We hate Iran's gov't, Love 1/2 of Lebanon's gov't, Hate 1/2 of Lebanon's gov't, and Love terroristic U.S. enemies who hate our hated 1/2 of Leb's govt

Get this. I heard it on the radio last night.

• The majority coalition currently governing Lebanon is pretty much fine with whatever foreign policy the United States decides to pursue.
  They are led by Sunni Muslims.


• The biggest party in a minority coalition, which wants the majority coalition to share more decision-making power with the minority coalition (for example, the way our congressional committees have to be at least partly filled with members of the minority party/ies).
  This largest party is Hezbollah.
  Yes, it's both a paramilitary organization and a political party at once.
  Anyway, Hezbollah is very much against 85+% of the foreign policy that the United States wants to pursue (or that the United States tells other people in Europe & the Middle East to pursue and impose upon Lebanon). Heck, they take the propaganda so far that some people just say that Hezbollah "hates America." Whether or not that's a fair assessment (do they hate "America" or just our foreign policy ever since the European powers left the region?) I can't say.
  Hezbollah is led by Shiite Muslims.


• Also existing in Lebanon are militant / paramilitary groups that "hate America" (and they DO seem more likely to be thinking about more than just foreign policy's effects on Lebanon, since they don't think about politics and governance nearly as much as Hezbollah).
  They are made up of Sunnis.
  Even though they're very anti-American and anti-governments-who-support-America's-ideas and even though at least some members from each of these 3 paramilitary Sunni groups has buddies from back in the day in Afghanistan or some other connection to Al-Quaeda, we and the Lebanese governing majority have decided that, hey, they'll fight Shi'ite-led Hezbollah without turning on us or the Lebanese once they're done, right?
  Because they're Sunnis, and so is the Lebanese government's majority coalition leadership!

As my roommate said when I told her about this, "I think we've tried that in other places already. And had it not work."


*sigh*

(By the way, such groups, up to a couple of years ago, used to be given a swift kick in the pants out of Lebanon. Now, at our encouragement, the Lebanese government has been letting them stay & even work on their training. That's right...we're encouraging the Lebanese government to let them stay while we're chastising the Pakistani government for letting practically identical groups stay. But, hey, the Pakistani militants who are Sunni aren't helping the Pakistani Sunni government kill someone else we don't like, so it's okay to stick to the old sensible line about, "Get rid of your terrorists!" when talking to Pakistan.)

Read the rest of this entry




The bigger narrative I heard that story within is the idea that if we get all the Sunni-led countries in the Middle East to do 2 things, Hezbollah and Iran will both lose out.

• Why do we want Hezbollah to lose out? Because, at the mildest, we think they'll change Lebanese foreign policy if they come to power.
• Why do we want Iran to lose out? Because Dick Cheney thinks that if Iran develops a bomb (despite the fact that all their mullahs who ACTUALLY control President Ahmadinejad have issued religious edicts that they absolutely oppose letting the government use a nuclear bomb on anyone) it'll give it to a Shi'ite led paramilitary group.
  (And this is the "at the worst" scenario that "we" think Hezbollah could do--Cheney thinks that Hezbollah has enough people within the United States to get an Iranian-donated bomb from Iran to Palo Alto or Washington & set it off.)

So, if Cheney's right about Iran, Hezbollah, & nukes, well, okay, he's saved us all. But if he's wrong about any piece of that puzzle (such as Iran actually wanting to nuke anyone or such as Iran just handing a bomb over to people they're not 100% allies with), we don't actually need to DO anything against Iran OR Hezbollah to make it not come true. It simply won't come true on its own.

Anyway, based on those assumptions about what would--oh no!--happen if Hezbollah and/or Iran weren't completely shut down, our government has decided to talk all the Middle East's Sunni-led countries to do things that keep Iran & Hezbollah from effectively doing ANYTHING (not just military & paramilitary activity--more like keep them from ruling at all, which, of course, would be bad, because it'd also cut off water supplies, police forces, museum staff, etc. just like it did in Iraq).

However, those countries aren't just going to send in their troops the way old-fashioned allies did. They say, "Okay. We'll send money to paramilitary groups who also happen to be Sunni, just like us. They'll try to kill lots of Hezbollah politicians and civil servants in Lebanon. Others will try to kill lots of Iraqi politicians and civil servants who happen to be getting money from the Iranian government in Iraq."

D'oh!

Guess who those groups Egypt, Jordan, & Saudi Arabia are pitching in funds to on our behalf? Groups with ties to a group that attacked us 5 years ago! Again, what are we going to do when these trained (Sunni) people have new weapons, lots of money left over, and are simply done fighting Shi'ite Iraqis in Iraq or Shi'ite Lebanese in Lebanon? What are we going to do when it's more advantageous for them to use their weapons on Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, or the United States?

Are we going to switch teams again and hope we can make it work? (Apparently the whole reason we've been supporting a Shi'ite-led, Iran-friendly government in Iraq for the last few years is that the White House didn't believe our intelligence community when they said, "Ummmm...if you think Iran's on the Axis of Evil, you might not want to kick all the Ba'athists out of the government. You're going to get a pro-Iranian government if you let the Shi'ites take over completely." The White House apparently thought, "Naaaah! Iraqi Shi'ites hate Iranian Shi'ites! They'd never work with them after that big war between their countries!" Can you BELIEVE we threw out a Sunni dictator partly on the premise that he wasn't even representative of his country's populace, only to re-support Sunni paramilitary groups in Iraq? What are we going to let them do? Install a Sunni dictator? D'oh!)




I don't even have any idea what to write to Congresspeople about this one. I don't think debates in Congress get as detailed as this situation is. I guess the best we can do is keep hoping they say, "You're not allowed to bomb Iran!" or something.

I can't imagine a bunch of them saying, all together, "You're not allowed to bomb Iran, you have to stop sending money to Lebanon's Sunni terrorists and telling other governments to send money to Lebanon's Sunni terrorists, and you have to tell Egypt, Jordan, & Saudi Arabia to stop sending money to Iraq's Sunni terrorists. (And, of course, while you're at it, for the love of all that is holy TALK to Iran and tell them to stop sending money to Iraq's Shi'ite terrorists if that's what you want them to do!)" Congress just doesn't get as complex as that. What a shame.




What do you think?

Fire glued to body parts

After reading Female Chauvinist Pigs and the Packaging Girlhood blog, I do think that burlesque is overrated on the "empowering" scale. I have this sense of, "Can't people just admire these same talents to the same extent when done by these women with their clothes on? No? Well, that's a damned shame."

And after starting to read blogs, I've been horrified to discover that reasons to be uncomfortable with stripping as a major way women can earn money go far beyond that concern above. (Oh, and in breaking news, there's this terrible story, too!)



But apparently, there're also 62-year-olds who've perfected their art and learned to so finely control the motion of their breasts that they can spin tassels that're on fire.

WOW!
I almost want to buy a ticket to Las Vegas (nat'l. burlesque competition) just to go see her.

(That and cheer loudly for the women in our local burlesque troop who're competing and who told me the story.)

Public Housing

David Smith does it again: today he's crowded my browser's Bookmarks list with another "keeper" of a post.

Similar to this post (whose key words are "eyes on the street" and "defensible space"), today's entry uses economics and other disciplines to discuss bad things happening in geographical concentrations of people.

not

"You must make X% of my income to have your dick sucked"

On "Feminist Allies," Jeff cited an article he found cited on "Feminist Critics." In that article, an interviewee complained that she was very unhappy when she had to be in charge of people at work and in the household.

(Interestingly, neither site diverged onto the discussion of whether or not men "could" handle being "in charge" both at work and in the household back when that was entirely expected of them. Do Jeff or HughRistick or the interviewee in that quoted article feel that men are naturally able to juggle this, or do they feel that the years we spent making them do both were as terrible of conditions for men as women like the author of this article now think are so terrible for women?)

She implied that

1. men who don't have some sort of status outside of the household won't act like they're in charge in the household and that
2. to keep a heterosexual relationship happy, she and other women need to live out the [at least partly] submissive aspect of a traditional woman's role in the household.

Though she implied she was fine with being in charge at work and making a significant salary, she also seemed to be saying that it's very difficult to maintain happiness with a man who isn't even close to her outside-the-household status, not because of financial stresses, but simply because of the way his outside-the-household status impairs his ability to adopt a role inside the household that would please her.

Interesting.

However, I feel like she generalized her experience too far and incorrectly applied her theory about "what's wrong in my relationship with a man of this sort" to her sex life when she wrote, "I’m not going to pay the bills—I feel like his mother—and then come home and suck his dick."
Click the link to read this post in full

She generalized it too far because switching to crude language implies that you're one of the masses--that surely everyone shares your experience, right?

And why don't I think the masses feel that her theory of outside-and-inside-the-household-roles sums up the problems with their oral sex lives? Because I think that, given how it's assumed most people in 2007 feel about the merits of sex for mutual fun vs. sex for one powerful person's fun, the "normal" status of a member of "the masses" (true or not--maybe I should say the normative status, but that's why I put "normal" in quotes) is someone who has sex "because it feels good" and considers BDSM "kinky" or "weird."



This woman should think about whether she as an individual even wants to have sex orally if the only way it’s appealing to her is to think of it as a favor to a more powerful person.

I’m not saying she shouldn’t do it at all--maybe she’ll come to the conclusion that she as an individual needs a couple of power-and-submission-based sexual activities to keep her happy in a sexual relationship.** But if that’s the case, she should explain that so there’s some context. Otherwise, readers assume that she fits into that "normal" category of people--people who don’t need such things to keep them happy in a sexual relationship, and those readers read her as speaking for such people.



The thing is, if you read it as though she were speaking for such people, she makes them sound pretty fucked up. If she represents them, then even people who don’t get any sexual pleasure out of power-and-submission acts in bed somehow "need" to perform acts of submission in bed to be...happy, I guess.

Weird.

**(However, if she doesn’t, AND if she also finds no purely sexual appeal in feeling her partner get sexually stimulated on account of what she’s doing with her mouth, THEN I’d recommend that she abstain from sucking dick altogether.)

Couscous

I'd like to extend a heartfelt thank-you to the people, past and present, of North Africa for inventing and preserving couscous.

I just had a bite or two at lunch in the cafeteria today. Marvelous!

I experienced a little bit of heaven.

IMPACT Defense Against Multiple Assailants class

     Fighting multiple unarmed assailants bore some similarities to fighting single unarmed assailants. Firstly, the premise of the attack was sexual assault or some other act that implied the assailants wanted you alive and aware of what they were doing until they felt that they had managed to perform this act. Therefore, assailants were more likely to grab and restrain us than to throw a deadly punch.

     As in Single Unarmed Assailants class, the presumption was that they were out to

1. convince us to stop hitting them but not "fight" the way men fight each other and
2. do sexual things we didn’t want them to do (or, as I said, something like that).

     This class is not adequate preparation for fighting multiple henchmen in a Jet Li movie whose only goal is to kill you as fast as possible.


     Another similarity to the single assailant class was the idea that men who attack women (or anyone they perceive as belonging to a “weaker” social category, like children or the elderly) are easily frightened by the yells and blows of an opponent who is fighting a "real" fight. The evidence (crime reports, interviews, etc.) shows that this is even truer of assailants who feel the need to have a whole group to be sufficiently intimidating to a woman.

     It is also truer with multiple assailants because the reasons for the attack are often focused on feeling masculine in the eyes of other group members rather than in the eyes of the woman. This can make a lot of members of the group lose commitment and run away or give up as soon as they see their only judges failing the intimidate-and-abuse mission.

---

     The neatest trick we learned was lining up assailants. Though they roam and threaten like a wolf pack, they don’t move like a wolf pack. Trained combat teams have better things to do: they have Jet Lis and Uma Thurmans to fight. Thirteen-year-olds are not combat teams who know how to move in relation to one another. They probably formed their group 30 minutes ago!

     So if they try to come at you from 2 or 3 different directions, you back up and move left or right until becomes . However, it doesn’t take long for the ones in back to figure out that their path is blocked, so you must hit or kick the front one as soon as you get that line and then keep moving to make a new line out of the assailants (preferably including the one you just mobilized, because he/she might be mobile sooner than you think).

     If one does manage to run around you (instead of you keeping him in front of you by backing up as fast as he’s approaching your flank side), you might indeed get grabbed from behind. We learned several handy techniques for that! We learned:

• how to clock someone behind us in the head
• how to hurt him in the groin despite having our backs to him
• how to take out someone in front of us if that person seems too close to first hurt the rear person and take the time to turn around and strike a better blow, and
• most importantly, no matter how many or few assailants we’ve struck, to see exit opportunities from the sandwich and take them right away.

How’d we learn? Practice makes better!
(One of our instructors refuses to say, "Practice makes perfect.")

---

     We also learned how to hurt them and thus escape if they’re pinning our arms and legs to the ground. Again, as with single unarmed assailants, it’s important not to think, "He’s holding me and there’s a hand coming to grope me!" and to think, "He’s at my feet, restraining them from moving in 2 directions, but not a third. I will move them in this third direction and use them to hurt him. If he leans in to try to grope me, all the easier, but I’ll figure it out no matter what he does."
     (Strong abs make this easier, by the way! Balance and gravity make it possible even without them, though.)

     Same goes for people holding your arms. Don’t worry about what they or their buddies are doing to your breasts and crotch. Focus on the ones pinning down your weapons (limbs) and only once they’re too immobilized/stunned to grab back your weapons is it helpful to worry about [using those weapons and] getting rid of or escaping out from under people with their hands on your privates.

---

     Since an attacked person can keep the fight much more manageable by staying mobile, we learned new kicks and hits that weren’t taught in the Single Unarmed Assailants class. There we almost tried to lie down on the ground as fast as possible. Here we had to learn to stay confident and strong while standing.

     We also learned to "shuffle" because walking, running, or traveling sideways by stepping with criss-crossing feet (I’m so bad about doing that!) is more likely to make us trip. It’s not all-important, but it helps.

---

     The strike-once-and-only-once-and-move tactic doesn’t last forever. Once every assailant has had a few blows they generally pause longer to recover. If you have put two on the ground ahead of you and a third is staggering away from you on your left from a blow to the head, when you draw the fourth out to your right and hit him/her, when he/she bends over or goes down, you might see that no one else is on his/her feet yet. If you see that, it is safe to throw one, two, or more kicks against the same assailant and knock him/her unconscious (ball-clutching or head-clutching assailants can recover and run quickly enough to catch you half a mile down the road. Unconscious ones give you time to get to a safe place and report the attack to the police).

---

     Towards the end of the fight, you use both the one-hit-and-move strategy and the hit-until-knockout strategy as appropriate until all assailants have been knocked out ("ASSESS!") or truly run away ("LOOK!").

     Use verbal assertion to dissuade any menacing onlookers from jumping in to start a new fight. Fight if attacked. Look, assess, and repeat if there are more menacing onlookers.

     Leave the scene, watching where you’re going. They’re all unconscious or gone--you checked earlier. Don’t get hit by a bus or trip in a gutter by looking over your shoulder while you walk or jog.



That’s what we learned in class!

Absence over

Long absence. Grandma died; had to leave town. Blogged on paper.
Tough choice--put it on my book blog or here? It's inspired by a book...cross-post because this one has readership and I haven't yet opened the book blog up to the public? :-\

National Sanctity of Human Life Day

You know why I think things like the Prevention First Act are so important? Because things like that act display the beautiful, best humanity of truly "pro-life" people, whether or not they believe that abortion is among acceptable answers to the life-damaging problems that unwanted pregnancies bring.

I salute all of you, this day after yesterday.

Yesterday was both the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, cause for celebration among those who believe that abortion is among acceptable answers and "National Sanctity of Human Life Day," allegedly a day of celebration among those who believe that it isn't.

However, as "Plutonium Page" pointed out, the day, if taken at its title's face value, should not have a darned thing to do with whether or not abortion is an acceptable answer to life-damaging problems caused by unwanted pregnancies. If the title lived up to its words, the day should be dedicated to decreasing suffering in the most effective ways possible (that is, usually as close to the beginning of the problem as possible).

Plutonium Page posted the following gut-wrenching photo commentary illustrating that point:

(Click here to expand this post and read)

Today is a very special day for Mister Bush. He has declared January 21, 2007 "National Sanctity of Human Life Day". Check it out, right there on the White House website, a nice, pretty little message.

I filled in the blanks.

America was founded on the principle that we are all endowed by our Creator with the right to life and that every individual has dignity and worth.

(AP photo)

National Sanctity of Human Life Day helps foster a culture of life and reinforces our commitment to building a compassionate society that respects the value of every human being.

(AP photo)

Among the most basic duties of Government is to defend the unalienable right to life, and my Administration is committed to protecting our society's most vulnerable members.

(AP photo)

National Sanctity of Human Life Day serves as a reminder that we must value human life in all forms, not just those considered healthy, wanted, or convenient.

(AP/Nabil)
Click here for more photos. (WARNING: graphic content).

I call upon all Americans to recognize this day with appropriate ceremonies and to underscore our commitment to respecting and protecting the life and dignity of every human being.

(AP photo)

• Caring for the Wounded in Iraq - A Photo Essay - warning, extremely graphic content.
• Coalition casualties in Iraq

Oh, and Mister Bush? I'll leave you with the words of John Prine:

But your flag decal won't get you
Into Heaven any more.
They're already overcrowded
From your dirty little war.
Now Jesus don't like killin'
No matter what the reason's for,
And your flag decal won't get you
Into Heaven any more.

I, like Plutonium Page, want to take the focus off of whether or not abortion is an acceptable answer to pregnancy-related suffering in life. I want every day to focus on the more effective ways of reducing suffering in human life--ways like

• the Prevention First Act
• a strong Federal Emergency Management Agency
• a contribution of 0.5-0.7% of our GDP to countries in "extreme poverty" whose governments are doing very well given their financial situations, and
• talks with other countries even though we're not allied with them.

Why I don't want Sen. Hillary Clinton to be president

Here is a quote that describes the types of reservations I have about Sen. Clinton.

Yes, yes, I found it on Daily Kos...I swear I only started reading it because this primary race has me curious to see what the biggest leftytalk site is saying about the candidates, not because I usually agree with the people on there...

Anyway, this particular text did resonate with me:

"too many people think that underneath, she is a would-be aristocrat who would sell out America to the forces of free trade globalization in the same way that her husband did, only with a sterner look. Besides her money, her sex and Bill, Hillary's best asset is probably that she comes across as the most legitimate 'keep-the-oil-flowing' candidate, the one best able to play the Davos game. There is still a powerful lurking fear even among the Left, namely that the oil will indeed stop, so we really need to trust the old guard no matter what. This secret fear is probably what is propping up the Right from total collapse right now."

I have no idea who or what Davos is, and for me not all bad things in the state of worldwide economics have to do with oil per se, but I hope this quote communicates the gist of why, if Clinton is the democratic nominee, I would quite possibly vote third-party.

I've spent the last 3 years learning about nuances of the status quo / "old guard" of economic and social policy, and I've seen so many great ideas proposed by economists and other theorists just...flounder...when they reach people like Sen. Clinton who don't seem to give them the attention they have the power to give them.

I'm tired of that.

Now that I have a better idea of what new paradigms I do like the idea of (such as legislation that moves us closer to getting externalities factored into sellers' costs instead of social costs), I won't settle for someone who is as much of the old guard as Sen. Clinton is.

Race vs. Skin Tone (do you really know what someone looks like if you can only identify race?)

I happened to see an old article from a Twin Cities-area campus newspaper and found it interesting.

Apparently, though no one is complaining about specific descriptors of HOW peach or HOW brown a person's skin color is in crime reports, two students represented complaints about not-actually-physically-descriptive terms like "black" or "African American" being on the little security alert flyers that the college puts up around campus.

West, by the way, spent his major and earned a Rhodes scholarship studying what psychologists and other scholars have figured out about the way people perceive race. Just a little tidbit from other issues of that paper.

Until I read the article, I hadn't thought much about the idea that there were both nonoffensive and offensive ways to report skin color in crime reports, and that there are pretty good English words for showing that they're differentiated based on helpfulness (or unhelpfulness).

Check out how the two students put it at the end of this quote:

[Security chief] Gorman said it is difficult to decide whether to use race when it is the only descriptor that a victim remembers, because he wants to provide as much information in security alerts as possible. He said that victims tend to give very vague descriptions when recounting an incident.

“We’re going to use skin tone colors and other descriptors that could be helpful but sometimes [race is] all people remember,” Gorman said.

West and Littell argue that if a person only remembers the race of the person and cannot remember any other physical characteristics that gave them the impression that they belong to a certain race, then they do not actually know what the person looks like.

Male circumcision helps them avoid getting HIV

Or so says an article I found while trying to get the text of the Prevention First Act.

Weird.

The idea of encouraging lots and lots of people to alter their bodies to avoid one problem when we don't fully know what problems it might increase their chances of squicks me out.

Then again, that's common medical practice. In fact, it's common "naughty bits" medical practice. Women have been advised to do it for years.

Lots and lots of female people have been encouraged to alter their bodies to avoid pregnancy when we didn't fully know what problems it might increase their chances of...and even now that we know, it's still common medical practice to keep encouraging them to do it anyway.

Lots of feminists claim that the traditional reluctance to encourage lots and lots of men to do things with their genitals, hormones, etc. to avoid problems (such as unwanted pregnancy of a partner) is outrageous sexism.


So should we just be glad that at least some human beings are getting treated right by "common medical practice" and keep fighting to get "common medical practice" to stop being so nasty and deadly with the advice it gives to women?

Or is there some inherent value to encouraging these kinds of risky behaviors, as supporters of hormonal birth control have argued for years, that we should be glad that male human beings are finally getting to be the subject of?

Prevention First Act (S.21)

Yippee! Congresspeople want to put through a law increasing funding for birth control and other things that good studies show actually reduce abortions.

Is your senator a sponsor? Ask her/him to be one! If you're behind this even partly for religious reasons, I suggest mentioning that in your letter.

(Click here to see my letters)

Dear Sen. Klobuchar:

Firstly, congratulations on your win! I campaigned and voted for you--in fact, I knew who you were since you first started sending e-mails to the Kerry volunteer mailing list, and I've looked forward to your tenure, believing that you would make a fantastic senator for the Minnesotan people--extremely responsive to constituent concerns.

I am writing to ask you to sponsor the Prevention First Act. Thomas.Loc.Gov does not have the full text of the bill online yet, so unfortunately, I have not been able to see what I think of it, but the outline on Planned Parenthood and the Daily Kos have made me feel that even if it isn't a perfect leap forward, it does not seem to contain any passages that are steps backwards in the fight to help underprivileged
women suffer less, the fight to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies each year, and the fight to improve the quality of life for every citizen of this great country regardless of material privilege (these, by the way, are fights that MY Christian faith leads me to believe are moral and good).

Thank you, and I look forward to seeing the great steps you can help our
country take these next six years!

Dear Sen. Coleman:

Please cosponsor the Prevention First Act (S.21?)

You have won a lot of support from me by sending an individual reply to every one of my concerns, Sen. Coleman. When I voted in 2002, I hadn't thought we had ideologically opposed opinions on social issues, but because of you and your staff's attention, I have come to find how much we have in common! (Every time I think of writing you, I delight in finding out that we, as Twin Cities area residents who have experienced what an unusually beautiful place this is, with safe biking and park views within a mile or two of everybody, no matter how poor, valued the environmental protection and health benefits of biking equally. I wrote to ask you to vote for a bike commuter bill, and you had already beaten me to the punch by cosponsoring it!) I have come to feel that you are a good senator for the Minnesotan people--extremely responsive to constituent concerns.

I am writing to ask you to sponsor the Prevention First Act. Thomas.Loc.Gov does not have the full text of the bill online yet, so unfortunately, I have not been able to see what I think of it, but the outline I saw on Planned Parenthood and the Daily Kos have made me feel that even if I will eventually read it and find it isn't a perfect leap forward, it does not seem to contain any passages that are steps backwards in the fight to help underprivileged women suffer less, the fight to reduce the number of abortions each year, and the fight to improve the quality of life for every citizen of this great country regardless of material privilege (these, by the way, are fights that MY Christian faith leads me to believe are moral and good).

Thank you, and I look forward to seeing the great steps you can help our country take these next two (or more?) years!

Dear Sen. Dodd:

Please cosponsor the Prevention First Act (S.21?)

I am not a Connecticut resident (though I did donate to the Connecticut senate race last year!) but you are no mere senator, thanks to your membership on the HELP committee, so I hope you will have the time to read my request.

I am writing to ask you to sponsor the Prevention First Act. Thomas.Loc.Gov does not have the full text of the bill online yet, so unfortunately, I have not been able to see what I think of it, but the outline I saw on sites supporting it have made me feel that even if I will eventually read it and find it isn't a perfect leap forward, it does not seem to contain any passages that are steps backwards in the fight to help underprivileged women suffer less, the fight to reduce the number of abortions each year, and the fight to improve the quality of life for every citizen of this great country regardless of material privilege (these, by the way, are fights that MY Christian faith leads me to believe are moral and good).

Thank you, and I look forward to seeing the great steps you can help our country take these next four (or more?) years.

Dear Sen. Enzi:

Please cosponsor the Prevention First Act (S.21?)

I am not a Wyoming resident, but you are no mere senator, thanks to your membership on the HELP committee. You represent a constituency larger than state borders, so I hope you will have the time to read my request.

I am writing to ask you to sponsor the Prevention First Act. Thomas.Loc.Gov does not have the full text of the bill online yet, so unfortunately, I have not been able to see what I think of it, but the outline I saw on sites supporting it have made me feel that even if I will eventually read it and find it isn't a perfect leap forward, it does not seem to contain any passages that are steps backwards in the fight to help underprivileged women suffer less, the fight to reduce the number of abortions each year, and the fight to improve the quality of life for every citizen of this great country regardless of material privilege (these, by the way, are fights that MY Christian faith leads me to believe are moral and good).

Thank you, and I look forward to seeing the great steps you can help our country take these next two (or more?) years.

Happy MLK, Jr. Day!

Minnesota Public Radio rebroadcast a fascinating race-related interview in honor of Dr. King today.

Dr. John McWhorter discussed his opinions on how to answer the question, "What can we do to help poor black people not be so poor?" which he tried to put into a book.

He mentioned two ways that people generally respond to the question, said both weren't going to change a darned thing, and wanted to advocate a third:


1. Poor people who happen to be black have no reasonable reason to not want to work and need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps--that is--they need to just start wanting to work.


2. Poor black people are poor because the factory jobs all moved out to the suburbs (and now to China). What employers remain in the areas where they live won't hire them or won't give them the same amount of flexibility & trust that they'd give to white employees. We have to fix A) these employers' attitudes and/or B) the overall economic structure of the United States before we'll ever be able to help poor black people stop being so poor.
   (Dr. McWhorter feels like this idea came about largely because for the first time in history, during the Civil Rights Movement, black people did get external circumstances making life better.
   He feels, however, that this triumph of convincing external agents to help black people have fewer obstacles to success made people forget how to A) live one's daily life and B) work to help more poor black people succeed under the assumption that external circumstances aren't going to get any better.


3. A disproportionate number of poor black people indeed don't want to work, but their reasons for feeling that way aren't unreasonable. Whatever the reasons were that older generations of young black people stopped wanting to work (Greatest Generation social policy, jobs moving away from the city, discrimination by employers, etc.), young black people today don't think about their predecessors' motivators & demotivators consciously. They just grow up observing it and imitating it, like all humans do. Dr. McWhorter's example of this was a child born to Chinese parents in Brooklyn. That kid's going to grow up speaking English because he/she observed it and that's what humans do.
   
   Dr. McWhorter, therefore, posits that while it's not anybody's fault for being too "lazy" to work, it is possible to retrain people and make them feel differently than their early conditioning caused them to feel.

I wish I had a copy of his book to skim, because I'm putting together his "third view" based solely on what he said in refutation of views 1 & 2 and on one single example he gave of work that people who hold the third view should passionately support ("youth opportunity organizations," if I remember correctly.)


Considering the guy only came up with one example and spent most of his time explaining why he didn't think views 1 or 2 were going to do any good, I don't have much hope that he elaborates View 3 much better in his book. Oh, you silly academics who deconstruct other ideas and forget to clearly construct your own.

I'll find his book later and add to this list based on his words if he does flesh out View 3 examples better, but for now, I'd like to ask you in the blogosphere:

• What people, organizations, etc. (besides youth opportunity organizations) do you think address problems facing blacks from a "View 3" point of view?


• If you agree with Dr. McWhorter that this is the way of approaching problems that's gonna get them solved better than any other, what are your favorite (most effective, best run, etc.) groups, individuals, & projects from the list that could be generated by my last question?
  (I'm always looking for time & money donation ideas.)


• I'm a very privileged and inexperienced young white person from the suburbs. If you agree that organizations, groups, and projects working from this view of problems facing people of color are the most likely to make change, how should I interact with them?
  • Do I, with my background, have any characteristics worth imitating that poor people of color would have a hard time finding examples of in other people?
  • Or should I keep my irrelevant self out of the Boys & Girls Club and just donate my relevant money & goodwill-towards-the-orgranization-when-speaking-with-others-like-me (which are things my background arguably does give me)?
    I mean, it's not like I'm an entrepreneur or a doctor who can mentor an aspiring entrepreneur or doctor. I'm just a specialtyless office assistant myself.
    
    (Anyway, enough about me and my "What should I do?" questions. I'm primarily interested in generating discussion on Dr. McWhorter's ideas.)

Another lovely race-related item I found today is this quote:

A White Guy Honors MLK.

Good Will Hinton grew up in suburban Atlanta. Court-mandated busing, whatever else you may say about it, checkerboarded his friendships and integrated his heart, to the point that when he got to the University of Alabama at Auburn,

it just felt strange hanging out with mostly white people. So I ended up joining the gospel choir and becoming the only white member there. I'm not sure if that was part of MLK's dream for Alabama but I'd like to think that it was.

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, everyone.

Why Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, but not Iran, Syria?

I posted variations on this text at a few sites, and I've gotten some great responses, but so far the best has come from Haroon Moghul (dangit, why'd he delete his old blog's archives? Now how am I going to share his incredible Dubai article with people?).

The original text:

I don't get it. This morning on NPR, I heard Condoleeza Rice say something to the effect that we wouldn't be talking to Iran & Syria, asking them to stop funding Iraqi insurgents and seeing what they want in return for that.

Interestingly enough, we're not announcing that we're going to ask Saudi Arabia, etc. them what they want to get them to stop funding insurgent groups--we're going to ask them what they want to get them to do...well...just what I'm not sure...something to stop Iran & Syria from funding Iraqi insurgent groups.

But, hey, if that makes sense, and Iran's side & Saudi Arabia's side are doing the same thing, why not talk to Iran and ask them to stop Saudi Arabia from funding Iraqi insurgent groups? :-)

The point is...why are we on the Saudi-etcetera side only?

Iran has oil, too, so that can't be it. They're both states with a lot of "morality laws" and "morality police" to enforce them. They're both oppressive dictatorships who keep people who want more relevant Islamic principles as well as more liberal principles to rank higher in politics down & unheard. (The "morality laws" are the way the states pretend to be including Islamic principles in politics. They lock up the people who say, "But those aren't the aspects we considered important!" up & throw away the key.)

They just ain't so different. So what's the deal? Why are we treating them as if they were two totally different types of political system with two totally different types of interaction with religion?



What is our advantage in trying to get one side to put the other side's efforts down instead of trying to get both sides to scale their own efforts down?

I'm not asking this as, "Bush sucks!" kind of criticism.

I'm asking this to wonks who might be more perceptive or intuitive than I am.


I want to know of our proposed approach: what's in it for us, according to the approach's proponents?


Only once I know that would I consider starting to critique or criticize the policy.

Haroon replied, in a comment called, "A Few Good Reasons Why:"

When Iran overthrew its Shah in 1979, Americans learned that no native population can be so pliant as to be used, abused and manipulated solely for good as we perceive it to be. This shock, to the system, birthed our role in mutating the monster that was becoming Saddam. This realization has frightened Americans as it has all imperialists in the past: A native population, with a representative government and an ideology of resistance, cannot be crushed. The days of old-style wipe-out-the-native-resistance is gone; weaponry, media and resources are too diffuse for that brief moment in European genocide ahem expansion and Renaissance to come again.

But who then can America's ally be? Israel, of course, can never reject America -- not without ceasing to be the Israel it has, for decades, been; so long as Israelis believe they are like a colony in an alien world, they will never reject American support. (Or, if they do, it will be because they will find a bigger, better sugar daddy - just as Weizmann went from the Ottomans to the British and then the Israelis went to the Americans.) Saudi Arabia is a useful ally in this regard to, for several reasons

Firstly, it is not and never has been a real country; its population is unlikely to revolt against American interference because it has no national idea around which to rally -- and movements that have no national idea, and national base, nearly always (if not every single time) fail and fail miserably. We live in a world of nations. This is why Saudi "resistance" either goes the road of severely parochial tribalism (the reality of Saudi society, the means by which Saudis practice divide) or a malignant, internationalized Wahhabism, a la Osama Bin Laden... the means by which the Saudi royals practice conquer...

Secondly, Saudi Arabia's royal family knows that when the going gets tough, they'll go out Saddam style, albeit properly enough, with a lot more embarrassed knees-knocking. (Saddam, a brutal tyrant? Yes. A coward? No.) Saudi Arabia has no legitimate government -- it is the result of breeding aided and abetted by rentier stipends. When the going gets tough, nobody's going to care about the Saudis. Nobody. Even their support, the Wahhabi establishment, probably does du'a after every salat for a suitably sickening mass decapitation.

Not to mention oil. Oil, oil, oil.

Saudi isn't Iraq, or Egypt, or Iran, or Turkey. It isn't a country. It's a fiction that continues to be imagined by way of oil revenue, and a convenient one for US interests. Israel is too small, too controversial and, increasingly, too militarily weak to hold together the Middle East the way America wants it to be held together. America needs a new ally. But who can America rely on? Has to be a big country, of course, with money and resources. (Qatar is not Krazy Glue, in other words, and Dubai never will be.) But America learned in 1979 it can't trust a secular despot ruling over a proud, nationalistic, generally strongly-Shi'i people. We learned in 2003 that we can't even trust a well-secularized population, namely Turkey, because as a democracy, the Turks will look out for number one.

Saudi Arabia's number one is its ruling family. Saudi Arabia is America's hostage. A rich one, too. Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, they can never be as humiliated, as pathetic, as hypocritical, as militarily lame -- for all the Wahhabi bravado, their record is pretty pathetic -- as Saudi Arabia is and has been for several decades now.

Don't make friends with someone who can give you a bloody nose. This has nothing to do with human rights, with ideology, with some kind of attachment. It's power politics, plain and simple, and the Saudi royals keep digging themselves in deeper and deeper (into American pockets and defense networks.) They're useful precisely because, in the absence of their oil money, they would be useless. They know this, and know that nobody else can use them in quite the same way.

Boy, is that man good at analyzing current events through the lens of how colonialism affects decision-making today without being the annoying kind of "Colonialism is the only factor in everything!" academic that's easy to shoot down. :-)

But what a depressing outlook. Is nothing suggested in this book a realistic proposal?

Or are the suggestions about asking non-allied countries single short-/medium-term requests (modeled off of contributing diplomats' perceived "success stories" from the past) only realistic and possible for the United States when all the other states involved in a situation are of relatively equal "nationness?"


Click here for more answers I've received to my first question and my replies to those answers.
I'd love to see how you feel they compare to Haroon's response--better?
Worse?
Saying the same thing?

Can you come up with anything that could be done to prove them all wrong and get us to make requests of all sides in this situation?

[insert this text later]

Koufax Awards

Lots of people have written about the Koufax awards, but Sage's post acknowledging that she nominated people was the straw that broke the camel's back. I, too, will go public and suck up to my blogrolled favorites draw attention to my nominations.

1. Batch 1
2. Batch 2
3. Batch 3

Speaking of Sage, I sure do love her blog. All my favorite friends in real life speak & write English language usage rants just like this:

In other news: I was reading an article on Britney Spears in the grocery store line today, and she was described as having "functional highlights" in her hair. I'm no English major or nothin', but isn't that an oxymoron of sorts? How do they function? Do they cook her breakfast or whisper sweet nothings to her or advise her on fashion choices each week?

:-)

Iraq deescalation

If you're too lazy to write a letter to your congresspeople, but you wish they'd use funding or whatever other tools they come up with to block the "surge" of troops, you could always sign this. Looks like the people behind it have connections & money to get an ad into a paper that circulates with congresspeople pretty quickly. Or something.



Update: Just saw this. Yuck.

"You probably saw this at the beginning of the week, but just in case you didn't:

Commanders seek more forces in Afghanistan
Taliban prepare offensive against US, NATO troops

[...] President Bush is expected to announce this week the dispatch of thousands of additional troops to Iraq as a stopgap measure. Such an order, Pentagon officials say, would strain the Army and Marine Corps as they man both wars.
A US Army battalion fighting in a critical area of eastern Afghanistan is due to be withdrawn within weeks to deploy to Iraq.
Army Brigadier General Anthony J. Tata and other US commanders say that will happen as the Taliban is expected to unleash a campaign to cut the vital road between Kabul and Kandahar.

"Mind you, this is from this week, in 2007, not from 2003 or 2004. Right now, troops are being drawn from the actual 'war on terror' in Afghanistan to instead go fight in Iraq. Again."

I hadn't been up on the news enough to know that there was some particular big battle we pulled out from in 2003 or 2004. Yuck. Stay there, defend the road, people. Yeesh.

More laws I love

Sweet! We've got some really neat ideas floating around the house.

• Instead of waiting for the bill numbers to get up into the thousands, someone has put the failed-to-be-passed-before "Powder-Crack Cocaine Penalty Equalization Act" into the system early--it's #79 this year.
  
  Only thing I can't tell is if it applies to possession. The language looks like it has to do with smuggling, but the history of the bill makes me think it's a street-possession kind of bill.
  
  Okay, so it's not a great law (hey, who knows...making the sentences harsher for the rich white teens' drug might make them even less likely to be convicted and increase racial disparity in the prisons, but I have this feeling that our legal systems are a little too transparent and our society come a little too far on transparent issues for that to be the likely outcome), but in this particular case, I'm for making a small improvement and then, when people see that it's not enough, saying, "Well, let's make another improvement!" rather than doing nothing until the perfect improvement is proposed & funneled through the political system.


• This one looks kind of cool: a GI benefits bill "to amend title 38, United States Code, to provide that members of the Armed Forces and Selected Reserve may transfer certain educational assistance benefits to dependents, and for other purposes." H.R.#81


• Two Native American tribes (the Lumbee tribe--I'm resisting the urge to link this to one of my favorite songs, "Lumby," because it's completely unrelated, even though it's great--and the Rappahannock tribe) are getting official recognition as Native American tribes. NC's done it for years with respect to the Lumbee tribe, and now the USA might, too. H.R.#65 & H.R.#106.


• A bill "to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to expand and extend the incentives for alternative fuel vehicles and refueling property and to repeal the oil and gas production incentives added by the Energy Policy Act of 2005." Sounds like a good start. H.R.#86.


• A bill outlining a particular right for states that doesn't seem too harmful (i.e. it doesn't allow them to trample all over a particular group of people's human rights): "A State may limit or place restrictions on, or otherwise regulate, out-of-State municipal solid waste received or disposed of annually at each landfill or incinerator in the State, except [for the first 2 years after this bill is passed where local agreements are already in place]." H.R.#70.


• A bill "to amend the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 to require the disclosure of the original source of funds made payable to a lobbyist who is subcontracted to engage in lobbying activities on behalf of a third person or entity, and the disclosure of the identity of that third person or entity." H.R.#90


• *snicker* If H.R.#101 had been a college rule, Tom, my sophomore buddy down the hall, would have had to step down from his Student Government Election Coordinator post in shame. The advice he gave me for running for student government wasn't immorally advantageous to me--but he did give me a leg up by saying, "Oh, geez, Katie, just knock on the door and walk into the boys' bathroom if you want to put signs there" when I lamented that I didn't have any male friends but him around at the time, and I knew he shouldn't be posting flyers. Was that him managing my campaign? Hey...maybe I wouldn't have won without those toilet stall signs!


• "Funds provided by grant under this section may be used--(1) to establish statewide articulation agreements in math, science, engineering, and technology among public 2-year institutions and public 4-year institutions to provide a seamless transition for the transfer of students from the public 2-year institutions to the public 4-year institutions by having both such types of institutions provide and use a common core curricula that reflects the workforce needs of private industry..." H.R.#102.

Surgery is very dangerous. Pills are less dangerous. Save the only pill alternative to surgery for this particular health problem.

While browsing proposed House legislation because I wanted to see if there was an inflation-indexed version of the minimum wage bill instead of the "clean" yet unindexed House Resolution 2, I noticed that there was something called the "RU-486 Suspension and Review Act of 2007."

I'm still reading the bill and reading up on it, and so far it looks like some congresspeople think the drug is dangerous (potentially deadly) and should be pulled off the market until it can be studied better.
They claim that it was hurried to approval and that it really needed to be studied longer in the first place, and better late than never for pulling it off the market and studying it.

It looks like there were also a "RU-486 Suspension and Review Act of 2003" ("Last Action: Nov 14, 2003: Referred to the Subcommittee on Health ... This bill never became law.") and a "RU-486 Suspension and Review Act of 2005" ("Last Action: Mar 3, 2005: Read twice and referred to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pension ... This bill never became law").

I thought many of my readers would want to know. Though I haven't had an abortion myself, I do remember reading "BB"'s detailed accounts of an abortion on RU-486 after she was denied emergency contraception after a condom broke (partly because many of the medical staff in her rural area thought that emergency contraception was the same thing as RU-486!) She covered the physical feelings of it as well as all of her emotions and the time she spent going over pros and cons and making her decision.

(If you're curious to hear more details, she had to go the condoms-only route because the way her hormones are make it so she can't be healthy on hormonal contraception, and the way her vagina is shaped makes it so she can't use barrier methods inside herself. What's more, she had to go the abortion route once contraception failed because she'd been told by multiple doctors that another pregnancy would probably kill her, and she had 3 kids to raise.)

Thinking of people like BB, I want to say,

"Listen, yes, some people have died because they took RU-486, but other people have avoided dying because they took RU-486.

"How is it different from any other medicine in that respect?

"If you let legislators pull it off the market while it's being studied, people in the latter camp will die while it's away.

"I have a hunch that there are more of them than there are women who'd die because of taking the drug."

If you agree with me, please write your Congressperson and encourage her/him to table House Resolution 63. And/Or please pass on the above reasoning on your own blogs.

( Additional keywords for search engines: mifepristone misoprostol )

Hooray, Canada!

HOORAY, CANADA!

Whoops.

I got really excited, because I thought it was Tanzania whose textile mills had all closed by 2004 on account of dead white men's clothes (stuff that doesn't sell at Goodwill, etc. in North America) undercutting the cost of making clothes locally, but it turns out it was Zambia.

2005: "Textile mills in Tanzania that had previously been mothballed were brought back into action and now employ thousands."

They're exporting them, too, which means that Zambia's probably still got no employment for textile workers and no up-and-coming textile factories making mosquito nets, but overall, still a great story. It's not like Tanzania wasn't hit at all by the "dead white men's clothes" markets. They lost a lot of textile mills, too, as implied by the statement "brought back into action." I don't quite understand how the economic policies worked, but work they did, so God bless whoever in Canada, Africa, etc. thought this up.

(Mosquito nets, are one of the most promising methods we have of reducing population growth in Africa.
1) People pop out kids to replace the ones they think will die, only people aren't very good at those predictions and always overestimate their dead kids, so the population grows. Population growth specialists seem to have determined that knowing your kids will live is the most effective incentive to take contraceptive action.
2) When parents die before kids know how to run a farm, carve shoes, or whatever it was they were going to learn as a skill for making a living, the kids end up dispersed, hopeless, living on the margins, and exposed to fewer reasons to take contraceptive action. Population growth specialists seem to have determined that keeping parents alive & healthy long enough to apprentice kids well also dramatically reduces population growth.)





Oh, and by the way, does anyone know if the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is as into funding attacking-the-viruses-themselves research & development as this guy says it is? They were so highly praised by Jeffrey Sachs, the economist who is all for biomed miracles if they work but wants people to focus fastest and hardest on technology & methods that keep things simple, that I can't imagine they'd get that kind of praise from him if they weren't contributing to things like mosquito net distribution.

I can't decide if this article is a complete misunderstanding of what "donating to medical/technological solutions" often means in practice (is this one of those guys who also thinks no doctors anymore recommend diet & exercise? He's wrong!) or if I'm just ignorant of Bill & Melinda Gates dangerously taking "medical" and "technological" to mean only "fancy creams & injections" and not taking it to mean "nets and roads."

*snortle*

...
“That mosque is why I’m here today Ali Eteraz,” said The Jafi. “Because I am convinced they are all practicing [dissimulation], today at 2 pm someone I know will be calling the Feds on the mosque. That den of dissimulation has existed in our midst long enough.”

Ali Eteraz grew silent and then spoke up. “But sir, today is Friday and that is the time for Friday prayer. Even I will be in the mosque at that time. Won’t I also get arrested and charged?”

“Such things are necessary, Ali Eteraz,” the great Jafi headed out the door. “I always told you that you needed to do more to make them more like you. You needed to do it faster. I gave you three whole months and yet none of them appear any different to me, none of them come by to kiss my feet. It must mean that they are dissimulators and potential terrorists!”

“But what if there is a shoot-out sir? What if an accidental bullet goes off? My reputation will be tarnished at the least! What about my career? My family? Who will pay for my bail?”

“I don’t have time for this Ali Eteraz,” said The Great Jafi who had no time for such petty concerns.

“Sir please!”

“Sorry Ali, but you and the mythical moderates didn’t do what you were supposed to do. Now we must protect the homeland.”

“Sir I thought you said I was an integral part of the future of the world.”

The Great Jafi was almost out of the door. “Yes, I said that but only in one potential scenario. In the other scenario, the one taking place today, you are collateral damage. Goodbye Eteraz, you failed me. When all of your humanity is taken away blame your people. It was their inherent prowess in lying that made me do this. When you are in jail, blame Islam.”

The Great Jafi reminds me of O'Brien in 1984. I wanted to throw the book at walls and scream, "No! You.Don't.Make.Sense! Stop it!"

This story (of which I quoted the end) is fucking hilarious when you get absorbed and feel it like fiction; irritating enough to make you want to scream and cry if you think about the possibility of people really interacting like that.