtual badges and other goodies throughout a shift.
Think Tetris, but with real boxes.

Participating in the games is voluntary, we are told, and the nonparticipants are supposedly not punished for choosing not to game.

So one way of looking at what Amazon is doing is that it's alleviating boredom and making routine work more exciting.  Another way of looking at the same thing is to note that it's trying to squeeze more productivity out of a given number of workers, and at least so far the rewards for that extra productivity (and thus its costs to the firm) are very minor:

Amazon’s experiment is part of a broader industry push to gamify low-skill work, particularly as historically low unemployment has driven up wages and attrition. Gamification generally refers to software programs that simulate video games by offering rewards, badges or bragging rights among colleagues.

And things can get even better for the firm if it quietly keeps modifying the targets in the game, as Gabe Zicherman, an expert on gamification in firms notes:

But, he said, gamification can be used to mask higher productivity goals, because the games’ algorithm is typically kept secret. In customer service jobs, for instance, gold stars awarded for resolving 20 customer concerns may over time require 22 or 25. “When [employers] want to generate more output, they can ratchet those levers,” he said. “It’s like boiling a frog. It may be imperceptible to the user.”

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* An example of this from a somewhat different context could be a graduate student who messes with the work of other students in the lab so as to guarantee that they won't graduate early enough to be able to apply for postdoctoral grants or jobs at the same time as the saboteur.

Fourth Fundraising Post 2019. What Percentage Of American Men Are Biological Fathers?

Please give if you read here and can afford to give.  It takes a lot of chocolate to run my creative engine. 

Just kidding.  But those of you who know about opportunity costs (what Echidne could earn if she wasn't fashioning and researching blog posts) might be aware of the sacrifices I make for your well-being.  (Let's see if guilting works here!)

***

A conversation I had with some people tried to establish what percentage of American men become biological fathers during their lifetimes.  One person Googled for the answer and found a summary of supposedly a CDC study from 2006 with this information:

By the age of 44, only 47% of American men are fathers.

Wow!  That cannot be right, right?  (And no, it's not right.)

But if you Google, say,  "percentage men fathers, " the link to that summary is the third on the first results page.

This is a huge problem, because the real statistics, more recent ones, give us a very different percentage:

Most estimates of fertility measures for men and women aged 15–44 in 2011–2015 were similar to those reported in 2006–2010. For 2011–2015, 85.0% of women had given birth and 80.4% of men had fathered a child by ages 40–44.

Bolds are mine.

I have no idea why that 2006 summary is so wrong*.  But note that anyone trying to find a quick Google answer to the question will be badly misinformed.

And so in no time at all we might find the incels quoting that 2006 summary to explain why only the alpha males are allowed to mate, how they are justified in hating all womankind, and how beta males are undergoing extinction by women not allowing them to pass on their seed**.

At the minimum we are going to find all sorts of people making theories about why so few men become biological fathers when most women become biological mothers.

All because of flawed data.

The point here is naturally that the validity and reliability of online information matters, and Google should take those demands more into account in creating their algorithms.

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*  And it had to be wrong in 2006, too.  I have contacted the website and asked them to remove the flawed summary.  I'm sure they will do that when pigs fly.

** Because men are much more likely to become first-time parents after the age of forty-five than women, the overall percentages of men and women who are biological parents during their lifetimes is probably roughly the same at the end of one's life.  This is awkward for the incel theories.

On the Invisibility of Things Female

1.  US News does a Best Countries ranking which has several sub-indices.  There's even a methodology page where you can learn how the various parts of the final index are weighted and so on.  Looks very sciency, it does.

I was bored the other day and scrolled through its various sub-indices.  One was about the best places for you to start a career.  The three top countries, in order from first to third, were Qatar, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

Never ever drink coffee while reading silly stuff, because the coffee goes all over the screen and the keys and up your nose, too.  In any case, this example is a wonderful one about the way women are still mostly invisible.

But not to worry!  The overall index has a separate sub-index about the best countries for women!  In that one Qatar, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates don't rank terribly high.  So wimminz have their own slot in this index.  This makes me wonder if all the other subindices are to be interpreted as applying to men only.

Welcome to Gilead. Or More On the Reasons Behind Alabama's Abortion Ban.

Alabama's Republican governor , Kay Ivey, has signed the new abortion ban.  It criminalizes almost all abortions:

Republican Gov. Kay Ivey signed the measure Wednesday. The law will make performing an abortion at any stage of pregnancy a felony punishable by 10 to 99 years or life in prison.
The bill contains an exception for when the pregnancy creates a serious health risk for the woman, but not an exception for rape or incest.
There would be no punishment for the woman receiving the abortion, only for the abortion provider.

The ban is created so stringent on purpose.  The forced-birthers want the Republican-tilting Supreme Court to address one of the many new Republican-created abortion bans, in order to overturn Roe v. Wade, and a stringent ban is more likely to end there.

Thus, in one sense everything is going according to their plans.  But there's a PR price to be paid:  People who don't live in Alabama can now see how that state regards its women and their rights.  As uterus-havers... 

Speaking about women's status in Alabama, one index judges it to be the fifth-worst state to be a woman in the US,  and the Alabama legislature has one of the lowest percentages of female lawmakers.  The twenty-five Alabama senators who voted for the bill are all men, though the sponsor of the bill is a woman and so is the governor who signed it into law.

As the Washington Post article notes, though:

Coleman-Madison and Democratic state Sen. Vivian Davis Figures, the only women who spoke during the four-hour debate, acknowledged in interviews with The Washington Post that the divide on the issue is primarily one of ideology rather than gender; the Republican sponsor of the bill in the Alabama House, for example, is a woman, and Republican Gov. Kay Ivey will is expected to sign it.

What might that ideology be?  I'd wager my money on fundamentalism.  According to a 2014 Pew survey 51% of Alabama Christians believe that Scripture is the word of God and should be taken literally.  That percentage is the second highest in the country.  Only Mississippi has a higher percentage of fundamentalists among Christians (56%).  And fundamentalists of all religions preach male dominance and female subjugation and strongly prefer the exclusion of women from public life.

But the scarcity of women in the Alabama legislature is probably also a consequence of this ideology!  In other words, the two are not competing theories about the reasons why Alabamans want abortions banned.  It could even be the case that a ban on abortions is seen as more desirable because it will make women's participation in the labor force and politics and so on more difficult.

Third Fundraising Post, 2019

You have to read Alexandra Petri's latest piece.  It imagines how the forced-birthers in Alabama, Georgia and other similar places who legislate on abortion might explain to us the female body and its reproductive system, how ovulation works, how early you might know that you are pregnant, and so on.

Petri is roaringly funny.

After that enjoyment you can give me some money to keep this site going.  I'm not as funny as Petri, but I have my moments.

Weekend Reading, 5/10/19: On First Women, The Trip To The Alt Right World And Back And Other Topics

1.  Several interesting pieces have recently appeared about women who were first or early path-breakers in some field. 

- This one talks about a book about Cuban flora created by Anne Wollstonecraft, and lost from our attention for 190 years.  The drawings of the plants are beautiful.

- The recent Kentucky Derby makes  an article about early female jockeys particularly timely. 

I have never understood why jockeys should be so overwhelmingly male.  Young girls like riding a lot (so there's no pipeline problem) and women are, on average, smaller than men, which would be a useful characteristic in a jockey.  The reasons that have been proposed for the scarcity of women in the profession range from an argument that being a jockey is more dangerous for women for physical reasons to the impact of a widespread misogynistic culture in the field.

- An interview with Dorothy Butler Gilliam,  the first black woman who worked as a reporter at Washington Post, makes for interesting reading.  Gilliam has written a book about her career as a journalist.

- Finally, this piece is about an early French woman in cinema, Alice Guy Blaché:

Until recently, Guy Blaché was mostly relegated to the footnotes: credited regularly as the first female filmmaker (when credited at all), but overlooked in terms of her impact as an artist and an innovator. And yet starting in 1896, she made around 1,000 films, constantly pushing visual and thematic boundaries. She experimented with early synchronized sound, color and special effects. She explored gender, race and class. And she inspired future giants like Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock and Agnès Varda.

2.   Why would a thirteen-year-old Jewish boy join the Alt Right?  A long piece gives one family's story about the trip there and back. It describes the specific events and mental states which caused a young boy to seek solace online, and it also describes the powerful effect of online hate sites.  Ignoring those sites will happen at our own peril.

3.    Speaking of online hate, two Guardian articles have recently addressed online misogyny and how its effects are beginning to leak into the meatspace. Mary Beard is, of course, correct about the ultimate reason for the ways misogyny is expressed in the social media:  It is intended to silence women in public spaces.

4.  This is a fun quiz to take about evolutionary psychology of the weird kind, the kind I call Evolutionary Psychology (EP) to differentiate it from the more neutral general kind (ep).  And this is a fun take on the invisibility of women running for the Democratic nomination in the presidential primaries. 

The Candy And The Wrapper. Or on Women, Abortions And Pregnancies.

By serendipity, I read two articles about pregnancy, one after the other, and then considered them together.

The first tells us a piece of news which should be truly shocking:  Maternal deaths, and especially black maternal deaths, in the US are rising*:

Globally, maternal mortality fell about 44% between 1990 and 2015, according to the World Health Organization. But the U.S. is out of step: Moms die in about 17 out of every 100,000 U.S. births each year, up from 12 per 100,000 a quarter century ago.

Possible factors include the high C-section rates in the U.S. and soaring rates of obesity, which raises the risk of heart disease, diabetes and other complications.

Black women in the U.S. are about three times as likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause as others, partly because of racial bias they may experience in getting care and doctors not recognizing risk factors such as high blood pressure, said Dr. Lisa Hollier, the obstetrician group’s president.

That article concludes with a comment by a doctor about the finding that one third of pregnancy-related deaths take place in the time period between one week from giving birth to up to a year after it:

“It’s like the baby is the candy and the mama is the wrapper,” she added. “Once the baby is out of the wrapper, the wrapper is tossed aside.”

Second Fundraising Post For 2019. Retractions and Corrections of Studies Are Mostly Invisible in Social Media.

This year my fundraising will be more than a week, but on the other hand you won't get these begging posts every day!  Win-win.

My heartfelt thanks for all of you who read and comment here.  If you can afford to chip in for the costs of maintaining this blog and like it to go on for a while longer, please check the instructions in the left column on how to give.  Thank you.

I'm reading Gina Rippon's book The Gendered Brain.  The New Neuroscience That Shatters The Myth Of The Female Brain.  There will be a proper review of the book later, but today I want to quote a longer bit from the book, because it ties to some of my own earlier findings about the way research is popularized and about the way corrections and retractions to such research are not popularized.

The particular study Rippon describes was about studying the brain structures of 143 one-month old infants (73 female, 70 male) with a high-resolution scanner.  Because one hypothesis argues that many sex differences in the brains are innate, getting information about very young babies can help us test it.  The results and what happened next:

The authors of this paper reported marked sex differences in total brain volume, grey matter and white matter.  Again, this was quickly disseminated into the public realm, this time by an online research summary source that pitched this report as an important breakthrough in the search for explanations for female-male differences in behaviour.  The source concluded that 'pretending these early sex differences in the brain don't exist will not help us make society fairer.'

The trouble was that the reported findings were actually wrong.  Although the researchers claimed to have corrected for brain size, an eagle-eyed neuroscientist noted that the data in the paper weren't consistent with this claim.  The authors were contacted, rapid checking and reanalysis followed and all the claims of significant differences disappeared.

A correction was quickly issued, published on both the journal's and the research digest's websites.  But there was a two-month gap between these events, and social media had already pounced.  Reference to the paper had already appeared on Facebook with one telling comment:'I actually had an argument about this with someone who claimed to have a degree in the field very recently.  Rubbing her face in this will make me so happy.'

...

In these days of ideological echo chambers it is the fake news, or in this case fake neuronews, that stick around, even if later disproved.

I include that long quote, because the story here is very similar to what happened to another study, also on purportedly innate sex differences.  I wrote about that in 2014.

Studies which appear to support various ideological beliefs are widely disseminated in social media, because they are click-bait.  Both those who hold those ideological beliefs and those who absolutely do not will read such research summaries.  But those who disseminate these studies tend not to check if the studies are later retracted or corrected.  When that happens, the popularization process leaves people misinformed.

This process is not a symmetrical one in the study of sex differences.  Studies which show sex similarities* almost never get the kind of online media boost that studies showing sex differences do, never get a thousand comments in the New York Times or the Guardian, and so on.
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*  An additional reason making this bias worse is that sex similarity findings are often not published at all, and if they are, they are not stressed as one of the main findings of a study. 

                                                                    

Ruthlessness in American Politics: A Vice or A Virtue? The Kamala Harris Case.

Politico.com has a new piece on Kamala Harris, one of the women among the contenders for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 presidential elections. 

The title of the piece:

'Ruthless.'  How Kamala Harris Won Her First Race

My summary of the whole piece:  

Yes, Harris was clearly very competent, but she slept her way to the top*.  Yes, Harris was clearly very competent, but she re-interpreted her prosecutorial history to look more lefty than it really was (something no other politician has ever done).  Yes, Harris was clearly very competent, but her campaigning was extremely ruthless.

And then there are the detailed quotes from one person, about the ruthlessness of Kamala Harris:

Gary Delagnes, a former president of the city’s police union who would later have a falling-out with Harris over her refusal to seek the death penalty in the case of a young police officer who was shot to death while on patrol, recalled a party where Harris approached him to ask for his support. “I was standing in the corner,” he said. “I didn’t know who she was … and she came up to me and she put her finger in my chest and she said, ‘You better endorse me, you better endorse me. You get it?’
“I took it as almost half-kidding, but also very serious, that, ‘Hey, I’m going to win, and you better endorse me,'” he said, the implication: “I’m a player and I’m going to be a player and you better get on board or get out of the way.”
“I never forgot it,” Delagnes added. “She’s an intelligent person. She is a—let’s see, I better pick this world carefully: Ruthless.”

So.  The sample size here is one, and that one person had had a falling-out with Harris before he made these comments.  Yet they seemed worth publishing in Politico!

Now, you might think that being ruthless in politics is a good thing.  Biden has been accused of not being ruthless enough, for example.  Politicians tend to be ruthless, right?  It's not a bad thing, right?

Senators Kamala Harris and Mazie Hirono Speak

She was quite wonderful in slicing and dicing Barr's arguments for our main course.  Senator Mazie Hirono gives us a delectable not-too-sweet dessert.

First Fundraising Post in 2019

Yes, my sweetings, it's that time of the year again!  I need your moneys so that I can afford to go on writing on this here site.

My plans were initially to quit after fifteen years.  That's long enough for anyone's financial and emotional sacrifice, right? 

But I had too much fun in the gaps that were left between the financial and emotional sacrifices, and, besides, having this site makes me feel as if someone hears my squeaky little voice (which is, in reality, quite mellow and sorta like coffee with too much milk).

So I'm going to continue until November, at least.

The instructions how to contribute are on the left.  One-time payments per year give me a larger net amount than small monthly contributions.  So if it makes no difference to you I prefer the former.  But the latter are also gratefully accepted.

Thank you all for reading and discussing and existing.

Where Echidne Grumbles About Algorithms

I use the Google US news page as a quick glance-through about the day's events when I start writing.  Some months ago it added a section on that page which is intended to match the interests of the user. 

That would be me, in this case.  I copied my "For You, Based on Your Interests Section" today, even though it's a bit more relevant for my actual interests than it has been in the past:

I have never watched a single episode of the Game of Thrones (I get enough of that by watching real-life politics), and I have no idea who Ariel Winter is.  I have not searched for anything related to the Game of Thrones or Ariel Winter ever.

So how does that list reflect my interests?  What is the algorithm Google uses there?

This is a trivial topic.  But note that such choices can involve steering, of making people keep on reading what they may have read in the past (or, more likely, what the algorithm thinks people in their demographic group want to read). 

That's dangerous in the field of politics, because we are already getting different news and believing in different "facts," depending on which party we more closely align with. 

The algorithms Twitter, Instagram and Facebook use to "increase engagement" seem to be designed to increase angry bickering between total strangers.   That is a less trivial topic.




  

The Trump Administration Aborts The Birth of An UN Resolution On Rape in Wartime.

There was a time in America when most of the proposed forced-birth laws allowed for abortion in the case of rape.  Alas, this is no longer the case, because our right-wing has been radicalized!*

As one example of this, the United States succeeded in turning a United Nations resolution on rape in conflict into something which simply tut-tuts on rape.  China and Russia further helped the United States by making sure that there would be no UN body whose job it is to monitor rape in wartime and to report on it!

There’s something mesmerizing  about such resolutions!  On the surface they look like support for the rights of rape victims, but a deeper look tells us that they are filled with foul-smelling air, signifying nothing. 

Except, perhaps, that the rights of women, the largest group among victims of rape, are very very secondary in this world.

What the United States accomplished was the removal of this language from the resolution:

"Recognizing the importance of providing timely assistance to survivors of sexual violence, urges United Nations entities and donors to provide non-discriminatory and comprehensive health services, in line with Resolution 2106."

As Jill Filipovic notes:

It's bizarre and frankly cruel to oppose a resolution about rape by objecting to sexual and reproductive health care. Not to put too fine a point on it, but rape is a crime that directly impacts a woman's sexual and reproductive health.

Rape can damage a woman's sex organs. It can result in a sexually transmitted infection. It can result in an unwanted pregnancy -- something that can compound a rape survivor's trauma. Any standard of care for sexual violence survivors includes providing sexual and reproductive health resources.

For rape survivors who are able to get medical care within a few days of the attack, that means prophylaxis to prevent the transmission of HIV and other infections; emergency contraception to prevent pregnancy; an exam to gather evidence; treatment of any injuries; and psychological care.

For survivors who don't receive care until much later, the standard of care includes treatment of infections and injuries, as well as psychological care (something that, in crisis settings, is in high demand and short supply). And yes, rape victims should also be entitled to end their pregnancies -- something that is safe and legal in much of the world.

But none of that matters to the strong forced-birth bloc inside the US Republican Party.  All that matters to those people is that a woman who is, say, gang-raped by enemy soldiers not be allowed to avoid the possibly risky pregnancy and forced birth of a child from that rape.

All this reminds me of the Monty Python song Every Sperm Is Sacred.

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* We should study how that radicalization happened.  Online?  By listening to Fox News and by reading Breitbart.com?  In all those fundie mega-churches? 
(This is sarcasm.)

Trump On Trade Deals, Again

Remember when our Supreme Leader withdrew the US out of the twelve-nation Trans-Pacific partnership, the free trade deal Obama had begun to negotiate but didn't finish? 

It was one of Trump's first acts as dictator, and it was based on his general view that the US was the victim of relentless worldwide bullying, and that he can do better trade deals, given that he sees himself as the master of the Art of the (bilateral) Deal.

The other eleven nations, of course, went on with creating the free trade deal, and now the chickens have come home to roost:

While Trump was busy slapping tariffs on China and other countries, Japan also concluded a pact with the European Union that lowered duties and other barriers to ease trade flows. Between the EU and Asia-Pacific, Japan is now starting to import substantially more from its free-trade partners, at America’s expense. That’s bad for U.S. farmers who were already reeling from tit-for-tat tariffs on soybeans and other farm goods entering China. 

For some products, the difference in tariffs is stark. Australian wine entering Japan is taxed at 5.6% and will eventually drop to zero. There’s no duty at all for wine from the EU and Chile. But for California, it’s 15%.

This is one of the zillions of chickens, most of whom are coming home to roost, because a sufficient number of American voters (with lots of help from Vlad's people) decided that competence, or the ability to see wider connections,  was totally unnecessary in the president of this country.  Even narcissism was perfectly acceptable. 

At least we avoided the email scandals...

Microsoft's Damore Moment

Microsoft is having its own Damore moment!  An internal discussion wonders if women are innately unsuited for engineering and similar fields, and if aiming for diversity actually constitutes discrimination against white and Asian men.

I have no idea if those internal discussions tried to explain why men of other ethnic groups or races might not be innately suited to engineering, but never mind.

Here's the money shot from the discussion, as reported by Quartz:

The posts were written by a female Microsoft program manager. Quartz reached out to her directly for comment, and isn’t making her name public at this point, pending her response. 

“Does Microsoft have any plans to end the current policy that financially incentivizes discriminatory hiring practices? To be clear, I am referring to the fact that senior leadership is awarded more money if they discriminate against Asians and white men,” read the original post by the Microsoft program manager on Yammer, a corporate messaging platform owned by Microsoft.

I have bolded the two sentences I want to address in this post.

Note that this female Microsoft program manager assumes "something" about the initial situation, and that "something" is a necessary though unmentioned foundation for her argument to hold.

What is that "something?"