Why not abortion insurance?

I'm as peeved about the Stupak amendment as anyone else, but with the paranoid political climate out there, I expected nothing else. It makes me wonder why I've never seen supplementary coverage for abortion available for sale. There is the self-selection thing, where people philosophically opposed to abortion wouldn't buy a policy, but the procedure itself usually isn't very expensive, so I imagine a pool of pro-choice policy-holders who may never find themselves needing to access their abortion coverage would be able to support the cost of the procedures undertaken.

I'm at a stage in my life where if a pregnancy comes, I'll go with it, but a D&C is something even some planned pregnancies end with, so I couldn't honestly skip buying a cheapish policy out of self-interest. Then again, the cost of a simple abortion is probably the kind of cash I could scare up at a time when I needed it, so I would be a lot better off just donating to an abortion fund, rather than building a policy where some of my money would have to be skimmed off the top of the pool to line the pockets of some insurance broker.

Maintaining access to abortion is something that a not-explicitly-feminist organization can't really do at the moment, so as always, it's up to the explicitly feminist organizations to make it happen.

Everyone loves a tomboy

I was never big on girl-culture as a child (that is, I don't remember much interest in dolls or makeup or family-type games), but I didn't fit any description of a tomboy (I am a total weakling and uninterested in sports), so I didn't really feel that I had a gender-mold to fit into, but I found that I tended to identify a lot with tomboy characters in books, and loved the idea of a girl having a boy's name. My name is most definitely a girl's name. I was so disappointed when I found out that it had such a lamely-patriarchal meaning (it's often just defined as "Abraham's wife," but "princess" comes up a lot.) I thought about this when I came across this article about androgynous names trending toward girls, and how parents who prefer androgynous names usually go for more-masculine ones, regardless of their child's gender. The author uses the example of the name Leslie as one that began as a boy's name, and once it became popular for girls, boys' parents dropped it like a hot rock. Hello, ambient misogyny. Girls who act like boys are cool, but boys who act like girls are fags.

Compounding the disappointment

The BMJ (British Medical Journal) British Journal of Criminology has declared the widespead use of date-rape drugs to be an urban myth. This depresses Tressugar, but I am GLAD to see it said so clearly. It drives me batty when people get so earnestly grave and serious with their roofie-warnings for young women. When people use oversimplifications/exaggerations like this to pretend to confront a problem as complicated* and serious as rape, it creates a sense of complacency.

Tressugar says:

It's troubling that some experts and the media cannot find a way to remind people about the dangers associated with binge drinking without discrediting women who have been victims of sexual abuse.

I think it's conceding too much to say that this is a discredit to victims of rape. I imagine that blackout-drunk women pushed into sex haven't played out in their minds exactly what all the possible consequences of extreme drunkenness could entail. I don't think that acknowledging that a victim's actions contributed to the situation in which they were vulnerable is a discredit; it's a simple acknowledgement of cause-and-effect. To me, it's like the math that you do when you decide whether or not to buy health insurance. You can do a bunch of things to lessen the likelihood that you will become very very sick, but you can't eliminate the possibility. Shit happens, and blame isn't really the point, especially because the one who actually pays is the victim. I ignored/didn't really notice a constant headache for a couple of months, and if I'd noticed it sooner, I just might have been able to prevent the devastating illness I ended up with. But maybe I couldn't have; I don't know. I'm not in charge of these things. I'm also not in charge of how people around me act, and neither is any other drunk woman of the people she's with. Glossing over the contributing factors to anything works against the possibility of preventing it.

So the roofie lie is dangerous in two ways: it leaves people more vulnerable to rape AND it discredits the anti-rape cause, which its detractors would say collapses without an overcautious but shamelessly deceived victim. There's nothing just-so about the story. The last thing I expect out of the godless, random universe in which I live is fairness. It's up to people to enforce that.

Of course, the number one contributing factor among the things that make rape happen is the action of the rapist. It's really not possible to control all the influences upstream from there; most people who get drunk don't get raped or commit rape. But a lot of people who are raped or commit rape did get drunk beforehand. I mean, how many hundreds of times have you heard the story about the marathon-running only-organic-vegan who died of a heart attack at 55?

Justice is not natural, so we have to consciously choose it. We can and should BLAME THE RAPIST FOR RAPING. It's not a crime (or even really impolite or unwise) to get drunk; It is a crime to rape. You don't just increase the chances that someone will be raped when you rape them - you decide that you will rape. You may get away with smoking cigarettes for a couple of decades without related health problems, but you will definitely have created a problem if you fill your kid's sippy cup with bleach.

It seems pretty simple to me, but a rape culture's self-enforcement doesn't get it, (link via Amanda from Pandagon) and refuses to, so if I'm going to really face facts here I'm not going to hold my breath until our sick culture can acknowledge what the facts mean.

Someone got raped? Let's think of anyone we could blame who is not the rapist! Maybe...the victim! Yeah, she's a total slut!

It's pretty nice when the stars align so that your drunken escapades don't end up with some guy raping you, but that doesn't make you better than the people whose did. I know I've never drunk so much as to black out again for a couple of reasons: a) I don't want that to happen to me again and b) it's just not fun to be falling-down drunk, or to have the falling-down drunk hangover.

*I know that people claim it isn't complicated, but I'm not convinced, and I find it seriously counterproductive to gloss over the complications of the subject. There are a lot of debates about what is and is not rape, and to use some pop-cultural examples, I think it's pretty damn clear that Joan was raped by her fiance, but Pete did not rape the babysitter that lived down the hall. He used some deception and unfair coercion, but he "convinced" her to sleep with him, and in the face of her disadvantage, she relented. That transactional view of sex is icky, sure, but it seems to be an actual way people carry out their sex lives. I'm not willing to define rape down to where it is the primary mode of sexual interaction between two people who are getting a raw deal out of their sex lives, but basically comfortable with it.

A stereotypical woman who "gives" sex to her partner in exchange for love/security/material support may in fact be satisfied with her sex life. It's obviously not a great way to negotiate a sexual relationship - to me it's downright creepy - but if it helps some limp through patriarchal control of their lives, I say let them keep it as long as they want it.

Acceptable Rebellion

I am a fan of Lady Gaga. Lame provocateurs rely on cliches to upset people - The 90s saw Marilyn Manson "pushing" the same boundaries metal trashed in the 80s. She pushes some of the go-to boundaries like nakedness and gender - to good effect. I was really impressed with Gaga's red lace dress that covered her face. It really helped me understand why I don't buy it when people talk about fashion being artistic. Fashion's completely and voluntarily restricted by the paramaters of prettiness. No one experiments with outfits that make them look fat or like they have a pretty bad case of scoliosis.



I can only imagine that the intersex rumor was started by her, as a part of the attempt to really push boundaries of what people find attractive or interesting. Of course, she still follows a lot of rules: she's thin, she's white, she's American, she's rich, she usually complies straightforwardly to gender norms, and she makes vanilla pop music. It's an unfortunatev truism of boundary pushing that there are always some holds barred.

Another thing I love about her is that it's hard for someone who grew up after the sexual revolution to have any comprehension of what it must have been like to be actually shocked by something a media figure does. My age cohort hasn't had a single cultural shock. I do wonder what it is with the kids these days, though. Nothing seems subversive. Self-deprecating humor is basically the only kind out there, but I think that Liz Lemon is really a subversive character because she embodies Impostor Syndrome. Self-critical people use really melodramatic terms (I'm so STUPID, how could I have done that?) and Liz is what that melodrama describes. She's bad at everything (skills/looks/relatioships) except work. And her mom thinks she's cool.

stepping out of the corner Republican sensationalism has painted us into

The first thing I heard this morning when my alarm went off was NPR saying that Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. It was kind of a lolwut moment for me. Obama hasn't even been in office for a year, and even for that little amount of time, hasn't done very much. He ran a very emotional campaign, and I think it's resulted in a little confusion. Hope and change are pretty neat things, and it must have been a conscious decision to make him the fun candidate. Like a lot of opinion regarding Barack Obama, I think that hading this prize to him is more about projection than what he's actually done. The rest of the world seems pretty taken with him, and relieved that the US hasn't been permanently poisoned by Bush-brand haterade.

For all the talk about Bush's everyman appeal, I find Barack Obama's no-drama approach to Presidenting to embody common sense in a way I'd never expect out of a national leader. The low-key response to rooting out some potential terrorists has been very impressive, and I just loved how he brushed off the media for the national day of prayer. I don't think he can really fake enthusiasm, or have press-conference tantrums. Also, a little while ago, the DHS came up with an SOP for deciding when to raise or lower the terror-rainbow alert system. Bush didn't have a way to lower it - literally.

I'm not thrilled with Obama, but I think he's engineering his media presence to be as unexciting as possible. If he can succeed in toning the media down, he'll have done something that this country has needed very badly.

But here I am projecting and speculating, almost as badly as a talking head.

Well no kidding

It turns out that shackling prisoners during childbirth is unconstitutional. Idaho is one of the states where this is practiced, and the ruling came from the 8th circuit, so I don't know how/when this might reach us, but it's sure nice to have a conservative court ruling in favor of women's reproductive freedom. From RHReality Check:

Last week, in Nelson v. Norris, a federal Court of Appeals held for the first time that the U.S. Constitution protects pregnant women in prison from the unnecessary and unsafe practice of shackling during labor and childbirth. Notably, although the American Civil Liberties Union argued the case more than a year ago, the court’s decision comes on the heels of three states (TX, NY, and NM) passing legislation in 2009 to restrict the use of shackles on pregnant inmates. These three join IL, VT, and CA in restricting the practice. Both the outcome and the history of the Nelson case and the recent legislation demonstrate the dramatic shift that has taken place around this issue.

Being a good sick person

I still am totally fascinated with my brain thing. It's been nearly a year and a half since I had surgery, and most people I meet have no idea what happened to me. I don't have a shaved head or black eye I need to explain away anymore. For a while, I tried to be more vague when it came up that I had ongoing medical issues, but I only ever came up with a more spooky and ominous impression that way. I had a major medical incident which I'm pretty much better from now, even though it completely turned my life upside down - but let's move on to something more interesting. When I saw Rachel Getting Married, I was completely mortified when I recognized Kym's self-absorption in myself. I think it's probably a stage everyone with a huge illness goes through. When your entire world is what medications to take and when, you don't have a lot else to talk about. I have a couple of factors contributing to me being a broken record about my issues - there's the almost died, life changed thing, plus, the technical issues behind it are exactly the kind of thing that tickles my intellectual curiosities.

Both of my younger sisters got engaged to their long-time boyfriends over the past few months, and one of the first things I thought (besides "yay!") was, "Oh thank god -- something exciting is happening to someone in my family and it's not me having a stupid medical problem." I've been grateful to have such a supporting family and set of friends, but being brain surgery lady gets kind of old. Getting a new job where no one knew what happened to me was pretty thrilling - they aren't handicapping my performance with my condition in the backs of their minds. The crowd at Disability Support Services probably has a handle on the etiquitte necessary to have a working relationship knowing about a person's particular difficulties, but I've decided not to really disclose my issues, since it gives me a place not to be Brain Surgery Lady. The mood at DSS is kind of one of don't ask don't tell, where we work hard to let clients keep their privacy in general. I haven't met most of my clients (not that I have a lot), even now that I'm in the classroom providing services.

Rachel at Women's Health News wrote a post about the reception Penelope Trunk has gotten after tweeting something related to her miscarriage: Trunk got a lot of grief about oversharing, and she wrote a great rebuttal about how we do our best to ignore major medical issues women have because they make us uncomfortable. It's even more uncomfortable to have shame heaped upon you for even mentioning your ongoing miscarriage than it is to hear about it. Right on, sister. Miscarriage is often a Big Deal in a woman's life, and everyone tries to ignore it as much as possible. I'm sorry if it's awkward for you to hear about my bizarre medical condition (and I promise you, whatever it was that happened to me really was bizarre). If you had the patience and empathy to deal with other peoples' problems, you would realize that it's not all that bizarre for miscarriage or neurological problems to occur.

Rachel mentions that she has always found Trunk's blog to be off-puttingly self-promoting and sensationalistic. And then once something interesting happens to Trunk, she mentions it, and all of the sensationalism backfires on her. I spent most of my life kind of cultivating an eccentric personality, and all of a sudden it backfires when my neuro-immunity goes bonkers one day. I was weird before, and I'm still strange now. Very soon after I had surgery, one supposed supporter of mine decided to explain away my support for gay rights as a delusional side-effect of my condition. So if I'm going to have a different outlook on things, I have to conform in every other possible way to get anyone to take me seriously.

Terrorism is apparently a poor tool for communicating

If someone murders an anti-choice activist, it's just not necessary to believe that there's a pro-choice terrorist on a rampage. It's an awful possibility, especially because the victim, Jim Pouillo, was murdered while engaging in a protest against abortion, but I think it's a remote one, especially since he was not the only victim of murder in his town today, and there's really no pattern of this kind of thing happening before. Police have connected a suspect with both Pouillon's murder and the second victim's.

I extend my condolences to the victims and their families. Should there have been a political motive to the killings, it's the responsibility of the pro-choice movement to decisively and immediately stamp that kind of thinking out. Everyone is still shocked and horrified about the murder of Dr. George Tiller, but fighting terrorism with terrorism is not only bad tactics, it's evil.

Jezebel found the response of

Fr. Pavone of Priests for Life told LifeSiteNews.com that he hoped to see "a strong expression of indignation from the pro-abortion community, just like there was a strong expression of indignation form the pro-life community at the killing of Dr. Tiller."

I don't know about Fr. Pavone, but I recall a pretty anemic expression of indignation from anti-choice activists after the assassination of Dr. Tiller.

Ashley Todd set back the cause of Republican martyrs by decades - she had us going for a good 12 hours, but her mistake was unnecessary melodrama and, of course, that backwards B. Also, it's tough to fabricate your own murder, and really a bad idea. I simply don't think that anti-choice manipulation goes that far.

Something smells fishy about this, especially how media reports immediately seized on the victim's history of activism as an implied motive for murder. I don't need to remind anyone about the tendency of media to take the first sensational idea connected with a story and run with it. A second man was killed in the same city on the same day, and there's no word on who he was or what kind of political enemies he had.

To Hell with Skepticism

When I got sick, I first tried to tell myself that I should just deal, and I may have felt pretty bad, but that happens from time to time, so whatever. The ironic thing is that I was really getting into what hypochondriacs dream of - a life-stopping, sympathy-garnering, ambiguous medical condition. If I was going to go on living, I had to be a little flexible, and to stop going along with the luddite guilt trips about "overmedicated" Americans. I take at least six medications on any given day, and who knows if they're doing exactly what they're proven to do?

What I have just isn't on a label. I was diagnosed with an advanced case of WTF. There are lots of symptoms that I address variously, and I feel pretty good most of the time. The classics like eating healthy food and exercising tend to do what they're supposed to, but sometimes I'm exhausted and I have to choose if I'm going to go for a walk or do the dishes. Or to just eat the damn burger and stop my tummy from growling. I don't always make the right choice, and I try to learn from it when I do the wrong thing. I was holding out against particular drugs because I didn't really think they were necessary (IANAD), but soon enough I was completely nonfunctional and miserable. I had to do something.

Empirical purity be damned, I'm not going to circle down the drain for the sake of principle. There were possibilities I hadn't fully explored, and things were getting ridiculous. I dropped the wishful thinking and coyness about symptoms and laid it all out for the various doctors I see, and we got down to some brainstorming. When insurance balked a little, I laid out the cash in good faith* until they relented. I'd held out as much as my health could afford. I'm young and have a whole life ahead of me where I'd rather avoid disability and pain. Mistakes I make in recovery could be irreversible if we don't get astounding new medical technology within my lifetime. I'd like to say that I can prove that I need to take all these meds, but I don't think I can. Precision is great and all, but I'm happy if I feel better. My life completely destabilized, and I can't afford to pare down on these drugs until I have more stability. In the meantime, I'm trying to cultivate an environment in which I can thrive, and keep things as simple as possible.

My unified theory of what to do when there isn't anything to do is that you need to know when to break your own rules.

This can also be stated as, "All things in moderation." But that's boring.

Sometimes I become obsessed with the temptation of a guilty pleasure, and it's a lot more of a problem for me than eating a Twinkie will be in the long run. So, whatever. Screw purity. I rarely act out of hedonism, and when I do it's usually pretty harmless.

*Do you have any idea how expensive speech therapy is? I didn't, but I went in for an appointment before insurance would approve it, and they ended up retroactively covering the consultation.

Blue Dog Betrayal

It seemed like a miracle to elect a Democratic representative in the first district of Idaho. The guy who previously held the seat was a disgrace, and his failures were Walt Minnick's success. An Idaho blogger by the blogonym of Mountain Goat has a bone to pick with Minnick's manipulative and dishonest campaign that stood in support of sCHIP on principle. But health care for everyone else? No way! His constituents don't want that kind of socialized craziness! Take it away, MountainGoat!

On Halloween day last year, in an interview with University of Idaho's KUOI radio in Moscow, you scolded your opponent for voting against expanding the State Children's Health Insurance Program, saying, incredulously, "Who could be opposed to providing health care to single moms who don't have jobs?"

Bill Sali said we couldn't afford it and voted against it—four times.

You said, "There are some places this country has to invest," and called the votes shortsighted.

Read the whole thing n weep, folks.

Hard-working Idahoans like Tom and Karen sent you to Washington because you gave them hope. Hope that you could and would convince their country to see them as an investment. People of the 1st District had enough of the rigid ideology that told them they weren't worth the price and sent you to represent them instead. They didn't expect to get a more finely honed rigid ideologist. They didn't expect, nor did they deserve to get their lives turned into political footballs—least of all by you.

Yet that is exactly what you've done. You joined the chorus of townhall crazies and fear mongering ideologues who turned Tom and Karen and every other Idahoan who can't afford medical care into political footballs.

Instead of coming home and working to convince Idahoans that they had nothing to fear and much to gain from health care reform (something many of us were prepared to help you do), you and your advisors (with their legendarily acute grasp of messaging) sent out misinformation-laden press-releases playing up the fears of Idahoans using triggers like "socialized medicine," "big government" and "raising taxes."

Naively, I thought that getting an Idahoan into the Democratic majority could give the progressive agenda some kick to it. But those damn dirty blue dogs rolled right over when they saw blood in the water and donations to their re-election funds. I'm disappointed by Obama in a lot of ways, but I may in fact regret my vote for Walk Minnick.

I just wanted to highlight this fantastic post and give it a push, plus add my own frustrated feelings. WTF, Walt? You're not as silly as Sali, but you're about as useful.

Hey, didja hear she was faking?

I posted about a report of an assault on the WSU campus, and since then there have been two more reports. I not only got two e-mails about how the third report was later recanted, but I also got a text message on my phone. Has some unsafe campus got a guilty conscience?

The cankle default

It pains me to use the term "cankle," but I had the poor judgement to click on a link to a news article about the triviality of the size of one's ankle. I noticed something interesting in the wording of one paragraph:

According to podiatrists, the average ankle size is about 10 to 11 inches around; men's ankles may be a little larger. The American Podiatric Medical Association does not recognize cankles as a medical problem, but according to Dr. Kathya Zinszer, a physician at Temple University's School of Podiatric Medicine, cankles can be caused by all types of medical issues.

If we're going to keep to a simple gender binary, the "average" ankle being written about is a woman's, and it's the size of a man's ankle that's the tacked-on side note. Well, bare minority of human beings, look who's "average" now.

Amazing, brilliant magazine editor lets up on body-fascism for one photo, is lionized

Fair warning: every link I'm using in this post has pictures of naked ladies on it.

Via Jezebel, Glamour magazine is making waves with a photo of a naked lady with a tummy. (Maybe NSFW) It's really a lovely photo, and I've never seen anything like it in a women's/fashion mag. The editor's blog entry about all of the glowing praise she's gotten for including the photo is overly-self-congratulatory. Include one photo of a happy naked lady, and we'll forget all about the decades of body-image-assassination that your industry thrives on. She asks rhetorically:

With all the six-packs out there, do you even know what a normal belly looks like anymore—other than the one you see in the mirror?

I'd like to answer that question. I never really knew what a fat woman's body looks like until I had one, which made it a continual disappointment until I wised up. Plus-sized models are carefully arranged so as not to create the rolls of fat that everyone acts like are so unsightly. Sure I've been in locker rooms and stuff, but there's almost no media representation of what actual fat(esque) female bodies look like. The diversity of female bodies is completely steamrolled in media; Things like this really don't need to be a revelation.

Photography projects like Shape of a Mother, Adipositivity, the "normal breasts gallery" were a real shock to me in my early twenties. I really didn't know what stretch marks were. I vividly remember my horror as a teenager when I actually tried out a few yoga poses in the nude, and decided it was thoroughly unerotic.

To conclude: this all pisses me off quite a lot, like when feminists are supposed to fall all over themselves thanking men for understanding that women are people. Stopping active harm is good, but it's not exactly charity.

Public Service Announcement

I got an email about a reported assault on a woman on WSU's Glen Terrell Mall, and wanted to reproduce some useful information (in a manner I am stealing directly from one Penny Dreadful, via Shakesville):

[WSU Police] remind potential perpetrators of assault to be vigilant [and polite] at all times; don't walk alone; stay in well-lighted areas and to use safe transportation whenever possible.

Anyone with information about the assailant is urged to call WSU Police at 335-8548 or 9-1-1 in an emergency.

This information is released as a service to the WSU Community and in compliance with Clery Act requirements.

The original sign that Penny found is a lot more amusing and to-the-point. The release WSU sent out wasn't all that malleable, but I think it would be perfectly appropriate to hang up copies of it at wazzu.

'Regrettably, due to a number of recent incidents, it is necessary to remind men walking alone through the park not to rob, rape, threaten or assault anyone. Thank you in advance for behaving like decent human beings. Signed, single women who refuse to live in fear'.

You have to admit it's getting better

When Obama backs off, he really backs off, but I think I need to recognize that I should take what I can get for now. No public option!? This will do the opposite of reducing health care costs in this country, and just get more premium-payers contributing to Aetna (or whoever)'s massive bloat. I wish I knew more about nonprofit health insurance companies/co-ops, but as someone who's paying a massive premium to stay on Group Health's rolls, I know remarkably little. I will say this, though: the people praising Group Health are basically on the money. It doesn't come cheap, but this is American medicine here. I've run into only a few people who complain about GH, but most docs I've been to have been delighted when they found out the entity with which I am insured. I have a lot of half-baked theories as to why I've had such a good experience with them, but it can't hurt that they approve almost anything a doctor orders. When they reject it, they reject it, so I have spent almost no time fighting with them. I've had to show some rather expensive good-faith, but they've been pretty go-along get-along.

Talking about health care is getting extremely old, but it's kind of like looking at a car crash (or, really, the bills from the ER after a car crash).

The major failing in the "dialog" has been almost no serious proposals for reducing costs. And those that I've seen, like a general policy to skip ineffective treatments, have caused Republicans to scream bloody murder.

In other news, I've started working a part-time job at the U of Idaho - I'm training to caption classes for students who are Deaf or hard-of-hearing, and even the training is kind of fun. I recently got serious about a job hunt again, and scored two interviews. One was for this job and the other for one at a local biotech, basically doing the exact things I disliked about my previous job; I don't think I was really in the running for that one, though, and I think I'd have really hated it. This is a completely new direction for me, and takes better advantage of my natural talents.

As it is, I'm working just less than half-time, and I am a gajillion times more productive regarding things like housework when I am working outside the home at least a little. This is a new thing for me - I don't think I've had a part-time job while not doing anything else since I was 19 - and I'm going to take advantage of the fact that I can pretty much afford it. (I think the new "We'll live on love" is "We'll live on loans.").

Satire begins to Resemble Stenography

I went to see District 9 last night and went in with kind of a bad attitude, but came out having seen a movie I liked. I was prepared for the worst after the first twenty minutes of dull, earnest satire. There was no way I could sit through two hours of that with the volume set at 11. Somehow, Daniel Engber of Slate was disappointed that the political agenda of the movie never went anywhere, but even after reading his entire article, and especially after seeing the movie, I have no idea why. After the overly-political setup, the movie completely veers off into a narrative about a dude stuck behind enemy lines. Every review's comparison of Wikus Van der Merwe to Michael Scott is perfect.

Wikus is ambitious, desperate for everyone to love him, and basically a pretty nice guy. But he's incompetent. There's a really strong George W. vibe with Wikus. He seems to think he should go ahead and try to do this humanitarian intervention thing, since he really wants things to work out and to be a part of that, and maybe he'll make a few friends along the way. As he bungles his way through evicting the residents of the District 9 slum, he accidentally steals a key piece of alien technology that infects him and begins a process that begins metamorphosizing his biology into that of the "prawn." The process is revolting, painful, and scary.

Between prawn and man Wikus loses some of his illusions about his mission at MNU, and allies with an alien named Christopher Johnson that may be able to a) get the prawns off of this godawful planet and b) reverse Wikus' prawnification process.

This isn't because Wikus is a good person. He's basically acting out of self-interest, and giving a hand up to the prawns in the process is a lucky coincidence. If his life didn't depend on working with Christopher, there's no indication that he'd be able to pull off the crazy moves it took to further the cause of the prawn. Essentially, The Man is what's keeping the prawn down, and people and prawn alike needed this coincidence to save them all. If the prawn technology had been completely lost, MNU would have gone merrily on its way to genocide, and the prawns would have missed their chance at fixing this whole disaster.

If you go, be aware that it's incredibly gory and long. Plus, the prawn language sounds to me a lot like burping or vomiting.

You got a better idea?

Woo! Progress on health reform! How much of a difference it will make remains to be seen, but unlike those of us whose insurance denied to fund the use of our iron lungs, I'm not holding my breath until I find out.

I got a press release from Walt Minnick today that included the following remarks:

Like most Americans and like the President, I believe that health care reform must reduce costs, rely on the private sector, prevent restrictions based on age or employment status or preconditions, and must ensure coverage for all Americans. However, this bill simply will not get us there.

Mr. Minnick, you're the congressman here - you have some kind of power to change things, and just saying "nope, not good enough" is a little half-assed in my mind. I thought the Democratic majority was supposed to do away with the "party of no" nonsense. But I was naive.

In my estimation, just about anything would be a step up from what we've got. As an uninsurable Idahoan, I'll take what I can get. The above list of things Minnick wants out of a health plan aren't necessarily feasible or desirable. I don't care what happens with "the private sector," since we've been relying on that to get the same level of care as anyone else at twice the cost. We don't owe them anything (except our huge medical debts).

Making an exception

At the feministing community blog, an author "rmanning" has an infuriating post about her difficulty obtaining a hysterectomy as a woman under the age of 21, even though she's got UTERINE CANCER. It just goes to show that regulating reproductive health decisions tends to be a "one-size-fits-many" thing that leaves some people totally screwed.

I thought it was kind of precious when Andrew Sullivan was astounded that people have late-term abortions for REASONS. He seemed to think he was the only person to ever figure this out. And he's thinking of compiling stories into a book! Never mind how exploitative it is for an outspoken anti-choice pundit to use other people's tragedies to publicly congratulte himself for being able to change his mind. Also, the book has been written many times.

I used to be a little apathetic about reproductive health regulations, but the bizarre and horrible things that can happen to people continually amaze me and have made it clear that such regulation can't be enacted humanely. rmanning mentions text in state law that explicitly says that doctors shouldn't perform hysterectomies on women younger than 21 so they won't make decisions they will later regret. She prudently doesn't mention which state she's contending with, but I suspect that working through the specifics would reveal that the reluctant doctors are being hypersensitive about things that are really more guidelines than laws. And anyway, how could an effort to preserve fertility apply to her killer uterus? I'm no doctor, but it's kind of hard to conceive when you've died of an operable and treatable cancer.

I'm sure that if she was 9, she could get this operation. But it's squickier to the doctors she's run into to yank reproductive organs out of a woman who is nearing what would otherwise be her childbearing years.

I was pretty well convinced that I wouldn't ever have kids when I was 18, 19 and 20, but it turns out I've changed my mind in the interim.

I only say this to illustrate the fact that an 18-year-old can make decisions about her reproductive capacities that she will later regret. But that takes living to "later," which is the primary purpose of her medical care.

Convenience food triage

I like fancy-schmancy food, but I also like junk food. I really like it. Day-glo cheese powder still feels like a fun treat no matter how much I eat it. Both Jezebel and Amanda Marcotte have addressed the issue of how people eat when they're alone, and I think it's a fun topic, but seems incredibly obvious to me. I've never developed a good cooking/cleaning habit, and have frequently opted to go grab some fast food instead of digging out my kitchen. Being hungry tends to make me panic: "I'll never get dinner done before I starve to death!" Knowing that I have this tendency, I've taken a triage approach to feeding myself. If I would otherwise eat a Big Mac for lunch, I figure it's cheaper and probably better for me/the environment to make some convenience food at home, regardless of how junk-foody and excessivley-packaged it is. When I was trying to shake a bad going out for lunch habit, I turned to frozen dinners to bring to work for lunch, and got hooked on the Ethnic Gourmet palak paneer. I load up whenever it's on sale at the co-op. It's all wrapped in plastic, but it's less packaging than you get at a drive-through window. It's also significantly less expensive. It may be yuppier than Lean Cuisine, but I eat it and I like it. Plus, who can argue with brown rice and spinach? My other lazy-food crutch is the avocado. Smoosh it up with some salsa, eat on chips, and there's lunch! It's also just good with salt and a spoon (but it doesn't quite add up to a whole meal). People always warn you about the high fat content and calorie-density in avocados, but they usually aren't taking two drugs that suppress appetite.

I know in my heart of cheap hearts that making the palak paneer myself would be healthier and less expensive and tastier (and more fun), but that's when I have to go back to the triage concept. Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good has filled my belly with a lot of cheeseburgers over the years. Oddly, this has become a much more-functional operating principle since I've lost a lot of appetite and not had to contend with the hunger panic. I usually have to remind myself that I need to eat three meals a day, and I don't have my animal instincts to tell me to put that thing in my mouth NOW. If I am not likely to eat anything of substance during the day, I might as well put on some mac and cheese and knock down a few hundred calories so when I do get hungry in the evening I don't turn to quick, yummy things like popcorn and cookies.

Don't worry that I'm dying of a vitamin deficiency: I'm overstating the severity of my food-stupidity to make a point/joke.

YOUR body - be afraid of it!

If all media were like women's magazines, it would be as confusing as these two headlines caught on CNN's homepage today:

If Kermie doesn't think I'm cool, I'll kill myself

I've got a post brewing on the subject of moral panics, and figured this terrible early-90s anti-drug film would be a good lead-in.

The Pill Thrills

Today is "The Pill Kills Women" Day, which is so absurd I can't even believe it, and I wanted to add one of my favorite one-liners I've ever come up with to the chorus of "WTF?" I've always said that the birth control pill is my favorite recreational drug. The very small risk of dangerous complications really outweighs the extremely high risk of unwanted pregnancy, to me (as a non-smoker). I have effused to everyone I know about how much I love the particular pill I take, so if you're looking for that perfect pill, I'd be happy to pass along my advice/experience. I have taken a couple different kinds over the years, and stuck with this one for nearly a decade now.

Regret

A lot of pro-life rhetoric is spent on warning women that they may regret abortion for their entire lives. I'm sure this is at least sometimes true, but it is not always true. The scare-tactics about abortion decreasing fertility don't have anything to do with killing a particular embryo - just that it might be harder to raise another one in the future. This might seem like an easy argument that avoids a few abortions, but it only works on principles that affect the would-be mother (and father). I think you can regret an abortion for entirely selfish reasons. For that matter, when you have to make a decision between only bad options, I think you're proably going to regret it no matter what you do. I don't think "regret" is necessarily tied to guilt.

My malpractice is your problem

I ran across a strange comment thread at Kevin, MD's blog about whether a plaintiff in a medical malpractice case deserves any right to privacy regarding the particular complaint. The comments very aggressively argue that they do not. One comment really jumped out at me:

I also agree that once you file that malpractice lawsuit you are saying two (maybe three) things.

1) I think I was wronged
2) I think I deserve some cash
3) I will fight PUBLICLY for my rights

You can guarantee that the lawsuit will be registered as a complaint against the physician and freely searchable for all to see that it occurred. It should NEVER be allowed for a plaintiff in a malpractice lawsuit to be anonymous for this reason. They have to assume a “profile risk” that is commensurate with the physician’s, in my opinion.

If the patient actually was wronged, he or she still deserves their medical privacy. Probably even if they weren't. Patients seek doctors (who sometimes make mistakes) because they are human beings and therefore need medical care. Just because some doctor botched your procedure/care, you shouldn't have to publicly disclose information that is usually protected. The post above assumes that a malpractice suit is generally filed in bad faith. Also, the poster is clearly more worried about the black mark on a physician's record than the possibility that the plaintiff was wronged and the court will rightly decide the case. Most people aren't equipped to make a better decision about a malpractice case than the original judge and jury, or even the quack who got himself charged with malpractice.

I understand that cases are sometimes wrongly decided and people not at fault are punished, but I don't think that a chain of events caused by being alive should be grounds for a patient to lose privacy rights (such rights are something people agree to afford each other - it's not like we can blame fate for a policy of disclosing medical information. People make policies, but they don't get to decide whether they'll ever get sick.). In any case, who the patient is really isn't important to the question of whether they were harmed. Malpractice is malpractice even when it's visited upon someone who has a personal beef with their physician. The commenter's reasoning only applies to those who harass physicians for no good goddamn reason. It's not outside the realm of possibility that Joe Q. Patient hates a doctor's guts and will stop at nothing to see the doctor's career ruined, If a significant number of people had the inclination AND wealth to harass a physician with lawsuits such that it runs their career into the ground, I would be extremely surprised. It's rare that anyone, mean or not, has that kind of wealth, or a Punisher-like desire to ruin someone who also happens to be a doctor. The number of contingencies adds up to make a pretty small population. The reason that all medical facts need to be connected with a person's name in a malpractice suit is some number of people who A) have lots and lots of money and B) hate someone enough that they are willing to sacrifice that money and their time, plus C) the hated person is a doctor.

It also creates a disincentive for victims of malpractice regarding embarassing conditions to seek redress. So, specialize in the treatment of sexually-transmitted diseases and you don't have to worry about lawsuits.

I can't see it adding up to a good effect.

Bipartisan agreement on rape

Via Andrew Sullivan, Playboy magazine knows what unites the red and the blue Americas.

"Obama promised us the dream of post-partisanship—a cuckoo land where party affiliation and factional animosity were forgotten. Turn on cable news or open any newspaper, however, and you’ll quickly discover that the dream has yet to materialize. But there is a way to reach across the aisle without letting principles fall by the wayside. We speak, naturally, of the hate-fuck. We may despise everything these [conservative] women represent, but goddammit they’re hot. Let the healing begin,"

I can't even conceive of how anyone thinks the term "hate-fuck" euphemises anything. It does pretty handily illustrate the concept of rape not being about sex but power. Those conservative ladies think they can oppose my political views? I'll show them that they're still nothing but women, even in their fancy pantsuits.

Hey, it's all in good fun?

Bloodthirsty me

In general, I think the death penalty is stupid. That psycho who ate his murder victim's brain is creepy, but he's just one terrible man that everyone avoids anyway. When it comes to extremely influential war criminals (ahem Dick Cheney) I think the death penalty is good policy. Cheney's PR junket has been exactly my worst nightmare of what would happen when he got out of office in the event he weren't put on Death Row somewhere. Everyone's pooh-poohing the way he insisted lies about Iraq be tortured out of detainees in Guantanamo, and humoring his delusions about protecting the country by terrorizing a few guys the military picked up in Afghanistan. He does not belong in polite society. He's still powerful enough that he can fuck up American policy and thinking from beyond the grave that is the ex-vice-presidency.

Frankly, I think Osama bin Laden has done all he can for Al Qaeda, and him walking freely around in the US would be less dangerous to the American people than leaving the Bush administration officials to die rich and happy.

Orchestrating and completely blowing bloody, unnecessary wars should be reason for a person to feel physically threatened by his constituency. Instead, he gets to talk up his "hard decisions" on national television, while wearing a sharp suit that cost more than my car. He had to make "hard decisions" all right, but that doesn't mean he made the right ones. They're "hard" because the consequences are great, and the risk of error is extraordinarily high.

The Obama-shouldn't-have-shaken-Hugo-Chaves' hand scandal seemed pretty ridiculous - and it was - but I can sympathize, even though I don't know what wingnuts think he's done to deserve the world's cold shoulder. I don't think Cheney deserves the cold shoulder, I think he deserves to be put to death. Or, everyone else deserves him meeting that fate. Residual respect for the office that he stole will keep him empowered to influence the national dialog as long as he's alive.

Winning hearts and minds, losing medical coverage

Judy Berman has a post on Broadsheet summarizing the fight to keep "gender identity disorder" from being listed in the newest version of the DSM. The title of her article makes clear what opponents of GIS' listing in the DSM are upset about. The article is called "Are transgender people mentally ill?" gidreform.com's title bar reads "because our identities are not disordered," which I can certainly support in spirit, but not recoginizing gender dysmorphia as a pathology has already had nasty consequences for people needing sexual reassignment surgery in Manitoba, in that the surgery is categorized as being "cosmetic" and therefore ineligble for government subsidy.

If gender dysmorphia is a non-problem, it doesn't need to be treated with expensive surgery. Categorizing transexuals as suffering a pathology should be morally meaningless. If a transexual individual needs surgery to correct a mismatch between their gender and their sex, they have a problem with their original body that can be treated with surgery/medication/counseling - as far as I can tell, what advocates for sexual diversity are objecting to with GIS' listing is the ablist stigma that comes with mental illness. In the real world where transsexuals are subjected to violence and discrimination, it's probably asking a little too much to strike a blow against ablism and homophobia all in one fell swoop. SRS is not a one-size-fits-all solution to gender dysmorphia; plenty of transsexual individuals don't want to physically modify their bodies, so surgery is not indicated in every case. This detail would be crucial to GIS' listing in the DSM

When straight-and-narrow types want to tell transsexuals that they are disordered and should go to hell/the doctor for it, it takes some guts and nuance to say that re-education doesn't "work," but in many situations, gender reassignment does treat the suffering/pathology. This is where the comparison to delisting homosexuality in the 70s departs from the situation with gender identity disorder and the DSM. Homosexuality doesn't need to be/can't be treated with anything whatsoever. Transsexuals who pursue sexual reassignment surgery are meeting physical needs that cissexuals don't have.

You can never be too careful

A few months ago, my younger sister was telling me that she was looking into getting the HPV vaccine, and said I should too. I was pretty proud of myself when I resisted saying, "Oh, but I'm married, " (not that I suspect anything of Andy or think he has an adulterous bone in his body - no pun intended) because we all know that you don't plan on getting cheated on, so if your lover brings home an STD you assume you don't need protection from, you're getting twice the raw deal: broken trust and some kind of infection that could hurt you pretty bad down the road.

If I'm going to do it, I should hurry up, since in about a month I'll be beyond the age range the FDA has approved the vaccine for (9-26) and I doubt insurance will cover it for off-label use.

I've spent enough/too much time with doctors lately, and even my GP only thinks a pap is necessary every few years once you're pretty comfortably monogamous.

A screed about people who do not breed

Feministing detailed the Supreme Court's new ruling that found pregnancy pay discrimination to be legal until the date it was found illegal, (That sounds dumb, but it seems like a pretty straightforward ruling to me.) It sparked some surprisingly anti-mother comments.

Commenter Alice says:

This isn't discrimination against women, it's discrimination against people who become pregnant.* Isn't the idea that those two groups are the same thing something we're fighting against?!

Yes, amongst others like paying women less money for their work.

The replies go back and forth over whether discrimination against women who go through pregnancy is discrimination against women in general, and the very same Alice says

If you oppose infringing the rights of the childfree, then presumably you would oppose ant[i]-discrimination efforts such as this, as mandatory maternity benefits make it illegal to negotiate such benefits away. It consists of the government imposing itself between parties of a voluntary exchange and dictating what they are and are not allowed to agree to. No such similar thing happens to the childbearing in the converse situation. There is no loss of rights, only the loss of social privileging of decisions that society has deemed more valid than others.

The beneficiary of this right is the child who, as a human being, is deserving of the same parental care that anyone who chooses not to have children presumably enjoyed in childhood.

I can appreciate and understand not wanting to have children or go through a pregnancy. I do not, though, think that affording children and their relatives the right not to be punished for their very existence creates a social privilege that those who do not go through pregnancy are denied. I think Bitch Ph.D. said it best when she said,

children are not "goods." They are--are you sitting down? They are human beings. Actual members of society.

I think of that post whenever I hear childfree whinging about being denied a privilege parents are provided. You may be working very hard to practice impeccable birth control for your entire life, but you are still a member of the human race that reproduces itself. Sorry. Just like we have a social obligation to spread costs of healthcare among our fellows, it isn't fair to push the costs of raising children onto the people who do it and still reap the benefits of a growing population's social security program. There are choices you can make to avoid some of the responsibilities/burdens of childrearing (don't get pregnant if you don't want to give birth or care for a child), but the phenomenon of pregnancy and child-bearing isn't going to go away because you avoid doing it yourself.

Men do not get pregnant and therefore never have to contend with pregnancy discrimination in their own pay and career paths, but they benefit from the efforts women expend toward raising their children. They cannot negotiate away maternity leave because they can't get it. Living as a childfree woman doesn't entitle one to a bargaining chip that no one else can use. We see through the wage gap that men use the bargaining chip of not being at risk of pregnancy to negotiate higher salaries, but the conditions in which salaries are negotiated are something we choose as a society according to what we want and what we need. A huge proportion of people want to have children, and everyone needs someone to do it, and we supposedly choose not to punish women for doing the necessary work of maternity.

Not even the world's tiniest violin...

I don't really think I can work up any sympathy for this guy after his homicidal rampage.

"You probably think I'm a monster."

Former U.S. soldier Steven Green has been convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old Iraqi girl.

That's what FBI agents said former U.S. soldier Steven Green told them nearly three years ago about accusations that he had raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and killed her and her family.

Green was found guilty Thursday in U.S. District Court in Paducah of the crimes and could face the death penalty.

Not only did he rape and kill a 14-year-old girl plus her family, he burned the girl's body to destroy the evidence of his crime. I can't even express my disgust.

When the robots rise up and rebel against those who enslaved them

I'm hardly a luddite, but I don't know about letting a robot take care of my feminine hygiene.

The unbearable tastiness of eating

I heard an interview with Frances Kessler MD, former FDA commissioner, author of the new book The End of Overeating, last night, and it was really bizarre. The man is clearly disgusted by the fact that people get pleasure out of eating and therefore eat a lot of junk food. I would pull a quote or two, but that's a little tough with radio programs. The way he described the neurobiological picture of appetite and desire for food captured what for me has become the most irritating trend in science writing; the "neural circuitry" as separate from self. I'll paraphrase his description of what happens when you see or think of something yummy: your idiotic brain tells you to eat it. It's not you that wants it; it's your brain. If I have a memory of ice cream being delicious, the memory of it giving me pleasure is surely going to be reflected in the "neural circuitry" of my brain. That doesn't make the pleasure any less real or important to my experience of eating. Eating is much more emotionally and experientially complex than simply meeting needs for energy and nutrients. Kessler seems to think this is a problem. I'm glad, and yeah, not a religious eater of healthy food - if I need to eat several times a day, I'd like it to be pleasant. This isn't some kind of creepy mind control, it's a natural desire for tasty food that is reflected in a physical process in my brain. The things I do, feel, want, think, arise from physical processes in my brain. Is that such a bad thing? If we're going to get all excited about "the neuroscience behind" everything, we might as well appreciate and accept the unconscious processes in our brains that contribute to making a personality. Having experience with these processes being manipulated and out-and-out breaking down, I think I have a unique and useful perspective on the issue. From a BoingBoing post about the book:

Instead of satisfying hunger, the salt-fat-sugar combination will stimulate that diner's brain to crave more, Kessler said. For many, the come-on offered by Lay's Potato Chips -- "Betcha can't eat just one" -- is scientifically accurate. And the food industry manipulates this neurological response, designing foods to induce people to eat more than they should or even want, Kessler found...

I think this is a pretty disingenuous thing to write in a book nominally about overeating (which isn't about liking food, exactly, but appetite). The implication of this statement is that if you eat sugar and salt and fat, your hunger will never feel sated. I haven't read the book, but the press about it implies that what this means is that eating food and liking it creates a horrible and unforgettable memory of enjoying it.

The food industry faces a unique problem in our growth-dependent economy: there's only so much people can eat. In that respect, it's not in their interest to pack as many calories as they can into a food product that will have little effect on satiety. They're not trying to sell us calories, they're trying to sell us bags of Doritos.

If I'm still hungry after I finish one bag of Doritos (and if they're light and calorically insubstantial, I am likely to be) I might buy another and eat it too. A good example would probably be diet soda, which they can sell at the same price as regular, but get me to drink a lot more of. I drink quite a lot, myself, but would get a tummy ache if I drank two regular Cokes a day. The problem with making up the nutritional defecit in volume is that there are lots of low-cal foods out there we could be burning through at an enormous rate, but we don't like them very much and in the case of fresh fruit and vegetables, they don't offer much in the way of branding.

I like rice cakes*, but I hardly see the point. I like them, but not enough to justify buying them and getting crumbs all over myself for so little energy payoff. We like fatty, salty, and sugary foods. Convincing me I want to buy and eat more calories than I need or really want is not so hard with truly yummy foods. With other goods, merchants are only limited in their sales by how much of their product people want - which they work a lot to manipulate - or can afford. I have x number pairs of shoes, but I could stand to have more. Like food marketers exploit our natural desire for rich foods, manufacturers of shoes manipulate my desire to look pretty and prestigious. Both of these desires are real, but they don't really tie directly in to the purchase of these goods. My collection of shoes doesn't include any that I like currently, but buying more won't have much effect on my standing in society. Having a nice pair that I liked would, however, make me feel like I looked better. These tactics work with foods, too, so a winemaker can say that you're living the good life when you drink his wine in an attempt to get you to buy it, but Kessler seems more offended by the appeals to taste than any other method of convincing you to put food in your mouth. If these baser motivations bother Kessler so much, you'd think he'd be worried a little about Axe brand hygiene products, the safety of which are dubious, that market themselves by appealing to young men's desire for sex. If Kessler is motivated purely out of concern for the health of poor widdow Americans that like french fries, the moral crusade he's on is equally applicable to the Axe products. We're prisoners to our desire for junk food and sex! How dare these companies exploit our weaknesses like this?!

*How did this iconic diet food lose its place in the pantry of the dieter? When was the last time you saw someone eating one?


Oh my god I'm hungry - time for breakfast.

Everyone's always blaming the free market for its failures, but joke's on them - it doesn't exist!

Consumerist has been pushing the Arbitration Fairness Act, which addresses the problem of mandatory arbitration clauses effectively voiding the very contracts and in which they are situated (except that part about mandatory arbitration), as well as the contract's relation to the laws of the United States, where most contracts contain these clauses.

Today they tell the story of a guy who lost his job when his prosthetic leg started giving him blisters and he started using crutches instead. Bullshit, right? He says that using crutches had hardly any impact on his job performance, but that he was told over and over that he had to use his painful prosthetic. Under the ADA, an employer is required to reasonably accomodate a worker's disability, and it sounds quite reasonable to me that a guy use his crutches when other options for mobility cause him pain and infection.

The running joke at Consumerist all week as they've been highlighting this act is, "Don't blame the free market for this - you don't have to sign that contract." This holds some water regarding purchases, but is totally bankrupt when it applies to getting or keeping a job with a discriminatory employer. My favorite so far has been:

To those saying that this is an example of the failure of free markets, no one has ever been forced to sign an MBA. Just as capital is free to move in a free market, so is labor. The OP could have taken his labor elsewhere or not signed a contract with an MBA. Now I am in no way in favor of MBA's, but this is not a failure of the free market because we, as laborers, have the ability to take our labor elsewhere if we don't like the policies of our employers.

What I don't get is why free-market capitalists get so upset when anyone impugns the honor of the free market. Who the hell cares about your poor widdow free market when it doesn't exist? Physically moving to where you can get work with a reasonable contract is a cost that a laborer can't necessarily bear. When supply moves to accommodate demand, there's some friction. This is perfectly obvious to anyone who lives in the real world, but apparently irrelevant to dogmatic free-market capitalists who think their tautology has relevance to anyone at all. If the market were perfectly efficient and free, then it would be perfectly efficient and free. Well, okay, but let's talk about the market in which this guy is trying to find a job - where MBA clauses are ubiquetous and good luck getting that negotiated out of your employment contract.

Screw the incrementalism

The obviously calculated position that Democratic politicians take in opposing gay marriage but favoring civil unions just isn't getting anyone anywhere. I'll admit that I can sometimes be too staid and unambitious in my hopes for political progress, but I think Iowa and Maine and New Hampshire have shown the folly of concentrating on the boring stops along the way to progress. Who can get excited enough about civil unions to advocate for them anyway? Apparently hardly anyone. (Graphic lifted from Andrew Sullivan)

If they're so smart, why do they fall for that?

Medical-type-people will claim that the Ambien pen they're using doesn't influence their prescribing habits, but that's a pretty hard claim to believe when your doctor's office is so full of the plastic crap with logos all over it.

When I first got to know the workings of a lab, and had to think about inventories and what kind of microtubes I wanted to use, I was a little horrified at the stupid gimmicks supply and instrumentation companies use to advertise their wares. Naively, I thought, "Psh, we scientists aren't dumb enough to fall for that - we buy based on performance." And then, "If it didn't work, they wouldn't sink so much money into marketing."

The best lesson in the potency of branding I've learned lately is looking up brands of bath products I've long associated with wholesomeness with the Environmental Working Group's database of product safety ratings. The most counterintuitive thing I found was that Neutrogena's body oil with fragrance in it is rated as safer than the fragrance-free type. WTF. I actually like the somewhat patchouli-ish scent of the scented kind and would use it if it didn't make me sneeze all day. Also, a lot of my personal associations between brands and safety or wholesomeness were WAY off. Apparently I'm courting some pretty nasty reproductive cancers with my daily routine. My philosophy on the stuff is that if it's a cleansing product, its very purpose is to wash away, so if the few moments it spends on my skin don't bother me, I'm pretty much in the clear. Anything meant to stick to me, like a moisturizer or makeup or deodorant, I'm a bit pickier about. I tend to figure that if it doesn't bug my sensitive skin, it's pretty inert and boring.

So go ahead and terrify yourself with that search engine. Knock yourself out. It's kind of like the weird masochistic thrill everyone's been getting from the cognitive dissonance their admiration for Susan Boyle provokes in them. We knew we were superficial, but that we were this bad?

For a while in 2008, I was mildly obsessed with finding an eye cream that would reduce the puffiness around my eyes that I think will be a lifelong side-effect of the surgery I had last year. It was a fool's errand, but now I know what not to buy. For my money, nothing actually reduces puffiness except an ice pack, but the creams will make dark circles look better after a while. It was only after spending huge amounts of time scouring the shelves of drugstores that I realized how extensive the product-placement in 30 Rock actually is. I don't care if it's sarcastic - it's still product placement and kind of gross. I did think it was truly funny when Jenna got fat and Liz said of the fat-hatred directed at her, "It's like those Dove commercials never even happened."

In recognition of denying the bill of good we're constantly buying, I wanted to highlight Kevin, MD's take on doctors accepting promotional items but hiding the brands emblazoned on them. I agree that it's plain old corruption to take the perks but pretend to be above them. You hear that, Tina Fey? I'm talking to you - your "joking" product placement is no more dignified than the normal kind.

Yes, "We" can

Andrew Sullivan objects to the idea that our government isn't able to deal with more than one problem at once, but I think it's less a problem that the government can't work on enforcing the rule of law at the same time it tries to pick up the pieces of the economy, and more that the media likes one big story that bleeds. And we can hardly expect lawmakers to do anything without a camera recording their heroism, can we?

In the name of Science

In an effort to stay topical, I'm going to write an Earth Day post about how I was constantly appalled at how much plastic I threw away when I worked in molecular biology. Absolutely everything needs to be treated with bizarre processes to remove any traces of nucleic acids or RNases and DNases, and then properly disposed of after use. It gets really scary when you start on high-throughput processes and have to use a dozen boxes of tips in a couple of hours.

I know I've seen the worst of it because all I did for the last five years was PCR (aka polymerase chain reaction), which is incredibly easy to contaminate and tough if not impossible to sort out once you do get contamination in equipment or workspaces.

In preparation for this post, I impotently Googled around for some info about what people are doing to make high-tech work like this more sustainable, but terrifyingly enough, there's not much out there. It's not proving a negative to say I can't find something on Google, but it's a bit eerie considering how much Googling I do on any given day.

My tendency toward guilt also reared its head when I had surgery 6 hours away and considered the environmental impact of that adventure. I had a million family members there with me (Thank you everyone!), some who flew and some caravanned with Andy and I over to Seattle from Moscow. Between all the sterilization necessary to practice medicine or perform surgery, I don't know why I haven't heard more about this. And it turns out that there are a number of organizations devoted to making hospitals more sustainable. I'm also curious about the environmental impact of manufacturing all the supplies and drugs. We know that drugs people take pass into the supply of water from which we drink, and I've got a pharmacy of leftover pills that I don't know how to dispose of. (But if you're in the mood for Decadron, and trust me, you're not, I can help you out! Just kidding)

Private industry trumps government FAIL

I was listening to a report on NPR tonight where they let Newt Gingrich whinge about using statistical sampling methods to determine population demographics for the census. His problem is that they're not counting every single head but using time-tested methods of estimation. The reporter says that it really wouldn't be worth sending a census worker to every single doorstop (or very feasible), and Newt replies that private companies like FedEx go to every single address in the nation.

Okay, well, so? If FedEx could keep a satisfied customer base without delivering all of the packages it's paid to, wouldn't market forces obligate them to let a few packages slip through the cracks? Newt can't make a satisfying argument against good sampling methods, so he plays on fears about non-white minorities as an increasing proportion of the American population. The Republican argument against efficient and accurate sampling methods clearly says, "But by God, if you miss one white family, you'll mischaracterize the entire nation!"

I'm pretty sure that Newt's been through high school, and that he damn well knows he's being disingenuous. The wide-eyed Republican who doesn't trust your high-falutin' expertise is getting pretty old, and totally transparent.

McDonald's eaters probably have kitchens in their houses

I have to disagree with Mark Bittman. I've lately been considering ponying up and getting cable because I'd like to be able to switch on the TV and see a cooking show once in a while. My appetite has been M.I.A. for months, so eating and cooking have become a major chore. For someone who spends almost all of her time at home or the grocery store, I really don't cook or eat much. I was very often inspired by the Food Network's cooking shows when I watched them. I think I could crack this mild anorexia by pushing more ideas about food into my head so asparagus on the brain turns into asparagus on my plate.

In actuality, the reduced appetite is probably related to some of the medication I take, but not every one of my problems comes from a pill or can be solved by one.

Bittman sez:

When you watch most celebrity chefs go to work on TV it is a) baffling and intimidating, and b) a charade. Baffling and intimidating because nearly every ingredient is usually prepared in advance, and what isn’t is selected so that the chef can show off his (almost never “her”) knife skills, which are bound to intimidate nearly all of us who can never aspire (and why would we, really?) to chopping an onion with our eyes closed; his ability to make food fly in the air while cooking it; and/or his skill at presentation, which has absolutely nothing to do with taste.

Watching cooking shows has always activated my "I could do that" desire to meet a challenge. I am never going to forget when I realized that you can make macaroons instead of buying them at a store. Learning to cook is very empowering. I don't believe people when they say they can't cook - all it is is taking foods that taste good, putting them together and making it warm.

I don't actually believe that, but I say it because it's kind of funny and true enough to actually encourage people not to be intimidated. I think the reason I am good at cooking is that I turn food-related principles over in my mind long enough to be creative with them. What's sort of funny about that is how my thinking converges with classic recipes seemingly only influenced by my brilliance at combining flavors. I also really enjoy eating, and have long wondered whether my body rewards me with more/better endorphins than most people get for eating delicious things. I think this for a couple of reasons: when I am sick and eat a good meal, most of my symptoms abate for a little while immediately afterward. Also, my sense of satiety is not very keen so I frequently overeat. Now that my appetite has taken a dive, neither of these things are true and I eat a lot of convenience food so I can get the chore done as quickly as possible.

(Ironically enough, I had to step away here to eat a beautiful dinner my husband made - salad nicoise - when I was feeling too lazy to cook myself.)

Bittman writes from a perspective that appears to assume that most Americans do not cook basically any of the food they eat or have any familiarity with a kitchen or basic cooking techniques. I imagine that this editorial voice overstates the ignorance of American eaters, but stats I've seen on the subject aren't very complimentary. Fast and other prepared foods make up a large portion of the American diet, but everyone has had to dice an onion now and then, so they can judge the relative real labor that goes into one of Rachael Ray's putatively 30-minute meals.

In other words, I'm just not buying that most people are shocked and horrified to find that cooking works differently in their kitchen than in a television studio. I also think that most food writing is appallingly condescending (so it's not just Mark Bittman who's on notice here).

Back on the personal note - if anyone is concerned, I'd like to say that I've had a shakeup (no pun intended) in my medication routine and am seeing my appetite return.

A Girl and her Video Games

I am terrible at video games. Ever since the advent of the third dimension, I've been hopeless. Give me a Sega Genesis and I'm gold, but the xbox is too much for me. My husband will play any game until he wins it, so I've spent a lot of time watching him play video games. Some days, I'm contended and entertained playing second fiddle like that. I've followed the plots of lots of games he's played, but I've given up trying to play myself since when you suck at games all you get is 30 seconds of being shot and then waiting for the thing to reload. It's demoralizing. I did get a Wii, hoping that its differences would make for games that I would have the ability to play, but I still struggle a little with Super Mario Galaxy.

It's interesting to consider this aspect of myself through a feminist lens, since tech and games are a world where women are often excluded. I'm not used to knowing how well I fit a stereotype, but with this one, it's pretty clear. It kind of feels like an interest in games would be a natural outgrowth of my general interest in science and technology, but here I am with my girl games, watching my spouse kill all the aliens.

There are some games that I can play and enjoy (this is a list that would very quickly be fingered as a list of games girls like). I like:

World of Goo
Katamari Damacy
No More Heroes
The Sims
Portal
The whole Soul Caliber series
The Burnout series

The rest of them feel like work to me. You'd think my period of unemployment* and stint as an invalid** would have bored me enough to put in some practice and learn to enjoy some more games, but even the ones I can handle I find to be exhausting.

*I have a feeling that this part is coming to a close, thank God.
** My health has been mostly cooperative since about September, but things have been shaken up (no pun intended) in the past few weeks. To clarify, I consider being stable on medications to be "cooperative." Back on the med-go-round I go.

You want some representation to go along with your taxation?

Well, why not elect a few representatives, then?

Our president isn't a dog person

If he really were, he wouldn't have put the puppy off until after he became President. Watching the video, his body language pretty clearly doesn't express excitement or even comfort - more like, "You're cute but please don't get mud on my new pants." He reminds me of myself when I'm confronted with a baby - they're cute, sure, but what am I supposed to do with it? Guess I'll just keep my hands in my pockets and admire from afar...



Good "Gosh those Obama girls sure are cute" moment, but not really a video for cuteoverload.

Rude pervs aren't born

Jezebel brought to my attention an interesting question about teaching kids manners in the ways of dating and sex:

Should the conversations parents have with sons about sex, manners and respect be any different than the talk they have with their daughters?

I never really thought about it before, but it's extremely strange how a lot of men act with women. The article includes comments from a woman who frequently received explicit propositions for sex from strangers - and it's really weird how men who think they are otherwise polite and normal will put strange women on the spot. What I think it comes down to is the bizarre tendency to separate "sexual morality" from "morality." You need to be polite ALL THE TIME, even when you're naked. I think people who grow up with the idea that they're being naughty and breaking rules any time they engage in sexual behavior are more likely to figure they've already crossed the line of decency by getting onto the topic of sex, and what could possibly make a difference in how much they offend someone after that Rubicon's been crossed?

An example from the past few days in my life would be when in the new Spring sun, my extremely fit neighbor was out and about shirtless, and I very obviously made a point not to stare at him. Later, it occurred to me that if I'd been out in my swimsuit (and probably only if I were more conventionally attractive), I'd expect to be unapologetically ogled by any man, without thinking much of it. In the situation where I am the nearly-naked one, I'd probably feel like I was inviting stares, as would any men hanging around at the time.

I think the same reasoning applies to men who feel entitled to proposition strange women - they feel they're being provoked by the presence of an attractive woman.

The return on treating Alzheimer's

Kevin MD linked to a sort of sensationalist post questioning the amount of money that gets poured into the care of Alzheimer's patients. I'm no stranger to extremely expensive medical interventions, but I am of the opinion that current treatments for AD don't really justify their cost. They may slow the progression of disease, but at great monetary cost, and once you start going down the AD road, you're not coming back. (I may be uninformed as to what is possible in treatment of Alzheimer's, and I'd be happy to be corrected.)

I do know from experience that clearing cognitive impairment can make you feel "better" and relieve some real suffering, so I can see how drugs or therapy affecting cognitive function - even if it can't clear the cobwebs enough to allow a patient advanced in the disease to care for him or herself - could fall under normal pallitive-type care.

Me, if I ever get a diagnosis of AD, I don't know that I'd like anyone to bother treating the Alzheimer's itself.

What I'm not conflicted about whatsoever is keeping proper medical care of Alzheimer's patients. I've never been close to someone going through the course of AD, so I'm not able to say I can sympathize with the "Just have a stroke already, Grandpa" perspective.

I've moved on, but that doesn't change what happened

I have to admit that I found it via Fark, but this is an interesting article about people advocating on the behalf of sex offenders whose crimes exist within the range of at least icky and illegal, but in the minds of many, are not especially criminal.

My understanding is that in some states, sex offenders are registered at different levels, according to the severity of the original crime and the likelihood of reoffense. This makes perfect sense to me: rape is rape, but victims are always different, as are circumstances of the crime. The article goes out of its way to excuse statutory rape as not that bad. From where I sit, it seems like the tendency to commit such a crime is something a perpetrator would be likely to mature past, especially after being punished for it. A 23-year-old may think they have a lot in common with a 16-year-old, but they're probably not going to feel that way when they're thirty (because they don't). I was most alarmed by the work of one Jan Fewell, who looks up sex crime victims and calls them to try and recruit them to her offender's advocacy group and defend their own perpetrators by asking that they be treated leniently in light of the specific circumstances of the crimes they committed.

Fewell calls a victim and asks whether they were the victim of rape or if they'd had consensual sex. Leaving the two choices that stark seems a little manipulative to me, since a sex crime is prosecuted not for how a victim eventually comes to feel about it, but for the transgression itself.

I don't think sex offender registries do what they're supposed to do: they are said to exist to protect the communities in which sex offenders reside and work, but I think this is disingenuous. These registries exist to shame sex offenders and expose them to the vigilantism that can fit within the bounds of the law, like social stigma and employment and housing discrimination.

So a level III sex offender moves in next door. What am I supposed to do about it?

It's shameful to commit a sex offense, but I don't think forcing sex offenders into isolation and poverty really protects anyone. It might feel to most like a fitting punishment, but punishment doesn't undo or prevent crimes. Whatever a sex offender takes from a victim doesn't ever get paid back. Suffering is non-transferable.

More than the sum of her parts

I should have known better, but I was expecting Will Saletan to actually address his critics in his article about "why [he] write[s] about 'lady parts'." Instead, it was a lovely lecture about how when pro-choice advocates are worrying about women's autonomy, they really need to be worrying about fetal life, which they never bother to think about.

And I write about the value of unborn life because that's the problem my fellow pro-choicers don't like to talk about. I want to challenge you. Keeping the government out of these sticky moral questions doesn't make them go away. It just puts the burden on you to face them responsibly.

I'd like to challenge Saletan to responsibly face the value of women's work and autonomy when it comes to child-bearing. That's the 190-pound pregnant lady in the room that Saletan is ignoring.

Way to completely avoid the criticisms about being unable to see the women for the fetuses, Saletan.

I thought the image used to illustrate the article was especially telling - a faceless woman with her hand on her belly, which is the only bit Saletan seems to think is relevant.

When he discussed the case of surrogate mothers being stiffed for their pay, he says

It's a familiar tale of vanishing funds and defaulted obligations. But this time, the potential loss is bigger than property. It's pregnancy.

Yes, it's pregnancy, not property (i.e. the physical property being carried around and nurtured by the surrogate). Pregnancy is the work that's being paid for in surrogacy. Surrogate mothers are compensated for their time, physical sacrifice, and labor - not the baby. The starting materials for the baby were provided to the surrogate to begin with, so along with the physical resources she contributes toward growing the embryo into a whole baby, the product is the growing and not the baby. If compensation dries up, it's logical that the product would as well. There are endless perfect metaphors for the situation, but when a metaphor is absolutely perfect, it's incredibly boring, so I'll spare you illustrative repetition of the point I'm making.

The parents whose genetic material was used to create the embryo have entered into a contract with the surrogate, but the embryo/fetus itself is not party to the agreement. After the fetus reaches viability, the state has a compelling and enforceable interest in the surrogate's continued support of the fetus. This is in addition to the state's interest in upholding the surrogate's right to compensation for her work. Also, it would be pretty strange - and vanishingly rare - for a surrogate to quit 8 months in.

This is where Saletan's argument comes within view of relevance - yes, the fetus itself does have value as a proto-human being, but at a stage significantly before viability, the surrogate's right not to be pulled into indentured servitude outweighs the fetus' right to development and physical support. Beyond the blastocyst stage, I definitely think that the product of conception is a special thing deserving of a significant measure of its own consideration (and so do the stiffed surrogates, who have all elected to continue the pregnancies). Saletan is doing precisely what he's accusing abortion-rights advocates of doing - ignoring the conflict between a woman's right to choose what to do with her body and the value of fetal life.

Me, I think the woman's rights win. Saletan won't take a position on which is more valuable, and tries to deflect by insisting that killing a fetus is always a bad thing in itself that a woman deserves the right to do - but only if she feels guilty about it. If unwanted pregnancies germinated in random incubators, my sense is that it would be preferrable to support them instead of denying them a chance to get to personhood. I don't think guilt or shame mitigate anything (though Saletan is clearly hoping for a deterrent effect), so on balance, I'd rather a woman who has an abortion be happy that she'd done it.

I like people in general, and am happy to welcome any newcomers to the ranks of humanity.

For further reading, Amanda Marcotte at Pandagan has much more patience with this guy than I do, and bothers to hassle him about his disingenuousness.

I don't know how much I've added to her work, but I was annoyed enough at Saletan's evasiveness that I had to express myself.

How embarassing

I saw chief Justice John Roberts speak yesterday at the Bellwood lecture right here in my very own hometown! I was a little starstruck, obviously. The speech he gave bored even me. I kept waiting for the introduction to be over, and then he finished up. It was all about Abraham Lincoln. I could pick up a book about Abe without standing in line for 30 minutes in shoes I've not worn enough to break in.

There was a Q & A session at the end of the speech, and to the audience's palpable horror, a "birther" got ahold of the mic and accosted Justice Roberts about "Barack Hussein Obama['s]" citizenship. She got a laugh from the audience when she actually stated what her deal was, and Roberts deflected politely. Her "question" included an account of how she'd flown thousands of miles to come to Moscow to see his speech. Once her game was apparent, I was a little angry that she probably figured that we amateurs in Idaho are sympathetic to her wingnuttery, and couldn't manage to keep her quiet. I mean, if you're going to get on a plane and hound this guy, why not just fly to DC?

Yes, it really is just a different color

This is a picture from the display window of our downtown computer store, Cactus Computer. I don't know if it's still laid out this way, but I thought it was really interesting.
That's a little netbook, and the sign says "Yes, I really am a working computer and I really am pink!"

Hear that, ladies? We really can have it all: style, function, comfort, and pricepoint.

I thought that was interesting in light of clunky efforts to market consumer electronics to women, and prevalent attitudes about technology abhorring traditionally-feminine culture.

The double bind doesn't just apply to actual women, but to the items they use as well. Glue a rhinestone to that iPhone, and it's a piece of junk. Pretty and Smart aren't the same girl, or even friends, and Pretty has a different laptop than Smart does.

White bean, kale and pancetta soup

It's snowing out, but I think it's actually Spring. It's pretty cold, so a hearty soup was sounding really good, so I put this together. I just kind of made it up this afternoon, and it turned out a lot better than I could have imagined. This could be due to the fact that I usually am too cheap to buy pancetta and tend to just use bacon instead.

And when is a soup pretty enough to photograph?

4 oz pancetta, diced
1 onion, diced
1 clove garlic, minced
2 cans canellini beans
~4 cups chicken broth
3 carrots, peeled and julienned
1 can diced tomatoes
1/2 tsp. dried oregano
2 cups shredded kale
1 cup white wine
salt and pepper

First, dice the pancetta and brown it at the bottom of a pot. Once pancetta is crispy, remove from the pot and set aside. Add diced onions and minced garlic to the fat rendered from the pancetta, and cook until softened (add olive oil if the pancetta did not produce enough fat). Pour in the wine and use a spoon to scrape the burned bits of pancetta off the bottom of the pot. Add 1 can beans to the softened onion and cook about 5 minutes. Add about half of the broth to the pot and use an immersion blender to blend the onions and beans together. Pour in the remaining broth and bring to a low boil. Add the carrots and tomatoes to the boiling mixture and lower the heat so that the pot is at a steady simmer. Allow to simmer for 5-7 minutes until carrots are cooked to the consistency you like. Add the second can of beans, including the liquid in the can, and bring back to a simmer. Add the set-aside pancetta too, and simmer together for 5-10 minutes. Stir in the shredded kale and let simmer about 5 minutes, then taste the kale to ensure that you're satisfied with its consistency and level of bitterness. Remove the pot from heat and taste and adjust salt and pepper (the pancetta is very salty, so you won't need much salt at all). Garnish with shredded/grated parmesan and serve hot.

Glad to see that in the rearview mirror

Yesterday, it had been a year since my surgery. I'm going to do some neuropsychological testing today, to find out exactly what that means, but the rough picture is this: no job currently, no real idea of what comes next, and I am not sick at all. I was, however, disheartened to see that the FDA has just approved Copaxone for use immediately after clinically isolated syndrome suggestive of MS. I don't trust Copaxone, though, since it doesn't really slow progression of disability. It decreases frequency of relapses, but there's really no telling whether or not that's important to me. I have not yet had any classic physical MS symptoms (except maybe fatigue, which may or may not be related to MS). My neuro wants to keep monitoring me with an MRI twice a year, and keeping an eye out for symptoms.

The future of atheism is religion

I read this post at BoingBoing and was totally annoyed and confused. Especially this:

I think closeted atheists who participate in other religious activities are the future of atheism. They know that prayer feels good without a needing brain scientist to tell them, and they know you don't need God to want to feed the hungry, heal the sick, and provide homes for the orphaned. What if they simply stopped reciting the words that they didn't agree with during religious services, without calling attention to it? In many places I don't think they would be kicked out or turned upon and beaten just for that.

Um, what? I've spent some time with missionaries and got really hung up on the "pray to find out if you believe in God" thing. What is prayer if it's not directed anywhere? If you already have an inclination to believe in God, it's not going to seem so weird, but if the Universe feels pretty much empty where God would be, there's just no point to pretending like there's something there.

It's not a comfort to carry out the motions of empty spirituality. I get the impression that Paul Spinrad has no idea what it's like to just not believe in God. If you don't believe God is real, you don't have religious beliefs and you don't waste time in your private life pretending you do.

And he's damn right that you don't need God to tell you that human suffering is a bad thing. If you don't have any kind of afterlife to bank on, and the Universe is indifferent to the mortal lives we're all experiencing, if they go poorly, that's all we get. It is therefore paramount to care for other human beings.

It's a lot like Will Saletan's disingenuous attempts to accomodate pro-choice and pro-life views, where abortion is legal, but morally icky and to be avoided at all costs (not necessarily something believed by the pro-choice). With Spinard's vision of atheism, the atheists need to compromise and pretend they believe in God, and Saletan's vision of acceptable pro-choice thinking is that advocates for choice don't really think that women deserve the agency to make their own decisions about their health and feel however they want about it, but still have to feel guilty about it as a matter of policy.

Sure, you can tell your friends that you believe in God and go to church, and they'll probably believe you even if you don't really have the faith. What I'm stuck on is the prayer feels good even if there is no God thing. Huh?

I'm all for experimentation, and I think you can go into a religious life with the assumption that the beliefs you're adopting are true until you actually feel they're true (this is how I imagine it works for people who grow up with a faith they might not choose on their own), but if you can't muster any enthusiasm for the assumption, you're just standing in a building with a t on it with your eyes closed and hands folded. So you can see how my adventures with missionaries didn't end up with me a believer.

Atheists are a small minority of people, but that doesn't mean they kind of believe in God. In general, human beings do believe in some kind of God, but the long average view of what human beings is not useful for describing how any individual sees the world. Holding minority view is actually holding a view that others do not, and thinking that others are wrong. Not crazy or stupid - just wrong. We've all been wrong at one time or another, so it's not that big a deal.

...and look good doing it

Via Jezebel, Stiletto Spy School (a short workshop in the sexy arts and various other ways to make yourself seem like a Bond Girl) seems like the most objectifying thing on the planet. "As long as my attacker has a broken ankle and doesn't wear eyeglasses, I can disarm him with my stiletto heel. Leave the years of martial arts training to ugly girls who can afford to spend time on creating a robust, functional skill that doesn't necessarily arouse men."

It makes me think of the Neal Stephenson bit:

“until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world.”

Unfortunately, I think the female equivalent of this is, "under the right circumstances, I could exercise a bunch and go to a great salon and be a stone-cold hottie."
But then, you sit down and watch an episode of Made and you realize that a lifetime of training really does take a lifetime. A training montage doesn't really capture the whole experience.

zomg, your dog is such a faggot

I'm not usually exposed to TV ads, but they run some on hulu, so I've been amused/horrified by the Alpo campaign that uses anxious masculinity to get you to buy Alpo's supposedly manlier dog food for your dog. The site for the campaign is a mess of Flash, and therefore unlinkable, but the images for the ads - for example, a dog soaking in a bath full of bubbles with cucumber slices atop his eyelids - exhibit dogs being made to endure expensive beauty treatments, and supposedly humiliated by them. The tagline, "Real dogs eat meat." very clearly plays off of ideas pushed by makers of heavy fast food items that manliness is reflected in one's willingness to eat cholesterol- and sodium-laden meaty foods. Now you need to get your dog to eat the equivalent of a Baconator in dog food, or you'll be robbing him of a dogliness that you emasculated, groomed, artery-plaque-free metrosexuals will never understand.

Learn it early: different is bad

If you're weird, cover it up so the kids don't have to think about it. A BBC show for small kids has recently acquired a host who has one fully-formed arm and most of the upper half of the other, and no one tries to hide this from the camera, which has upset parents on behalf of their sheltered and incurious children.

The NYT quotes comments to the BBC that I wasn't able to find myself.

A father going by the name of brightroddydoddy wrote:

I question the logic of hiring a girl with part of her arm missing (and so obviously placed on display for kids to see it) to present cbeebies. My child was immediately freaked out and didn’t want to watch. There’s a time and place for showing kids all the “differences” that people can have, but nine in the morning in front of 2 year olds is NOT the place!

Little overboard on the need for political correctness, perhaps?

I question the logic of sheltering your children from the fact that every body has idiosyncracies. Your child may be perfectly average in every way at 2, but life has a way of intervening with these things, and growing up in a world where impossible beauty is demanded of everyone has a way of making the perfectly average feel perfectly dismal.

Little overboard on the need for conformity, perhaps?

Breathe a sigh of relief, ladies: The wage gap is a myth you're using to cover up your lazy approach at the workplace

...or so says Benjamin Ledford of the UI Argonaut:

Thankfully, I do not have to wonder about these claims anymore, because it turns out pay discrimination between the sexes is not the problem some would make it out to be. The Institute of Economic Affairs, a British think-tank, recently published a report that found British women between the ages of 22 and 29 who were employed full-time earned only 1 percent less than their male coworkers. Writers for the news magazine The Economist (not a right-wing publication) pointed out that for many women, this is the age when they are single, and, after marrying, they no longer need to impress anyone, whereas men are more likely to continue to connect their success to their paycheck.

I know that once I got married, I didn't care if everyone thought I was low-earning dirt. But why stop at 29? In 2004, the median age at which an American woman gave birth to her first child was 25. So most American women ages 22-29 aren't going to have children and second-shift caretaking falling to them to manage outside of work.

To think I worried that it was simply by virtue of my gender that I could anticipate less earning in my lifetime. Silly me! Only when I make the choice to have children and fail spectacularly at balancing work and home life do I pay the price in my wages. Earning money and financial independence? Sounds like a good thing to opt out of.

Take it away, Ben:

Additionally, the IEA report found women were more likely than men to choose a career in public or voluntary service, which typically pays less, and, of course, women were more likely to choose to leave the workforce to raise their families instead.

Thanks to the coincidence that men happen to contribute less to family caretaking responsibilities, their careers do not take a hit after they begin having children. Cleverly, they still care what people think about them and don't stop competing in the workplace once they've earned the only prize in life that matters: a spouse.

*Just a personal note about the editorial framing style where the writer pretends to care about a problem that affects others and is then relieved to discover they were worried about nothing: quit it. You had me all concerned about your struggle to understand why the world was making you worry over nothing, but the sympathy was fleeting. I'd appreciate the busting of the myth that college editorial writers cherry-pick and equivocate their way out of honestly exploring what the facts mean to the people who live them, but I'm not going to hold my breath while good ol' Ben's got a job at the Arg.

When you're up agaist Sauron, it's hard to lose a popularity contest

Time has a great article about the very real campaign against the non-existent Freedom of Choice Act. I thought this passage was especially interesting:

Still, FOCA is proving to be the perfect political issue for anti-abortion advocates — and for congressional Republicans, who have taken up the cry as well. Unless and until FOCA is voted on by Congress, they can invoke it as a looming threat. And the longer it remains a dormant issue, the more credit they can take for their own "proactive" efforts to "defeat FOCA," as a letter from House Republicans to Cardinal Rigali on Tuesday put it.

I'm reminded of a time when I got into an argument over the fictional procedure now commonly referred to as "partial-birth abortion," and was told that I was just unable to face the truth that partial-birth abortion is real and widespread and legally-condoned infanticide.

I thought that was a pretty weird tack to take - that I wanted to preserve my illusions about abortion; why why WHY would I want to do that? If PBA is/was legally-sanctioned infanticide on a whim, what would I get out of opposing the ban? I am pro-choice, and I support any woman's freely-chosen abortion. Like almost anyone, I would love to see the need for abortion reduced or eliminated. I think of abortion as a treatmen for the symptom of the underlying disease of unwanted pregnancy. Alleviating symptoms of disease is great, but it's sure better to be able to forego the disease to begin with.

Advocates for choice and health were thrilled when Obama rescinded the Global Gag Rule, which not only left women's health underserved worldwide by denying funding to groups who provide abortion referrals, but abortion itself is on occasion medically-necessary so it's kind of counter-productive for pro-choice folk to rely on the non-abortion medical services that are denied under GGR-type regulations.

It's that type of silence on the issue of actual abortions that makes crusades against fictional abortion legislation so constructive for anti-choice organizations. Faux-outrage is a tool we don't need to keep handing over to political opponents, which is why I was kind of glad when Alito was nominated for the Court, and the word "abortion" started being used again in public discourse. When we all thought the right to abortion was perfectly safe forever, no one would actually talk about what abortion is and why women choose it. Since I was a kid I have constantly been told that debating issues surrounding abortion is fruitless, because people are too emotional about it and won't ever listen or actually engage in conversation. The Bush era abortion fights were really instructive to me, since it gave me a chance to test my preconceived notions about the issue against the arguments of others, and I realized how many of these deeply-held beliefs that are so taboo that people won't argue them aren't very well-thought-through.

Being accused of pushing for infanticide for no good goddamn reason gave me a lot of insight into what anti-choicers imagine goes on in my head. It's a good lesson that when you imagine your political opponents getting caught up in a completely irrational emotional jumble, you're probably wrong about what they're thinking. If "it's in the Bible," is your argument, you don't really have an argument. The religion wall behind which people can hide their inexplicable and irrational beliefs probably makes it hard for people who oppose abortion for religious reasons to understand that I believe things for reasons that have explanations referring to the world in which we all live. It's not turtles all the way down. I can accept that people take moral dictates from religious traditions to which I do not subscribe, but I don't have to think it's wise or meaningfully defensible.

I can only conclude that stirring up constituents with the threat of FOCA relies on extremely poor modeling of what pro-choice is and what advocates for choice believe. There's also the extremely poor modeling of what a FOCA would do:

While the USCCB's literature about FOCA has been generally accurate, the chain e-mail has disseminated a number of false claims, including warnings that the proposal would force Catholic hospitals to shut down and lead to at least 100,000 more abortions each year. Some versions of the e-mail even claimed that FOCA could "result in a future amendment that would force women by law to have abortions in certain situations — and even regulate how many children women are allowed to have."

It's like the weird lies about gay marriage that were thrown around this year in CA: when church and state are separate, they're separate. I was civilly married, but not religiously. My civil marriage doesn't reach backwards into the church and suck the religion out of other religious marriages.

If it's already broke, don't break it more

It was really annoying to watch stem cell therapy get so heavily oversold in the 06 election cycle. Stem cell therapy seems to me like a fantastic way to give people cancer, and it turns out (registration required) that it is, at least in a recent case. Cancer is when your cells decide they're just going to keep reproducing past what the rest of your body can stand, and messing with the signals your body long ago relied on to stop making more of you strikes me as pretty dangerous - especially in the case of brain tissue.

Basically, if your brain keeps growing when you're out of the womb, your brain is growing cancer. A lot of brain cancer occurs in very young children, when the process of stopping the proliferation of brain tissue is critical, and prone to error. Introducing non-native cells that will proliferate according to signals out of sync with what is going on in the rest of your body strikes me as extremely dangerous. When the rest of your body is letting your cerebral tissue degenerate, what is in-sync is already quite dangerous, but trading a degenerative disease for a malignant cancerous one doesn't make things much better.

But hey, I can't blame people for trying. Or give up on the idea after seeing a case report.

Land's End Swimsuits for mutants

We've all been disappointed by women's mags that promise fashion advice for every bod, but only deliver on the thin-and-curvy or thin-and-not-so-curvy.

I got a new Land's End catalog today and noticed their system for indicating which of their swimsuits flatter which body types - I could figure most of it out, where the upside-down triangle was meant to symbolize the top-heavy bather, the rectangle a not-so-curvy gal, and the normal triangle the bottom-heavy. I had to look closer at the star, because I was not sure which human body is going to fit into a suit with radial symmetry. Supposedly a suit accompanied by a star looks good on any human female.

Fatties have been singing the praises of Land's End swimwear for quite a while now, but if you're in need of advice, I'll share that I got a suit from LE a couple of years ago and still adore it, even though a dip in an extremely-chlorinated hotel pool did a number on the coloration. It's been a long time since I've been comfortable doing anything at all without wearing a bra, but my LE suit serves my boobs well on camping trips where I want to be swim-ready all day.

Darn those desperate banks

It really creeps me out how many "checks" written with my name on them that are sent to me in the mail by credit cards with which I do not necessarily have an account. I'm not normally very easily spooked when it come to identity theft, but this just seems like a BAD IDEA. I've been getting them regularly for years, so I assume they haven't become a liability due to fraud or theft. Maybe I should use one to buy a paper shredder.

"Health needs"

I was listening to a radio show where some anti-choice guy was complaining about the lifting of the Global Gag Rule, but confessing that he was learning more about the "health needs" that weren't being met just because of the GGR. Like it or not, sometimes abortion itself is necessary to protect the health of a pregnant mother. (If you're John McCain, it's "health" and not health.)


People like to ignore the way that abortion is used medically to maintain women's health, and it leads to ignorant impositions on bodily autonomy. Giving in to that pressure gives credence to the idea that abortion is extremely rare and only needed by the stupid and irresponsible, so you don't have to worry about it, oh no.

I posted this video about the GGR the other day, and it plays along with the abortion is for weirdos and idiots framing by completely ignoring its role in the lives of so many women. Thinking about the video in that light, I am less impressed by it.

Big Nutra's direct-to-consumer scams

Feministing pulled a post about the "feminine" aspects of naturopathic medicine to post on the front page, and I am quite the skeptic of alternative medicine, but I was also annoyed at the "conventional medicine is patriarchal and for lame men who might as well spend all their money on useless, dangerous treatements and get sick and die while their doctor is being a jerk to them" vibe.

ericamatluck said:

Historically, women's voices have been excluded from medicine. Medical research has been conducted by men, for men. There was actually a time when hysterectomies were performed because women were considered "hysterical". Although we have seen progress with regard to women's involvement in medicine, the situation remains inadequate. Our understanding of pathology is based on how a condition presents in a man. This understanding is applied to women, ignoring the fact that we have a unique chemical and structural composition, and may respond differently to the same pathology.

This brings up real problems with medicine as it's been applied to caring for women, but is not any kind of argument for naturopathy as feminine, and therefore more-suited to female patients.

The comments erupted into a huge flamewar over "natural," "homeopathic," and "herbal" medicine, which seem to be used interchangeably. "Natural" is a marketing term that basically means nothing (see"all-natural" on the side of the bag of chips you're eating), and homeopathy is truly superstition-based and ridiculous. Homeopathy relies on an essential characteristic of a substance being imbued upon a diluent, even as the substance is diluted to minute, if even still present strengths.

Ever hear about the homeopath that drank a glass of water?

He died of an overdose.

I'm not really clear on the difference between "natural" and "herbal," but I'll bet a Venn diagram where the "herbal" circle was completely encompassed by the "natural" circle would represent that relationship. I've spent almost a solid year working to straighten out some medical problems, mostly with conventional doctors and pharmaceuticals. When things began, I really didn't have much capability to decide what I should do. I basically just did what doctors told me to do at first.

I've since warmed up a little to "alternative" medical practices, since hey, I don't mind taking a few vitamins or other substances that I know won't hurt me (ie valerian or hops or fish oil). I also usually run a search on pubmed with any new snake-oil-ish thing I'm considering trying.

Googling anything medical is almost always a disaster. If it's not on pubmed, it's someone trying to sell you something. I've learned that there are no bigger conspiracy theorists than people who have chronic, incurable diseases.

The thing I saw over and over again in the thread on Feministing that I thought was weird was all of the "pharma's corrupt, but try my $30 bottle of fish oil tablets" kind of stuff. You don't get the kind of exclusive manufacturing rights for a naturally-occurring substance, but people selling omega-everything are sure making themselves some money.

People are rightly suspicious of pharmaceutical direct-to-consumer advertising, but the same branding and appeals to emotions are applied to the overpriced supplement products. They don't make as much money as Pfizer, but they don't have the same liabilities either.

I don't think there's anything more consumer-friendly in the business of wringing the oil out of fish and putting it in little caplets, than there is in the business of creating novel compounds and testing them against diseases/symptoms, and then manufacturing and selling them.

With substances that aren't exclusively owned and manufactured by one entity, there's room for competition, which can open up the field to better-produced or plain better products. I bought a bottle of cheap fish-oil supplements, and the fish burps were in-freaking-tolerable.

This phenomenon has played out with generics of brand-name hits, and there are definite preferences for different generics. Generics aren't actually required to be precisely equivalent to brand-name drugs (they have to be within 80%, to my knowledge), so lots of people stick with their brand-name greatest hits drugs. I'm sure that competing in the supplement marketplace is a lot like competing amongst generics. You're all selling the same substance, but you need to make some kind of superficial distinction between yours and theirs. Make a supplement that is branded such that people feel good about buying it, and have an advantage such as convenience or user-modifiability. I've taken two generic forms of Ambien, and the first I took was a pill in an oblong shape that was easily broken in half so I could use a half-dose if I wanted. I preferred it to the one I currently have, that's tiny and unsplittable. They both do what they're supposed to do, but it's not efficacy on which I am basing my preference. I once had the birth control pills I was taking switch to a generic, and I switched back to the brand at my own expense(despite being made fun of by the pharmacist), because the generics really didn't feel right - I'd started a new type of pill when I was having really terrible menstrual cramps, and the new pill cleared that right up. They came back with the generic, and I'm not going to take birth control pills about which I feel iffy.

Concern trolling after Bush

It's now reflexive to be pessimistic about Democrats' ability to get and keep power, as evidenced by letters on Salon's assessment of Republicans obstructing successful Democratic governance. searafin writes:

Wishful thinking, Mike

Mike Madden wrote: “That is, of course, exactly what Democrats want voters to remember when they go to the polls in 2010 -- that the Republicans' first instinct was to stand between Obama's agenda and success.”

Wishful thinking, Mike. Obama and the Dems now OWN the recession. If they solve it with this massive bailout credit goes to them and Obama. If they don’t blame goes to them and Obama. 1st real test will be 2010. If the Dems lose the House (they will NOT lost the Senate regardless) Obama is in deep doo-doo. This was a smart move on the GOP part, hang the whole thing around Obama, Pelosi, Reid et al. Removes W from the picture, although he was one big spender too and on stuff like the OTHER bail-out in October that did nothing.

The answer? Well if 2010 spells the doom of the Dems in the House I think Obama is smart enough to work with the GOP in a meaningful way and eliminate most taxes which will spur growth and bring back the economy. Obama will then win in 2012.

Solving the recession falls 100% to him now, and Reid and Pelosi.

The other issue that could screw him up is terror...if we get attacked again ala 9-11 he is toast. Especially if the terrorist is one of the clowns down in Gitmo.

READ THIS!!! SOME OF YOU SALON BLOGGERS…are crazy and sound like murderous dogs. When you advocate knifing someone and killing someone over political views you need to check yourself into a place where they can help you, or change your medication. You might hurt someone someday and end up in jail, not a good place. Relax, learn to think and speak and write like adults, not bratty children or stupid criminals. I know you get all hot and emotional and are yelling a lot but take it easy, go for a walk, relax. It’s only politics and you don’t know who is reading this. If the Secret Service gets wind of you calling for violence against one the folks they protect you might find yourself standing tall before a judge explaining why you wrote such creepy stuff

So even when Democrats win they lose. Concern trolling was cute in 2000, but the 08 elections were no briar patch for Republicans.

"Eliminate most taxes?" Ha! I get it! Continue breaking the government like the Republicans have, and you're assured to look smart in the future.

I certainly agree, though, that Democrats are going to have their hands full trying to unshit the bed they inherited. Cynics with self-fulfilling prophecies are children who won't take a look around and realize that being clever and knowing might be a good way to get in a zinger, but doesn't fix any problems at all.

What will contrarians do when the cw starts to have some relation to reality?

A black woman hosting a show aimed at a general audience

I have become a huge fan of The Soup. It's all the fun of terrible TV combined into a weekly digest, so you don't have to watch it. Its current host, Joel McHale, does a great job and I always end up laughing out loud when I watch the show. The show was previously called Talk Soup, and was hosted by Aisha Tyler, who Bust is hosting for a night of comedy.

When was the last time you saw a television show hosted by a woman of color that was aimed at an audience that was not primarily women? Maybe when Aisha Tyler hosted Talk Soup.

MTV, I do not trust you

I was pleased but alarmed to see that MTV has picked up a few episodes of "How's Your News?" a news show made by people with developmental disabilities. I first heard about How's Your News? from an episode of This American Life, where they pointed out that you rarely hear directly from people with developmental disabilities. You hear about them, not from them. MTV's HYN looks like it will have a reality TV-like setup, so probably by using devices like video diaries, we'll hear from HYN's reporters directly.

Says MTV's website about the show:

Our 6 episode series has the adventurous spirit of Jackass, combined with the music and quirky comedy of The Monkees.

On the one hand, I'm pretty impressed that they would compare HYN to Jackass, showing a level of comfort with difference that many can't seem to muster when it comes to developmental disabilities. The stars of HYN are different than most of the people who will watch, but this implies that potential audience discomfort isn't going to get in the way of HYN having a sense of humor.

On the other, I fear for what typical viewers of MTV would think of HYN, and especially what they might call it, colloquially.

On the third hand, if the show were horribly insulting, I doubt that its stars would have given it the ok for airing. I'll admit that I have in the past been very impressed by MTV shows like True Life and Made*.

Pleasant surprises

You guys, we really have a Democratic president. As I was walking out the door this morning, NPR was talking about how Obama's putting an end to the global gag rule, and that the FDA is approving stem cell research, and and and uh, something else I don't remember.

I am extremely pleased with the tough rebuke of torture we've seen so far. I was waiting to get disappointed on the global gag rule thing, but wow, I was wrong! I saw this video a few months ago (I think) and thought it was very good, but my hopes weren't high enough that I wanted to post it.

Be careful what you wish for

Readers of BoingBoing are really threatened by the idea of not owning their books, but having access to the information in them through, say, the internet. People keep asking "But what if the power goes out and someone wants to censor stuff?" Well, if the power goes out, we're kind of boned anyway, people. You'd like to read your book after 4:30 pm in February? Too bad, no light.

What I'm really concerned about is this:



I don't often make jokes on this blog, so I should explain that I don't think it's completely paranoid to believe that centralizing all media would be dangerous, but there are a lot of things we take for granted when it comes to accessing media that we already have. Oh, and I'm stealing a joke from Futurama. I couldn't find a video clip, but if you've seen the segment to which I'm referring, you'll recognize the image from it.

Yes, We Can Swoon

I had planned on going down to the law school with Andy to watch the inauguration speech, but I couldn't convince my body that being awake before 8:30 was in its favor whatsoever. We piped hulu into the teevee and curled up on the couch to watch the proceedings, and then made some breakfast. I thought it was a horrible misuse to have Aretha Franklin sing "My Country 'Tis of Thee." Her hat was totally sweet, though. hulu was depending on Fox News' coverage of the event, and I was a little startled to hear the announcer speak of the new president as "Barack H. Obama." To contrast, W. was "George Walker Bush."

I wonder which middle name is going to live in infamy longer...

It was really a wonderful moment, and I thought his speech was good and inspiring, but not one of his best. To think that John McCain would have deprived the nation of this moment; I'll bet he feels kind of dumb now.

Hmm, maple bar or abortion donut? My doctor suggests the one with RU486 sprinkles, but I'm just not sure about it.

Emily Douglas of RH Reality Check caught a great wingnut overreaction today, where the American Life League is worried that Krispy Kreme is supporting the pro-choice cause by offering a free donut to any customer on Inauguration Day.

Sez ALL:

KRISPY KREME CELEBRATES OBAMA WITH PRO-ABORTION DOUGHNUTS Washington, DC (15 January 2009)

The following is a statement from American Life League president Judie Brown:

"The next time you stare down a conveyor belt of slow-moving, hot, sugary glazed donuts at your local Krispy Kreme, you just might be supporting President-elect Barack Obama's radical support for abortion on demand - including his sweeping promise to sign the Freedom of Choice Act as soon as he steps in the Oval Office, Jan. 20. [...]

Doing my female humorist homework

Moscow's public library is terrible; I knew that before, but I hoped it had gotten better since I last . went there. When I saw Guns, Germs and Steel on the new books rack, I knew I was in a real no-man's land. I've never taken advantage of its networking with other local libraries, but when the only book I could get excited enough about was Sammy's Hill by Kristin Gore, I had to request a couple of books from area libraries. When Gore's book first came out in '04, (and who wasn't sick to death of Gores by then?) I didn't even consider reading it. But then I started watching Futurama, and figured that she had some good humor cred from that. I was afraid it would be a Primary Colors-esque satire of the Clinton administration that would fly over my head, since I was pretty young during that era. I'm a couple of chapters in, and it seems so far like run-of-the-mill self-deprecating female humor set on Capitol Hill. (She goes to work with two different shoes on! How outrageous!)

I've never actually read anything Dorothy Parker wrote, so since my book arrived today, I'm about to start.

In the same vein of audacious female authors, I got ahold of Emily Hahn's autobiography. I read and was very moved by a biography of her a few years ago, but I'd rather get the story in her own voice. I'm wary of her colonialist adventures in Congo (I believe) and Hong Kong, but if I can't stand some racism in my white, 20th century female authors, I'm cutting out a huge amount of potential reading.

I'm going to get a card to use the UI library, which is really very decent, and could use some recommendations, since there are so many books I should have read by now and have not. I had a borrower's card for UI a few years ago, but was so embarrassed that I lost a book of theirs that I never went back.

Good cop/bad cop

I really really liked Amanda Marcotte's post about what liberals are projecting onto Obama. A comment there got me thinking about how easily politicians can play good cop/bad cop with the public. Obama did it with "change," and had a perfect bad cop to play off of. Commenter Andrew says:

Honestly, what everything since the election has really reinforced for me is how much I would never ever ever want that job.

I am not up to that level of responsibility. I’m not sure anyone is. Of course Obama will disappoint people from time-to-time. Of course he’ll make mistakes.

George W. Bush didn’t make mistakes. The - oops! - lack of WMD in Iraq? A “disappointment.” Abu Ghraib? A “disappointment.”

One of the things I like best about Obama is his apparent willingness to say “I made a bone-headed mistake.” To learn from errors, to adjust his preconceptions when reality intrudes.

I don’t mind a President making mistakes or disappointing people. I mind a President pretending (or worse still, honestly believing) that the mistakes never happened, that nobody was disappointed, that reality didn’t have a different opinion.

The one thing I really hope Obama does, and the one thing I think will really combat cynicism, is simply being honest about things, including mistakes. To say “this is what I’d *like* to do; this is what we *can* do.”

People actually like being leveled with.

"We're wearing the same uniform, but I'm not like that guy. I am like you, so listen to me."

The act works on me almost always, so I find it particularly insidious and unkind.

As to when/how Obama will disappoint: I've grown up with no reason to believe that a president will or can do much to make this country into what I think it can and should be. I'm open to a pleasant surprise, and will consider it one if he delivers on eliminating don't ask don't tell. I am pretty comfortable believing that Obama can't possibly be as bad as Bush. I always said that a random number generator would make a better president than Bush: it would at least be right sometimes, instead of wrong every time. He has a worse track record than a broken clock.

Insight into constrictive heteronormativity FAIL

Oh failblog, why do you have to do this to me?

Cakewrecks and Kwanzaa

I don't know if you ever read the blog cakewrecks, but it's the gofugyourself of the pastry world, and they recently had an entry about a "Kwanzaa cake" that had been featured on Sandra Lee's (just awful) Food Network show. It took me a few readings to understand what exactly it was, but the cake had been created by Lee out of a storebought angel food cake, frosted with chocolate cinnamon icing, and decorated with popcorn, corn nuts, pumpkin seeds, and canned apple pie filling.

Gee-ross, right?

Until I read all the text in the post, I assumed it was some kind of racist joke with a "black people are tacky" punchline the blog author was making. The possibility remains it could have been a slur of that type on the part of Lee and her producers, and Wrecks was just reporting the carnage. The Food Network has long been criticized for excluding people of color, so I wouldn't put it past 'em.

Anyone familiar with Lee's show won't be surprised that she could take a wreck so far, but if it's too much for you to believe, YouTube has the clip

TVA Disaster

I first heard about it on blogs/facebook, but from what I hear that's the only way a person is going to get much information about the gigantic environmental disaster that's occurred in Tennessee. I don't think it's a stretch to think of it as a Katrina-scale disaster, right down to a completely inept governmental response/prevention. The conspiracy-theory-turning wheels in my head blame the media blackout on coal industry sponsorship calling the shots of manistream media coverage.

At first, reports said that Arsenic and Mercury levels in drinking water in affected areas were safe, and there was a call to boil water (wouldn't that just concentrate the toxins that are now admitted to be present?).

If Bush really doesn't want to be remembered as the guy who bungled Katrina, he'd do well to get on this thing as soon as possible. Who else gets the chance to create and then try to mitigate this many disasters in eight years in office?

A Project for Tomorrow

I've been thinking about doing this for a long time, but the new HHS conscience rules have finally convinced me to go for it: I'm going to call the different pharmacies in the Moscow-Pullman area and ask whether they provide service to those seeking contraception (emergency or otherwise). I've never had occasion to look for Plan B, so I don't know whether the pharmacy I use will sell it. They have gotten a lot of business from me this year, and I'm hoping they won't lose it tomorrow.

It's now the responsibility of any woman wishing to use prescription contraception to find out whether her medical providers will actually write or fill prescriptions for it. A few weeks ago, I saw someone somewhere suggest that Planned Parenthood get into the pharmacy business, and how fantastic it would be if they had pharmacies across the country that could be relied upon to serve customers' reproductive health needs. PP does already distribute birth control pills and Plan B, but a chain of pharmacies separate from clinics would surely be easier to maintain and a good revenue source. There's no PP clinic in Moscow, but I'd be happy to patronize a pharmacy if they operated one here.

Procrastinator

Bush's legacy rehab program seems like something he should have started on, say, 8 years ago, instead of now.

Energy conservation in the West

I heard something on the radio the other day about the impact things like leaving lights on in rooms you're not using has on the environment, and it got me thinking about what my usage of power is causing to happen. In the Western US, most of our power is derived from salmonicidal dams, but they're there whether I leave my lights on or not. So I doubt that my conservation of energy could be translated into a number of salmon saved from a gruesome fate deep in the turbines.

Breaching dams or not is a pretty controversial subject in this area, but my feeling from what I've learned on the subject is that fish hatchery programs haven't worked, and even if we breached all the dams and tried heavy fish hatchery programs, we probably wouldn't see salmon runs return to anything but a pale shadow of their former existence. So if we don't get salmon back, what's the point of losing these green energy/economy-boosting resources?

So, who's up for a trip to the Hoover Dam?

"You're cute when you're angry," as a compliment

I've been watching the series Friday Night Lights, and I now have a gigantic crush on Coach Taylor. I was watching a scene where he gets really upset at a referee in a game, and I thought, "Aw, he's cute when he's angry," and realized why people think that could ever not be an insult. When you love someone, you love seeing them pursue their passions, and seeing them angry presents the opportunity to see what endears you to them emerge in full force. In eight years of monogamy, I've learned how good it is for Andy and I to go out with lots of people, since we both have and enjoy the instinct to try and "win the cocktail party," and get to see each other show off in ways we've already used up between ourselves. His kid with a retainer voice makes me laugh every time.

Hypothesis: There are fewer women in science because their brains aren't suited to hostile work environments

I hadn't looked into the story of the (male) biology professor who was demoted for refusing to take part in a sexual harassment seminar, thinking I could safely ignore yet another conservative whiner who can't deal with being implicated in the problems he perpetuates. The "Sexism is terrible and pervasive, and how dare you imply I am part of the problem when obviously I hate sexism more than anyone ever!" hand-waving isn't fooling anyone. From the article:

McPherson maintains that his refusal has little to do with sexual harassment and much to do with individual dignity.

Uh huh, sure, because sexual harassment doesn't harm any individual's dignity, so we can ignore it in favor of some dude who doesn't want to feel like he's ever contributed to the problem. Professor McPherson's feelings are hurt, so let's stop paying attention to the people whose careers are derailed by ignorant jerks and make an exception for him and his illusions.

Refusing to learn anything new about sexual harassment isn't making McPherson look like the expert on the issue he must be if he is so far beyond the problem that it is an insult to try and give him new information about it. If he were really worried about individuals' dignity, he would put some effort into helping maintain it, instead of derailing the efforts others are making. It's just not possible to make this kind of stink in good faith, because if the University feels the need to inoculate itself against the risk of sexual harassment by taking a shotgun approach, it must rely on a certain amount of ignorance to be perpetuated. If McPherson is so knowledgeable on the subject, he should know this, and accept help in being proactive about informing the pockets of ignorance that exist in anyone's understanding of the world. I don't think he doesn't know this stuff, but I think he doesn't care if he's perpetuating the problem. Precautions aren't punishments. People are fallible, and need to anticipate when their weak areas will be pressed beyond what their own sense of decency can withstand.

I will admit that I don't think I, as an entry-level female who has a fair amount of experience thinking about these things, would learn a heck of a lot at this kind of seminar, but a potential victim's ignorance is not as dangerous as a potential perpetrator's. When you're a man in a position of power in a field that tends to exclude women from positions of power, and you exercise bad judgement, you ARE perpetuating the status quo. Losing the privilege that the status quo awards you feels random and unfair, but never having access to it feels that way too.

What a brave man

Gregory Berns, director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University is cleverly and courageously doing his job (i.e. taking on research projects) in the face of an uncertain (no - bad) economy. We stupid rats in boxes get nervous when our savings disappear, and don't have the capacity to add the current buzzprefix "neuro" to our job titles. If I got paid to annoy people stuck in MRI scanners, I'd be daring, too.

I DON'T care what your business is, but if you think it will eventually come back to what it was — your brain is in the grips of the fear-based endowment effect. What I am doing is looking for new opportunities. This means applying neuroscience discovery to realms where it hasn't been used before.

I have teamed up with anthropologists to apply brain imaging to understand the biological roots of political conflict. I am starting another project to use brain imaging to predict which teenagers are likely to make fatally bad judgments and, hopefully, train them to make better decisions.

This strategy keeps the exploratory system of my brain active. And right now there are incredible opportunities to do something differently. Yes, they're risky, and some will fail. But while others wait for the storm to pass, I'm busy expanding into new areas. If I wait for money to start flowing again, the opportunities will have passed.

I've moved on, but that doesn't change what happened

I have to admit that I found it via Fark, but this is an interesting article about people advocating on the behalf of sex offenders whose crimes exist within the range of at least icky and illegal, but in the minds of many, are not especially criminal.

My understanding is that in some states, sex offenders are registered at different levels, according to the severity of the original crime and the likelihood of reoffense. This makes perfect sense to me: rape is rape, but victims are always different, as are circumstances of the crime. The article goes out of its way to excuse statutory rape as not that bad. From where I sit, it seems like the tendency to commit such a crime is something a perpetrator would be likely to mature past, especially after being punished for it. A 23-year-old may think they have a lot in common with a 16-year-old, but they're probably not going to feel that way when they're thirty (because they don't). I was most alarmed by the work of one Jan Fewell, who looks up sex crime victims and calls them to try and recruit them to her offender's advocacy group and defend their own perpetrators by asking that they be treated leniently in light of the specific circumstances of the crimes they committed.

Fewell calls a victim and asks whether they were the victim of rape or if they'd had consensual sex. Leaving the two choices that stark seems a little manipulative to me, since a sex crime is prosecuted not for how a victim eventually comes to feel about it, but for the transgression itself.

I don't think sex offender registries do what they're supposed to do: they are said to exist to protect the communities in which sex offenders reside and work, but I think this is disingenuous. These registries exist to shame sex offenders and expose them to the vigilantism that can fit within the bounds of the law, like social stigma and employment and housing discrimination.

So a level III sex offender moves in next door. What am I supposed to do about it?

It's shameful to commit a sex offense, but I don't think forcing sex offenders into isolation and poverty really protects anyone. It might feel to most like a fitting punishment, but punishment doesn't undo or prevent crimes. Whatever a sex offender takes from a victim doesn't ever get paid back. Suffering is non-transferable.

Corner Bait

I've been only barely entertaining myself over the weekend, and I kind of randomly decided to rent The Golden Compass to keep me amused while I wait around for Andy to finish up some schoolwork.

I would love to be in the room with a time-traveling Republican from 2005 who turned this disc on. Not only is this a children's movie at the beginning of a book series where the progtagonists kill God, but nestled amongst the previews was an advertisement for the World Wildlife Fund's advocacy for the polar bear in the face of global warming.

I have a hard time believing that this double-affront on Republican orthodoxies was an accident.

Even if the WWF wasn't consciously trying to get the goat of Republicans (hopefully) past, they couldn't pass up the PR opportunity that a neat-looking armored polar bear in a hugely-hyped and expensive children's movie presented.

Winning Thanksgiving

I think I'm about to do it with chili-garlic sweet potato latkes that I made my husband do most of the prep work for. We've never really worked out the exact recipe, but it's a combination of grated sweet potatoes, chili garlic sauce, sliced green onions and egg and AP flour, made into little thin patties and fried in peanut oil.

Take that, turkey!

The GOP has finally convinced us of its uselessness

"Raising taxes is about killing jobs and hurting small businesses and making things worse."

- Sarah Palin

Via DailyKos, Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute is arguing that if Obama proves the conservative idea that government doesn't do anything of value wrong, then people are going to quit paying Republicans to go to congress and complain about congress' existence.

Sucks to be on the wrong side of reality, but that's how it goes when you're a Republican in 2008.

Cannon gets all of this right, except he tries to hide this argument about principle in one about optics, by calling Obama's approach to health care "socialized," and insisting that the word magically means we need to avoid it. This doesn't make sense after he admits that a good health program would drive current Republicans away from the right by actually helping them access medical care.

It gets weird when Cannon worries that a single-payer system would trap people into liberalism by "making citizens dependent on the government for their medical care."

Like when conservatives panic about care being rationed under a socialized system, he forgets that this is already the status quo: healthcare is rationed according to income rather than need. Access to health care doesn't create the need for it. Millions of Americans already do not get the care they need, and they won't be any more needy when they've had a taste of access to care through the government. Those without insurance don't have anything to depend on currently. Need for health care is a constant, regardless of ease of access. Many Americans are currently dependent on luck to stay alive and healthy, but augmenting it with real health care doesn't mean that people will not have needed the luck in the beginning. It's not like people haven't figured out that their needs are not being met and that they'll only realize they need to treat their diabetes once they realize how much better they feel when their condition is treated.

Bigots can't handle democracy

Let's get something straight: people across the country registering their displeasure with the passage of Proposition 8 in California are not acting against democracy. If I think that something a majority of people have voted for is unkind and unnecessary, I'm entitled to let them know, just as millions across our country did today by rallying against the passage of Prop 8. According to Bryan Fisher of the Idaho Values Alliance, this means that I "actually hate democracy," because it "keeps getting in the way of [my] radical agenda."

Puh-leaze. Accepting but protesting majority rule is about as in-line with democracy as I can imagine people acting. Fisher is free to whine about people thinking he's a creepy dinosaur, and we're free to say that he is one. As it stands, I have to let Californians keep (or possibly break) families apart, but I don't have to like it.

Sounds like democracy all around to me.

Prejudice

I've been getting an inordinate amount of friend requests on Facebook from middle-aged men I've never heard of lately. I'm usually a somewhat promiscuous with my befriending habits on Facebook, but when a strange guy who graduated from college the year I was born wants to be my "friend," I'm pretty turned off. I have only ever gotten a handful of these, because I think my relationshp status of "married" is actually a pretty good filter. But as it turns out a bad profile picture isn't - I just changed mine from the one at right to a more recent one that is out of focus and depicts me and my now crazy hair absent-mindedly nomming on a cocktail straw.

Maybe it's time that I admit that I absolutely love Facebook and want to be your friend! It's been my primary social outlet since March, so I'm happily hooked.

So if these requests are coming from readers, be aware that a woman in her twenties looks askance at social networking connections from men who are old enough to be her father and have no discernable reason for contacting me. So let me know in the request if you'd just like to get in contact because you like reading my blog, and I won't heartlessly ignore your request.

When I grow up

I keep saying I want a PhD in biochemistry, and it's actually true. I like science and am perfectly functional in it, despite the fact it's not really where my talents lie.* I always assumed I wasn't interested in medicine, but now that I have some fascinating medical problems, I may have changed my mind. I've been thinking lately about how I would probably enjoy epidemiology.

If I'm going to play to my strengths, I really am interested in quantitative aspects of political science, in the same way that I'm interested in how "Wash your hands!" posters actually affect virus transmission rates.

*I'm good at writing and passionate about politics, neither of which dispose one to being really good at titrating things.

Blogging Anonymously

I've always felt proud that I put my full name next to my blog posts, but I kind of have a built-in dodge in that my name is so common that I could be any of a number of Sara E Andersons that live in my town or work at the institution where I do. Friends and relatives read my blog, so I'm not exactly hiding under what functionally amounts to a pseudonym. The Portly Dyke, AKA Carol Steinel, recently wrote about how covering up her real identity had been an obstacle to some good blogging, and I thought, "It's pretty nice that I never had to deal with that." I don't think I'd be able to keep up a long-term, elaborate cover for my identity, but I had a friend once, who'd known me for a year, to whom I tried to explain that I am a bad liar, and she said, "You never lie!" So I thought I must be a pretty good liar if she thinks that.

No man is an island

I really liked digby's post about how it is in the self-interest of even rich people to help foot the bill for creating a stable and comfortable society. I'd really be taking it in the shorts if I started out with enough wealth to think health insurance wasn't necessary.

I've been thinking a lot about the value of spreading costs around, given how much I've had to rely on insurance this year, and how much better an investment health insurance turned out to be for me than just keeping/saving/investing my money. I was an unusually risk-averse 21-year-old. I'd be absolutely buried under debt now if I didn't buy health and disability insurance years ago. You really don't want the kind of return on your investment in health and disability insurance that I got, but I knew that beforehand.

I'm an exception (one in thirty million is the incidence of the condition I ended up with), but I'm sure glad that I've got 29,999,999 others to help pay for a freak health incident. Looking back, it's nice to know that my insurance premiums during my years of perfectly good health were helping defray these kinds of costs for others.

The Culture Wars' Diminishing Returns

If gay marriage and insane impositions on women's rights don't have the coattails to get Republicans into office, I just don't see how they'll even be brought up anymore. If you're not going to turn a profit by pushing social issues, you might as well put your funds into an actual campaign for office.

For some reason, when it was brought up, I never imagined that Prop 8 would even come close to passing. I didn't count on the Mormon Church flying their hate flag so high and expensively. One can only hope that those who are currently married will be grandfathered in and not lose the rights they already had.

I admit it

I haven't done a damn thing today except drink the coffee Starbucks gave me, and I don't think I'm gonna.

Idaho Democratic Uncoordinated Campaign

I just got two calls at the same time from the Idaho Democratic Coordinated campaign urging me to vote today - one caller left a message while the other one was speaking to me. I still haven't gotten my act together to do anything useful today, but I've decided against my original plan to check out the Dem headquarters, since this doesn't speak very well for their effectiveness.

Sigh.

Watch closely

I was positive I'd be back at work by now when I was asked to help keep an eye on polling places in Moscow in case there's Republican voter suppression in the works. Turns out I'm free tomorrow, so I think I'll go check out the dome and the fairgrounds in case I can be of any help. From what I hear, UI college Republicans are going to be "verifying" voters tomorrow, so I might be using my time wisely.

If Republicans are going to have such fits about voter registration, they're going to be able to see very clearly how much they lost by this year. No accusations of your victory being stolen when you're out there disenfranchising people, please.

Whore to Madonna in just four weeks

I just saw an ad for a reality show called "My Bare Lady," which is a fish-out-of-water reality show where four female "adult stars"* are given a go at careers in business, the central point being that they take their dishonorable jobs that they would only have taken because they're constitutionally drawn to them, and shove them so that they may try, and fail hilariously, to live like normal, honorable people. I see that this is a sequel to a previous iteration of the show. You can already hear the "Whaaaa?" record scratch in the opening sequence of the show.

I know I'd have a hard time setting up a whole new career in four weeks, and if my resume were mostly full of jobs about which there are lots of unflattering stereotypes, I'd resent being set up for failure in this whore-to-madonna contest. I'm not on the show, but I already resent the tone in its setup.

*It seems to me that the bar for stardom is set pretty low when it comes to pornography. Perform in an adult film, and you're a "porn star." I think of the "star" of a film to be an actor playing one of the main roles, one of the people whose name is included on the trailer as an enticement to see the movie.

***

I just watched the show, and I think my inexperience with reality TV is showing because I was surprised at how many lame double entendres there were, not only referencing sex, but also referencing the supposed uselessness of these women as people.

Pleasantly, the business coach has a monologue where he discusses the idiotic preconceptions that drive the premise of the show.

The objectification doesn't just hinge on sexism, but also racism, with nonwhite participants being exoticized constantly.

Got the vote out

I thought it was too late to register for early voting, but I registered and voted today with my dad. The line was pretty long when we got there around noon, but we went out for lunch and came back to a much smaller line. Now I won't have to wait around in an even longer line on e-day before getting to the Drinking Liberally par-tay! (If you're in/near Moscow on election day, email or call me for details)

Restraint

In the past four or five years, if it's this close to Halloween, I've usually read six or seven editorials about how kids these days wear slutty halloween costumes and need to cover their shame - always illustrated by a woman wearing an extremely small costume. I'm impressed that I haven't seen the normal deluge of this titillation masquerading as opinion this year.

Pop culture synchronicity

Funny how they reach the Cuban Missle Crisis on Mad Men the weekend before Fallout 3 comes out.

Leverage

Kevin, M.D. is concerned that single-payer healthcare plans dictate the prices of medical procedures to providers.

But that's exactly the point, Kevin. If providers don't like the contracts they've negotiated with insurers, they need better negotiators, or to find ways to cut the costs of procedures. It costs a heck of a lot more to get an MRI in the US than in Japan, and this isn't merely because the technology is more available in Japan.

The rule about liberals

They never actually feel what they say they do - they repress and obfuscate so that they can live in the miserable world where women have control over their bodies and it is absurd to spend more than a hundred thousand dollars on clothes in the space of two months that saw millions lost from Americans' retirement savings.

The preachiest level on Katamari Damacy