Mel

I was discussing early European occupation of the American continent with my son. He made the point that one of the most effective themes of propaganda was to portray the Europeans as strong, smart, capable parents and to portray the indigenous as weak, ignorant, helpless children.

Then I read this article about Iraq. Some themes never go out of style.

I was looking through the question one material and ran across the following advertisement against Prop 8 that never aired.



It's part of a series of ads. The best, in my opinion, because it takes the "think of the children" line at face value and makes people actually think of the children.

I wish the state-wide ad buys ran this and ads like it instead of those abstract ads that try to refute opposing talking points but really just give them more air time. I bet it would have moved the electorate about four points.

I woke up this morning to the sound of my wife's voice. She was still asleep, but her voice was on the radio. Then mine. We were reviewing "Capitalism: A Love Story" at a special press screening we saw last night.

I highly recommend the movie. Moore doesn't spoon feed his conclusions. Instead he puts provocative material that most viewers will be unfamiliar with in context. This gives politically motivated reviewers plenty of ammunition to pan his work by claiming a lack of connections. A few of them seem to have willfully missed even the most obvious points to do so.

I'll hold off on any deconstruction at least until the movie opens. Go see it so we can talk about it.

The violence is escalting. This is way past the easy-to-back-down point.

I've recently been introduced to the writing of Jean Swanson as a complement to Barbara Ehrenreich and her ilk. One of the things she does is a adopt a violent framing of class oppression, most notably featuring the term "poor-bashing" as way to highlight conflict.

The work has a lot of positive elements, but I'm not reviewing her work in detail here. I want to talk about the choice of terms. My second thought was that it would lead to people confusing intra-poor violence (i.e. effects of oppression) with the system where employers collude to force the poor to offer their labor at poverty wages (i.e. oppression itself).

My other reaction to that was that the term derives its power from the term "gay-bashing" in an appropriative way. Someone I trust who self-identifies as a queer'd dyke and who came from an impoverished history asked me to reconsider the term in terms of its usefulness.

So I'm trying, but not getting very far. The specific actions that the term is supposed to highlight are blaming the poor people for their condition (e.g. "This exceptional formerly poor person worked super hard and rose from worse circumstances than you are in; stop whining you lazy you."), cutting off social safety nets, and keeping them isolated from better opportunities.

Is "poor-bashing" conducive to thinking about poverty structurally or causally? Or does it degenerate into hypernarrow consideration of the individual in crop-tight focus?

I'm stuck.

For those of you wondering how long fomenting violence at Town Halls would take to turn to actual violence, please mark this waypoint on your chronology and make sure your have room to record the first shooting.

It's a lot easier to start a mob down this path than to stop one.

I got so stuck on a report for work I needed to fill out a meme. The rules: 15 books of fiction in 15 minutes that were somehow formative or growthy for me.

The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Neffenberger [ed: should be Niffenegger]
Mary and the Giant by Phillip K. Dick
Dragonflight/Pern by Anne McCaffery
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
A Long Way Away from Anywhere Else by Ursula LeGuin [ed: actually Far Away From Anywhere Else]
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
The Hobbit /LOTR by J.R.R. Tolkien
Lord Foul’s Bane/TCoTC,U by Stephen Donaldson
Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Cetaganda by Lois MacMaster Bujold
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Lorax by Dr. Seuss
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Dune by Frank Herbert
Lamb (The Gospel According To Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal) by Christopher Moore

I wanted a space for Richard's Dinosaur Book by Mel Nicholson, but felt uncomfortable putting it on this list, and now I can't figure out what to bump for it.

So that was more like 5 minutes than 15. Whatever. Back to work.

Read this if you ever watched the Breakfast Club or wrote a letter.

The air is clean. Really clean.

When stepping into the street in a keep-left country, the traffic is over your RIGHT shoulder.

The suites at the Sydney Four Seasons are really nice. It's not just that they are huge. And have a view of the harbour and Opera House. And are well lit. And serviced by a staff that takes pride in their result. And are furnished to flow nicely. Okay, maybe it is those things.

It's a harbour, not a harbor, because they say it is.

The word "key" (as in "the Florida Keys") is one of the few words pronounced by Australians the same as mericans pronounce it, but they spell it "quay." The word "key" as in "the thing you unlock with" is spelled the same but pronounced differently.

The Sydney Observatory has the oldest telescope in the Southern Hemisphere. With it I saw the Jewel Box, a cluster of 90+ stars of various colors. The 4m focal length is pure-refractive - look ma, no mirrors! Just a 4m long tube. It's weird to think that it was there since before we harnessed electricity.

They are colors and not colours because I say they are.

Kangaroo does not taste like chicken. The locals compare it to venison, but I think it tastes more like rabbit. Crocodile tastes like chicken.

You aren't supposed to tip in Australia according to the tour guides, but the cafe areas targeted at the 20-somethings all have tip jars on the counter, so that may be in the process of renegotiation.

The feral camel populations are growing dangerously large and threatening indigenous species and the viability of some Aboriginal-controlled land. Public control methods may possibly be supplemented by a private enterprise to sell camel meat pies.

Burger King goes by the name "Hungry Jack's" in Australia. Some SPARFers (don't ask) in the 90s told me stories of making meat pies there, but when I saw the menu last week those were gone. They offer an Australian Whopper with beetroot and egg, but otherwise the menu is a subset of what you see in the States.

The USA is "the States" to Australian. The TV news coverage of the health insurance debate in the States is more detailed than the news reports in the States. The Australians view of the US is grounded in FDR and WWII, especially in the older generation. Sarah Palin is the current favoured example of "Where do the Americans get such stupid politicians?" Comments about the POTUS don't seem to include President Obama much, except implicitly in the phrase "Thank god you finally threw Bush out!" The Parliamentary mindset may make it a bit difficult to notice significance the term-limit ejection, but until 10% of Americans know what "preference voting" and "parliament" mean, I won't be judging.

The flying fox is a kind of bat, and is somewhat active during the day. The botanical gardens in Sydney are full of them. The gulls in NSW and Victoria are about half the size of the the smaller of the most common California gulls (the Lesser Western Gull). They have a pure white head, a brilliant red beak and legs, and black wingtips. The Crows have a white patch on the back of their necks, and white beaks. Owls fly around Sydney Harbour at night.

Restaurants close around 9pm in Sydney and Melbourne. The theatre lets out around 9:30pm. Therefore the phrase "dinner and a show" should be taken in that order. The Australian production of Wicked was a lot of fun. The Melbourne International Film Festival started just as we arrived. Seven theaters; a different movie each showing and location for two weeks. We saw two, and were pleasantly surprised by both.

The night tour of the Moonlit Sanctuary outside Melbourne was the highlight of the trip. If you go to Melbourne and do not avail yourself of this opportunity, there is something wrong with you. A gray kangaroo will hold your wrist in both its forepaws if you have food. If a wallaby is a small kangaroo, a betong is a tiny kangaroo. They hiss at each other like cats, especially when there is food. A Frogmouth is a kind of bird; it doesn't hurt when it bites your hand. Wombats are more like small bears than big dogs. Koalas are tree wombats. This is much clearer when you see them together. Gliders are like flying cats. There is much much more to see here, so YOU SHOULD GO. Really.

There was a recent story allegedly about racial violence in a foreign student slum housing area touted in the enthic-Indian press that turned out to be grossly inaccurate factually. The assailants weren't white, and the target of the mugging was a reporter for a competing paper who is lambasting the original report. The racist comments from the white people responding to the above take a lot of unpacking and I'm still processing, so I'll need to leave that for another post.

Federation Square, near the Yarra River, has a huge television open to the public. It shows Aussie rules football on weekend nights. The Melbourne Cricket Grounds was packed full of around 100k people to watch the game live. Since about 20% of all Australians live in the Melbourne area, there are several teams which all have the MCG as their "home" pitch (i.e. field). The supporters (i.e. fans) of each team sit intermingled and tease each other, but with no hint of the European soccer-hooligan violence.

Aussie rules players are just like I imagined them in SPARF. They even make the kinds of stupid plays when they get pressured. If you have to ask about this one, it's too long to explain. Sorry.

The Australian victory at World Series of Poker has led to poker rooms popping up in all the casinos. They only play no-limit. The no-tip rule is in force here, so if you throw a tip-chip to the dealer out of habit, they will be confused and wonder what you are trying to do. All the casinos are non-smoking and have visible clocks.

The Star Casino in Sydney has a terrible poker room. You need to go to the cage each time you buy chips. The dealers deal from a shoe and are slow, often needing help to determine who won the hand ("does the kicker play?"), and the players are just as confused. The time charge is $5 per hour, *plus* they rake 10% up to $6 from each pot. I would not play there again unless someone else told me they had gotten their act together.

The Crown Casino in Melbourne is much better run. The dealers loft the cards and most are accurate. They know the rules, but sometimes have challenges controlling the action. To be fair, the players there are a bit harder to control, since they still seem to be reading from a movie script rather than a rules book. The only game with a reliable quorum is no-limit holdem. Even with the insane rake there is a lot of money to be made until the locals figure out how to play well.

Restaurant prices are higher than in the states, probably to compensate for the no-tipping so they can actually pay their people. The waiter politeness protocol requires you to ask for the check or they will let you sit at the table forever undisturbed.

I know this left the news cycles a while ago, but the Dr. Tiller murder was on my mind tonight. For those who don't remember or didn't know, Dr. Tiller was a specialist who performed late term abortions. He was murdered by an Operation Rescue member after years of being threatened and harassed by the group. The group is celebrating the closing of his clinic after his death and even talking about taking over the building as a new headquarters.

Nowhere in wide distribution media did Operation Rescue get more support for this murder than from Bill O'Reilly on his show The O'Reilly Factor. Bill O'Reilly frequently mentioned Dr. Tiller on his show as "Tiller the Baby Killer" and spoke of Dr. Tiller as a criminal who needed to be brought to justice. Dr. Tiller's murderer sees himself as just this sort of a vigilante. In Bill O'Reily's defense, he claimed after the fact never to have seriously suggested murdering Dr. Tiller, and that all the juxtapositions of Dr. Tiller with death were protected by Free Speech. I couldn't agree more, as you'll see.

As an aside, there is no connection between this story and the infamous loofa incident where Bill O'Reily sexually harassed an employee of his show. After all, he is famous and successful, two traits I'm told that women admire, so we should not see Bill O'Reily as a pathetic man who needs to abuse his authority to get women. To use the vernacular, you expect a successful, famous man like that to be more of a lady killer stud than a snivelling, wretched criminal.

So anyway, Bill "Lady Killer" O'Riely was talking to a guest after the Dr. Tiller murder, but instead of talking about the murder, he wanted to talk about abolishing abortion. In essence, he was rewarding the murderer by bringing the man's favored topic to the fore.

One thing you may not know about Dr. Tiller, is that the leading reason his patients were seeking late term abortions is that they had breast cancer and needed to abort the fetus in order to begin chemotherapy. Without the procedure, they could die. I want to stress that just because Bill the Lady Killer O'Riely is against the procedure being readily available, doesn't mean he should be held responsible for pregnant women with breast cancer. That would be irresponsible and no one is arguing that.

Of course, now that Dr. Tiller is dead, it will be harder for pregnant women with breast cancer to get life saving treatment. A woman whose life Dr. Tiller might have saved might have her procedure delayed since other doctors may now be more reticent to perform the procedure. The delay in starting her chemotherapy could be the difference between life and death. I hope the woman's husband keeps this in perspective and doesn't want to shoot Bill the Lady Killer in the face for killing his lady. After all, he didn't kill her himself, the cancer did.

One thing we can all agree on here is that research into a cure for breast cancer is a good thing. I was thinking that Bill the Lady Killer would obviously support this noble goal, so while we would never want anyone to actually shoot him in the face, maybe we could give the husband above some peace by holding a breast cancer research fundraiser. We could hold the fundraiser at shooting ranges across the country, and put posters of Bill the Lady Killer on the targets. Each time someone shot a picture of the Lady Killer, sponsors would donate money to breast cancer. If they shot him in the face, twice as much money would go to charity. So remember to aim for Bill O'Reily's face when shooting to fight breast cancer.

I certainly hope that Bill O'Riely will fully support this effort to fight breast cancer. A friend of mine suggested that all this talk of shooting Bill O'Riely in the face might cause someone to actually shoot the man in the face because he is responsible for the death of women who die from breast cancer, but as Bill O'Riely said, we can't be held responsible for what some fringe lunatic might do because of what we say. After all, it's not like we are shooting Bill O'Riely in the face ourselves.

We're just fighting breast cancer.

How long should it take to a pump up bike inner tube from zero?

Here is some analysis from 538 about the difference between thinking of same-sex marriage. There seems to be a dramatic difference between support for allowing same-sex marriage versus support for prohibiting it. In other words, some people who wouldn't be in favor of enabling same-sex marriage would be against laws prohibiting it. I know it seems like a contradiction, but people have lots of contradictions in their thinking.

So far the heteronormative forces have won this framing down pat. People from both sides of the aisle are using terms more favorable to their position.

This raises a question for me that I hope some of the married same-sex couples who read here can answer for me: Would a win based on not-prohibited-frame arguments be emotionally equivalent to a win based on allowed-frame arguments? If not, how?

A recent AP quote: "She said she has White House press credentials."

Are you kidding me? You can't fact check whether she has press credentials or not?

[Crossposted from OKC]

Source of this quote unknown (if you know, please tell me so I can properly attribute it)

When you pass laws which assign greater guilt to certain parties for committing the same crimes, based on nothing more than what they were thinking at the time and the “class” of citizens who were the victims, then you are providing unequal protection of the laws. You are assigning a higher value to the lives, liberty and property of some victims than others based on their sexual orientation, their race, skin color, religion, etc'...Creating classes of victims means creating classes of citizenry. Either we’re all the same, or we’re just competing for the most politically-correct biases. That’s more likely to perpetuate resentment than it is to reduce hatred.

I've seen this quote in a few places asking about why hate crimes are treated differently than other crimes. For the most part this is asked as a rhetorical question and the poster is assuming there is no good policy basis for a hate crime law. I'd like to treat the question seriously and offer some insight into how Hate Crimes laws work when they are implemented well.

Before looking at the laws themselves, it is better to look at the community into which they are being applied. Gay people get bashed, often fatally, just because they are gay. Similar crimes plague minorities, and domestic violence has disproportionate effect on women. There are lots of statistics about exactly how disproportionate the impact is on the various communities, and I've seen many an argument get lost arguing those stats, so I want to put them explicitly off limits because frequency has little to do with this.

What does have a lot to do with this is discretion within the executive branches, especially of local governments. If the local police officers or prosecutors are bigots, crimes against the targeted group sometimes get ignored. Even if the criminal is not a bigot, the knowledge that they are more likely to get away with a crime if they target a transgendered person (for example) makes them more likely to pick one.

One of the most important effects of a Hate Crimes law is that it allows officers like the Federal Bureau of Investigation to step in to investigate and prosecute an individual a local bigot would have allowed to get away. So this looks like a special protection, but it is really a way to deliver the regular protection when the regular mechanism would fail.

Consider a lynching in a deeply racist town, where "some of those who burn crosses are the same who work forces" (i.e. the police are criminal participants and unlikely to arrest themselves). Without an external law enforcement agency authorized to investigate, there is no effective law nor justice for the victims.

Moi wrote the following caption on one of her artworks, and I was wondering if it was original to her or something she was quoting. A quick Google search found nothing.

A vivid dream becomes a vague reality.

Mayor Newsom has announced that he is running for Governor. Time to rework all the models for whether prop8-repeal is feasible for 2010.

Iowa, Vermont, ...

I just finished reading a pop. biology book (Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice for All Creation). The final chapter of the book goes through the rationales for why sex evolved in the first place, including some theories about repairing damaged genes and the like. What was absent was the theory that I've long since held as an obvious answer.

I believe the evolutionary advantage of sex is the unite advantageous genes.

Let's start with two contrived species of bacteria. One has a large homogeneous population and reproduces asexually. The other has a large homogeneous population and can reproduce sexually. One day, among the many bad mutations that get deleted because the offspring is somehow defective, each receives a mildly advantageous mutation. At a moderate rate, these advantageous genes are spreading through their respective populations.

While each species has a small fraction of the population with the "good" genes, let's say each receives a second advantageous mutation to unmutated parents. In each species, there are now three strains: the unmutated, the first mutation only, and the second mutation only.

In the sexual species, a member of the strain with the first advantageous mutation will eventually meet a member with the second and produce offspring with both mutations. Over time, the sexual species will accumulate more and more changes and variety, and enjoy all the benefits of combining them.

The asexual species will not. Each successful mutation create a new monoculture and will receive no benefit from any advances of its cousins.

I always thought this was obvious, so much so I was surprised not to see it in a list from an otherwise thorough author. Is the theory above not commonly discussed in bio circles?

So the new Transportation Secretary was thinking about reworking the gas tax so that cars pay per mile instead of per gallon. So SUVs and my little compact would pay the same amount per mile. So the existing economic pressure to get fuel efficient cars would be reduced.

WRONG WRONG WRONG.