Saturday, January 22, 2005


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

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel Schorr

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

Here is Schorr on the U.S. media:

...who can believe TV news reports when they may turn out to be government-financed videos? Have you ever seen the report on the drug benefits of the Bush Medicare act that ran on 40 local TV stations, complete with the "out-cue": "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting"? The Department of Health and Human Services paid her to play the role of reporter. Or, did you see the report on the antidrug campaign produced by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, narrated by nonjournalist Mike Morris?

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

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

Some Good News From Iran (or Not)








Hmmm. Someone must have given Elham a phone call.

Friday, January 21, 2005

Friday's Gingerbread Blogging

Gingerbread Castle Posted by Hello

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

Theocracy Beginning?

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

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

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

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

But apparently not naughty Bill Graham.

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

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

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

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



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

Today's Action Alert

Today's Action comes from MoveOn:



Call: 1-800-772-1213

Then press 3.
Then press 0 to speak to a representative.

Thanks for taking today's action.

The Other Side of the Nine Balls

Original link from here.

We Are All Republicans Now

Or so it appears:

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

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

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

Thursday, January 20, 2005

What Neutrality in the Media Means

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

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

Via Atrios.

Flirting Instructions from the Religious Right


Be Genuine . . . Be You!


Who needs feminism?
Link courtesy of Biblio

Having Fun in Washington, D.C.

From Roxanne:

Check the top link for more pictures.

Mine! All Mine!

Link courtesy of watertiger

What To Do on a Boring Day

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

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

(from Enough Rope (1926))

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

(from Enough Rope (1926))

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

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

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

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

(from Esquire (1957))

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Here We Go

I was wondering when all this would start:






Bolds mine.



Bolds mine.


How to Commemorate the Coronation Tomorrow

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

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

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

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

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

Women in Bush's Social Security Plan

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is Fun

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

"Cult of Victimization"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think it's nice!

Today's Action Alert

Today's Action:

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

Thanks for taking today's action.



1. The eighty-hour workweek expected
3. Discrimination against women.

















Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Hi There








You're Not Playing in My Yard

That's intended to be a line from a really old song about the rivalries of children, and how children try to exclude those they dislike. Our administration does the same thing, or so it looks:

A senior State Department official has notified the Taipei Times that he will no longer speak to the newspaper's Washington correspondent in retaliation for a Times editorial on Monday which called Powell a "sorry wreck of a once principled man."

This reporter received a call on Monday from Randall Schriver, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in charge of China, Taiwan and Hong Kong affairs, complaining about the editorial and saying that he would no longer speak to the newspaper because of it.

Schriver said that the administration does not take issue with newspapers that disagree with the administration's policy, but he said the description of Powell went too far.

It was not clear whether Schriver was speaking for himself or for the administration.

This would be an interesting way to control the press without explicitly having any kind of governmental censure.
Link courtesy of Tom Daai Tou Laam on the Eschaton threads.

Why There Are So Few Women in the Hard Sciences: Part II

Time to dive in deeper. Lawrence Summmers' little speech suggested three different explanations for the scarcity of women in hard sciences: the eighty-hour weeks one is assumed to work, possible biological differences in talent between the sexes and discrimination against women. I wish to look at each of these, and I'm going to begin with Summers' second hypothesis, the one about biological differences between the sexes. The other two questions will be addressed in my next post if I ever get there.

It is useful to note at the very beginning that all these causes are likely to be extremely intertwined. For example, if people like Dr. Summers believe that women are less able to do hard sciences, and if people like Dr. Summers happen to become the presidents of major Ivy League universities, well, then there is quite likely to be discrimination against women in these places even if there was no innate sex difference in scientific talent. Likewise, if many employers accept the idea that women shy away from an eighty-hour week then they are going to be less likely to look at female applicants for such jobs seriously which can cause discrimination. And so on.

Also, it is interesting to ponder on the reason why hard sciences are called hard. What is it that is hard about them? Most seem to think that this label serves to distinguish them from soft sciences, but then, once again, what is so soft about some sciences? In reality, the hard sciences are in many ways easier than the soft sciences (which tend to deal with human data) because the empirical evidence has so much less static in it. It might be interesting to ask whether this hardness has anything to do with the idea of hardness in penis comparisons. I have no opinion on this!

Ok. Onwards and upwards. Are women less talented in hard sciences for purely biological reasons? The correct answer to this question is that we don't know. I can imagine many readers turning red here and starting to spew liquid on the keyboard, but bear with me for a while.

How would we find about such innate differences? The obvious answer would be by using genetic study for it, but as far as I know genetic study is currently not in a position to answer such complicated questions. If anything, we are learning that the interplay between inherited tendencies and the environment is much more complicated than we previously thought. It is even possible that the environment turns genes on and off, and in that sense there might not even be any such thing as purely genetic influence.

We don't have data on purely genetic influences in this field, or at least we don't have data that could be guaranteed to contain nothing else but the influence of our genes. What we have instead are three types of evidence which have been widely used to argue that differences in the numbers of women and men in hard sciences is biologically based: studies of differences in cognition between groups of girls and boys or women and men, studies which analyze the impact of some known change in the fetal stage or the impact of some known medical condition (such as autism) on cognition, and teleological studies which really use these same data but pedal backwards from them to various interesting stories about the division of labor between prehistoric housewives and brave map-reading warrior-hunters. I'm not going to say anything about the third group because discussing pseudoscience doesn't add anything (except hilarity) to what I'm trying to convey here.

The first type of evidence is the most important one of the three, because it uses large samples of relatively randomly picked individuals from all types of societies. The problem it has is that the measures of cognition elicited by asking children, teenagers and adults are unavoidably not going to be pure measures of genetic differences. The environment and the general culture have had time to work on the study subjects beforehand, and factors such as the quality of schooling the person has had, the family income and the general societal norms all can be shown to influence the findings.

Keeping this in mind, it's possible to note that most cognitive tests show some average gender differences in mathematics. Boys are, on average, better at certain types of mathematics problems than girls, especially in word problems, and this is true from a very early age and across various cultures. As Virginia Valian points out in her book Why So Slow, this might paradoxically be caused by the girls understanding words better in communication: most word problems require the solver to decide which parts of the statement are important for the solution, which parts are not and whether there is enough information for the solution. In the actual understanding of speech all parts have a function, even if some of the functions are half-hidden. Not knowing this may make a solver better at using the words mathematically.

Such gender differences are unlikely to be purely biological. This is because the differences between children in different countries are far greater and because the gender differences within countries have been declining for some time. But some part of these differences could be purely biological. What their significance for the hard sciences participation rates might be is more complicated. Consider the one test which shows the greatest sex difference of all: the mental rotation of three-dimensional figures, in which boys outperform girls pretty much everywhere. Most studies suggest that ability to do well on this test and other mathematical ability are not correlated. Thus, it's not possible to explain women's scarcity in mathematics in general by using this single test as the explanation.

The tests we develop and apply in cognitive studies are not necessarily neutrally selected. Every researcher has a gender identitity, after all. This is important to remember. For example, there are tests in which girls outperform boys by the same large and consistent margins as boys outperform girls in the mental rotation of three-dimensional figures, such as the one on perceptual speed, but these tests are not studied as intensively as the more familiar ones are. Even more generally, the tests we use are spot measures, may not reflect all important skills and tend to be overapplied to the young and then ignored for the rest of the individuals' lives. There is evidence suggesting that women have different lifetime patterns of mathematical abilities from men, and very little research exists on this and its possible meaning. For example, women outperform men in old age.

Many who argue for the biological explanation for the sex-skew in hard science practitioners say that what is really important to analyze is not the average scores on all these tests but the proportion of boys and girls who score exceptionally well. Because these tests have greater variability for boys, there are many more boys than girls with exceptionally high scores, and this fact alone could explain why most mathematical geniuses appear to have been men.

This is an interesting argument. Consider a different test, that of writing skills. Girls outperform boys on this test, and the variability is much greater for girls (see Dianne Hales: Just Like A Woman for references on the evidence). This means that there are many more girls in the high-scoring part of the test and therefore we should expect the geniuses of great literature to be overwhelmingly of the female denomination.

The reality is very different. Either we have been excellent in compensating boys for their "innate" deficiencies in writing talents or something else has affected the outcome, too. Or perhaps we should stop taking all this so terribly seriously.

A different avenue towards trying to find innate sex differences in mathematical ability uses subjects who are known to differ from the average in some pre-birth induced way. One such case is the genetic disorder of congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) which leads to an overproduction of androgens in the fetus' adrenal glands. Both boys and girls with this condition have very high levels of circulating androgens, and girls with CAH show many forms of behavior which are regarded as traditionally male (boys are harder to diagnose so there is less data on them).

Girls in CAH score very high on the mental rotation of three-dimensional figures, as might be surmised, but they don't score any better in general quantitative tests than other girls.

Simon Baron-Cohen has proposed a similar approach to testing gender differences in cognition by using children with autism as the study sample. He believes that autism is a form of an "extreme male brain" and that the greater mathematical abilities of many autistic children are evidence of the biological nature of gender differences in mathematics. The problems with his arguments become evident if you read his book on the topic (The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain), which I have done. He presents no new evidence for his arguments and he even goes on for some pages about the hypothetical "extreme female brain" which doesn't exist, but if it did exist, Baron-Cohen believes that it would be favored over the "extreme male brain". Which sort of shows where he biases lie.

And if you weren't convinced about them yet, you could always take the very objective test in the Appendix of his book which will tell you how biologically male your brain is by answers to questions such as:"Can you fix your own electrical problems?" "When you look at a piece of furniture, do you wonder about how the joins were made?" (What about when you look at a beautiful dress?) "Do you like to chitchat more than you like to collect coins?" Or you could take it here.

Ok. Enough for one post. I'm not an expert in this area, though I'm a sort of a Renaissance goddess, so the usual caveats apply.

Why There Are So Few Women in the Hard Sciences: Part I

Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University, gave a controversial speech at an economics meeting last Saturday:








This speech has caused a sensation, or, rather, two sensations. One is the fact that Summers referred to genetic explanations of gender differences. The other one is the fact that at least one woman got up and left the room in protest of the speech. The first sensation, or rather furor, is a debate about what Summers might have meant and whether he was just presenting a theory for further inquiry (as he himself stated) or whether he was actually making a biased statement. The second furor, mostly on various right-wing blogs, is whether the behavior of the participant who left is in fact evidence of women's greater emotionality and inability to engage in logical dialogue.

There is so much material in all this for me that no way will I just write one post on it. To prolong the excitement as long as possible (a sort of an intellectual foreplay), I'm going to blog on Summers' three theories on Tuesday (looking forward to that!). Today I'm going to blog about the reactions I just described.

It is indeed true that proper scientific inquiry requires that all possible theories are discussed, and from that point of view Summers' bringing up the genetic difference theory is perfectly acceptable. What makes it somewhat less so, for me at least, are the pieces of evidence he quotes in its support: one an anecdotal piece about his own daughter, and the other one on a medical condition called autism.

Anecdotal evidence is, by its very definition, not applicable as something we can generalize to large populations. I can find anecdotal evidence for most every single social behavior. It is not hard to do, and it is surprising that Summers would launch into what he himself calls a provocative speech while being so poorly prepared to back up his suggestions.

The example on autism is equally unsuitable. Many things are genetically determined, at least partly, and to state that they are so does not throw light on the genetic inheritability of other seemingly unrelated things.

On the whole, I'm wondering why Summers didn't equip himself with the many studies that exist in this area, not to mention the recent research in genetics which suggests that the way genes and the environment interact might be much more complicated than we currently understand.

All this is important to explain the furor over Nancy Hopkins' departure during the speech. Hopkins was one of the authors of an MIT study into gender inequalities, and it is possible that she is considerably better read in the field than Dr. Summers appears to be. She may have walked out because she realized that no constructive dialogue would be forthcoming. Of course, she may have walked out because she was fuming, too. Or she may have been fuming and aware of the futility of further debate.

Michelle Malkin (a conservative pundit) assumes that she was weeping, or at least that's how she titled her blog on the events. I see no evidence to support the weeping-argument. Malkin also argues that if Hopkins' behavior is indicative of what she teaches her female students, academia is better off without women. Taking her arguments to their logical conclusion, journalism would also be better off without women, given Ms. Malkins' own behavior.

The reactions to Dr. Summers' speech have been most revealing, though. It is interesting how very hungry certain commentators are for anything that would back up their opinions, and though this is visible on both sides of the debate, it is more pronounced on the wingnut side. Thus, "emotions" suddenly crop up as somehow meaningful in a debate about scientific ability; as if men don't have emotions (such as anger) that might affect behavior. All human beings have emotions. Only us goddesses can turn them off at will and write all this without even once feeling annoyed...
Original link to the story via

Monday, January 17, 2005

A Good Diary on dkos

This one: Why I Am A Feminist. The comments are very interesting, too.

Remember This When Hope Seems Dead

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable...
Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice,
suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and
passionate concern of dedicated individuals.

~Martin Luther King, Jr.

In Alphabetical Order

Right before the Iraq invasion, I jokingly said that the only Bush administration plan of invasion is based on the alphabetical order of countries: First Afghanistan, then Iran, then Iraq and so on. That Iraq came before Iran has to do with our leader's difficulties with words.

Sadly, this joke may have been no joke at all. Seymour Hersh reports on extensive preparations for a possible military attack on Iran in the latest New Yorker:

The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer. Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and missile sites, both declared and suspected. The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids. "The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible," the government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told me.


Why they are doing this is a story in itself, but essentially it is what the neo-conservatives in the administration want. In an interview on CNN's "Late Night Edition", Hersh said this:

"The planning for Iran is going ahead even though Iraq is a mess," Hersh said. "I think they really think there's a chance to do something in Iran, perhaps by summer, to get the intelligence on the sites."

He added, "The guys on the inside really want to do this."

Hersh identified those inside people as the "neoconservative" civilian leadership in the Pentagon. That includes Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith -- "the sort of war hawks that we talk about in connection with the war in Iraq."

And he said the preparation goes beyond contingency planning and includes detailed plans for air attacks:

"The next step is Iran. It's definitely there. They're definitely planning ... But they need the intelligence first."

The New Yorker article goes into much more detail about the possible war with Iran, and Hersh argues that Donald Rumsfeld is the central player in all this. He has essentially neutralized the CIA and now runs his hidden commando troups without any Congressional oversight:


Well, we have been riding with a different lot of bad boys for four years now, so not much is new about this idea. What was new to me, assuming that Hersh's arguments turn out to be true, is the enormous number of kamikazi fliers in the Bush administration. For surely attacking Iran while the U.S. troops aren't sufficient to even pacify the much smaller Iraq is totally suicidal. A general draft would be absolutely required and large numbers of nonprofessional soldiers would die. No Republican president would be re-elected as long as anyone with the memories of this war would be alive.

Or so the consequences would be if this world was sane. But even in the world as it is, getting the American people to approve of an attack on Iran would require something along the lines of the 9/11 massacres with some proof on the culprits being Iranian. And this is what really worries me: that I find myself seriously considering whether the administration would mind this very much if it gave them a change to go out and play military commanders once again.

Sunday, January 16, 2005

A Little Rant









Shedding the Skin







Who Is Getting Fleeced?

George Bush is telling us all in his Washington Post interview. For your benefit I have read through it and extracted the crucial pearls of something from his ramblings. Here they are:

And at home, reform systems that will say that we have recognized we've got problems for future generations that we intend to deal with. One is Social Security, one is the tax system. As well, I'm mindful of the twin deficits we face. The fiscal deficit -- we will address the fiscal deficit in two ways: one, by submitting a budget that will continue to keep the pledge of cutting the deficit in half by five years, and secondly, addressing some of the unfunded liabilities inherent in the fiscal budget.

Interpretation: I'm going to ge rid of Social Security so that we can all watch the financial acrobatics of the elderly and the disabled walking the tightrope. This also saves a lot of money as we no longer will need reality shows to keep people diverted from politics. I'm also going to change taxes so that the rich pay nothing and the middle classes everything. This will have the added advantage of killing the middle classes so that we have more obedient workers as spare labor at low wages.

I'm taking on three issues: asbestos reform, class action and medical liability reform

Interpretation: I'm going to make it very much harder for the consumers and workers to sue corporations of any kind. Note that I'm listing the three main forms of lawsuits in which ordinary little people sue someone. I'm not mentioning all the corporate lawsuits at all!

The Social Security issue is an interesting issue when it comes to African Americans. After all, the life expectancy of African American males is a lot less than other groups and, therefore, if you really think about that, you have people putting money in the system that aren't -- families won't benefit from the system. And, therefore, it seems to me to make sense, if I were a part of a group of people that were being disadvantaged by the Social Security system, that I'd at least like to have the opportunity to have some of the money I put in the system passable to my family.

Interpretation: This is something I'm doing for African Americans! I don't understand why they didn't vote for me; I'm the President of Everyone. I'm giving the African Americans the savings that come from not having to pay Social Security payments. That way they don't have to worry about dying earlier than the rest of the country, and I don't have to address the question why they die earlier. Saves a lot of money all around.

Are you still wondering if there is class warfare in this country?