Monday Morning Reads: Systems that Benefit the Privileged Elite

Posted: March 18, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 66 Comments

educationcorporateschoolGood Morning!

I’m going to start the day’s reads off with two really good articles on modern capitalism.  Both actually have titles that ask questions.  I’ll start with the first one written by Richard Wolfe at The Guardian as reprinted by RS.  ” What’s efficiency got do do with capitalism?”   The answer is absolutely nothing.

What’s efficiency got to do with capitalism? The short answer is little or nothing. Economic and social collapses in Detroit, Cleveland and many other US cities did not happen because production was inefficient there. Efficiency problems did not cause the longer-term economic declines troubling the US and western Europe.

Capitalist corporations decided to relocate production: first, away from such cities, and now, away from those regions. It has done so to serve the priorities of their major shareholders and boards of directors. Higher profits, business growth, and market share drive those decisions. As I say, efficiency has little or nothing to do with it.

This is what we call a “positive” economic discussion on policy in that that the data leads one to the conclusion and values don’t play a role in the argument until the end of the article when the author makes a case for democratization of the economy.  This is called making a “normative” case.  For a “normative” economic discussion from the get-go, turn to this article in WAPO by Steven Perlstein.  “Is capitalism moral?”

Note the Gordon Gekko-like logic here: Because pursuit of self-interest is the essential ingredient in a market system, it somehow follows that individuals and firms are free to act as greedily and selfishly as they can within the law, absolved from any moral obligations. And it’s not just in the movies. The same amorality was on display at those Senate hearings in 2010 where Fabrice “Fabulous Fab” Tourre and the team from Goldman Sachs tried to explain to incredulous lawmakers why it was perfectly reasonable to peddle securities to clients that they had deliberately constructed to default.

Free-market advocates have a stronger moral case against government “confiscating” the money earned by one person to give it to another.

The traditional liberal defense of redistribution, of course, is that a lot of what passes for economic success derives not only from hard work or ingenuity but also from good fortune — the good fortune to be born with the right genes and to the right parents, to grow up in the right community, to attend the right schools, to meet and be helped by the right people, or simply to be at the right place at the right time. A market system should reward virtue, they argue, not dumb luck.

The problem is that we don’t really have anything resembling textbook market capitalism because all markets don’t exhibit characteristics that make them amenable to an unrestrained market.  Also, we have a political class that is easy to capture via donations and lobbying who set up laws that allow already dominant industries to become more monopolistic and less ‘free’ through preferential legal treatment and taxation.  The worst of the folks that scream about the virtues of ‘capitalism’ are the ones that really know nothing about Adam Smith or the origins of the system and its simple agriculture and industrial roots.  For a real life example of the failures of unchecked capitalism, check out BB’s post last night outlining what’s going on in Cyprus.  The overall mismanagement of lending and under-evaluation of risk by British, American and German banks has cost the citizen’s of many countries a lot of wealth.  The Cyprus situation is unprecedented and sets an especially dangerous precedent.  You can see how the powerful can co-opt the system in this play that takes savings from depositors. Markets all over the world are responding.  Asian markets were the first to tank.

I spent a lot of time yesterday in an absolute rage over the rape apologia rampant in coverage by two of CNN’s women journalists who seemed more concerned with the lasting impact the verdict of the trial would have on the convicted rapists than the victim and possibly more victims of their out-of-control male libidos.   There was also more discussion of the role of teen alcohol abuse in the incident that the attitudes and privileged treatment of the male athletic stars by the media.  It was totally disgusting!! I posted  some of this down thread in the Sunday Reads but feel strong that it needs to frontpaged and repeated.  The judge got the verdict right  while CNN turned into a rape apologia factory.

CNN’s Candy Crowley began her breaking news report by showing Lipps handing down the sentence and telling CNN reporter Poppy Harlow that she “cannot imagine” how emotional the sentencing must have been.

Harlow explained that it had been “incredibly difficult” to watch “as these two young men — who had such promising futures, star football players, very good students — literally watched as they believed their life fell apart.”

“One of the young men, Ma’lik Richmond, as that sentence came down, he collapsed,” the CNN reporter recalled, adding that the convicted rapist told his attorney that “my life is over, no one is going to want me now.”

At that point, CNN played video of Richmond crying and hugging his lawyer in the courtroom.

“I was sitting about three feet from Ma’lik when he gave that statement,” Harlow said. “It was very difficult to watch.”

Candy then asked CNN legal contributor Paul Callan what the verdict meant for “a 16 year old, sobbing in court, regardless of what big football players they are, they still sound like 16 year olds.”

“What’s the lasting effect though on two young men being found guilty juvenile court of rape essentially?” Crowley wondered.

“There’s always that moment of just — lives are destroyed,” Callan remarked. “But in terms of what happens now, the most severe thing with these young men is being labeled as registered sex offenders. That label is now placed on them by Ohio law.”

“That will haunt them for the rest of their lives.”

The purpose of a justice system is to make sure those guilty of heinous crimes pay for their crimes.  I’m still livid about this and so are most of the folks on my twitter stream. You can look down stream on Sunday’s thread for videos and links.   I found  Dan Wetzel’s post particularly compelling as it describes the entitlements given to male athletes in Steubenville and elseville.

The Big Red players were disorganized crime. No secrets. No code words. No shame. They neither grasped the depth of the crime nor the unrelenting pressure of true authority – not their compliant parents or ball coach, but a legal system that didn’t care a whit about Steubenville High football.

Steubenville’s football program has long been a source of pride in the community. (Reuters)For all the rumors and speculation around town of cover-ups and favoritism being played, the authorities did their job. There is zero indication the Steubenville police did anything but aggressively and swiftly investigate the charges.

When understandable conflicts of interest – only 18,000 people live in the city and everyone knows everyone – arose in the local prosecutors office, the case was handed over to the state’s attorney general out of Columbus. A judge was brought in from across the state, near Cincinnati. And it was Judge Lipps, not anyone around Steubenville, who granted immunity to the witnesses.

Meanwhile, attorney general Mike DeWine called on Sunday for a grand jury to continue an investigation into the case.

“This community desperately needs to have this behind them,” DeWine said. “But this community also desperately needs to know justice was done and that no stone was left unturned.”

It’s still hard to say if Mays and Richmond ever grasped the trouble they were in until Sunday.

Mays knew enough to grow concerned. The girl was never sure whether to press charges, but once her parents found out, there would be no doubt. They culled social media for clues and walked into the Steubenville Police Department with a flash drive of evidence.

Just prior to that, Mays became panicked and texted the girl.

“I’m about to get kicked off my football team,” Mays wrote.

“The more you bring up football, the more pissed I get,” the girl wrote back. “Because that’s like all you care about.”

They had no idea about the severity of what they had done which means there’s an awful lot of parents, teachers, and clergy that need to sit down with some girls and boys and define sexual assault.  They also need to make sure that everyone knows that the laws apply to every one.

I know there are many ‘recovering’  Catholics that read this blog so I thought I’d link to this article in Salon by Andrew O’Hehir entitled “Is Pope Francis a Fraud?”  He makes some valid points about looking at each parish or archdiocese as distinct. He focuses on the recent purge by the Jesuits of their liberal coherts and the position of the new Pope in a church in turmoil.

But the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio emerges from a Jesuit order that has been largely purged of its independent-minded or left-leaning intellectuals, and his reputation at home in Latin America is decidedly mixed. While Francis seems to be an appealing personality in some ways — albeit one with a shadowy relationship with the former military dictatorship in Argentina, along with a record on gay rights that borders on hate speech — it’s difficult to imagine that he can or will do anything to arrest the church’s long slide into cultural irrelevance and neo-medieval isolation. His papacy, I suspect, comes near the end of a thousand-year history of the Vatican’s global rise to power, ambiguous flourishing and rapid decline. It also comes after 40 years of internal counterrevolution under the previous two popes, during which a group of hardcore right-wing cardinals have consolidated power in the Curia and stamped out nearly all traces of the 1960s liberal reform agenda of  Pope John XXIII and Vatican II.A handful of intellectuals, both inside and outside the church, quietly believe that means Pope Francis isn’t a legitimate pope at all.

I can’t speak to any of those being a WASP turned WASB, but I thought I’d share it all the same since I read the article knowing the role of Popes and the church in history.

President Obama is set to nominate Tom Perez for Labor Secretary today.

Perez, 51, is the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division. If confirmed by the Senate, he would replace Hilda Solis, who resigned in January.

The White House portrayed Perez as someone in line with Obama’s sense of social justice. An official lauded Perez for settling the nation’s three largest fair lending housing cases, boosting enforcement of human trafficking laws and protecting rights of veterans and students. He also led the Justice Department in challenging voter ID laws in Texas and South Carolina.“Tom is a dedicated public servant who has spent his career fighting to keep the American dream within reach for hardworking middle class families and those striving to get into the middle class,” the White House official said.

I’d say that’s enough of me writing things.  Now, it’s your turn.  What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Steubenville Rape Trial Descends into the Slut-Slamming Hell Realm: Lessons in Toxic Masculinity

Posted: March 16, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Violence against women, War on Women, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , | 19 Comments

rapistsI’m really trying to enjoy the perfect New Orleans weather and the Saint Patrick’s Day festivities.  However, it’s hard to avoid the twitter streams on two really horrible reminders of the darker side of American Life.  CPAC continues to reach new bottoms every year.  That, however, is not the worst thing to watch at the moment.

The Steubenville Rape Trial is currently streaming live and the Defense Closing argument is a good example of everything that is wrong with how men view rape.  The defense attorney just basically said the victim threw herself at  “that child” and gee, she drank a lot of vodka so probably said “yes” and forgot about it.  ABC News just stated that the rape victim “made plan to meet” attacker and characterized it as “incriminating.”  The defense strategy is that “date rape” doesn’t exist. So, basically all of our young women that go on dates have just automatically placed themselves in the position of saying yes to whatever their date wants.  Looks like we may have to bring back chaperones if this guy’s arguments succeed.

The defense stayed quiet with its date-rape-doesn’t-exist strategy, even as many of those following the case so closely finally saw the two accused high-school football players for the first time.

“There will be challenges for everybody in this case,” Special Prosecutor Marianne Hemmeter told Judge Tom Lipps during a packed session at Jefferson County juvenile court, with a silent protest from Occupy Steubenville carrying on outside. “Holding these two responsible for what they did — that will be the easiest you will make.” Hemmeter’s opening salvo was unflinching — she named the victim as a courtroom video feed sent  it around the Internet, she repeated the word “degradation,” and she spared no details about how suspects Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond “repeatedly violated” the victim (who will likely not be named by the media, as is custom with alleged victims of sexual assault).

As we reported in our in-depth trial preview earlier on Wednesday, Hemmeter and her fellow prosecutor have been silent in the press and about the investigation, even as hackers tried to piece together clues. But within the first 30 minutes of the trial picking up in earnest after an hour-long recess, Hemmeter introduced evidence beyond what a rapt nation has seen on Instagram (above) and YouTube: she submitted as evidence and projected onto the courtroom wall two naked pictures of the victim, one allegedly taken and sent from the phone of Mays, the suspect facing multiple charges. “The person ushering her [to the bathroom] was Trent Mays,” said Hemmeter, insisting that the Steubenville High quarterback was present when the alleged victim realized she was inebriated beyond control. There is also a blanket with the alleged victim’s DNA.

Hemmeter also reiterated the controversial pre-trial testimony from three Steubenville High athletes who said that the alleged victim was not conscious while being attacked. Hemmeter said, rather graphically:

You heard the testimony that in the car, Trent Mays unzipped her shorts and slipped his finger into her vagina … They [witnesses] will tell you that Trent Mays tried to put his penis in her mouth and you’ll hear that Ma’lik Richmond was down by her feet and inserted two fingers into her vagina while she lay motionless.

So it’s now finally clear that the prosecution will rely on the pre-trial testimony and on social-media evidence we haven’t yet scene, all in an effort to discount the increasingly strong — if increasingly vile — strategy from the defense for Mays and Richmond. The defense was granted a last-minute appeal on Tuesday night to subpoena three of the alleged victim’s friends who apparently made incriminating statements to police that she had made plans to meet up with Mays and that she “was completely fine” the morning after. That would seem to give the defense its own trio of star witnesses from West Virginia, testifying against their “best friend,” to counter the prosecution’s three star athletes, who appear to be doing the same.

Rape will never be treated the way it should be until men in this country learn about and rebuke “Toxic Masculinity”.

Toxic masculinity has its fingerprints all over the Steubenville case. The violence done to the victim was born out of the boys’ belief that a) sexually dominating a helpless girl’s body made them powerful and cool, and b) there would be no consequences for them because of their status as star athletes (If you want to see stomach-churning first-hand evidence of this, check out this video of one of their friends gleefully talking about how “raped” and “dead” the victim was). The defense is basing their entire case on it, arguing that this near- (and sometimes totally) unconscious girl’s body was the boys’ to use because “she didn’t affirmatively say no.” The football community’s response—by which I mean not just the coaches, school, and players, but the entire community of fans—is steeped in the assumptions of toxic masculinity, treating the athletes and the game as more important than some silly girl’s right to both bodily autonomy and justice. Steubenville residents have been quick to rally around the team, suggesting that the victim “put herself in a position to be violated” and refusing to talk to police investigating the assault. The two players who cooperated with police were suspended from the football team, while the players accused of the rape have been allowed to play. The coach even went so far as to threaten a New York Times reporter asking questions about the case. (No surprise there: When it comes to male-dominated sports, toxic masculinity is the rule, not the exception.)

But sports is hardly the only breeding ground for toxic masculinity. Witness the recent, vicious bullying of Zerlina Maxwell by fans of Fox News. Last week, Maxwell was on Hannity and dared to opine that the best rape prevention isn’t about what women can do to protect themselves, but instead focuses on raising men who don’t rape. She also personally identified herself as a survivor of rape. What followed was a nearly inconceivable onslaught of misogynist and racist attacks, including repeated threats of rape and death. All because a black woman insisted that the work of stopping rape—“women’s work” if there ever was such a thing—requires men’s labor. Under the influence of toxic masculinity, the logical response to a man being forced or even encouraged to do something coded “female” is always violence.

The defense lawyer is ringing all the bells and whistles he can to declare “Jane Doe” a slut; including using the 16 year old’s name.

An expert testifying for the defense today said a teen girl reportedly raped by two Steubenville football players could have had an alcohol-induced blackout after drinking last August, but still could have made the decision to leave a party with the athletes.

However, a prosecutor said the expert had not been shown all the evidence, pointing out that the person had not seen three photos in which the girl appears to be passed out.

Kim Fromme, a professor of clinical psychology at University of Texas, who conducts research on the effects of alcohol, said her analysis shows the girl might have no memory of the night, but based on her evidence the girl was still moving, walking and talking, and could have consented to leave a party with the two defendants.

“It seems pretty clear she made a voluntary decision to leave with (the 17-year-old defendant),” Fromme said.

Much of her testimony focused on the difference between a blackout and being passed out. Fromme said the brain essentially shuts down if a person is passed out. However, a person experiencing a blackout from drinking can still function, but will have little or no memory of what they did. She said people have performed surgery or flown a plane while experiencing a blackout.

She said if the girl was doing things such as voluntarily walking unassisted down stairs, she was capable of engaging in voluntary decisions.

On cross-examination, prosecutor Marianne Hemmeter showed Fromme a picture of the teen girl apparently passed out and being carried by the defendants. Fromme said she had not seen the picture. Fromme also had not seen pictures of the girl laying naked on a couch and on the floor of a basement.

Hemmeter said testimony from other witnesses that Fromme had not heard indicate the girl might have drank more than Fromme’s evidence indicated. Fromme estimated the girl’s blood-alcohol level at between .18 to .25, based on witnesses who saw the girl drinking. (Motorists in Ohio are considered under the influence of alcohol if they have an 0.08 blood-alchohol level.)

“So if she was sexually assaulted during that blackout, she wouldn’t remember, right?” Hemmeter asked.

“Yes … nor would she remember if she consented,” Fromme said.

Fromme appeared as a witness for lawyer Walter Madison, who represents the 16-year-old defendant.

It’s hard to watch the live stream and the live tweets for #Steubenville aren’t very heartening despite the number of outraged feminists providing commentary including @Karoli and @feministing.

It’s a damned shame that things are going down like this.  I have no idea–at this point–if the young victim will see justice but I do believe that this will discourage reporting.

Thursday Reads: Goodbye Google Reader, Pope Francis and the Dirty War, and Other News

Posted: March 14, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 37 Comments

Afternoon-Coffee

Good Morning!!

For the mainstream media, the big news yesterday was the election of a new pope. I’ll get to that shortly, but first I’ll address the even bigger news for bloggers–the imminent demise of Google Reader. Google announced last night that it will be shutting down the popular application on July 1.

From The Atlantic Wire: Like a Dagger to Bloggers’ Hearts, Google Just Killed Google Reader.

Journalists and geeks united in exasperation on Wednesday evening when Google made a very sad announcement: The company is shuttering Google Reader. We should’ve seen this coming. And those that didn’t see the inevitable death of Google’s RSS feed organizer and reader might’ve easily missed the news, since Google buried it halfway down an official blog post about a bunch of other stuff. But it is true. The search giant will pronounce Reader dead on July 1, 2013. Based on the somewhat storied history of Google killing Reader features, though, we’re pretty sure someone will start working on an alternative within the next few hours.

Apparently most computer geeks weren’t surprised, because Google stopped updating and servicing the reader back in 2011, even when they could have done so using cloud computing. But plenty of people were freaking out. Immediately after the announcement, twitter went nuts and the pope jokes faded into the background. Here’s Tom Watson at Forbes: Google’s Strange Attack on Bloggers and the Public Internet: the Massive Reaction to Reader Shutdown.

Does Google understand the concept of corporate social responsibility? That seems to be the basic question around the company’s strange decision to shut down a tiny service that serves as a major audience conduit for many thousands of bloggers, citizen journalists, and self publishers.

Google’s announcement today that it is destroying Google Reader, the most popular RSS syndication tool was a massive blow to the blogging community – and to most of those speaking out tonight via social media, an entirely unnecessary attack on an important corner of the public Internet by a company with more than $50 billion in revenue and a newly-won reputation as a tech giant on the move.

“That giant “NOOOOOOOO” sound is the Internet’s reaction to Google’s most unpopular decision in — well, as far back as I can remember,” wrote Pete Cashmore at Mashable, in a post emblematic of the flood of negative reaction to Google’s strange decision.

The thing is, Google is the giant gorilla of the internet–so it can do whatever it wants and everyone else has to just deal with it. Here are some articles with suggestions of how to do that, but be aware that things could change quickly. I downloaded Feed Demon last night, and then learned that it is now going to go out of business when Google reader shuts down.

Lifehacker: Google Reader Is Shutting Down; Here Are the Best Alternatives

Ars Techinica: Poll Technica: Where should we go when Google Reader is put out to pasture?

Forbes: Google Reader and the Underpants Gnomes

ComputerWorld: Google Reader alternatives roundup; RSS FTW!

Now, on to pope news.

I found some articles last night that address the biography of Pope Francis a hell of a lot more realistically that the corporate media did yesterday. The best is probably this one by investigative reporter Robert Parry: ‘Dirty War’ Questions for Pope Francis.

If one wonders if the U.S. press corps has learned anything in the decade since the Iraq War – i.e. the need to ask tough question and show honest skepticism – it would appear from the early coverage of the election of Pope Francis I that U.S. journalists haven’t changed at all, even at “liberal” outlets like MSNBC.

Pope Francis

The first question that a real reporter should ask about an Argentine cleric who lived through the years of grotesque repression, known as the “dirty war,” is what did this person do, did he stand up to the murderers and torturers or did he go with the flow. If the likes of Chris Matthews and other commentators on MSNBC had done a simple Google search, they would have found out enough about Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio to slow their bubbling enthusiasm.

Bergoglio, now the new Pope Francis I, has been identified publicly as an ally of Argentine’s repressive leaders during the “dirty war” when some 30,000 people were “disappeared” or killed, many stripped naked, chained together, flown out over the River Plate or the Atlantic Ocean and pushed sausage-like out of planes to drown.

The “disappeared” included women who were pregnant at the time of their arrest. In some bizarre nod to Catholic theology, they were kept alive only long enough to give birth before they were murdered and their babies were farmed out to military families, including to people directly involved in the murder of the babies’ mothers.

Instead of happy talk about how Bergoglio seems so humble and how he seems so sympathetic to the poor, there might have been a question or two about what he did to stop the brutal repression of poor people and activists who represented the interests of the poor, including “liberation theology” priests and nuns, during the “dirty war.”

More at the link. Some other sources of information on Bergoglio:

Alternet: Cardinals Elect a New Pope from Argentina — Does the New Pontiff Come with a Dark Past?

Foxcrawl: “Sins” of newly elected Pope Francis I: accused of kidnapping and torture during dictatorship in Argentina

2005 story in LA Times: Argentine Cardinal Named in Kidnap Lawsuit

Via Greg Mitchell, a 2011 article from The Guardian: The sins of the Argentinian church

A final note–I’ve heard that the name chosen by the new pope may not be a tribute the St. Francis. More likely after St. Francis Xavier, co-founder of the Jesuits.

In other news…

Yesterday was the first day of the Steubenville rape trial. The Atlantic Wire is following the story closely, so it is probably the best source for updates. From yesterday:

Enter the Trial in Steubenville, Where the Cast Is Not Merely Football Players

The case of two high-school star football players accused of raping a 16-year-old girl as they travelled party to party last summer finally heads to trial on Wednesday morning in Steubenville, Ohio, the small fading steel town that became the focus of a social-media firestorm in big-time football country this winter. As the spotlight returns with open media access around but not inside Jefferson Country juvenile court, America will start putting faces to names that have been dragged through the headlines as violently as that Jane Doe from West Virginia allegedly was, while heavily intoxicated, on August 11. But a lot has happened since the hackers and leakers and protesters descended upon the town of 18,000 with a tortured past, beyond the shooting threats and the revoked scholarships and the FBI investigation — indeed, there were even developments late Tuesday night: The country may have looked elsewhere, but there’s a new judge after ties to Big Red football forced yet another legal player to recuse himself, and the hackers have now returned to the social-media pile-on as investigations into police cover-ups have given way to actual prosecution in the courtroom, where the alleged victim might testify after all, her friends can now testify against her, and the suspects are already speaking out.

The article then offers “a who’s who” of everyone involved in the crime and the trial. A couple more links:

The Steubenville Defense Will Center on Date Rape Not Existing

America Finally Hears the Case for the Victim on First Day of Steubenville Trial

On the trial of James Holmes in Aurora, Colorado, Time Magazine had a shocking report yesterday: Judge in Aurora Case Calls for Use of ‘Truth Serum’— But Does It Work?

If accused Aurora mass shooter James Holmes wants to enter a plea of insanity in the “Batman” movie theater massacre, he will have to agree to narcoanalysis.

That’s the ruling from judge William Sylvester, who made the narcoanalysis— in which defendants are injected with drugs to lower their inhibitions and presumably be more willing to tell the truth about their alleged crimes under questioning by prosecutors — a condition of an insanity plea.

WTF?! There’s no way forcing a defendant to take truth serum could be constitutional.

Experts were surprised by the legal determination that “truth serum” could be required in order for Holmes to use the insanity defense. They say that drugs touted for “narcoanalysis,” which typically include the barbiturates sodium amytal and sodium pentothal, are are not effective and certainly not reliable enough to meet legal standards of evidence.

“I was floored by it,” says Scott Lilienfeld, professor of psychology at Emory University upon learning of the ruling, “The claim that truth serum is truth serum is no longer taken seriously by anyone in the scientific community to my knowledge.” Moreover, Colorado is one of the states that apply the “Daubert” standard, in which scientific evidence can be disputed by the defense or prosecution. It requires that evidence meet certain standards to be admissible.

To pass the Daubert test, truth serum would have to be widely accepted in the scientific community and research literature and its use would have to yield a known error rate, both standards that experts say narcoanalysis does not meet. “In my view, it would not stand up,” says Lilienfeld.

But a former prosecutor, now a law professor at the University of Colorado and defense attorney, Karen Steinhauser, told CBS News that the technique is allowed under Colorado law. However, it is used so rarely she could not find any relevant case law.

Unbelievable!

pigs-4

The mystery of the thousands of dead pigs floating in China’s Shanghai River has been solved. Bloomberg: Shanghai Finds 6,600 Dead Pigs as Farm Confesses to Dumping

The number of dead pigs found in Shanghai’s Huangpu river climbed to at least 6,600 as the official Xinhua News Agency reported a farm in neighboring Zhejiang province confessed to dumping carcasses in the water.

The municipal government pulled 685 hogs from the river yesterday, adding to the 5,916 it had retrieved earlier, according to a statement on its website. A farm in Jiaxing admitted to discarding dead pigs in the river, after 70,000 of the animals died in the city from crude raising techniques and extreme weather at the start of the year, Xinhua said yesterday, citing the Jiaxing authorities. The Xinhua report didn’t specify whether other farms were involved in the dumping.

The discovery of the hogs comes as China’s legislature addresses food safety and citizens become more vocal on public health and environmental issues. The government said March 10 at a National People’s Congress meeting that it plans to create a regulator with broader authority to ensure food and drug safety and said the agriculture ministry will oversee the quality of farm products.

ancient grave

Finally, Beata posted this ancient burial news link this morning in the late night thread, and I thought I’d include it here to make sure that Dakinikat and JJ see it: ‘Medieval knight’ unearthed in Edinburgh car park dig

The remains of a medieval knight or nobleman found underneath a car park are to be moved to make way for a university building.

The grave and evidence of a 13th Century monastery were uncovered when archaeologists were called to an Edinburgh Old Town building site.

An elaborate sandstone slab, with carvings of a Calvary Cross and ornate sword, marked the grave.

It’s amazing what’s buried under parking lots in Great Britain!

Hey–I managed to avoid news about the economy and Village politics, and I wasn’t even trying! Now it’s your turn. What are you reading and blogging about this morning?

 

Monday Reads

Posted: March 11, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , , , , | 56 Comments

6bedecaa0b54b1f638346ba2237669e2Good Morning!

I’m afraid if you’re looking for a cheery Monday morning set of reads that I am not going to fill your bill today.

I’m not sure if you’ve been following the story of  Zerlina Maxwell who suggested that we consider teaching men not to rape since we’ve got so many incidences of rape in so many places here and around the world.  This is a timely question given the awful Steubenville Rape Trial that is scheduled to start today in Ohio.  In many ways, the videos and tales from Steubenville show that rapists are more common than the psychopathic sexual predator that many want to conjure up to gloss over the problems we with have with rampant male entitlement. Get ready for this week in rape culture and apologia. It will be coming to media near you.

With the trial scheduled to start this week and after a judge refused to change the trial location, officials are again prepping for the glare of the media spotlight to descend on the town.

In a press conference last week, DeWine told reporters that additional charges may be brought against the other teenagers after this trial concludes. He estimated the case would last between three to four days.

DeWine also met with protesters lead by Jacqueline Hillyer of the Ohio chapter of the National Organization of Women, who called for the arrest of Nodianos and the other teens involved for failing to report a crime.

“The worst thing about the crime in Steubenville and it was a crime, it was not that it was so ugly and horrible and disgusting but that it was ordinary,” Hillyer said. “It happens all the time across the state, across the country in high schools and people don’t intervene.”

Rape is all too ordinary. So, to many of us, Maxwell asks a legitimate question.  She even braved Hannity–the patron saint of white male entitlement–to begin a conversation on why rape is so pervasive and how we might try telling boys that it’s not okay to rape girls instead of telling girls to be in a constant state of alert and fear.  She got way more than she bargained as a result.

As Maxwell, a rape survivor herself, told Salon on Friday, “I don’t think we need to be telling a rape survivor that statistics are not on your side. That’s insensitive.” But where she drew outrage was in her suggestion to Hannity that “I don’t think that we should be telling women anything. I think we should be telling men not to rape women and start the conversation there.” She told Hannity, “You’re talking about this as if it’s some faceless, nameless criminal, when a lot of times it’s someone you know and trust,” adding, “If you train men not to grow up to become rapists, you prevent rape.”

The mere notion that maybe men need to be involved in the conversation about sexual violence earned Maxwell instant disdain, anger – and a lot worse. The Blaze called her remarks “bizarre” and the Washington Times reported that she’d “argued against women arming themselves.” Deeper down on the Internet, the responses got even more scathing, from bloggers who said she’d been “oversimplifying” to the Twitter trolls who told her she ought to get raped. Thanks for the feedback, Internet dopes. Why would anybody think that you need some sensitivity training?

“I knew going in I was going to get a lot of pushback,” Maxwell says. “I didn’t think I would receive rape threats. I can’t even go on my Facebook page; it’s full of people wanting to rape me. It’s too triggering. The amount of insensitivity is shocking.”

As Maxwell tells Salon, her point to Hannity was not about self-defense; it was about how we look at the big picture. “Telling every woman to get a gun is not rape prevention,” she explains. “The reality is that we need to be changing how we train and teach young men. We need to teach them to see women as human beings and respect their bodily autonomy. We need to teach them about consent and to hold themselves accountable.” And when we do, things change. After Canada launched a “Don’t be that guy” consent awareness campaign in 2011, the sexual assault rate dropped for the first time in years — by 10 percent.

There’s a basic problem with the argument that Hannity made which is essentially a similar statement made by the victim’s father in 6a7c8f5ed4b0f6e18840db1ad7410edeSteubenville.  The father said

“I’ve tried to show my girl that not all men are like this, but only a despicable few,” and their mothers that ignore the truth that they gave birth to a monster”

while Hannity told Maxwell that “evil exists in the world”.  I don’t think mothers give birth to monsters.  I think most cultures teach men that women and children are prey and property and can be brought into control in whatever ways it takes.

One in three women will be raped in her life time. Rape is all too ordinary.

I suppose I should backstory this by letting you know that I’ve never been raped by a stranger but I sure as hell have had to fight off bosses and high school and college peers to varying degrees.  I am  not a rape survivor.  I’m a girl who got lucky many times.  I  was ‘volunteered’ by a Junior League neighbor when I was a junior in high school for a rape and violence line they were establishing in Omaha.  There were very few things like that at the time.  It’s now a major program staffed with professionals. The program resides with the local YWCA.  Back then, it was a few psychologists and concerned women.  They got volunteers where they could and trained us with what little they had.

Two years of answering that phone one night a week morphed me into an advocate for changing rape laws by the time I got to university. By that time, I fully understood the threat of date and acquaintance rape. We succeeded in getting most Nebraska police departments to take officers responding to rape out of the property crimes division and asked for trained, women police officers.  Sex crimes are now properly placed into the major crimes divisions.  We also got the law changed so that a women married to her rapist could be legally recognized a a victim.  We fought the clause that said two people had to witness the rape and testify in order for it to be ‘rape rape’.  We also worked to block a woman’s previous sexual history as well as things like where she was or what she was wearing or had been eating or drinking.

Then there were changes that had to be made by the hospital and police responses to rape victims too.  I remember when one of my friends got raped by a stranger on campus.  She told me she thought she couldn’t report it because she’d been smoking pot before she was ambushed in the library by this criminal. She was afraid no one would take her seriously.  I told her hell no and let’s call a police woman right now.  But, of all the times I went to speak about rape at high schools and sororities, it became apparent to me what is apparent in the numbers.  The majority of women are not raped by ski-masked, gun wielding strangers that could be taken care of with the careful aim of the right caliber of gun.  I learned that was a myth of the old west about 40 years ago.  I still want to strangle any one that says women make up rapes or ask for it.  It’s obvious there needs to be some education out there otherwise this crap would go away instead of showing up in US Senator debates and on major news shows.

No one would ever blame a man for being the victim of a burglary or hold up.  But, our rape culture gives many folks the idea that women are always at least partially to blame for the aggressive sexual behavior of men.  No matter how old we get, how dowdy we dress, or how careful we are about the locks on our doors or where we park, the fear and danger is there. It’s not about our behavior, it’s about theirs.

Think about what kinds of things we teach children not to do via school.  These things include not engaging in consensual sex, not stealing, not fighting, and a lot of other things.  Check out these statistics on sexual assault and tell me it’s not a pervasive problem in this country. Many children–of both sexes–are not even safe in their homes, churches, or social groups.  Anyway, I know that we have many rape survivors here whose stories are more compelling than anything I could write.  It’s just that it’s going to be a week of watching this trial and listening to the same old canards.  I’m prepackaging my hugz already because I’m aware that were going to hear rape apologia along with the facts of the case.626d36d1d019d0b75a8e5cef86f58b25

Anyway, if you want to see how cruel the world can be to victims of crime, here’s a look at some of Maxwell’s twitter stream via TPM.  It’s awful beyond words. That she’s a rape survivor makes it more than awful beyond words.

So, here’s a few other things that you might want to read this morning that are slightly less traumatizing.

This is a compelling article on punditry and presidential scandal by Robert Parry.

A favorite saying of Official Washington is that “the cover-up is worse than the crime.” But that presupposes you accurately understand what the crime was. And, in the case of the two major U.S. government scandals of the last third of the Twentieth Century – Watergate and Iran-Contra – that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Indeed, newly disclosed documents have put old evidence into a sharply different light and suggest that history has substantially miswritten the two scandals by failing to understand that they actually were sequels to earlier scandals that were far worse. Watergate and Iran-Contra were, in part at least, extensions of the original crimes, which involved dirty dealings to secure the immense power of the presidency.

There’s an amazing piece of cinema out on America’s Hunger Epidemic called ‘A Place at the Table’.  It couldn’t be more timely given the impact of the sequester on basic programs like WIC.  I watched it On Demand so I’m sure it’s probably there for you too if you have access to that or some other on-line movie source.

Table’s statistics are overwhelming, but they are intended to overwhelm. Whether it’s the 50 million Americans who are living in food-insecure households (which means they are struggling with hunger), or the fact that 1-out-of-2 kids in America will, at some time in their childhood, have to rely on federal assistance for food. This is happening in the richest country in the world, and the problem is only getting worse. Under President Reagan there were 20 million Americans living with food insecurity. We’re well over double that figure now.

Table’s stories will overwhelm too. Whether it’s the fifth grader who is so hungry that she envisions her teacher as a banana and her fellow students as apples, or the single mother of two who finally gets a fulltime job only to realize that she is no longer food stamp eligible, a loss of $3-per-day that puts her family into serious food insecurity. That means her kids no longer have breakfast or lunch at daycare, and her youngest is already developmentally disabled due to improper nutrition. Lest we think she’s living large off her new job, food stamp eligibility ended once her salary passed $23,000, a figure hardly sufficient to pay for rent, utilities, insurance and transport, let alone food. (Most Americans are surprised to learn that the parents of hungry children typically have fulltime jobs.) Those who think food stamps breed dependency are wrong. As a child, raised singly by my mom after my dad died early, I too depended on food stamps. For many of us, they are critical lifelines of support while we get back on our feet.

I’ve got one last suggestion for you to ponder and then I’m off to finish coffee and work with students.  How do you redefine etiquette in the Digital Age?

Some people are so rude. Really, who sends an e-mail or text message that just says “Thank you”? Who leaves a voice mail message when you don’t answer, rather than texting you? Who asks for a fact easily found on Google?

Don’t these people realize that they’re wasting your time?

Of course, some people might think me the rude one for not appreciating life’s little courtesies. But many social norms just don’t make sense to people drowning in digital communication.

So, what’s on your reading and blogging list today?