Wednesday: Hoo Ha’s, Xenophobes, House Hunters, Male Egos, and Aliens, oh my!

Posted: June 20, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: just because | 24 Comments

Good morning, news junkies! Here’s your A.M. link dump…

This marks the first time in more than 20 years that a Nobel Prize has been given to a physician who specializes in all that stuff downstairs. Committee members praised Lazoff for helping to stem the frightening epidemic, which last year killed more women than ta-ta and derriere cancer combined.

The Kennedy name doesn’t have the reach it used to, but New England’s lone presidential swing state (along with the Massachusetts Senate race) may fall within that orbit, and in any case it’s not like the president has a line of surrogates stretching out the door.

In a 2006 article, Yerushalmi lamented in the inability to engage in “a discussion of Islam as an evil religion, or of blacks as the most murderous of peoples (at least in New York City), or of illegal immigrants as deserving of no rights” without being labeled a racist. He also wrote that the American founders were on to something when they limited the vote to white men. “There is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote.”

So what’s the problem? By now, the onus is on the viewer to consume all “reality television” with a chuckle and a grain of salt. The genre’s underlying appeal is often rooted in its escapist, aspirational qualities (or, at other end of the spectrum, its indulgence of our basest schadenfreude). But House Hunters was always much more about showing us an attainable reality than a fantasy. The show (and its many iterations), in which people just like us (juggling budgets, worried about school districts, pulled between city and suburb), go shopping for the best home their money can buy, not only glorifies the dream of home ownership, but makes it seem achievable. (If that IT guy and his elementary school teacher wife can successfully get out of their dingy apartment and into a new home with the requisite granite countertops, “marriage-saving” double vanities, and bedroom-sized walk-in closets, so can I!) This plays right into our inexplicably unwavering attachment to home ownership: Despite the collapse of the housing market, polling continues to demonstrate that we regard owning a home as the cornerstone of the American Dream—a perception that undoubtedly played a role in the home-buying craze prior to the bubble’s burst.

Showing houses that aren’t even for sale at prices divined by its producers, House Hunters is presenting dangerous misinformation about the home-buying process and deleting all of the accompanying complications and consequences. It’s turned what is actually a messy, frustrating, often dead-end process into a seamless (and perhaps necessary) path toward fulfillment. What’s more, it seems likely that viewers use the prices, locations, and home criteria discussed on the show as barometers for their own house hunts because the information is presented as fact. No, House Hunters does not explicitly condone selling one’s soul for a white picket fence, and other HGTV shows like My First Place and Property Virgins do delve into money and home-inspection woes from time to time. But doesn’t HGTV have some obligation to portray the housing market as it is, or, at the very least, offer a pronounced disclaimer about the producers’ creative and logistical liberties?

Maybe they could fix this whole mess and wipe the slate clean with a good old fashioned “where are they now” episode, showing us the truth after those mortgage payments start taking a toll.

One of the most notable risk factors for ethical laxity is one that all of the above offenders share: Being a man. A number of studies demonstrate that men have lower moral standards than women, at least in competitive contexts. For example, men are more likely than women to minimize the consequences of moral misconduct, to adopt ethically questionable tactics in strategic endeavors, and to engage in greater deceit. This pattern is particularly pronounced in arenas in which success has (at least historically) been viewed as a sign of male vigor and competence, and where loss signifies weakness, impotence, or cowardice (e.g., a business negotiation or a chess match). When men must use strategy or cunning to prove or defend their masculinity, they are willing to compromise moral standards to assert dominance.

Shall we blame it on testosterone, the Y chromosome, or other genetic differences? The current evidence doesn’t point in that direction. Instead, a recent series of studies by Laura Kray and Michael Haselhuhn suggests that the root of this pattern may be more socio-cultural in nature, as men – at least in American culture – seem motivated to protect and defend their masculinity.

  • While I was on the plane reading my copy of the Economist this past weekend (yes, Dr. Dakinikat, you’ve rubbed off on me in a serious way!), I came across this fun little piece of intrigue:

The search for alien life

Twinkle, twinkle, little planet
An undervalued optical trick may help to find life in other solar systems
Jun 9th 2012 | from the print edition

MOST astronomical telescopes employ reflection to focus starlight. A concave mirror creates an image from this light using a design pioneered in the 17th century, by Sir Isaac Newton. Those telescopes that do not employ reflection use refraction. They have a system of lenses, an idea first used to look at the stars by Galileo.

But there is a third way to focus light. A century and a half after Newton, and more than two after Galileo, a Frenchman called Augustin-Jean Fresnel worked out that you can do it using diffraction. A set of concentric rings, alternately transparent and opaque, will scatter and spread light waves in a manner that causes them to reinforce each other some distance away, and thus form an image. The rings are known as a zone plate. And Fresnel’s countryman, Laurent Koechlin, of the Midi-Pyrénées observatory, thinks zone plates are the way to find out if there is life on other planets.

Seeing oxygen in another planet’s atmosphere would be a giveaway of biological activity because the gas is so reactive that it needs to be continuously renewed. That would almost certainly mean something akin to photosynthesis was going on, for no known non-biological process can produce oxygen from common materials in sufficient quantity. Looking at such an atmosphere, though, is tricky. Stars are so much brighter than the planets which orbit them that their light overwhelms the small amount reflected from a planet’s surface. And this is where Fresnel comes in.

Read the rest! It’s fascinating.

Well, that’s it for me… Your turn, Sky Dancers! Have a wonderful Wednesday.

Caturday: Sisters of the Moon edition

Posted: May 26, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: just because | 39 Comments

Good morning, news junkies! I’m super-tardy, so this will be short and sweet.

  • MUST-SEE FOOTAGE: Saudi woman stands her ground against religious police telling her to leave; tells them it’s none of their business if she wears nail polish!

Lnouisiana [sic] is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly triple Iran’s, seven times China’s and 10 times Germany’s.”

That paragraph opens a devastating eight-part series published this month by The Times-Picayune of New Orleans about how the state’s largely private prison system profits from high incarceration rates and tough sentencing, and how many with the power to curtail the system actually have a financial incentive to perpetuate it.

The picture that emerges is one of convicts as chattel and a legal system essentially based on human commodification.

First, some facts from the series:

• One in 86 Louisiana adults is in the prison system, which is nearly double the national average.

If you’ve got the time this weekend, you best read the rest.

  • Oh and before I close this… a Very Happy Birthday to Ms. Stevie Nicks! “She is like a cat in the dark, and then she is the darkness…” Here’s one of my favorite live performances of hers on youtube… “Sisters of the Moon”… absolutely mesmerizing, just WOW…

Alright. Comments, Sky Dancers. You know what to do! Have a wonderful Memorial Day weekend.

Caturday Reads: What Happens to a Cat Dinner Deferred?

Posted: May 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: just because | 64 Comments

Kitty, it’s the tainted food supply causing the hold-up. Mommy has to spend extra time trying to find dinner that isn’t poison.

Morning news junkies…and cat enthusiasts! A little vintage Lolcat for you to get things started.

Also, a crazy cat lady book recommendation. Authoress Michèle Sacquin is curator at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France–and apparently cat historian on the side. I bought this hardcover a month or so ago at the MFAH (Museum of Fine Arts–Houston). It’s translated from French to English…I think there’s some quirk *gained* in the translation! And from what I can tell of the last page, there’s also a version out there available in Italian, which I’d love to locate along with the French. Anyhow, currently The Well-Read Cat is right here with me at my desk as I type this, but it travels regularly to and fro, between my kitchen and coffee tables and nightstand.

Now for some linky-business to go along with your morning cuppa…enjoy!

No farmer in their right mind wants to poison pollinators. When I spoke with one Iowa corn farmer in January and told him about the upcoming release of a Purdue study confirming corn as a major pesticide exposure route for bees, his face dropped with worn exasperation. He looked down for a moment, sighed and said, “You know, I held out for years on buying them GE seeds, but now I can’t get conventional seeds anymore. They just don’t carry ’em.”

  • Ag Department says healthier food costs less than junk food. I think I’ll have to take a closer look at that study. Wapo’s writeup makes no mention of special dietary needs and food intolerances, as if the poor are immune to such things and only the wealthy’s blood and organs have time to disagree with what they consume. Healthy foods cost less, my health nut butt! Plus, frankly most of our food supply is tainted with the complicity of Congress and our government agencies, so the US Ag department’s designation of fruits, veggies, and proteins that are “healthy” is suspect to me to begin with.

Perryton High — located just south of the Oklahoma border — has an annual “Red Ribbon Day” in which half the students portray Jews in the Nazi era and are forced to obey any commands by students or teachers and be subjected to random discipline, the suit says.

  • John W. Smart: Who Are These Bedbugs? I don’t like the source, i.e. Fox Nutsack, or its Fox Nutsack take on it. However, I’m glad John Smart gave a heads up on this story, because otherwise I probably would have had no idea Obama was inserting factoids about himself into past presidents’ bios. I’m trying to believe that compared to everything else at stake right now, this really is harmless, but it still seems a little odd, unnecessary, and insecure on the Administration’s part. They are fighting a GOP stuck in the 1800s, if that. Really, stop with the Obama vanity bios already, and give us some public sector gains to talk about. Cook this election up.

The “underground” is always with us. For better and often for worse, it’s how marginalized populations tend to survive —often not very well. (Think of the old, the young, the formerly incarcerated, or foreign.) In recessions – surprise, surprise– “irregular” employment grows. Consider recent stories from Greece, about wageless public “workers” swopping skills, and trading food for teaching. Austrian economist, Friedrich Schneider, an expert in underground economies, has documentd a surge in shadow economy activity in 2009 and ’10 in Europe. University of Wisconsin-Madison economist Edgar Feige has been doing his best to follow what’s happened here.

  • Jump Rope Physics from SciAm. Now, first and foremost I’m a bicycle enthusiast (“Whenever I see an adult on a bicycle, I have hope for the human race.” –H.G. Wells), but for GoRed Women’s heart health month this past February, I also procured from Tarjay two pairs of jump ropes made all fancy for grown-ups, one for myself and one for my mom. See, I’m all about the easy cardio that’s more about PLAY than cardio, ’cause that’s just how I roll. Enter bikes and jump ropes. Throw in some Saturday morning science, and we’re pretty much in girl geek heaven.

The play that “changed American theatre forever,” according to The New York Times, started with a few short lines from a long poem.

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?

Langston Hughes wrote the poem, and Lorraine Hansberry was inspired – both by the poem and by her own real-life experience – to write A Raisin in the Sun, the first play written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway. Today, on what would have been her 82nd birthday, and we’re celebrating Hansberry’s groundbreaking work.

A Raisin in the Sun (Amazon.com)

A Raisin in the Sun (Amazon.com)

Okay, you know what to do in the comments, Sky Dancers. Have a lovely weekend!

Humpday Link Dump and Gender Benders

Posted: May 16, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: just because | 36 Comments

Good afternoon news junkies… so here’s the deal: I wasted several hours on facebook sharing links earlier today and then realized I had enough material for a post on here, on stuff that shouldn’t wait until Saturday.

Hope y’all enjoy, or at least appreciate. Some of these links are depressing, starting with the first one…

Mary G. was born from the boats. Her children were born from the boats too, all fathered through her liaisons with male customers. She has never known anything else. Like generations of Native girls and women before her, Mary and her family are inextricably tied to prostitution in the great port city of Duluth, Minnesota. Long before the term sex trafficking entered the public lexicon and began appearing in headlines, Native women like Mary and her mother Ruthie were lured into prostitution. Largely driven by poverty and homelessness as well as an underlying racism that sanctioned the sexual degradation of Native women, generations of them have sold themselves to survive.

Today I introduced the Gender Equality In Combat Act to order the Department of Defense to officially phase out its female combat role exclusion policy. The fact is, women are already serving and sacrificing on the front lines and I feel it’s important to change our military policy to reflect this. It will also make it easier for women to advance in our armed services.

The battle for Wall Street reform continues. Read my op-ed on BostonGlobe.com.

http://b.globe.com/KtFdz3

PARIS — Valérie Trierweiler faces an uncommon predicament.

Twice married and twice divorced, she covered French politics as a journalist for more than 20 years with no inkling that she would one day become France’s first lady, certainly not when she fell for François Hollande, a jovial, unglamorous leftist politician who hardly seemed like presidential material.

“I almost want to laugh when I think of it,” Ms. Trierweiler said in a telephone interview.

But Mr. Hollande was elected on May 6 and was sworn in on Tuesday, and now Ms. Trierweiler — whom he calls “the love of my life” — is concerned with preserving her independence while supporting her partner.

‘The US press distinguished itself in the 1970s by exposing the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. How has the media lost its way?’

  • I Love Mario Batali! Batali has taken up congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton’s Food Stamp challenge and says he’s effin’ starving! [story via DCist; h/t Occupy Washington DC on FB]. Humor me while I get on my never-far-away soapbox for a moment to say that I firmly believe nutritious food is the right of everyone–poor people are just as susceptible as anyone, if not moreso, to diabetes, heart disease, cancer, food intolerances, etc. Having to eat the same sandwich on a fast food value menu, or any other interchangeable piece of drivethru preservative and additive loaded slime, twice or thrice a day is not only deleterious to the physical body but to the mind and spirit as well, all three of which are interconnected. A 4.44/day food stamp diet is not humane. It is a recipe for malnutrition and desperation. (Also, I’m not the least bit swayed by arguments about abuse of government aid–food stamp fraud only accounts for 1% of the program’s benefits.)

    Saw this on FB… made me think of the X-Files episode title “Gender Bender”

Joyce L. Arnold has two Brilliant, Must-Read posts up at Taylor Marsh’s right now:

  1. Super-Powered and Halo’d, Obama is Still the One?
  2. If ‘This Is Not Who We Are,’ Then Who Are We, and Who Gets to Decide?

Go Read NOW!

Carlos DeLuna always said that it was another man named Carlos who committed the fatal stabbing for which he was convicted and then executed in 1989. No one believed him. The prosecutors said Carlos Hernandez, the man who he claimed was the real perpetrator, didn’t exist.

Now, more than two decades after DeLuna’s execution, Columbia University law school professor James Liebman and a team of students have uncovered evidence they say proves that Carlos DeLuna was innocent, and that Carlos Hernandez not only was real but was probably the real killer. They released their findings in a book-length monograph and website published by the Columbia Human Rights Law Review on Tuesday.

“I’m convinced that no jury could possibly have convicted Carlos DeLuna beyond a reasonable doubt on the evidence here. That’s absolutely clear,” Liebman said in a videotaped interview with the Tribune from Columbia University in New York. Liebman discussed the lengthy in-depth investigation that the team conducted, which he said revealed that Hernandez had a long history of violent crimes, that police worked too fast, that important leads were never followed and that, in the end, even DeLuna’s execution may have been botched. “Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong,” he said.

  • One last image to leave you with:

Alright Sky Dancers, this is an Open Thread. The comment section is yours!

Caturday: Let’s get liturgical…

Posted: May 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: just because | 58 Comments

…or let’s say we did, and look at lolcats instead!

Here’s your late morning-ish meow, news junkies:

  • Did you know it is National Train Day? I enjoyed USA Today’s feature about 10 great places to celebrate. Here’s my favorite entry, though I went to school in St. Louis and I have to say there is a huge gaping editorial omission by not mentioning that the station has been converted into a shopping mall:

St. Louis Union Station
While train traffic has waned, this station still bustles with a museum, food court and attached hotel. Breslin says the site was a transfer point for millions of immigrants heading to the country’s interior. “It was a massive station at the height of train travel in this country. It was the Ellis Island of the Midwest.” 800-916-0092; explorestlouis.com

  • …and Hillary 2016! (Public Policy Polling shows Hillary with a “commanding early lead” in Iowa. The LA Times sez our badass advocate-in-chief Hillary “blows the speculative Democratic competition out of the water.” Well, ain’t that somethin’.)
  • Hillary honors Dorothy during keynote at the 25th annual “Celerating Women” breakfast. That is MY Madame President… Happy Mother’s Day:

“My mother had a resilience and a commitment to her family that she worked hard on every day. And I often wondered, How did that happen?” Clinton said. “When I got old enough to understand, I remember asking my mother … she said, At critical points in my life somebody showed me kindness, somebody gave me help.”

  • Joyce has an excellent Queer Talk post up at TM.com right now on this week’s developments. She speaks for me–best commentary I’ve seen yet on the subject anywhere, which is no surprise as Joyce has so diligently highlighted time and again the true everyday ordinary heroes and heroines of our American story as it unfolds, with her signature focus on the grassroots work of LGBT & other human rights advocates. Read it now:

“Obama & Marriage Equality – The “Personal is Political,” but It Isn’t Necessarily Policy.

  • Meanwhile, Mittens addresses Falwell U. Great way to shift to general election mode and not alienate more Independents. A sample of his nauseating speech, via the CNN link:

People of different faiths, like yours and mine, sometimes wonder where we can meet in common purpose, when there are so many differences in creed and theology,” Romney said. “Surely the answer is that we can meet in service, in shared moral convictions about our nation stemming from a common worldview. The best case for this is always the example of Christian men and women working and witnessing to carry God’s love into every life.”

Yes, the best case for this is always a big white evangelical cross. Also best case? Hoisting oneself with their own petard, Mr. Romney. We’re all morons with millions of campaign dollars to burn on idiotic campaign strategies, just like you. Seriously, you’re not going to win over the fundies who aren’t already willing to vote for you–they think you have everlasting celestial Mormon cooties, get it? The new Age fundies who don’t hate you because you are Mormon are already voting for Obama. You need to carve out YOUR own base of constituencies to reach out to–greedy and/or ill-informed “fiscal conservatives” who could not care less about social issues + people disaffected by Obama in this economy. You’re competing against Voldemort Axelrove et al. now, not the Sanctimonium “proletariat”–get it together, already. If it’s going to be a crappy election, the least you could do is not bore us to death. Occupy Politics 101, okay?

And, with that Sky Dancers, I’m off! You know what to do in the comments.

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