Sophianotloren

One of the many things that I love about the Internets is the opportunity it affords to be politically active without getting my head bashed in.  I was 18 years old in 1968 when my childhood friends started disappearing into jungles, or Canadian provinces, as the case may be. 

At that time, I learned that the most expedient way to express my grief and disapproval was to band together with the rest of my generation to make a very loud, often inarticulate, noise.  That behavior often resulted in my getting spit upon, derided and, on some special occasions, getting my head bashed or my pins knocked out from under me by fire hoses, for my trouble. 

Unpleasant enough stuff, but, as a rule, such encounters did not end as badly as Kent State.

Gradually, I learned that if one stood firm, kept faith and kept up the noise, it was, indeed, possible to make change happen.  Nowadays I’m way too old to get my head banged [or put myself in a position to, God forbid,  break a hip] but I still have an abiding belief in making noise.

It has taken me a few days to fully digest Charles Koch’s most recent lamentation, nailed up on Rupert Murdoch’s wailing wall for billionaires, the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal.  In case anyone hasn’t seen Koch’s op-ed, it was evidently far too important to put behind the pay-wall, where Koch’s target audience of Lying Libruls were unlikely to pay for the privilege, so you can find it here.  Very democratic . . .

Generally, I don’t much care for the Open Letter format but since my chances are slim for a one-on-one with Charles Koch, and my political beliefs won’t allow me to remain silent, I’m forced to rebut his opinions out here in the less populous reaches of the internet, where, nevertheless, worthy citizens of this republic still keep faith with the ideals that Mr Koch seems hell-bent to dispense with . . .

So, without further ado . . .

Dear Mr Koch:

Like you, I believe that a majority of American people appreciate the principles of a free society, and have embraced those principles to shape their lives, their families, their businesses and America itself.  Surely that is one of the reasons that America has been held up as a model of success in the Planet Earth Free Society Competition.

As to your claim that you have “devoted most of [your] life to understanding the principles that enable people to improve their lives,” that is not so difficult to believe, if by “improve their lives” you mean make more money.  I’m sure that your shareholders and the various recipients of your largesse will agree that you have certainly improved their lives by making more money than anyone else on the planet. 

But, as you yourself point out:  “A truly free society is based on a vision of respect for people and what they value.”  I would only add to that:  A truly free society is based on a vision of respect for people and what they value, regardless of their personal wealth. 

I understand that many among us truly believe that material wealth is a sign that a person is doing the right things by his/herself, family, business, god, country, etc.  And, according to what both of us say we believe, you and those who value wealth have a perfect right to feel that way and to pursue more wealth, in a free society.

By the same token, and by your own tenets, you do not have a right to disrespect those who have different values or to use your wealth to drown out their voices so that only your voice can be heard.

You state, in no uncertain terms, that:

. . . the central belief and fatal conceit of the current administration is that you are incapable of running your own life, but those in power are capable of running it for you. 

Somehow, you have come to that conclusion but that is certainly not my own experience as an American during “the current administration.”  I know that you will likely label me an “Obama Cheerleader” for the things that I am about to say but that would be an inapt conclusion.  I would be tempted to cheerlead loudly for Obama if he went much, much further to satisfy my values.  Nevertheless, I am very pleased and supportive of the progress that the “current administration” has been able to make despite the considerable opposition mounted by those with different values.

For example:

I value peace - so I am happy for the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the avoidance of wars in Syria, Iran and Ukraine - that improves the lives of many around the globe.

I value my personal dignity and that of my family - so I support marriage equality and I am excited to be able to marry my same sex partner of 30 years - that improves my family’s lives and the life of my community.

I value the dignity of others - so I support any effort to reward an honest day’s work with a living wage—that will improve our lives and our economy.

I value my womanhood and self-determination—so I support Equal Pay for Equal Work and I vigorously defend the right of every American woman to make her own medical and reproductive decisions—that has and will continue to improve our free society.

I value education - so I am eager for all children to have an equal chance to learn and succeed no matter who their parents are or where they live - that will improve all of our lives.

I value the American ideal expressed by the “Lady who lifts her lamp beside the Golden Door” - so I am happy to welcome others who want to make a better life here, in the Land of Opportunity - that improves America.

I value my life and independence - so I am grateful to finally have decent healthcare that will not bankrupt me or my family if I get sick - that improves my life and future solvency immeasurably.

And, finally, I value life on Earth—so I believe that Americans must lead in responsible stewardship of the planet and prevent the irresponsible rape of our home by those who care only about taking whatever they can wring out of our environment.

To borrow a phrase from you, sir—rather than try to understand my vision for a free society or accurately report the facts about the current administration, critics, like yourself, would have me believe that:

. . . the fundamental concepts of dignity, respect, equality before the law and personal freedom are under attack by the nation’s own government.

Or that:

The central belief and fatal conceit of the current administration is that you are incapable of running your own life, but those in power are capable of running it for you.

You know what that reminds me of, Mr Koch? It reminds me of your Dad, Fred, who helped found the John Birch Society because he believed, as he warned back in 1960:

“The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” and that public welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks and Puerto Ricans to Eastern cities to vote for Communist causes and “getting a vicious race war started.”

Oddly enough, your falsehoods about the “current administration” [which, I guess, dare not speak its name?] reminded me, too, of the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s observation, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”

So, why in the world would you say something like:

EPA officials have commended us for our “commitment to a cleaner environment” and called us “a model for other companies.”

When it’s so easy to verify the facts:

In the decade of the 2000s, primarily from 2006-2009, the EPA had 27 enforcement actions for various Koch violations. It will not surprise you to learn that of the roughly $280 million in penalties Koch was slapped with, 95% of them were from 2009! Yes, Koch Industries is a model for other companies … a model of what not to do.

In regard to that same statement, the Pulitzer prize-winning Politifact.com awarded the statement a rating of “Mostly False” with a well-sourced, in-depth refutation.

Which brings me to your charges of character assassination . . . a classic case of stones and glass houses.  I understand that you’re a busy, busy man but certainly you have some time for decent oversight and, if nothing else, you probably care about getting value for your money, eh?

So what’s with the millions of dollars spent on cheesy anti-Obamacare ads “so misleading that even conservatives won’t back its Obamacare claims.”

Well, as they say, it’s your money . . .

As to the rest of it? your peculiar definitions of “collectivism?”  I’ll just chalk that up to your being an eighty-year-old armchair political scientist but, a word of caution from one opinion writer to another—throwing Saul Alinsky into the mix really f*cks with your credibility.

So, in closing, one thing is incontestable: you Koch boys are totes awesome at making money.  I hope it has made you happy and your father proud.  But, no matter what dollar amount your personal wealth comes to, I doubt that you can buy off America and remake it in your image and likeness.  Not if it’s the America most of us—on the right, in the center, or the left—believe in.

And, since you had the stones to quote Thomas Jefferson to support your opinion, here’s something else that Jefferson had to say that I find very apropos:

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.

Myself? I prefer the earthier words of H.L. Mencken who said:

The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.

Good day, Sir, and thanks for sharing your opinion.

New wealth numbers show that for the first time since the Gilded Age of the late 1920's, the concentration of America's total wealth in the hands of the wealthiest one percent is now above one-fifth.





As you can see, in 1975 that number was about 7%.  It's 21% now, meaning the share of wealth gained by the super-rich has tripled in the last 40 years or so.  Half of that total increase (from 14% to 21%) came since 2001, just 12 years.

And this will only get worse.  The rich get richer, and the poor must suffer because only the rich are worthy or even moral.

The Best Practices Policy Project, the Desiree Alliance, Global Action for Trans* Equality and INCITE! are calling for US-wide and international action on April 11, 2014 to support Monica Jones’ campaign for the rights of transgender people and sex workers.

Monica Jones, a human rights defender in Arizona and an advocate for the rights of transgender people and sex workers, was profiled and wrongfully arrested for “manifestation of prostitution” by a police sting operation and anti-prostitution diversion program known as “Project ROSE”. Ms Jones had been a speaker at a rally protesting Project ROSE—which is run by Phoenix police and Arizona State University’s School of Social Work—the day before. At the time of her arrest, she was not engaging in sex work, but was in fact walking down her street to the local bar.

On April 11 at 8.30 am (US Mountain Standard Time) Monica’s case will go to trial at Phoenix Municipal Court. She will plead not guilty and an action is planned outside the court to show the City of Phoenix Prosecutor that we won’t tolerate the systematic profiling and criminalization of transgender people of color and sex workers. The court date was postponed after Monica’s defense filed a motion challenging the constitutional basis of the manifestation law, and Monica promised to return with “twice as many people.” Last month, two sex worker rights advocates went to the United Nations in Geneva to bring international attention to Monica’s trial and the ongoing human rights violations occurring in Phoenix and across the United States.

We call on people and organizations across the United States, in the region and internationally to show your support for Monica Jones and the issues she cares about. We encourage individuals, organizations, and communities to acknowledge the day in whatever way they feel safe in doing to raise awareness, to learn and share about the issues (it could be through social media action, by sharing a meal, organizing a public action, writing a letter to the press, through art and so on).

Please email us at bestpracticespolicyproject @ gmail.com and director @ desireealliance.org to tell us about the action you plan and if you would like us to highlight your action on our websites. If you wish to add your organization’s name to this call, email us and we would be happy to do so.

More information about the case, Monica’s trial can be found at:

https://www.facebook.com/events/477216822384806/

http://www.swopphoenix.org/monica/

http://www.bestpracticespolicy.org/2014/01/10/phoenix-calling-the-united-nations-new-iccpr-report/

Since refusing to plead guilty to the charges she is innocent of, Ms. Jones has been targeted four additional times by police officers while walking around her neighborhood carrying out everyday activities such as bringing groceries home or heading to her local bar. Each time, the police use insulting and transphobic language and threaten her with arrest, despite the fact that she is doing nothing more than simply walking outdoors. Across the U.S. and in Phoenix, transgender people of color are routinely targeted for harassment and hate-motivated violence, by both police and the public, and are frequently profiled as sex workers by police. Transgender people are also targeted for cruel treatment in prisons, including by guards.

Ms. Jones states, “I believe I was profiled as a sex worker because I am a transgender woman of color, and an activist. I am a student at ASU, and fear that these wrongful charges will affect my educational path. I am also afraid that if am sentenced, I will be placed in a men’s jail as a transgender woman, which would be very unsafe for me. Prison is an unsafe place for everyone, and especially trans people.”

Monica Jones should not have to go to court to fight wrongful charges resulting from a discriminatory and arbitrary arrest stemming from a department in which she studies. Sign the petition to have the charges against Monica dropped.

Penguins on display at Ireland’s Oceanworld:

Two female penguins have paired up for the mating season in a South Pole exhibition at Dingle Oceanworld in County Kerry, Ireland

OMG LESBIAN PENGUINS :D

medievalpoc:

randomredux:

"Has diversity in gaming gone too far?" Yes, clearly this drop to only 98% of games having straight white men as main characters is unacceptable.

Reblogging because this isn’t an exaggerated number. That is actually not too far from game characters overall, not just protagonists and main characters…this, despite the fact that Black and Latin@ gamers spend more time and money consuming video games.

As I said earlier, the problem is that game developers are overwhelmingly white, nondisabled, heterosexual men. I’m really not kidding:

I think it’s kind of fitting that the privileged group that dominates the industry and sucks at representing other groups in games is illustrated by a giant Pac-Man eating everybody else up.

When I originally wrote this, the crowd-funding campaign for funding this book was still ongoing. It’s over now—but yay, it succeeded! Here’s what I wrote about it.

Cranky Ladies of History: Annie Oakley

Several months ago, Tehani Wessely and Tansy Rayner Roberts contacted me and asked if I would consider writing a story for their anthology, Cranky Ladies of History. “That sounds awesome,” I said, and also, “I so don’t have time.” But I agreed to do it anyway, partially because I (and all SFWAns, but especially me) owe Tansy Rayner Roberts a huge debt for her work on the interim issue of the Bulletin, which she co-edited brilliantly and in a ridiculously short amount of time. But also because this was an easy favor to grant—because come on, Cranky Ladies of History, how cool is that?

Cranky Ladies of History had met its crowd funding goal. They also had a blog tour where the anthology’s writers blogged about the cranky ladies they chose to crank about.

I spent some time in IM talking to Tansy about which Cranky Lady I should pick. Tzu Shi? Agrippina? Mary Anning? Ada Lovelace? Eventually, we decided on Annie Oakley.

You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun

If you don’t know who she is, Annie Oakley was a sharpshooter with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. She grew up in poverty which necessitated that she learn to shoot so that she could help feed the family. After joining the Wild West Show, Annie became a hugely successful performer, especially groundbreaking as a woman.

She had a complicated relationship with feminism: she taught women to shoot, and she advocated for women to be allowed in the army. On other important women’s rights issues of the day, she wasn’t in synch with the feminist position. For instance, she opposed women’s suffrage.

Although the musical that was made about her life story, Annie Get Your Gun, includes the song, “You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun,” she sort of did. She married Frank Butler after beating him in a shooting competition.

I Can Do Anything You Can Do Better

With her gun, Annie Oakley could:

Shoot distant targets by sighting through a mirror

Shoot holes in thrown playing cards before they landed

Snuff a candle

Shoot a cigarette out of a man’s mouth

Shoot the cork off of a bottle

There’s No Business Like Show Business

Annie Oakley was an extremely highly paid performer, and she’s been called America’s first female superstar. One interesting aspect of her show biz persona was her conservative dress style. Pictures show a stiff, strong-featured woman with long brown hair, wearing loose blouses and calf-length skirts with boots. She often wears fringe, bolo ties, and a wide-brimmed cowboy hat.

In the photographs that don’t look posed, she stands in a masculine style, displaying no submissiveness or apology.

Doin’ What Comes Nat’rally

I first learned about Annie Oakley as a kid from the musical, Annie Get Your Gun, which is a fictionalized version of her life. I wonder whether the real Annie Oakley might be annoyed by the way it’s shaped around her relationship with a man. The plot begins when she meets Frank Butler and ends when they go to the altar.

The music is by Irving Berlin and the book is by Dorothy and Herbert Fields. It’s an old-fashioned musical with racist moments such as the song “I An Injun, Too.” Songs like “Doin’ What Comes Nat’rally” also romanticize the poverty she grew up in while maintaining a condescending attitude toward the rural poor.

The musical also features a lot of hits, including “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”

My father had an abbreviated medley of songs from Annie Get Your Gun on a piano roll for his 88-key upright player piano. While he pumped, I used to sit on the rug behind the piano bench, and sing along.

In college, I saw the show on Broadway with Bernadette Peters as the lead. I have a soft spot in my heart for “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better.”

The greatest woman rifle shot the world has ever produced

There’s a lot of research ahead of me as I decide what to write about Annie, her gun, and all those shot up playing cards. I don’t yet know what story I have to tell about her, but I look forward to the books and documentaries that will help me find it.

This essay first appeared in Cliterati on March 16^th; I have modified it slightly to fit the format of this blog.

In early December, Elytte and Miranda Barbour were arrested on a charge of murder in the first degree, three weeks after getting married and moving from North Carolina to Pennsylvania:

[The Barbours]…lured a man to his death with an ad on…Craigslist…because they wanted to kill someone together…Elytte Barbour [said]…he and…Miranda…[lured] Troy LaFerrara…[with an escort] posting…Elytte [said]…Miranda…regularly…made anywhere from $50 to $850 by meeting with men for such activities as having dinner together or walking around a mall.  The ads she placed…all said upfront that sex was not part of the deal…“She is not a prostitute…she…meets with them and has delightful conversation”…

Generally, when a couple commits murder together, the man is the leader and the woman the follower.  But from the moment I read this report, I strongly suspected that this time it was the wife who was the psychopath  and the husband her weak-willed assistant.  Why?  Because she actually expected him to believe that the ridiculous “time and companionship only” disclaimer was literally true, and he actually did.  And a man who can “tenderly be led by th’ nose as asses are” in such a fashion is also the sort who can be convinced that killing somebody for fun is a reasonable idea.  After this story broke I waited for over two months for the other shoe to drop as I knew it inevitably must, and on February 16^th came the awaited thud:

[Miranda Barbour claims]…she killed many more victims…the 19-year-old…[said] she participated in at least 22 killings in the past six years in Alaska, Texas, North Carolina and California.  “When I hit 22, I stopped counting…I can pinpoint on a map where you can find them”…Barbour [said] she had her first experience with killing when she [was] just 13, shortly after she…joined a satanic [sic] cult in Alaska…she [says that she] felt no remorse for her victims and…killed only “bad people”…

While this bizarre fantasy was believed by the reporter to whom she first spoke of it, the credulous cop who called it “the real deal”, and a friend she first met in one of the psychiatric hospitals where she has spent much of her young life, just about everyone else realized that the idea of a 13-year-old female serial killer who murdered dozens without even being suspected is patently absurd:

Miranda’s father, Sonny Dean…is not the only one who doubts his daughter’s story…If she really killed 22 to 99 people in the span of six years in four different states…that means she was getting away with murder every few weeks to every few months since the age of 13.  It would make her America’s most prolific serial killer.  “Miranda lives in a fantasy world made up in her own mind,” Sonny said. “She craves attention, is selfish, dishonest and manipulative”…at…16, Miranda [had told a friend] she was a member of a “gang” that was “comprised mostly of men”…[and] “mentioned having been raped by multiple men at once”…[after returning from her first episode of running] away from home when she was 12…she told her mother, Elizabeth Dean, that she’d been “out prostituting” and had met a 25-year-old man named Forrest, who was “into satanic [sic] stuff” and was now her “ruler”…

Miranda claimed to have been “branded” with a swastika and Forrest’s name, but though her mother found large cuts on her they were not words or other recognizable symbols.  Several years later, after her parents divorced, Miranda claimed…

…that she [had become] pregnant…[and] the cult members…”tied her to a bed, gave her drugs and [gave her] an ‘in-house abortion.’”  Miranda’s mother…[immediately] took her daughter “to a doctor, who said there were no signs of an ended pregnancy”…

When she later really did become pregnant, she claimed that Forrest was the father, but that he had since been murdered; she also claimed to be a “high-ranking official in the satanic [sic] world” at the age of 17, when a judge decided it was better to send her to live with her uncle in North Carolina.  There she met Elytte, won him from his pregnant girlfriend, and talked him into eloping to Pennsylvania with her, where they committed the murder to “bring them closer together”.  And while it’s obvious that Miranda is capable of murder, it also seems very likely this was her first one.  She was never unsupervised in most of the places she claims to have killed, and…

…Alaska State Troopers issued a statement that there is “no evidence” that Miranda committed any murders in the state.  Members of Seeking Alaska’s Missing, a statewide support group, are also skeptical.  Authorities where Miranda lived in North Carolina said that their only unsolved homicide cases date back to Miranda’s infancy, and thus would’ve been impossible for her to have committed them.  Experts have said she doesn’t fit the profile  of a serial killer, who are rarely women [and] are typically older…

According to Miranda’s mother, a person claiming to be Forrest called about Miranda’s baby after she moved to North Carolina (and after Forrest had supposedly been murdered).  But though her mother seems to believe in the existence of this “Satanic cult”, I do not; while it’s entirely possible Miranda belonged to a group of maladjusted teenagers playing at being a “cult”, her ideas about the behavior of such groups bear far more resemblance to pop-culture depictions than to anything real.  The notion of uncatchable serial killers preying on “bad people” seems borrowed from the television series Dexter, the “branding” motif should be familiar to anyone who’s been following the “sex trafficking” hysteria, and imaginary “forced abortions” appear over and over again in the “recovered memory” literature and latter-day descendants of the “Satanic Panic”.  As I’ve explained before, those suffering from such delusions and confabulations remember them just as clearly as you remember what you did yesterday, or even more clearly if your day wasn’t very interesting.  And over time, the false memories invariably become more detailed, more extreme and more lurid, and conform ever more closely to whatever narrative the deluded person has embraced (such as the belief-system of a political or religious group).  Miranda Barbour’s story already bears some resemblance to those of “sex trafficking survivors” (branding, gang rape, enslavement, exploitation of adolescent girls by older men, etc), though for now she is not only claiming her prostitution was voluntary, but also that it wasn’t even prostitution.  However, this affair is not yet over and Barbour’s tale is not done changing; I won’t be at all surprised if she soon “remembers” being the victim of “sex trafficking”, and her “Satanic ruler” turns into a “pimp”.

This week, I changed browsers. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, but actually it was a chore. I’ve been a Firefox fan for a very long time. I love it for a lot of reasons. It’s an excellent browser and if they charged money to own it, I would have gladly paid.

Then Mozilla made Brendan Eich CEO, and I had to make a decision. A minor ethical one.

Eich is a brilliant man. He is an IT legend. He created Javascript. One of the most flexible scripting languages ever written. He helped found Mozilla in 1988 and, without a doubt, much of Firefox’s success is due to him. It must also, I surmise, be somewhat down to him that Mozilla maintained such a radically open source attitude to its products. The company has always believed in cooperation, openness, collaboration.

But Brendan Eich must also be, to some extent, a torn man. Because, with his public donation of $1000 to the campaign to pass California’s Proposition 8 which sought to prohibit same sex marriages in the state, he also showed that his understanding of openness and inclusiveness was limited to software. How can a man who sees the benefits of mutual respect and collaboration so clearly in the IT world, not see it in the real world?

Companies hire people who are right for the job they are expected to do. And clearly Eich was of great value to Mozilla as a programmer and a technologist, but when they made him CEO, they were saying that he was the right person to represent the company to the public. It was a bad, bad call.

I’m with Zizek and Badiou. I don’t believe you have to love thy neighbor. There are people I don’t love. There are whole groups of people I’d rather do without, but my obligation as a civilized person is to be polite and respectful and follow a live and let live policy wherever possible. I have my prejudices. I know what they are. I recognize them and I do my best not to act on them. I most certainly don’t seek to perpetuate them.

Mr. Eich has the right to be anti-gay. He has the right to feel however he wants to feel about gay marriage. He has the right to make that view public and donate to causes that support his views. But he does not, nor does anyone, have the right to do it without consequence. The paradox of free speech is that is it not free. In that we accept the consequences that may unfold because of what we choose to say publicly.

So when Mozilla decided to make Brendan Eich CEO of Mozilla, I decided that yes – it was their prerogative to do so, and it was his prerogative to be publicly anti-gay marriage, and it was my prerogative to change my browser and to say why I was doing it, publicly.

I have since received some rather nasty communications saying that I persecuted a man for his convictions. Persecution is not only a hyperbolic representation of what I did, but it is false. In the same way that Mr. Eich felt free to publicly support what I feel is an offensive piece of legislation (that didn’t pass, I’m happy to say), I felt free to say that I would not use the product of a company where he was CEO. A Chief Executive Officer is not just the most powerful position in a company, it is also very much a representative position. CEOs are the ultimate spokespersons for a company. If Mozilla was going to choose to let Eich represent them in that way, I was switching to Chrome.

But why am I bothered that some stranger, head of a company, doesn’t like gay marriage? Actually, it’s not specifically his anti-gay-marriage stance that bothered me. My concern stems from something Lacan called ‘the jouissance of Others.”

He attributed much of the world’s sexual, racial, religious and other prejudices to a subconscious envy that ate away at people. His believed that when people felt hatred or resentment, or sought to limit the opportunities of others, as a group, it was because they imagined that those ‘others’ had access to a more perfect form of pleasure. You see this especially in the kind of rhetoric that bigoted people spout. “Those lazy immigrants, they get all the good jobs and take all our welfare.” “Those faggots don’t have to take on the kind of family responsibilities I have to take on.” “Those sluts on birth control think they can fuck whoever they like.” There is, underlying this, a subtext that the speaker is victimized by and disadvantaged for his or her adherence to ‘normative’ rules. The irony about bigotry is that it so diminishes the bigot.

There is that seed of envy and resentment in each of us. It is irrational, it is unfounded, and it is one of the darker sides of our nature that any civilized person learns to repress. I expect anyone who is in a position of authority to tamp it the fuck down. I do.

People who are opposed to gay marriage, if you can get them past the irrational and inflexible cant of “marriage is a state between a man and a woman,” will tell you that gay marriage threatens the validity of THEIR marriage. How?

They can never tell you how. Because one person’s joy does not diminish another person’s joy in this case. Millions of gays and lesbians can get married and it won’t affect your heterosexual marriage one iota unless, of course, yours is so fragile, it needs to exist in a vacuum.

I am sorry for Mr. Eich. I’m sorry that his company put him in an unsuitable position and it resulted in a humiliating situation where he had to step down.

But more than that, I’m sorry that Mr. Eich believes, somewhere inside himself, that his conjugal happiness depends on some other couple’s misery.

But I am not sorry that the public airing of his prejudice had consequences for him.  That’s the price of free speech, especially when it’s hate speech.

Mozilla announced yesterday that Eich was stepping down as CEO. There’s an apologetic message from their executive chairwoman, Mitchell Baker, which reads, in my mind, rather self-servingly. Maybe I’m jaded. I’m not celebrating, and I won’t be moving back to Firefox. It was too much of a pain in the ass to shift over to Chrome.

There is a scene in the old Burton/Gardner film “Night of the Iguana” where Burton’s panicked character “Shannon” describes two levels of reality — one of them being the “fantastic” level.  This is not a good thing, any more than the original meaning of “terrific” meant something besides “great”!  I often feel a bit like Shannon when I watch or read the news –as if I have slipped into a realm at odds with all possible reality.  This has been one of those weeks; and sometimes the peculiarity is not the event itself (horrible as those may be), but the shit people SAY about it afterwards.

First, of course, the shootings at Ft. Hood — a horror to be sure, but as with most of America, one almost expects death from the end of a gun on an unfortunately regular basis.  Of course, America’s expectation is that soldiers will only shoot people they are TOLD to shoot.  Surprise!  Soldiers are flawed, sometimes even royally fucked OVER people who crack and go off the edge…and how MANY such soldiers are we creating, eh?  No, the emotional kill-shot for me was the three star general expostulating that the shooter was “not a wounded warrior,” and that he “had no purple heart.”  Ah, the logic that betrays makes my chin drop.

I get that the general was just operating without a proper idea of what the fuck was going on, I do.  A “purple heart” means a physical wounding — blood spilled, noted in ribbons and Army paperwork.  But not every wounded troop gets one, all the same.  Not every wound bleeds.  Just branding the shooter as having mental issues seemed pretty much the standard “random nut-job” definition.  If a general can’t manage better than that?  He should shut the fuck up.  Specially since a rather inhumane emergency leave policy might be what snapped this soldier — asking for leave to deal with family deaths and being told no or put off?  Yeah, cause that isn’t on the Army’s own shoulders, is it?  The military LIKES dicking with leave — they did it to my own son once; we had to call a Sergeant Major to ask why our son was granted no leave in over two years.  And while they all dither over a fucked up troop causing the death of his fellow soldiers, will nobody ask why it is ok for governmental NEGLECT to kill troops and veterans?

And then, summer being in sight (in spite of snow again?!) America’s thoughts turn to America’s game — misogyny baseball.  Imagine the nerve of a professional player, Daniel Murphy, taking his legally allotted paternity leave to be there for the difficult birth of his son.  And oh, the firestorm — you’d have thought HE had killed somebody if you listened to the asshole sports announcers.  Comments like “He could hire a nurse.”  Seriously?  You ASSHATS!  He is the child’s FATHER, and the woman’s HUSBAND.  For all that this nation spends a fair amount of time insisting every sperm is sacred life is sacred, they sure get pissy when anyone acts like an actual full-term living breathing baby should be treated like a human being.  Not to mention how pissed off they act at the idea that the post-surgical WOMAN might deserve some loving care and support from her husband.  

I have to say, baseball is very not my thing.  I actually don’t care much for professional sports  - grown men playing games for fabulous amounts of money while ordinary families choose groceries or heating oil, but not both?  Yeah, the boys of summer ain’t my priority.  And seeing their fans and announcers acting like tantrum tossing shitheads because a woman didn’t have her c-section EARLY for the convenience of their fucking game?  Makes me think all that much more that they can all go to hell in their own handbasket.

Oh, and Ms. Butterbutt herself, Paula Deen, after being legally called on her ingrained racism in her business dealings and losing business thereby?  She has shown her real class in her way of closing the restaurant where she acted like it was the good old plantation days — without a word to her now jobless employees.  Wow, that is a bit like slinking out of town at midnight to avoid creditors, what?  No, not at all treating employees like slaves serfs, Paula.

And I could go on, but I have a kitchen to work on….just had to let go of some steam so the wallpaper doesn’t peel off the den when I walk into the house.

Filed under: Life, Politics, Religious Nuts & Bolts, War & No Peace, War on Women Tagged: asshattery, birth, Ft Hood shooting, guns, labor rights, misogyny, moron media, ptsd, racism, sports

Because Right-Wingers use the dead to advance their beliefs. Conservatives are natural cowards who will never follow through with the BS they spout, as they lack the courage of their convictions.

However, they love when other people die because conservatives are grave robbers and fakes who have no right to speak for the dead.

The Second Fort Hood Shooting has reved up Dana Loesch, Jim Hoft, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity and so many other right-wing nut jobs to take to their medium, be it Faux News, Toxic Right-Wing Radio or the Right-Wing Internet Fart Bubble to blame everything from Obama's Lack of Military response to Putin in Crimea to President Clinton banning active duty military from carrying weapons on base but, never, ever the ubiquitous gun culture the Right has created and championed in the US.

Of course, it was the DoD under George Bush 41 who issued the 1992 directive which outlined when the carrying of firearms on base was authorized but, that fact is irrelevant to the larger right-wing purpose.

Allen West and Sean Hannity can try and speak somberly about on President Obama's unwillingness to accept a Post-9/11 World and failure to stand up Putin as the causes but, what's important is to consistently and reflexively Blame President Obama and Liberals for everything and to use the dead to advance right-wing beliefs.

What conservatives would love to see happen in the case of an active shooter on a military base is for other military members to come out hunting.

However, unlike, conservative fantasies, the bad guy does not have a Glowing Red X over his head indicating foe while other armed soldiers have Rotating Green O over theirs indicating good guy with a gun.

Friend and Foe recognition isn't automatic but, what do conservatives care? They won't be anywhere near the crossfire because conservatives don't serve in the military and aren't on base.

More guns is not the answer. It never has been. The death of American Sniper Chris Kyle last year could have caused Firearm Fanatics to re-evaluate their beliefs but because gun nuts are zealots and madmen, every shooting just serves to further entrench them and hardens their fanaticism.

Related:
Senior Breitbart Contributer and conservative hero Pat Dollard's tweet after the Second Fort Hood Shooting demanding that Americans take to the streets to start slaughtering muslims deserves mention. Back during the Presidency of George W(orst Ever) Bush, Dollard was invited onto Faux News regularly and in 2007 revealed so much of the modern conservatives, "This is a propaganda war, and if I can fight with a camera the same as a Marine with his rifle, I will."

Update:
True to form Speaker John Boehner is using the Second Fort Hood shooting to push for privitazation of VA Services. Of course, the Republican Plan would not address Mental Health or restrictions on guns but is a sick attempt to siphon off funds from the VA into the back accounts of the Rich.

Last night I got an email from a friend asking for my advice on how to respond to an acquaintance who viewed fat positive blogs on tumblr. After looking at a few blogs on tumblr they came away with the idea that fat stigma is an issue that only impacts white cisgender middle class women while also being horrified that we clearly disregard our own health. The first point, while being completely untrue, has far more to do with the hierarchy that has been created in fat spaces where fat people with the most privilege due to gender, class, race and even body size are given the most space.

That does not mean the community is a true reflection of fat people, as much as I wish it were, because if that were true the community as a whole would look drastically different and if this person looked a little further they would see that there is a good portion of the community that reflects that reality. The issue I’ve found are people disregarding the reality of who is impacted the most by fat stigma because they ignorantly believe that fat community is a true reflection of our society. This is part of the reason my own tumblr will rarely have anyone that looks like me and is filled with content that moves outside of the archetype created by fat community.

The lack of diversity is a huge issue in the community and that even harms the reality of what it means to be a fat person in regards to health, because when everyone thinks that fat people are white and middle class they falsely believe we all have access to health behaviors. This places soul blame on individual fat people for performing health in a way our society deems acceptable. For fat positive people that means preaching about health and proving to others that we may be fat but we are healthy. I’ve rejected this argument over the last few years for numerous reasons. People who demand we conform to an inaccessible performance of fatness, one that is based on proving health, are not actually interested in the humanity of fat people but in us performing for them and their comfort.

Those demands also harm fat people in the community who don’t perform fatness in a “socially acceptable” way due to numerous reasons but overwhelmingly you see that it has more to do with lack of access to health behaviors than just purely not caring. The emphasis outsiders place on fat people to perform fatness for their comfort is based within a neoliberal politic that demands individuals overcome whatever constraints on their lives to meet the demands of society. This was applied to the concept of health in the 80s by Robert Crawford when he coined the term healthism and the expectation that people can be healthy, transcending whatever barriers to health they have, if they have the will to do it.

I’m not here for that. My politic starts from the bottom up, so I’m not interested in performing fatness in a way that is socially acceptable to make other people comfortable. That is why I tweeting about the email I was sent and it turned into my dear friend @mazzie tweeting back with the hashtag #NotYourGoodFatty. I’m not interested in performing fat positivity in a way that harms other fat people by letting outsiders know I am meeting their demands on my body. I want to challenge those demands. I want people to work harder. I want them to think more about how if they were seriously concerned about the health of other people they would be fighting poverty not people.

Check out the hashtag here but here are a few tweets to get you started.

https://twitter.com/mazzie/status/451915334048813056

As always, connect with me on tumblr and twitter.

by Sarah Ovink

Women’s ever-increasing share of the student body on U.S. college campuses (57%, on average) is by now common knowledge. Hand-wringing in the national media over this gender reversal has also become commonplace, and includes worries about women’s dwindling dating prospects and speculation that we might see the number of stay-at-home-dads skyrocket in the coming years as women choose careers over child-rearing and family life.

As a sociologist of education, I read these stories with interest and some bemusement. While it is certainly true that women have come to outnumber men on college campuses, it is also true that men continue to out-earn women—even when comparing women and men with identical college majors, resumes, and career paths. Though women have undeniably made progress, is the college gender reversal also heralding a gender revolution in work and family life?

Curious as to whether women’s growing college success was, indeed, rewriting gender “rules,” I took a closer look at gender differences in my ongoing study of 50 Latino and Latina college aspirants. These 23 men and 27 women were high school seniors in the 2007-2008 academic year, and all of them aimed to complete a college degree. Using in-depth interviews with each of these young adults at three time-points, spanning a two-year period in their lives, I traced their post-high-school college and employment journeys. In my study, I focus on the influence of Latino/a familism, or the privileging of family interests over those of the individual, as a defining feature of these young Latinos/as’ college pathways. Familism influenced everything from where interviewees chose to attend college (usually close to home), to which major they picked, to how much was “worth” spending on college, especially when younger siblings were in the picture.

I found that, indeed, Latinas were more often enrolling in college and making progress toward a four-year degree. Women in my study perceived strong family pressure to finish college and establish careers before getting married and having children. However, their responses did not point to increasing gender equality as the reason why. Quite the contrary; Latinas felt they needed to attain a degree in order to earn independence—specifically, independence from men, in order to be free from worries about “needing a guy” for support. Rather than working to rewrite traditional gender “rules” about breadwinning and childcare arrangements, Latinas I spoke with sought merely to postpone the restrictions of conventional gendered family dynamics. All women interviewees expected to one day marry, and when they did, to “slow down,” care for children, and subordinate personal goals in favor of family interests. Latinos wanted a college education too, but their goals stemmed more from desires for prestige and higher pay, not fears of dependency. While both genders expressed familistic tendencies, I found that familism itself worked differently by gender. Gendered familism meant that Latinas and Latinos expressed different ideas about what it meant to put family interests first, how they planned to do so, and where college fit in their overall picture of family support.

Sarah M. Ovink, Virginia Tech, her article, “They Always Call me an Investment: Gendered Familism and Latino/a College Pathways,” was recently published in the April 2014 issue of Gender & Society.

Filed under: Uncategorized

I was somewhat surprised when I turned on the radi-adi-o and heard that some fella named Bruce Springstone covered one of my favorite songs by The Saints, an Australian band which released the first non-US punk single (a personal favorite of mine).

According to teh wiki, he debuted a live version in Australia, and followed it up with a single release this year:





Here's a recent live version by The Saints:





I'd compare The Saints to X- a band which matured from its punk roots to a more "rootsy", country-inflected sound. Hopefully, nobody in The Saints has become a 'bagger-friendly whackaloon. Yeah, that would be a bad thing.

Now, which other Australian punk bands are going to get a big American rawkstar to cover them? How soon before I hear a song by the Celibate Rifles:





Or the Radio Birdman (never knew their name was a mondegreen until today):





On the radi-adi-o?

In the home of the brave, free speech comes with a price tag, as the Supreme Court decided in a 5-4 (No! Really?) decision in the McCutcheon v. FEC case, which basically gives rich folks the license to print ballots.

Maybe I’m exaggerating a little, but here’s the deal—if putting your money where your mouth is, is a form of free speech, then some animals on this farm are obviously more equal than others, if laws that try to keep the rich from drowning out the voices of the not-so-much are seen as onerously violating the rights of the people who can afford to pay for this here microphone and mean to use it.

It kind of says, if you can’t afford to pay for the good sound system, you might as well shut up.

There was some dancing around in that decision about whether campaign financing was about quid pro quo—look, I get it. The decision for letting our politicians be bought outright was centered on not making it for each trick they turn out, but letting them perform on a retainer basis.  And that’s sweet, but let’s call it what it is. And let’s not pretend that our transactional political system isn’t about quid pro quo because the paymasters don’t give direction when our little dears can figure out what they are supposed to do to please Daddy without all that much direction.

Now, there might be an antidote to the influence of money in the form of a critical, tough, independent media who can cut through the “talk” of money and see to it that “bullshit” hits the road. A lot of our mainstream media might not necessarily recognize that cutting through the bull is their job, though. That’s kind of why I see blogging as important. Maybe this cosa nostra can strike a little bit back at the pezzanovantes that want to make peasants out of us. But otherwise, I encourage everybody to vote the fuck out of the GOP, because, let’s be honest, they are the most boughten and paidest-for. I’m all for kicking the Koch-machine—how’bout you?

(X-Posted at Strangely Blogged.)

American voters oppose the Affordable Care Act 55 - 41 percent and 40 percent are less likely to vote for a candidate who supports Obamacare, while 27 percent are more likely and 31 percent say this will not affect their vote.

Immigration also is a possible pitfall for candidates, as 39 percent of voters say they are less likely to vote for a candidate who supports a path to citizenship for illegal aliens, while 29 percent are more likely and 29 percent say it won't make a difference in their vote. 

But, there's good news for Dems too.

Reversing a slight shift to the Republican column, 40 percent of American voters now say they would vote for a Democrat for Congress this year, while 38 percent go Republican. Independent voters would vote Republican 35 - 27 percent.

And raising the minimum wage continues to be a big win in the D column with voters.

Raising the minimum wage is more popular as 50 percent say they are more likely to vote for a candidate who supports raising the minimum wage, with 25 percent less likely and 24 percent saying it won't affect their vote.

So no, immigration is not happening until the Dems get the House back.  But not raising the minimum wage is going to really hurt the Republicans, and the longer they hold out, the more it's going to haunt them.

…but in response to New York Mets second baseman Daniel Murphy taking three days off to attend the birth of his first child, WFAN radio host and former NFL quarterback Boomer Esiason said that Murphy should’ve forced his wife to have a C-section before Opening Day so he could “get his ass back to work.”

Murphy’s response most likely looked something like this:

The less offensive NYC radio host response was that paternity leave is a “scam,” a “gimmick,” and when a caller tried to say postpartum depression was real, the host shouted him down, yelling “Stop! Stop, stop, stop — no, stop! Don’t bring up postpartum.”

Stay classy, sports radio.

Bouie has been killing it at his new gig, and this is no exception:

Voting rights advocates have attacked these laws as blatant attempts to suppress the votes of low-income and minority voters, but Republicans defend their actions as justified to protect “voter integrity” and ensure “fairness” and “uniformity” in the system. Here’s Wisconsin state Sen. Glenn Grothman on a bill—signed last week by Gov. Scott Walker—to end early voting on weekends. “Every city on election day has voting from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. The idea that some communities should have weekend or night voting is obviously unfair,” he said. “It’s a matter of uniformity. I don’t know what all the hoopla is over,” he told Reuters.

The fact that some communities have a greater demand for voting than others reduces Grothman’s logic to obvious nonsense. To wit, under the constraints established by the new law, voters in the cities and large suburbs of Wisconsin are at a disadvantage compared to their rural counterparts. For example, Republicans have limited total early voting time to 45 hours during the week. In order to accommodate the number of early voters in 2012 under that time limit, explained Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, you’d have to have a voter cast a ballot every nine seconds. Areas with fewer voters, of course, would have an easier time.

The “uniformity” argument doesn’t make sense, either—but then, neither does the focus on in-person voter fraud, which doesn’t exist. Nonetheless, North Carolina Republicans cited fraud last year when—empowered by the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Voting Rights Act, which struck down the “pre-clearence” requirement—they passed a sweeping package of restrictions that cut early voting, ended same-day registration, introduced a strict photo identification requirement, and empowered independent “election integrity” groups to monitor polling stations and challenge voter credentials.

La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui assure le même nombre de cabines voitng dans quartiers urbaines denses et dans petites villes rurales!

The other thing to note about the transparently bad faith “uniformity” argument is that the American voting system is strikingly non-uniform, not only between states but generally within states, with pernicious consequences. But as we know, the Republicans who generally support this state of affairs are perfectly willing to pretend to care about uniformity to get results they like, so long as we understand that the question of uniformity presents many complexities and will not apply to any case where it doesn’t benefit Republicans.

While the unpaid internship is finally facing scrutiny from courts and government commissions, simply eliminating those positions doesn’t solve the problem of privilege. Further, reliance on a privileged class threatens both the publishing industry and society as a whole:

Media organizations, like all organizations and especially prestige ones, are rife with pernicious attitudes and biases that go undetected by those who hold them. This is hegemony in action, of course, though media people might defensively blame the business: when you’re tasked with putting together a big, exhausting, collaborative project every month or week, you’re more likely to fall back on familiar cues when deciding who to bring on board—cues, like schooling, that are inevitably bound up with class. This does a great deal of harm, intended or not.

Related Posts:

• Government Shut Down Round-Up, Part 2!
• “On Writing A Creep”
• The Violet Flowers Motel
• Unpaid Internships on the Rise

Melissa Gira Grant’s new book is causing all sorts of discomfort among liberals who are just flat not comfortable with thinking of sex work as labor. Katha Pollitt’s latest piece is an excellent example of this. Unfortunately, while Pollitt is writing in the language of second-wave feminism, she’s also writing in the language of prohibitionism. She tries to stigmatize a reality of the world as immoral, but in fact just reinforces a system by which women are in fact victimized. Even the poor women she accuses Grant of ignoring are not helped by keeping sex work illegal. If you legalize sex work, you are going to make it harder for underground sex operations that treat women terribly to continue because a major reason why they exist is that sex work is illegal and therefore stigmatized. That’s not to say sex work is great–it’s a bad job—but keeping it illegal does not promote the equality that Pollitt wants to see.

…To clarify one point, I realize Pollitt is not really calling for sex work to remain illegal, but by using language that separates it from other kinds of work as inherently and perhaps uniquely awful, it reinforces long-standing arguments used to keep it illegal. Quibble with my characterization if you’d like, but I just wanted to clarify this point a bit.

True understanding rarely arrives as anything whole. The most profound of it comes to us most often in glimmers and in shards, flickers and fragments, information that swirls around, perhaps chaotic, until one day we know something that we didn’t know before.

I saw a picture of my father recently, ran into it among old photographs during a recent move. I’m still startled by unexpected images of him, though he died more than twelve years ago. The primitive fear that photographs may steal our souls has this flip-side in experience for me; at the sight of a photograph of my father, I feel the presence of his soul. I feel him flash through me. And then I feel, again, the dizziness of loss. And only then am I steadied to see him. Him. His face.

He looks happy in this picture, leaning up against a window of his old office. Images of my father smiling are ones to which I have a particular response, something like gratitude. See! He could be happy. Here is some evidence of ease and of joy. Despite it all. Despite all the undeniable sadness and all of the fears, there were undoubtedly also these moments of delight.

*

In the summer of 2002, just more than a year after my father’s death, my husband and I were dining with a close friend, at his seaside home. A congenial trio, we were all the more so that night with the help of a generous supply of alcohol. The grilled steaks were excellent. A fire blazed in the fireplace, and music we could all agree on – Jimmy Buffet singing ballads, to match our seaside locale – hovered in the air.

I don’t remember why or how talk turned that night to the subject of religion, though it’s a topic that emerges easily enough from me. I have always clung fiercely to my identity as a Half-Southern Methodist/Half-Jew, exercising my prerogative as a self-proclaimed mutt to jettison neither side but maintain instead an idiosyncratic and inherently paradoxical duality of religion inside myself. Fifty-one years old now, I have, for the most part, given up trying to persuade anyone that this is no more or less rational than any other religious identity. I have, for the most part, given up. But as I say the topic arises easily enough and there remains a certain defensiveness in me around my right to maintain a sense of Christianity inside myself.

My husband is Jewish, as is my former husband, the father to my two eldest children. For many reasons, not the least of which can be summed up in the phrase critical mass, all three of my children have been “raised Jewish,” meaning they attended religious school, they have become Bar and Bat Mitvot.

We were all a little tipsy at that beachside dinner when the subject of my father’s Christianity arose. Tipsy enough for me to use the word Jewthodist to describe myself and think it very witty, and tipsy enough for our dinner companion, a Jew, to express incredulity at the idea that my father, a man of intellect and in many contexts good sense, well-known for being a logical thinker, believed that Jesus Christ was the son of God. Literally. The actual son. And, perhaps most impressively, tipsy enough for my husband to look amused, rather than terrified as this all too delicate discussion took place.

“Impossible,” this friend declared of my father’s Christian faith. “He can’t actually have thought that God and Mary had a child.”

“But he did.”

“I don’t believe it.” Our friend shook his head, as he poured more wine into my glass. “He was too intelligent. It’s incomprehensible.”

“Okay.” I leaned forward, a little heavily from drink. “Here’s what I don’t understand. I don’t understand why once you accept the existence of an all powerful immortal being, of God, why it’s any more irrational to think he chose to procreate. Or, for that matter, play golf. The leap, I would think, is between thinking there is a God and not. Not between thinking that there is a God and then thinking he would or wouldn’t do this or that. After you accept the existence of God, the rest seems like details to me.”

To which my friend replied, “You’re absolutely right. I no longer believe in God.”

Later, in the remorseful after-glow, my husband assured me that my brilliant, drunken rhetoric hadn’t actually robbed a true believer of many decades worth of comforting faith.

“I think he was yanking your chain,” he said.

And of course he was right.

So the puzzle that remains for me from this exchange has little if anything to do with my drinking buddy’s religious beliefs. The puzzle for me still is why I placed the words “comforting” and “faith” together in a clause, as though it were obvious that they should be linked.

A puzzle, because, as my father’s daughter, I had good reason to know better than that.

*

The fact that my father was a devout Christian was hardly a secret, though he never attended church with any regularity. Nor did he pray at meals or wear a cross around his neck or in any other way wear his religion on his sleeve. But still I knew, while growing up, that he believed. Occasionally, he said so outright. He was prone to declarations of position on matters that mattered to him, and religion was no exception. And there were other signs, unmistakable, and in some cases indisputably odd.

When I was ten, my pet guinea pig died. My father, sparing me the grisly aspects of this death as he could not later do with his own, wrapped the tiny body in a handkerchief and drove it to a garbage can outside the nearby United Methodist Church to deposit it there. Standing over the garbage can, he recited a prayer he had composed on a 3×5 index card: Dear Lord, Snowball was a sweet, good guinea pig. If there is a guinea pig heaven, I hope and pray you will find a place for her there. Then he slid this card and a note recounting what he had done under my bedroom door.

The story takes a short detour into comedy here, because for reasons of delicacy my father eschewed the phrase “garbage can” and replaced it with the word “receptacle” the result being that with the willingness of a child to think anything possible, I believed for a time that he had put Snowball’s rigid rodent corpse in the Goodwill collection box outside the church, and until my mother set me straight, this miscommunication misdirected my understanding of the event and I thought, quite simply, that Dad had done something far too weird to be remotely comforting to me or anyone. But once we cleared up the meaning of the word receptacle, I was struck by the reality of the faith that had driven him to do what he did.

He never made any attempt to transmit his belief to my generation. Couples who are of mixed religions can take any of many different paths. My parents chose to incorporate the celebrations of Judaism and Christianity into our home, but not the beliefs. There was no proselytizing from either side – only presents and food: at Christmas, at Passover, at Easter, at Hanukah. Candy canes, matzo balls, chocolate bunnies and chocolate monies, too. But no articles of faith.

Far more conspicuous than my father’s religious conviction, was his unhappiness. In my eulogy of him, I described him as “melancholic by nature” and as the word melancholic has a purposefully archaic feel to it, so too do other words that might describe his emotional state. Haunted. Tortured. Tormented. Woven into my earliest memories is the sight of my father, day after day, sitting in our kitchen, an enormous cup of tea steaming by his side, a pipe hanging from his mouth, his head drooped heavy into his hand, looking up to meet my gaze as I approached, rolling his eyes in all too clear pain. Shaken, obviously, by what night had once again delivered unto him.

“I’ve never had a good night’s sleep in my life. I have nightmares, Baby. . .” He would tremble a little, shudder at the memories. “Nightmares so terrible, I won’t tell you what they are.”

And indeed, he never did, but even so, these nightmares of my father’s haunted me. Often, as I lay in my bed, I would hear him rattling in our attic, moving from one room of his office suite to another, unable to sleep. Or unwilling to. Resisting the nightly descent into the horror of his own unconscious being. And I would find my own thoughts drift with the elastic envisioning of a child’s sleepy mind into imagining what realm could be so terrifying as to linger over him, diminishing his enjoyment of every following day.

*

Everything we know is made of puzzle pieces scattered, occasionally joined. Only in the joining can we know that the pieces are part of the same puzzle. Only then.

“I’ve spent every night of my life trying to forgive my parents,” he used to say.

At what point did I ask him “forgive them for what?” I’m not sure I ever did, but the story emerged through the years.

“They beat me, baby. They whooped me till I shook.”

There was a tree in the yard, he said, and he had been required to select the branches that they used. “It had to be a good one, too. You couldn’t try to cheat.” There had been alcohol involved, lots and lots of alcohol, and beatings that blended into other beatings until few stood out, distinct. There had been one, though, one so devastating that my father recounted his own father regretting it decades later, as he himself neared death. “We went too far that time. That time it was too much,” my father heard his own father say. “That one time we went too far.”

Comfort. I believe my father took some comfort from that exchange.

But where my father failed to find comfort, was in his faith.

Hell became a practical problem for our family when we suggested to him, dying then, that he might want to sign a Do Not Resuscitate order, a DNR. He was eighty-four years old and riddled with so many illnesses that when I asked my mother, “Is there anything Dad doesn’t have?” her answer was, “Only teeth.”

The disease that got him in the end was a rare form of skin cancer that itself carried a whiff of myth to it, a cautionary tale about the futility of outrunning one’s own history. Ancient mistakes, unknown as such at the time, can lurk, later to emerge from our own narratives, fatal finally. The cancer appeared as he passed eighty, first on his nose, barely noticeable. But those small patches grew, devouring his skin, ultimately causing the disintegration of that feature, and indeed much of his face, working its way through him like a singularly malicious curse – though the true origin was x-ray treatments he had received for acne, given in the late 1920’s or early 30’s.

My father’s reaction to the suggestion of a DNR was simple and shocking all at once. He wanted to talk to a Catholic priest. He wanted to know if signing would be tantamount to suicide and would result in his being damned to Hell. He wasn’t a Catholic – he had always balked at the doctrine of Papal infallibility – but he wanted the strictest possible reading of the rules, and he wasn’t taking any chances with the Methodists.

The priest who appeared assured him that even the Catholics have no problems with DNR’s, and the document was signed. So that was the end of that. Except of course that it wasn’t the end for me – because of what I’d learned.

Hell.

Hell is a metaphor to me. It is the act of imagining unimaginable pain. It is paintings I have seen, words that I have read. It is the idea of something being as bad as one can imagine; and then worse than that. It is a rhetorical device, a challenge to the imagination, a fear tactic; and not a real place. Hell does not exist for me.

But it did exist for my father. That was what I learned. Hell was an all too real possibility, drawing ever closer in the months before his death.

It comes back again to the question of why somebody else’s religious beliefs can seem unbelievable. As the priest came and left, and my father’s nurse witnessed the mark that he made on the page, it was unbelievable to me that my father was worried – as one worries about some practical issue like running out of gas or whether the milk is fresh – about eternal damnation.

During those final months, the Fall of 2000, early 2001, my father hovered between lucidity and delusion. All of the faculties that are likely to fail, did. The bladder, the bowels, the brain. He lost track of time and of place, lost his knowledge of who each of us was – and then knew everything again for days at a time. The physical, the emotional, the spiritual, past, present, the unimaginable future; all are loosely joined, reconfigured, in slow and certain death.

I have wondered, writing this, whether I care when the pieces fell together for me, when I gained an understanding of my father’s lifelong sleepless nights, but I have decided it doesn’t matter whether it was before or after the stroke he had that December, whether it was while I was in the room with him, perched beside him on his bed, or miles away, cooking dinner, in my own home. All that matters is that as my father’s reality fell into fragments, certain shards of it reassembled, inside of me.

There was a conversation in his room. I used to say of Dad’s study, where he spent his final illness and where he died, that it was the externalization of his Id. The space was crowded, bursting to overflow with his artwork, his books, his trumpet, souvenirs of travels with my mother, pictures of us all, drawings by his grandchildren. Even the smells – turpentine, tobacco, urine – competed for space, overlapping and creating new versions of themselves. When I describe myself as “my father’s daughter,” when I find the connection that a child naturally seeks, part of what I locate is this odd combination of clarity and chaos that has always resided within us both. Certain corners of his study would reveal themselves to be orderly, files alphabetized, aspects of his work recorded perfectly. But the overall impression was that a none too careful ransacking had occurred.

We were sitting on his bed, our feet dangling over the side, his, feeble and swollen twice their healthy size. And of course we were smoking. After more than seventy years of puffing away, my father had gratefully reached an age and stage at which everyone had stopped nagging him to stop. I haven’t smoked for years and never did very much, but always did around him – another sought connection, perhaps. By the time this conversation took place, he had grown too weak to grasp a cigarette, so I held one in each of my hands, placing his between his lips as I took a drag from my own.

My father had a lifelong habit of speaking from the train of his own thoughts, as though the listener had been privy to them and could easily join in. “I have tried and I have failed,” he said to me.

“To do what?”

“I cannot forgive those two people. But baby, I have done nothing but try.”

“Dad, it’s understandable. . .”

He shook his head. “Honor thy father and mother,” he said to me. “So commands the Lord. And I cannot. Baby, I have failed.”

My father had a face that could express a depth of sadness defying measurement. The light brown of his eyes seemed to come from a palette mixed purposefully for the depiction of grief. And as this conversation occurred, that face had already been ravaged by disease. The smoke that he inhaled, he exhaled through only vestiges of what had been a beautiful, even noble nose. In his final months he seemed more ancient than merely old.

But speaking of his parents then, he became a boy again. Childhood visited his being, catching up with him in the end, so I could see him, clearly, see who he was to himself. Somebody’s son.

I didn’t know what to say. I told him something I believed but that I don’t think helped him at all. I said that he was misreading the fifth commandment – giving it too strict an interpretation to make any logical sense. “I think that by devoting your life to trying to forgive your parents for what they did, you have honored them,” I said. “It can’t mean never dishonor your parents, never feel anger at them – because if it does, we’re all guilty for all our lives. If it does, it’s just an impossible commandment to fulfill.”

But nobody can define for anyone else what they believe. This has been my position all along. Nobody can convince me that it is impossible to be both Jewish and Christian at the same time. And I was not able to talk my father out of the conviction that he had let down his God.

Was he still alive when I understood that this was what kept him up at night for all those years? I don’t know. The logic of it, the poetry of it too, fell gradually on me, until I knew it was those intimations of Hell that filled his dreams, the Hell that he feared would welcome him at his death, because he had not been able to forgive his parents for abusing him, for making him choose the branches that they used, for taking turns at whooping him until he shook.

Somewhere in the heart of every abused child lies the suspicion that he or she deserves the abuse. The abused child who fathered me was no exception to this rule, and at the intersection of emotion and of faith, he devised an unimaginably terrible punishment for himself.

My father has been gone for more than twelve years now. And I often wonder why I cling with such tenacity and against the tide of my own household to a religion that I believe brought him such extraordinary pain. It might be more logical, more sensible, to disavow what caused someone I love those thousands upon thousands of nightmare-filled nights.

But then there are those words before me on the page: Logical. Sensible. Religion. Believe. And I should know better by now than to try to pull these particular puzzle pieces together into a rational whole. I should know better than to seek in logical argument an alternative to being who I am: the daughter who herself fought sleep as a child, listening to his footsteps, fearing that his nightmares might mingle with my own. The daughter who cannot ever disentangle or disavow his half of me.

He is buried near my house and when I visit him, I talk to him. And at times I pray – in my own way. I pray for my father to have found the peace I never doubt that he deserves. I pray for the shattered little boy he was to be somehow healed. But I haven’t recorded my prayers on a 3×5 index card, to slip under the door of a grieving child. I have written this instead.

***

Feature photo credit, Second and third photo credit.

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White House officials sought valuable primetime air for a rare, impromptu Tuesday night address to tout the accomplishment of signing up more than 7 million people under the Affordable Care Act.

But network officials refused to make the kind of accommodation they did previously for the announcement that Osama Bin Laden had been killed, for instance, and Obama was left instead cutting into the much smaller audiences ofEllen and other daytime shows.

Three sources familiar with the request confirmed the White House asked for the primetime slot in their effort both to emphasize a bright moment following the challenging roll out and, more important, to try to reintroduce the country to a law that remains unpopular. One top White House official referred BuzzFeed to another top official for comment on the conversation with networks, but the second official did not respond to a request for comment.

People familiar with the request declined to reveal which network blocked the primetime address, but broadcast networks have traditionally been much more reluctant than cable networks to provide the White House with evening air time.

Million dollar question:  when's the last time a President was flatly turned down by all the networks for an Oval Office address? 

Steve M. has the answer: it happened to Bush in October 2002.  He gave a primetime speech outlining his case for Iraq but only the cable networks carried it.

And then it happened again in May 2004 when Bush was speaking at the US Army War College.  Same thing, the cable networks carried it, but even FOX stuck to May sweeps programming.

So yes, it's disrespectful, but it happened to Dubya first.

Fox News reports:

A new report from the conservative-leaning American Action Forum, shared exclusively with FOXBusiness.com, shows hiking the minimum wage hurts hiring.

The study looks at the 19 states that have minimum wages above the national rate of $7.25 an hour, as well as the 31 states in which the minimum wage is equal to the national average. The report finds that in 2013, a $1 increase in the minimum wage was associated with a 1.48 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate.

What’s more, this $1 hike also led to a 0.18 percentage point decrease in the net job growth rate, a 4.67 percentage point increase in the teen unemployment rate and a 4.01 percentage point decrease in the teenage net job growth rate. Overall, the AAF reports that high state minimum wages increased unemployment by 747,700 workers and reduced job growth by 83,300 jobs.

The study, “How Minimum Wage Increased Unemployment and Reduced Job Creation in 2013,” is published on AAF’s website.

I’ve read it, and I don’t think it’s persuasive, for two reasons: First, it’s an outlier, and second, its methodology compares apples and oranges, because it compares entire states rather than economically similar regions.

1) In 2009, Hristos Doucouliagos and T. D. Stanley – both PhD economists who are published experts in meta-analysis (they literally wrote the book on the subject, har har har) – “conducted a meta-study of 64 minimum-wage studies published between 1972 and 2007 measuring the impact of minimum wages on teenage employment in the United States. When they graphed every employment estimate contained in these studies (over 1,000 in total), weighting each estimate by its statistical precision, they found that the most precise estimates were heavily clustered at or near zero employment effects.”¹

Doucouliagos and Stanley concluded, “Two scenarios are consistent with this empirical research record. First, minimum wages may simply have no effect on employment… Second, minimum-wage effects might exist, but they may be too difficult to detect and/or are very small.” Here’s their graph:

So this AAF study is, at best, an outlier. The evidence from 64 minimum-wage studies shows that the minimum wage either has no effect on teen unemployment, or that whatever effect it does have is extremely small.²³

2) In 2010, in a study published in The Review of Economics and Statistics (pdf link), Arindrajit Dube, T. William Lester, and Michael Reich showed that minimum wage studies “that do not account for local economic conditions tend to produce spurious negative effects due to” regional effects in employment “that are unrelated to minimum wage policies.”⁴

In other words, if you don’t control for regional differences in employment, it will look as if the minimum wage is correlated with higher unemployment; but the moment you account for regional differences, that finding disappears.

This is why the best studies of the minimum wage compare contiguous counties in neighboring states. The counties used to test minimum wage effects are, as much as possible, within a single economic region, except that one is in a state that has just raised its minimum wage. In other words, good studies compare apples with apples. The AAF’s hamhanded study, in contrast, simply compares entire states, as if the only significant economic difference between (say) Oregon and George were minimum wage levels. They’re comparing apples and oranges.

(To be fair, the AAF study also controls for high school graduation rates. But that is literally the only confounding factor they consider. Nothing else – not region, not college graduation rates, not industry – is controlled for.)

How did they make such an amateur mistake? Possibly because this study was conducted by an amateur. Ben Gitis, who conducted the AAF study, graduated from college (undergraduate) less than a year ago, according to his AAF bio. Gitis majored in econ, but he’s not an economist, and he doesn’t know how to objectively measure effects of the minimum wage.

1. I’m quoting John Schmitt’s excellent overview of the debate; pdf link.
2. Another recent meta-analysis, by Dale Belman and Paul Wolfson (pdf link), had similar results, concluding “that there is a negative and generally statistically significant employment effect which is between small and vanishingly small.”
3. To be fair, economists themselves seem to be split on the question of what effect the minimum wage has. However, a majority agreed that the minimum wage’s positive effects outweighed any negative effects.
4. In 2011, Dube and Reich replicated their finding using a different dataset, this time focusing on teen unemployment. Allegretto, Sylvia A., Arindrajit Dube, and Michael Reich. 2011. “Do Minimum Wages Really Reduce Teen Employment? Accounting for Heterogeneity and Selectivity in State Panel Data.” Industrial Relations, vol. 50, no. 2, pp. 205-240.

In another thread, Ron wrote:

The ACA is one example, when even the then-Speaker of the House said that Congress would have to vote for it to find out what’s in it…

Ron, regarding that Pelosi quote, here’s how Politico reported it the day Pelosi said it:

Pelosi: People won’t appreciate reform until it passes

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Tuesday that people won’t appreciate how great the Democrat’s health plan is until after it passes.

“You’ve heard about the controversies, the process about the bill…but I don’t know if you’ve heard that it is legislation for the future – not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America,” she told the National Association of Counties annual legislative conference, which has drawn about 2,000 local officials to Washington. “But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it – away from the fog of the controversy.”

During a 20-minute speech, she touted benefits she thinks will be tangible to the audience’s employers. She said there’s support for public health infrastructure and investments in community health centers that will reduce uncompensated care that hospitals now need to deliver.

“You know as well as anyone that our current system is unsustainable,” said Pelosi (D-Calif.). “The final health care legislation, which will soon be passed by the Congress, will deliver successful reforms at the local level.”

She was saying that Americans won’t fully appreciate everything they get from Obamacare until it’s been implemented and in place for a while. She was NOT saying “Congress would have to vote for it to find out what’s in it.” There is simply no reasonable interpretation of Pelosi’s quote, in context, which would lead a fair observer to conclude she was saying Congress didn’t know what it voted for. (Indeed, if you read the full text of her speech, she had just spent two paragraphs describing some of the ACA’s specific effects.)

I can understand why you’d be mistaken about that – the media (and in particular right-wing media) has lied about what Pelosi said, if not from day one, then certainly from day two or so. But now that you’ve been told the truth, I hope you won’t repeat that canard again.

Incidentally, I defy anyone to name any legislation in our lifetime that has been more thoroughly covered in more detail before passage than the ACA. We had two years – at least – of play-by-play discussion of every legislative proposal related to the ACA before it passed. There was commentary from specialized ACA-beat reporters and health economists constantly available on the web the whole time. I’m not saying knowledge was perfect – it never is. But anyone who complains that information on the ACA wasn’t available before passage must have kept their head shoved firmly in their pants for two years or more, because that’s the only way to have so completely missed out on that news story.

The post Demolishing the Red Road appeared first on .

It’s about time I got back to this and finished it up.

“City Enormities–Every Brute Can Beat His Beast,” New York, 1874

OK, this is not technically yet a dead horse. But it’s probably going to be pretty soon, as this image showing the horrible treatment urban horses received demonstrates. The dead horse problem was huge in American cities. In 1880, New York carted away 15,000 dead horses off the streets, weighing an average of 1300 lbs. This was a huge health and disposal problem in a society woefully underprepared for the growth of American cities. As late as 1912, Chicago still had 10,000 dead horses to deal with in a society transitioning to the automobile. This didn’t even begin to get to the problem of horse manure in cities without any mandates to horse owners on the collection of the stuff. Each horse created 15-30 lbs of manure a day. In Milwaukee during these years, that was 133 tons of horse manure every day.

So the horse in the American city was a major problem that would not be solved until the 1910s.

freedominwickedness:

hyenaboy:

“Yes, being in a female dominated field, I do know what it means to be marginalized. “

oh

my

god

omg

oh my fucking god

The really ugly part is they’ve actually done multiple sociological studies on this, and guess what the result is? Men in female-dominated fields aren’t marginalized at all; they get special treatment and are fast-tracked to the top, getting more credit for their work, faster promotions, and greater pay and benefits than their female colleagues.

Here’s one study. Here’s another. And another.

I’ve actually experienced this myself.  When I was read as male I worked in women’s clothing stores and departments, and rather than treat me as less knowledgeable, customers assumed I was MORE knowledgeable and preferred to talk to me because they assumed that if men (or people they perceived as men) were in a “women’s” field, they must be REALLY qualified.  Sometimes they would assume I was the manager.  And I really didn’t know anything, but they took my word as gospel.

The opposite is true now, when people read me as a woman and I’m doing something computer related.  Despite that that IS something I have a background in, people tend to assume I don’t know anything, are skeptical at what I say, and prefer to get a man to help them, because they feel more confident in what he says, even if it’s wrong. 

In my experience, people don’t assume that women in male dominated fields must be there because they have superior knowledge or ability, they assume they’re the weakest link in the chain.  But for men, they assume they must be the strongest link to have made it in.  Regardless of whether a field is male or woman dominated, the ideas we have in society about men being more knowledgeable, rational, able to solve problems, determined, and as the most reliable narrators still persist. 

killbenedictcumberbatch:

drugdoer:

A hero’s journey

this gif is like 20 seconds but it was like watching an entire movie

Woah, look at his acceleration and speed.  The team should try him out.