Food-blogging February: The Peanut Butter Cookie Trials

I haven't written much over the past few years - I figured I should get back to my roots and do some food blogging.  I intend to write something every day, so it is likely to stay pretty pedestrian and home-cooky.  I know it's not February yet, but I made some cookies today and wanted to be sure I get going on this project.

Peanut butter is a big part of my diet.  I love it, but have a hard time finding peanut butter cookies that aren't too sweet.  Maybe it's time I develop them.  I'm starting with this recipe, from Simply Recipes.  In the comments, someone says that they cut the white sugar down to 1/4 cup, and I followed that advice with a little twist inspired by overmeasuring - I just used 3/4 cup of packed brown sugar for the total sugar.  Another variation from the recipe is that I didn't get to baking the dough until it had rested for about 36 hours in my fridge.  From the taste of the dough, it may be a little too sweet, but I'll bake them and see how they come out.

Baked them 13 minutes at 350 degrees, they spread a little further than I expected, and they are somewhat overcooked, but the sweetness is about perfect.  The peanut flavor is not perfect - that will need a boost, maybe with some chopped peanuts.  Maybe the long resting time was too much for the baking powder, and they expanded horizontally instead of vertically.

The problems with the usual peanut butter cookie recipe that I'd like to solve are:

• Long resting time
• Lots of butter

I have a few modified recipes that I could try out next time.  Recipe A, to address the butter content, will be:
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
3/4 cup peanut butter
1/4 cup RT butter
1 egg
1.25 cups flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt

Note that the volume of wet ingredients stays the same here.



I suspect that replacing some of the butter with peanut butter will result in a better PB flavor and less spreading.  It might also make for tougher cookies that don't rise as well, but I'll just have to bake them and find out.  As for the time variable, I'll try one batch after a half hour's rest, another after an hour's, and if neither is satisfying, I'll try two and three hours' rest batches.

I originally conceived of this as an experiment to work on in the near future, but I don't know that I want to eat that many cookies in a short time.  Once this batch gets eaten, I'll use my modified recipe and resting times.

If the NRA took anything seriously

If the NRA were mildly serious about keeping guns out of the hands of the "bad guys," and the self-declared unserious and irresponsible, they would be very pleased to see James Yeager lose his right to carry guns.

I've been entertaining myself with some thought experiments about what would happen if the NRA weren't a bunch of machismo-poisoned culture warriors and industry shills.  If they hadn't relied so heavily for so long on the nonsense about needing to be personally armed against a tyrannical government, they could be telling us that we need a gun mandate, and everyone should be required to buy one and learn to use it as part of a well-regulated militia.  It would be good for their industry, and make sense regarding the common-sense interpretation of the second amendment.

Instead, we get self-reliant sharpshooting cowboy nonsense. 

Learning How People Learn

Working in the Discovery Center and at the Zoo, I have to guess a lot about what kids know when they show up and what I could possibly teach them.  I am not very good at guessing ages, but I find a "shibboleth approach" works pretty well when it comes to gauging a child's knowledge.  When I am in the butterfly garden, I like to ask kids if they know that all these butterflies used to be caterpillars, and if so, what's the big word  that's used to describe the process of changing from that wormy thing into a butterfly?  If they balk, I'll start it for them, "meta-" still leaving a chance for them to get it even if it didn't come to mind immediately.  What doesn't really work is to just ask, "Do you guys have any questions?"  That's a little too blank-slatey for strangers, I think.

These are things it's taken me a while to figure out.  I do remember a few major failures I've had in interactions with kids.  Once, a mother came in with her son who needed to talk to "a scientist" for a Boy Scouts project.  I volunteered myself, and I forgot to get down to the kid's level, and totally lost him when he didn't know what DNA was.  After that, I ended up sort of explaining my last job (molecular diagnostics) to his mother.  D'oh.

I've gone over this in my head several times since it happened about a year ago, and I even woke up this morning thinking about how I could have done better.  Between that, and seeing this link to a series of videos aimed at small children who need to interact with doctors from a Pinterest buddy, I was inspired to write up some of my experience learning education by doing education.  Plus, I need a bit of an extra push when it's this chilly outside and I need to get to the zoo in a few hours.  

The Hall of Sexual Harrassment

This is what I dressed up as for Halloween.  I did a big drinky party on Saturday, and this Wed went out with a couple of friends to visit the haunted houses/woods.  We went to a couple, and this was a new experience for me.  I was a bit sleep-deprived, so I was sort of hard to startle.  For some of the people hiding behind corners getting ready to jump out and scare me, I was a disappointment - so much so that they followed me down the path trying to get at me.  I'll give them that as being legitimately creepy.  My two companions were a lot easier to get a rise out of.  And I'll admit a few things made me shriek.

I found that somewhat disturbing - very much like the phenomenon of men who won't let you walk by on a street without responding to a vulgar comment.  The worst was the dude who asked me if I was a "pussy-flavored-pop-tart."  Dude.  No.  You don't know what my costume is, let it go.

The most amusing part of one was a "public health care center" offering "end of life counseling."  I wonder if they have that bit in blue states.  And they had to change the death panel sign after a while, I'm sure.

I left feeling like I was made of stone, a Halloween grinch.  There are things that creep me out, but they tend to be slow to burn.  I have a very hard time with wind storms.  And almost every time I've come across a snake in the wild, it's made me shriek.  Embarrassingly, when camping, I listen very carefully for the bears that are surely coming to eat my marshmallows.  

Location Location Location

A recently-concluded legal battle over the custody of IVF-created embryos involved at least one person who felt a lot more attached to her embryos than I ever have to any.  A couple created several embryos with the aid of reproductive tech, and only ended up having one child before they eventually divorced.  The mother, as it turns out, won custody of their daughter, and sued for custody of the embryos, which she won and eventually destroyed.

When it comes to reproductive choice, I've liked to discuss hypothetical situations about artificial wombs and claims to embryos and fetuses that would exist outside a woman's body.  It's sort of difficult to think about because it's so different than what humanity has been dealing with for all of our existence, but some court cases are demonstrating the simple-to-me principle that the right to abortion is one that exists because incubation occurs in a woman's body.  Once an embryo or other proto-kid of two parents is no longer in her body, the mother has lost her veto power.

Personally, I think that either parent should retain the ability to destroy embryos that are not in a woman's body.  In general, I think veto power should be retained when it comes to creating whole new people, so long as it doesn't require forcing abortion on an unwilling woman.  But I can understand why people would err on the other side.

The Gallows of Good Faith

People love to make fun of "Hopey-Changey," and they're right to.  Obama's 2008 campaign was based to an embarrassing degree on sentimental and generic idealism.  However, I still think that he tried to put it into practice.  Ever since he came into office, there have been outraged progressives upset that he even tried for compromise on anything with proudly-intransigent Republicans.  He gave them the chance to step up and govern, like they've been elected to do, and when they declined, it became just enough rope to hang themselves with.  You only need to see Romney's attempt to tear down Wall Street and back "Romneycare" to see that obstructionism in a time of crisis isn't just treading water and storing up political capital for when you get back in power and can use it up.  Win enough weeks and you've won the war.  

Revolting

I just downloaded an Android app for tracking my menstrual cycle, and it's ad-supported.  So far all the ads are for apps which use GPS to stalk one's partner.  

Lots of dead ends

The IUCN has profiled a lot of the very endangered animals it likes, and the comments are full of the stuff that had kept me frustrated with environmentalism for most of my life, like desperate calls to "wake up."  A commenter says

According to the Queensland Museum book of dinosaurs we have already lost 99% of species on this planet over time. We have to be more responsible as a species to try and save what we have left. 

This stuff bothers me because it's framed as an alarming talking point, but it's really just how things work.  Natural selection gives us an unsentimental system that makes most species dead-ends.  Where one goes extinct, another is supposed to arise and take advantage of the empty ecological niche.  The problem is that people have stepped in to fill a number of niches, and that's been harmful to biodiversity.  Where people are, large predators tend to disappear.  

It's not that people don't understand that there are competing interests, it's just that they're very difficult to balance.  

Mature Enough for Girlhood

Jezebel is discussing the phenomenon of extra-girly famous women, with a tone that suggests worry.  Megan Reynolds has responded.  It is kind of true that women are embracing a lot of things that fit girls better than they do women - like glitter, unicorns, and cute kitties.  I can identify with this a little, since I just turned thirty and have only recently been confident enough to really consider experimenting with my own style.  I never learned to put on makeup until I was 25.  Going with silly fashion trends takes a certain amount of confidence.  Teenage and younger girls are usually giant balls of insecurity, so I don't know why we're looking to them for bold silliness.

As a teen, I was influenced by the swing revival of the 90s and dressed sort of conservatively.  To this day, I dress far older than my age.  My skirts are almost always full, swingy, and knee-length.  It was when I was about 22 that I finally realized that little tiny pigtails are the ideal way to pull back short hair for a workout (You can lay down on a yoga mat without having a big bump in the back of your head), and at the time I felt a bit too old for the look, but I've continued doing it since then.  It seems pretty unfair that once I get to a point where I feel like I can try some stuff with fashion, I'm "too old" for it.

Another dimension is that most of the women in the Jezebel piece are very financially stable, They probably have the sense that they worked their childhoods away so they could achieve that, and they are owed some latitude to play that they never got as children.  In fact, I have that feeling myself.  If I worked my way into a career that isn't going to happen now, I get to wear that sparkling cloisonne strawberry necklace.

Just too horrible to contemplate

Like many, I'm tempted to blow off Todd Akin's comments about pregnancy as the product of rape being impossible.  It's so obviously stupid that it's hard to know how to respond.  This has given me some insight into how anti-choice politics work.  Akin probably has a hard time believing something so horrible could just happen to someone who was raped (something already horrible having happened to her).  I concur that it's difficult to comprehend.  Once in a while, you hear about something so bad that it just can't be the case that it ever has happened or ever will.

Except it did happen and will happen again.  People do things to mitigate the horror of an unfair world.  In the case of rape producing pregnancy, most people tend to agree that the best thing we can do to mitigate the horror is to let a woman opt for aborting the pregnancy.  But if you live in a tidy world where there is always a correct, not-just-acceptable-but-good choice, you just don't get pregnant when you're raped.  If you're pregnant, you were obviously not raped, so STFU.

If the world were just, we wouldn't have to enforce justice on it.  If our leaders can't handle that, they're irresponsible vermin who should slink back into their fetid caves and hide until we've forgotten about them.

The last people who we need in charge are the ones who have not asked the question, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" because they think bad things don't happen to good people.  

Throw Away the Key

In some ways, I am totally baffled by Romney picking Ryan as veep.  I agree with the analysis that Ryan's presence on the ticket shifts focus from Romney's strong issues (self-reliance, business, Obama Bad) to his weaker ones (social programs, taxes).

For a while, I've had a theory about vice-presidential selection that I think the GOP might be using: it's a great way to contain a weirdo.  Who's less relevant in Washington than the veep?  The conventional wisdom about a VP balancing a ticket hasn't really shown itself to be true.

When I do that thing liberals do - fantasize about what it would have been like if Gore'd gotten into the oval office - I think about how great it would have been to keep Lieberman locked up in the vice presidency.  

This again? Why won't people be serious about guns?

Florida is (again) trying to ban pediatricians from asking the parents of their patients if there are guns in the household.  This was already struck down as unconstitutionally-restrictive of the doctors' rights.  And it pissed me off royally, since people are always trying to regulate what doctors tell women about abortion, but see this as an intrusion on the second-amendment right to bear arms.

What?  Seriously?  A doctor asking if you have a gun in your home is making it hard for you to keep a gun there?  (Well, after you find out that if someone dies at the end of that gun, it's most likely going to be part of your family, you'll probably be a little less stoked about gun-ownership.  But God and the NRA forbid you learn that kind of thing from your doctor.)

It's one thing that this is stupid legislation.  It's quite another that it's being pushed again after a couple of high-profile gun crimes.

Just what about senseless gun violence makes Americans think it's time to pretend like we don't know they're dangerous?

I can usually ignore the gun control issue, but I'm getting riled up over how hard-headed Americans are when it comes to their guns.  

Did you know that the hyrax is closely related to the elephant?

Working at the zoo, there are a lot of conversations where I have to sort of skip over complicated points about biology, and condense things into soundbytes.  My ultimate goal is to keep simplifying something from being dumbing it down.  It's the hardest part about working at the zoo vs. the Discovery Center.  I try to keep information concrete, which is pretty easy given that we have all sorts of animal skulls and stuff to teach with.

The place where this comes up most is in conversations about classification and "relationships" between animals.  I think people in general think of these things as more concrete than they actually are.  I know I always did.  Linneas had no idea what DNA was, so a lot of the relationships that were determined to exist historically were based on things like outside appearance.  After you spend some time learning about single-celled organisms, you start to realize that the traditional means of defining a species are really not so relevant.  Asexually-reproducing organisms are pretty much classified by how much of their genetic code they share.  After a certain degree of difference in highly-conserved regions of their genetic material, they're considered different species.

This was especially interesting to think about when I worked in medical microbiology.  These microorganisms are critters that you can't see without a microscope, and are really only interesting to us insofar as as they affect our health.  I got to a point where it began to sound like semantics to me.  I mean, once penicillin kills an infectious agent, who cares what species or subspecies it is?  In my own medical care, I certainly don't much care (not enough to pay for the tests).  When it comes to epidemiology, however, the story is different.  Genetic signatures can help trace the sources of outbreaks.

This is exactly what people are talking about when they say "race is a construct."  Race, and species classification, are just systems we use to understand and categorize the world around us.  The natural world doesn't need us to tell it what we think of it.

I do this science education stuff in an area where people are often a little hostile to the idea of evolution.  I think a better understanding of this kind of thing would be really helpful, because popular conceptions of evolution are convoluted by the hierarchical pictures like the above.  I wonder how much resistance to evolution would go away once people had a better understanding of it.

(I don't mean to give the impression that I always felt like I understood this.  Most of the insight I'm trying to get across here were realizations I had in lecture halls in college, feeling like I should have always understood this stuff.  In case you're curious, the classes that were most instrumental to these realizations were anthropology 101, history of biology, biology for majors, and genetics.)

A rock hyrax

An African elephant

Conflicted Interests

I started this post a few weeks ago, but after the NYT just took the subject on, I decided I should go for it. I thought it was a little too negative, but the stakes with endangered species are high no matter how you look at it.

I went through orientation to work at Zoo Boise this summer as a "Zoo Naturalist," and I went in with  few reservations.  I wasn't sure that even the best enclosures were quite good enough for wild animals.  I'm still not sure that they are, but now I have a slightly different attitude about it.  Zoos create an educational opportunity that can't be replicated anywhere else, and raise a ton of money for conservation.  I think of it a little like I do animal dissection in biology classes - it puts a few animals at a disadvantage so that people can learn more about them and be inspired to take the next step and really get into science and conservation.

As a kid, I was a totally annoying environmentalist who would give you crap for littering, and simply didn't understand why people use pesticides in producing food.  Through my life, I've gotten really alienated with environmentalism in general, and have struggled to understand it in a pragmatic way.  I'm hoping my time at Zoo Boise will help me get back in touch with my environmentalist side (it is extremely fun so far), and yeah, conservation is quite expensive, but that's why part of your admission to Zoo Boise goes to their conservation fund.

One thing that I was very impressed with is that one of the nature preserves Zoo Boise works with, Gorongosa National Park, is administered in such a way that things are tolerable for the people who live there.  Money doesn't just go to maintaining park grounds, but to health care facilities for neighboring people.

Mostly, I've never been able to balance out the human needs with the environmental ones, morally.  In general, I lean much more toward helping people than I do animals, and I've always been extremely grossed out by the imperialist overtones in a lot of conservation movements.

To illustrate something I think should work pretty well, The US is trying to reintroduce wolves to their natural range in the Western US.  A lot of Idahoans don't like it.  Even our governor wants to kill him some wolves.  Frankly, I don't get it.  We have replaced a lot of the herbivores that used to roam around here with domestic ones that we like to eat.  Oddly enough, wolves like to eat cows too.  Sometimes they kill one - usually the gov't will pay damages, and so will an environmental group.  What's the harm done, if you pretty much don't lose money on the venture?  Camping is a little scarier, but it's supposed to be a little tiny bit scary.  (Last week, a cougar was seen gallivanting around downtown Boise quite near my home.  Frankly, I stayed off the greenbelt for a few days.)

Let's just PREtENDA that the woman isn't even there!

Congress has no problem with discriminating against already-born, adult, American gay human beings, but has a giant fit about selective abortion.  I hate hate hate that this invasive thought-police stuff is happening, but it's all the more insulting that PRENDA passed when ENDA has no hope.

Of all people, Andrew Sullivan captures the root of why this is bad, bad law:

I'm just deeply skeptical of how legal authorities could determine such a motive if the women do not say so. Banning explicit advertizing or marketing for sex-selective abortion would be another thing. But my sense is that this is all underground anyway, very hard to root out, and the kind of government power that would be unleashed in trying to figure it out is not compatible with a free country. I mean, how do you prove motive in such cases?


Right.  Who's to say it's the wrong kind of discrimination?  And even if it is, who really really cares?  China is seeing strange and bad effects from widespread anti-girl bias in sex-selective abortion, but there's really no proof that this is spreading much further.  It proves nothing, but I'd rather have a girl baby, mostly because I've spent almost no time with little boys.  


That's just me admitting a preference, but not intent to abort if things don't go my way.  Frankly, the kid will be their own person, so it's a roll of the dice, boy or girl. 

And I think that's the major point that anti-choice legislators refuse to understand about reproductive rights.  A significant portion of what happens in reproduction isn't under anyone's control.  It's a terrifying and awesome process, and the control a person can have over it should be their right, especially when it's happening inside her body.

And all of a sudden it slips away from them

They don't get it.  Republicans tried to harness identity politics with Michael Steele and Hilary Rosen, but they just don't get the core idea that people who aren't white men have legitimate greivances with systems set up to screw them.   Mitt Romney's trying to untwist the pretzel-logic of at-home mothers needing to work outside the home for welfare.  It doesn't make sense, and he can't force it to.  They're trying to raise the stupid ruckus they think that Democrats are trumping up all the time.

Seeing the tug-of-Mommy-War has made me think that this is when Americans can really attack the problem of support for families with children.  

What Ann and Mitt Romney are Ignoring

Hilary Rosen was right that Ann Romney can't identify much with the financial struggles of mothers who work outside the home.  She was wrong to say she hadn't worked a day in her life.  Ann Romney can afford help with her household duties, and having multiple sclerosis and five children, probably needs it.

This debate gets a little personal for me, since I am likely to embark on at-home motherhood quite soon - with uncertain health, and it seems like it's only a matter of time until someone tells me I haven't worked a day in my life.  I've gone to a lot of trouble to ensure that I can take care of myself financially (It's all a little rube-goldberg at the moment, which is still scary), and if I don't have Obamacare, I need my spouse's health coverage.

What bothers me most about this dialog is the way that conservative men act like the de facto restrictions they think women need (financial dependence on a man so they can follow the natural order and raise children) are a liberating force.  As a woman with ambitions toward motherhood, I can tell you that I don't want the devotion of my time to childcare to leave me even more vulnerable than I already am.  Unlike me, Ann Romney doesn't have to choose between treating her illness and sending her children to college.  

Despertainment

I watch an appalling amount of TV, through Netflix and Hulu.  It turns out that I love Toddlers and Tiaras, and have a shameful enthusiasm for Intervention on A&E.  Hoarders is so-so, but I'm just emerging from a really nasty cloud of fatigue wherein I watched at lot of TV and am getting kind of sick of it.  

I know it's exploitative, and I was thinking about how bad to feel about watching this stuff, and I realized that the fact that Americans will go on television at their lowest point just to get the help they need is a pretty serious indictment of the American mental health care system.  It's more like an expose than entertainment.  

I'm just surprised that I've never heard anyone say this.  I don't think Americans think about mental health as something that a community needs to step up and take care of on a public scale, like we kind of do with physical health.  Unless someone with a mental illness makes a major imposition on the life of the public at large, we think we can ignore it.  

It's really exciting to think about a country in which people had access to the mental health services they needed.  The way mental health and incarceration and poverty intersect in our country is very complicated and sad.  

The major conflict I feel about expanding the reach of mental health services is what would be imposed on people who don't want or need "help."  I'll think about this for a while, and if I come to any conclusions, update my thoughts.  

How Dare They

I love a lot of things about Idaho, and I'm in the process of putting down roots here.  I'd like to start a family very soon and my legislature is making me scared to.  If something goes wrong with the pregnancy I intend to have, I don't want to be stuck someplace where no one will help me without a bunch of hoop-jumping.  As it is, I'd be "high-risk," and I'm willing to accept what that means.  Maybe I just can't have my own baby.  Or maybe I can - I'd really like to - but it will not be a cakewalk.

Making a baby is serious business, which entails some major risks.  Strict regulations on abortion oversimplify the reality of childbearing dangerously.  The one who tries to think about this stuff ahead of time is made out to be the irresponsible "slut."  Excuse me for following all of your rules for my own reasons.  I'm a grown-up, smart, responsible woman, but I'm not treated like one.  If I need to opt out of a pregnancy, you bet I will try, and an ultrasound isn't going to change what my situation demands, or what I want.  I've spent at least 15 years thinking about what would happen if  I got pregnant - lawmakers seem to think it never occurred to me that I'd have to decide what to do.

I could go on for days about how busybodies want to complicate obstetric care, but the simple fact is that it's totally unnecessary, intrusive, and disrespectful.  That's the salient point here.  I don't deserve this kind of treatment.  

Duck Face and Shame

If you're not familiar with the culture and customs of Facebook, you probably have no idea what "duck face" is.  I spend an embarrassing amount of time on Facebook, and I had to look it up, myself.  It's apparently a common pose young women assume in photos, and the most popular outlet for misogyny I see in my feed.  Here's a fine example.

The usual thrust of duck face humor is that it doesn't look very nice at all, so stop making that face in your pictures.

I think duck face is just a variant (meant to look playful and silly) on the face most people make unconsciously as an expression of shame.  Making that connection put some things in perspective for me.  Duck face epidemics are probably just epidemics of self-loathing, and the hostile response creeps me out.  Facebook is a great way to indulge vanity (which can be annoying, but isn't the worst character trait I can think of), and it's interesting to see how people try to do so by a sideways, not-obvious approach.  We demand a certain amount of vanity in women, but punish them for any display of it.  If you try to put a funny spin on it, like duck face does, you are the target of everyone's disdain.

I'd love it if I looked fantastically beautiful all the time, and I try to look nice in pictures, but I've come to the conclusion that I photograph poorly (in that I look bad in photos, but I also am terrible at taking them.)

While I'm on the subject of social networking and photos of people, I hate how you can't pull out a camera without people awkwardly hugging and posing for it.  I'd like it if I could take a picture of a party, not just the faces of a few friends at it.  

Grow up, Leslie

I think Amanda Marcotte is right that NBC show Parks and Recreation is being set up as a sexist cliche, but I think her analysis of Leslie as a perfectly competent administrator and sane person are totally wrong.  Leslie's wanted to be a public servant to her town for all her life, and it's nice to see her follow her dream.  But she's not ten years old anymore.

As someone who followed her somewhat impractical dream all the way through college, I can tell you that a goal that stays static your entire life is kind of a limitation.  I was so focused on being a scientist when I grew up that I ignored pretty much all other areas of learning (and never noticed a talent and passion for writing)to focus on what I needed to catch up on to competently work in my field of choice.  Luckily, it turned out that an aptitude for these things can be developed if you don't already have it in you.

Having that uncomplicated route to a career derailed has allowed me to see that there's a lot more to me than liking science and tech.  I have to play to my strengths now, and that means some modification to my goals.

You can see Leslie slowly realizing this stuff, too.  She's a terrible campaigner, partially due to being clingy and unable to read people.  She's ignored serious romantic relationships in favor of her career (which is generally a false choice in fiction, but she's so set in her desire to stick with Pawnee, she's had to watch some potential happiness leave her there) and if she's going to be in the business of making life work better for people, she needs to understand what the lives of people who aren't so goal-oriented are like.  This stubborn streak is what she has in common with Ben.  He wanted something absurd for the town he bankrupted, and getting it was a disaster.  He's had to adjust his ambitions to fit his personality, and is trying to give Leslie the benefit of his experience.

Bigotry Sells

So, Washington state is set to make marriage equality law.

Industry tends to support marriage equality, because it means that they can hire the talented gay people with families away from anti-gay areas, since they can treat them as employees should be treated.

This makes perfect sense, and you'd think it would get supposed free marketeers excited, but it tends not to (See the conservative states that have banned gay marriage over the objections of industry).  A lot of times, when a really obviously bigoted ad gets some attention, people argue that it can't be racist because it would alienate potential customers of color.  Markets are segmented and targeted all the time, which alienates potential customers, but will create some loyalty in the targeted segment.  No one blinks when an ad takes advantage of classism to position its product as one of the good things in life, so why wouldn't one take advantage of sexism or racism or homophobia?

I used to believe this market-based argument against bigotry in advertising, but I've since noticed how attached people are to their -isms.  Anti-feminism is important to some people, and they might buy manly Dr. Pepper. 

Ron Paul is the least racist member of Congress

The title of this post is actually a comment I've read from a Paul supporter.   Typical Lost Cause bullshit here: Yes, Lincoln's motivation for war was to keep the unity of the country together.  The South was in it to keep slavery, or maybe squeeze a few extra dollars out of slavery's demise in a scam like Paul is describing here.

Intersecting Privileges and Oppressions on Facebook

It's true: the first thing I do when I get going on the computer is open up Facebook.  This morning was pretty interesting in terms of intersections of privilege.

The first thing I saw was a photo NPR had posted of amputee and runner Aimee Mullins, captioned "Inspiration, in On Photograph."  Mullins, a white, thin woman, is pictured in a bikini running on a beach, with the aid of prosthetic lower legs.  The comments turned into a little bit of a fight about how hard it would be for someone who wasn't so sexy to be called inspirational.  Mullins is a really attractive woman - it's true.  The thing that started to bother me in the comments were a lot of negativity about wheelchairs; Mullins had the good fortune to access the prosthetic technology she did.  Not everyone is so lucky.  Mullins works with organizations that seek to let everyone access this  tech, and educate people in general about disability, so she's no slouch when it comes to, well, anything.

Next up was an item from the Courage Campaign about Pat Buchannan's complaints that he's being forced out of MSNBC by "militant gay groups" and "people of color."  What stood out to me about this is the implication that people of color and gay groups (there's likely to be some crossover in the membership here) shouldn't have sway over what goes on at MSNBC.  Buchannan has been an embarrassment in American culture for too long, and he knows this was long overdue.

Oh, and what the hell.  I wrote a bit yesterday that would not have made a whole post on its own, so I'll just add it here:

Unfortunately, I am not in the regular habit of giving money to causes that need it.  In the past year or so, I've run into a few really absurd societal failures (like Topeka, KS stopping prosecution of domestic violence) that have prompted me to find a local program and send a few bucks in.  Today, it's transitional housing in Pennsylvania, since  if you have enough money on-hand to pay first and last-month's rent (ish, $2,000 in savings is the cutoff), you will no longer be able to get food stamps.  

The Economic Butterfly Effect

"The Market" is a complicated system.  The system's rules are often regarded as natural, even if they're arbitrary.  People have occasionally proven themselves bad at engineering complicated systems.  (Think Jurassic Park.)  People have lately proven themselves bad at pulling magical free money out of the market.  We've seen a lot of unintended and bad consequences from economic policies and financial innovation.

I don't see why it's obviously stupid to try and cut down on the population of dengue-carrying mosquitoes, but not obviously stupid to use the system of farm subsidies we do.  In either situation, there will be unintended consequences, but Paul Wolfowitz wasn't just suffering aphasia when he made up the term, "unknown unknowns."

I don't think either of these things is obviously stupid.  You see a lot of caution with regard to economic experimentation in the implementation of the PPACA.  On the one hand, it seems like the long phase-in of health care is a very bad electoral strategy.  On the other, if something horrible happens with a provision or two, we're not so far into it that we can't think of something else to try.

Oddly, I seem to be on the same page as Sen. James DeMint (R-SC) (Via Ezra Klein) with this issue of letting the system do what it does (when we can afford it).  As a statement against weird subsidies, I think that post is over-the-top but basically correct.  I just took out all of the unnecessary Obama-bashing, and added an analogy instead of a ridiculous shout-out to the artificial Christmas tree industry.  

Language Evolves

One thing I love about the Internet is that it’s democratized writing, and no longer is it just people with the inclination and talent who wrestle with semantics and spelling.  Before chat and texting how often did you hear anyone complain about bad spelling or misused semicolons?  Adding more participants to the world of writing in English has improved it.  Some conventions we’ve been using are just stupid.


Some common misconceptions have almost completely gone away (like, "kerfluffle.") but others are being accommodated.  One can "rifle" through a pile of papers, but that's a really weird word for the activity.  A lot of people say "riffle."  And I've noticed people writing it that way.  While I have never used it, I think riffle is better - it's got a nice onomatopoeia thing going on, whereas the noun meaning of “rifle” is sort of distracting.


Another word I've seen this happen with is "ogle."  A lot of people say it like it rhymes with "goggle."  I think  "oggle" also makes more sense, intuitively.  As such, I have more than once seen the word "oggle" used.  


Another change that doesn’t seem to have completely broken through is with periods and other sentence-ending punctuation’s placement with regard to quotation marks.  When you’re quoting someone, it makes more sense to keep the original punctuation of the quote inside the marks.  If you’re asking whether someone made a particular statement, you should be able to add your question mark after the quote with its punctuation included.  Did Marci say, “This is not what I wanted!”?  

So these were some changes I think needed to be made.  I’m not on board with all of the ones I've seen.  One I simply cannot support is single-spacing between sentences.  It’s strange how much you internalize rules in writing before you can articulate them; I am occasionally very confused by someone using the wrong “their” or “your.”  

I’ve also noticed a huge amount of unnecessary comma use, which breaks some aesthetic rules of mine, and seems to break a logical rule that I haven’t pinned down yet.  For example, if someone says, “Whatever happens, happens,” I don’t think there should be a comma between the repeated words.  A comma should almost separate a question from an answer within a sentence.  There needs to be a kind of tension that the comma supports.  The aesthetic thing is that a comma interrupts the flow of the sentence, making it seem rambly.  

Pee See

I've been thinking about the ability for words to harm lately, and which ones sting and why.  I'm hurt if someone calls me fat or a bitch or a slut.  There's something at work here with terms that you can't force away from yourself.  Slurs that mean, "what you are, which is is obviously a bad thing," stick.  I consider "bitch" and "slut" to be slurs that basically mean, "woman."  Ditto fat, to a certain extent.  (It's kind of hard to explain, and probably very idiosyncratic.)

I'm Fascinated

I'm a square.  I like rules.  Oddly, it's taken getting older for me to see how deeply this trait is embedded in me, and how badly I need to work around it.  I thought you were supposed to get more conservative as you age.

Anyone reading my blog may be getting sick of the Occupy talk.  But I'm hooked on the puzzle.  I can't quite figure it out (and I'm putting in the effort), but I can't shake the feeling that there's some "there" there.  I think that's a good sign.  If I need to rebuild a lot of my ideas about how the world works, I'm not going to put it off until I'm completely fossilized.

I find this pretty exciting, but it's a personal exploration that could easily get very boring to people who are not me.  I write this blog because I like to think out loud, and I assume people read it because they like seeing someone do that.  I promise to stop the soul-searching, and limit it to the actual revelations.

A thought

I came across a "hur hur, I go totally NUTS when I have my period" graphic on Facebook today, and those things really bug me.  I made a comment about how all people, female or not, are cranky and awful from time to time, but the menstrual cycle's effect on mood is at least predictable.

The Disconnect

There was something implied in the occupation of Zuccotti Park.  Picketing, protesting, marching - you do that until your demands are met.  I've been reading about consensus-building, and while it's fascinating and a promising model for organizing, I'm having a hard time getting on board.  If the process is the purpose, then I don't see how anyone will get more than participation ribbons within the next five years.  The most cynical thought I have had about consensus-building is that it's the terrifying result of Special Snowflake-ism.  Occupy is anti-hierarchical, which is not the way we tend to see things handled.  Anti-hierarchy seems in this instance to be anti-power, and therefore anti-empowerment.  I held out a little hope after reading this interview with Marina Sitrin on historical use of consensus-building, only to have it totally dashed by Ted Rall later on.

There are precedents of consensus-building working out beautifully.  But I don't think that will happen at Zuccotti Park.  It's the very last thing I want to say "I told you so" about.  I'd love to be proven wrong.  I've spent hours this week trying to convince myself that I am.

OWS has indeed empowered people to make their pain known.  I'll say unequivocally that is an accomplishment.  If I may be flip, America has been in need of a pity party.  (Tongue in cheek!  You can have a pity party about an actual problem.)  But it doesn't appear that this is all OWS has set out to do; there are still people camping out on Wall Street.

I read an article by Ted Rall today about how consensus-building is basically useless at making things happen, but super-fun and important anyway I guess.  I read this in the latest Boise Weekly, which is running a series on empowering people with intellectual and cognitive disabilities to vote.  Hilariously, Rall's article (wherein he made a snide remark about having to listen to the mentally-handicapped during the occupation) was on the opposite page of the first installment of the series.  

Domestic Battery Legal in Topeka, KS

People were circulating a news story warning that the city of Topeka, KS was considering stopping prosecution of misdemeanor domestic violence, but I didn't believe it would ever happen.  I guess I'm naive.  The story as to why this happened is that there was budgetary fighting between the city and the county over who would prosecute these crimes after a budget cut hit their department.  The county declined to take on the task, as did the city.  From Politico:

Shawnee County District Attorney Chad Taylor said the 10 percent budget cut forced his hand at a time when his office is bogged down by other cases. In response, he decided in early September that his office would drop its prosecution of misdemeanors - which include domestic violence and battery without a weapon - in Topeka.

If you'd like to donate to a local DV program, the Topeka YWCA can be found here.  I just did; their job is going to be awfully hard without the legal backup.

Atomized Inaction

I went to my first Occupy Boise meeting on Sunday, and left after almost two hours of hemming and hawing.  There was emphasis on  inclusivity far beyond what is possible.  This just doesn't meet the definition of a collective.  What I saw was neither collective, nor action.  The narrowing and unity that Occupy needs to arrive at will be painful, and a lot of goals will be abandoned to create a front that many can ally themselves behind.  As it stands, Occupy appears to be lot of people with legitimate grievances who would like to harness the energy for their own purposes.  I went because I was curious, and vaguely supportive.    

I can't argue with the fact that marginalized people's priorities tend to be pared off first, and I'll admit I don't know what to do about that.  I'll give Occupy the fact that they recognize this problem, but I can't say that they have moved past it.

Unfortunately, I think I'm equally stuck.

I can see how marginalized people see this as an opportunity to get a foothold on the mainstream consciousness, or maybe make some collateral progress.

Direction

I've been thinking more about Occupy Wall Street, and am feeling generally supportive, but not in any specific way.  In fact, I plan on making it to my first Occupy Boise rally tomorrow (I've missed two all ready).  When you compare OWS and the Tea Party, you can see the TP folks are more organized since they're just Republicans, who pretty much have their shit together when it comes to organizing.  A lot of people say that OWS has really bad timing in waiting so long after the crisis/bailouts/whathaveyou, but the fact that it's an election year, and some campaign* may have a chance to capitalize on the enthusiasm and save OWS from just falling apart.

*Elzabeth Warren?  Please?  (I do feel some irrational personal loyalty to Obama, but I'd vote for her in a primary over him.  Or maybe not.  It's very possible that she could do more good in the Senate than as President.)

What do you want, and when do you want it?

It's too bad I'm not the only one who is befuddled about Occupy Wall Street.  I'm pretty darn politically aware, and don't need a lot of hand-holding in approaching social issues, but I'm noticing that I lose interest when it comes to insubstantial ideas.  Yes, I want it to be possible to get by in this country.  I'm very interested in how exactly that can be made to happen, but stuff that is literally impossible is lucky if it gets a shrug from me.  Also, anything with a "Step 2. ?? Step 3. Profit!"

Step 1.  Occupy Wall Street.  Right on.
Step 2. This is what I am missing
Step 3. Thank God it's over.

I don't think that there are too many people unaware of our huge recession.  So it's starting to look like:

Step 1: Underestimate the intelligence of everyone
Step 2: Hey, wtf
Step 3: everyone is mad

What we need awareness of is what we need to do.  The problem is pretty damned obvious.  Though, I do look forward to Reimagine Work, the upcoming conference that seeks a roadmap to an economy that people can live with.  As far as I know, the basic premise is to uncouple income from work.  Now that's interesting.  It's a bit radical for my blood, but something's gotta give.  

It Happened to Me

Farhad Manjoo has a column discussing the white-collar job functions that may soon be automated.  I worked in a molecular biology lab from 2004-2008 and during that time, saw a lot of my duties partially automated.

Extracting DNA and RNA from samples that I had to process is something best done by a robot.  It will treat each sample exactly the same, which is almost impossible for a human to do.  These robots had some pretty clever mechanisms (sometimes mashing up different methods, like PCR and ELISA), and took some work that had the potential to be dangerous out of human hands.

In the short run, these automation systems have the potential to drive costs up, since you're using some patented materials. Still, as it is, using kits with pre-mixed chemical solutions takes advantage of the economy of scale for quality assurance, where you can farm that work out to the manufacturer of the kit.  It often works out to be more cost-efficient and reliable than paying an undergrad to do that work in your lab.

Any of this automation requires a person's judgment call during part of the process, especially with things like medicine.  The auto-radiologist may be able to detect subtler patterns than the human one, but I'd still want my MRI results double-checked.  

Undue Burden

Florida passed a law prohibiting a pediatrician from asking a parent if they own a gun.  It was later struck down on the basis of it violating a doctor's right to free speech.  Supporters of the law said it was a violation of second and fourth amendment rights.  You know what actually does violate fourth amendment rights?  Restricting abortion.  Conservatives will stretch the meaning of the Constitution to embiggen the second amendment, but it's still fine to force women to give up personal information if they want to have an abortion.  I almost wish there were actually a wealthy abortion industry which could afford to lobby like the NRA does.  We'd be freer.

This is an interesting case of lawmakers saying that people are able to decide when collateral damage is okay (e.g. gun accidents), but women surely can't be trusted to make a similar decision for their own interests or safety.  This is assuming equality between already-born people and those on their way to becoming people.  

Excuses, excuses

Andrew Sullivan has been facilitating a discussion on the reasons people don't want women to serve in military combat, and almost all of them have been about their sexuality.  Depleted uranium poses a risk of teratogenic effects on a woman's subsequent children* (but apparently this doesn't count for men who make babies after a day of learning how to use the weapons), men will not get over their desire to do the ladies, etc.  Now it's getting to the issue of rape.

Read the post - I keep starting to write something and finding that what I wanted to say has already been said there.  And anything else I've come up with have just been half-assed theories about male psychology.

*This is a problem when it comes to American women, but civilians in Iraq just have to deal.  

Looking at the right things

I was really impressed by this study that showed that laws requiring guided driving practice to get a license have reduced car crash fatalities amongst the people who actually participated, but the number of people who waited to apply for a license until they aged out of the requirement (usually at 18) almost cancel out the number of lives saved by introducing the program.  Interestingly, in New Jersey, where the requirement applies to all people under 21, there's a consistent reduction in traffic deaths.

I like this study because it has a broad perspective on what we can say actually "works."  It's hard to get excited about the effects of the program in its current form if basically the same number of people are dying before they get to drinking age.  Dying when you're 19 in't much worse than dying when you're 16. (I have to imagine; I've never died.)

So, the upshot is that guided practice improves the safety of drivers.  I would not have expected such clear-cut results, but then I don't know any teenaged car accident victims.  Thinking about this made me wonder how much it affects fatality rates that young drivers tend to inherit older and less-safe cars.

Sacrifice for Beauty

I like pretty shoes, but being mostly a pedestrian leaves me with few viable options in that regard. I went to a wedding this weekend, and wore a new pair of promising-looking heels. I try to go with old-lady brands, and these were Rockports, so you'd think I'd be doing pretty good. You'd be wrong. I walked about a total of two miles in the shoes, and my heels are torn up like you wouldn't believe. Here's a picture of the carnage that I discovered when I got to my destination. Double that, and you'll be able to imagine what it looked like after I got home.

I've never figured out what to do about this.  It's too bad the world has decided you can't wear socks with a skirt any more.  Until this heals, I'll be wearing sandals every day.  I noticed that Band-Aid makes a foot lubricant to put on your feet so the shoes won't rub.  I wonder if that just means your shoes fall off all the time.  People talk about uncomfortable shoes, but don't really mention that they are out for your blood.  How in the world are people supposed to stand this?  

Contagion

I saw Contagion over the weekend, and there were a lot of things that were 100% right about the movie, and a few that were questionable.

Who doesn't like a movie that glamorizes their stinky and nerdy profession?  I really appreciated how the cinematography saw the world through the eyes of an epidemiologist or microbiologist.  That menacing doorknob is just covered in deadly germs!  Why won't you people stop touching your faces all the time*?  It was jarring in the places where the movie slipped out of assuming that you know most of what's going on to explain some basic stuff to the audience (I'll admit that I didn't know what fomites meant).  And as someone who's done public health work outside of the CDC, I was a little insulted when the state health departments were portrayed as full of idiots.  Still, I appreciate that it was a detour that allowed the movie to talk to the audience like it's not watching the movie as part of a college course.

Speaking of the movie's respect for its audience, there was a strong undercurrent in the writing of someone who thinks people who haven't studied his specialty are dangerously stupid.  Still, the bad guy profiting off of a bogus homeopathic remedy (but I repeat myself) had educated himself just enough to lie well by the time he was able to influence the public.  In the beginning, he was just lucky to have guessed that the first few deaths were the beginning of a major outbreak, and still pretty paranoid.  His conspiratorial thinking wasn't entirely wrong, even if it was corrupt.

I also had a hard time believing that none of the health professionals read blogs about their area of work.  If you're charged with keeping the public healthy, it's a good idea to know how they're thinking.  And of course, there are those written by professionals for each other.  There was an absolute divide between the crazies who don't have degrees and certification but do read blogs and the trained professionals who only talk to each other.  For an attempt to humanize health professionals, there was quite a lot of paternalistic ivory-tower moralizing.

*As a feminist who rarely gets excited about makeup, I recently decided that the "don't touch your face so you don't ruin your makeup" thing is probably a force against the spread of disease.  On the one hand, it seems like you're sacrificing your freedom to rub sleepy eyes to the patriarchy, but on the other hand, don't touch your face so much.

These tampons will accommodate your fattie vag

Playtex has an ad campaign for a new design of tampon that uses a few silhouettes to illustrate the differing body types that may want to look in to their new tampon, including "empowered," "bubbly," and "chill."  The current iteration of the ad has the fattest of the ladies labeled as empowered, but I swear to god I saw an earlier one where she was labeled as "laid-back."  Of course that caused me to do a wtf and look for their website to catch a screenshot, but I couldn't find it.  Looking at the ad now, the labeling makes more sense, since the fat lady's posture is a lot more active than anyone else's.  Plus, it doesn't imply that your lazy, fat vagina needs a super-special tampon.

I have to add that the horizontal expansion model has been the principle behind o.b. tampons since forever.  I can't help but be an o.b. cheerleader, even if I kind of have given up menstruation*.  They make a superior product whose design all the other companies are finally catching up to.  And may I say, their startling redesign was an improvement on the previous product.  

*Yes, I do in fact think I am too cool for it.  

Some one-liners, since Reublican debates don't make me feel very serious

I just had a minor brainstorm: Republicans only favor fewer government restrictions on some people.  You're thinking, "Duh."  Somehow, this is a new way of thinking about it for me.  A single, disabled, low-income transwoman in America sure has some liberties at stake under a President Perry.  

Also, if property is theft, how do you have theft without the concept of property?  I assume that the point of the "property is theft" idea is to abolish/question the idea of private property.

Not again

I got my first notification of the immature innuendo being used to raise breast cancer "awareness" on Facebook today.  I had to respond with a link to Barbara Ehrenrich's essay about the saccharine and insulting world of breast cancer advocacy.   This year, it's also a "try to make boys think you're talking about something sexy" thing that makes absolutely no sense.  You post your shoe size and the amount of time it takes you to do your hair.  By the way, it's 6.5, 15-20 minutes.  And my bra is cream-colored.  

Idaho can't seem to write laws regarding abortion

I've only read about this from national wire reports (and blogs who picked it up), but apparently a Pocatello woman is challenging Idaho's new ban on abortion past 20 weeks, as well as a law that's been on the books for decades.  You'd think a state with a budget shortfall would learn its lesson after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars defending laws they're told are unconstitutional upon writing.

I'll give them the fact that it's hard to ban things which are found to be constitutionally-protected.  Lots of other states have been successful in regulating abortion out of accessibility, but Planned Parenthood of the Inland Northwest appears to have a crack team of attorneys that outmaneuvers that.  

Nurturing gender differences

Supposedly men are naturally better at spatial reasoning than women are.  However, someone recently conducted a study comparing the spatial reasoning skills of men and women raised in patrilineal vs. matrilineal societies, and found that women in the patrilineal society were less-good at solving a shape puzzle than men were.  The women raised and educated in a matrilineal society solved the puzzle at the same speed that men from their society did.

I have a few concerns about the experiment.   For example, the patrilineal* society compared against the matrilineal* society is described as simply educating their men for more years than they do their women.  I wonder how the results would shake out if the patriarchy's women benefitted from the same education as their men did.

There's a pretty good example of a patrilineal society where women are educated in roughly the same way men are: American/Western schools educate men and women in the same classrooms, and for the same number of years.  In some ways, American education benefits women more than men, yet we still see a differential between men and women in the spatial-reasoning skill.  What was that?  Did somebody say stereotype threat?

Taking all of this together, I think the conclusion is that living/being educated in a patrilineal society negatively affects the spatial reasoning skills of women.  Unfortunately, there are no matriarchies where we could test the effect of patriarchy itself, which I'd find a lot more interesting than the effect of lineage patterns.  The article linked above from The Scientist simply substitutes -lineal for -archal, which I think is rather dishonest (and not something I'd expect from the publication, which I like quite a lot).

*These terms refer to whether family relationships are defined through mothers or fathers.  If children are named with their father's names, it's a patrilineal society.  It may seem like a non-sequitur of a variable to test across, but whichever pattern of lineage a society follows can predict some things about power and family structure.  

Brave New Food

It seems obvious to me that in-vitro meat is a more-ethical way to build a burger.  Lots of people are working on making a commercially-viable system for in-vitro meat.  I have a really really hard time believing that the huge amount of resources needed to maintain tissue culture could ever compare favorably with cows cycling the energy from grass into meat that other animals can eat.  As it turns out, in-vitro muscle tissue needs to be "exercised" to avoid atrophy.  This presents a huge problem for those wishing to culture the tissue.  Instead of letting a cow's native metabolism exercise the muscle, we have to provide that energy.

I'm also perplexed by common attitudes toward cultured meat or protein products.  In fact, I would suggest you try Quorn, a mycoprotein chicken substitute, before it loses its commercial viability.  A few years ago, on  short-lived sitcom Better off Ted, the company that all the characters work for developed an in-vitro steak, which turned out not to be delicious and beefy, but to taste of "despair."  It was implied that such an artificial process for creating a steak would have to be depressing.  I would agree that it's "soulless," but here that's only a good thing.  There aren't any potential animal souls harmed in the making of this dinner.

But if the energy demands of the process can be surmounted, I'd really love to see something like this at my supermarket.  Also, I'm sure investigating the ins and outs of growing actual tissues in vitro will advance the technology for creating replacement organs or tissues for humans who need them.

And because I was apparently the only person who really dug Better off Ted, I'm going include a few of the awesome advertisements for the fictional corporation Veridian Dynamics.  

Our moral failure

You sometimes have to wonder what currently-accepted practice will be looked back on with horror by future generations.  I've read a lot of people who think it will be the way that we treat animals, but I think the more likely and obvious one is how we treat our prisoners.  We give their labor to giant corporations, keep them in unsafe conditions, and aren't selective enough about who ends up in the system.

  No one wants to extradite criminals to our courts because of our capital punishment habits.  Getting our criminals back after they flee is a lot harder than it needs to be, and I don't think our error-prone death penalty is worth that trouble.

It's almost impossible to envision the moral innovations of the future, and "how we treat our prisoners" may soon sound like, "how we treat our slaves."  To modern ears,  the "treatment" is trumped by the horror of "our slaves."  I'd like to believe that someone can come up with something more useful and less expensive, traumatic, or inhumane than prisons.  Imprisoning people for their crimes is hardly an ideal way of reacting to socially-maladaptive behavior.  But who knows, maybe there's no ideal way to deal with it.  

Scared of the Palouse

In the past decade or so, the Palouse has been host to some really terrifying violence against women.  Deadly domestic violence, and last weekend, a young woman was apparently murdered by a man who'd been stalking her. and we're just now finding out about WSU's lax response to sexual assault within its student body.

I don't really know what conclusion to draw from this information, but the pattern is striking and terrifying.  

Poverty is hard work

....and you'll need training if you're going to do it right.  There are a lot of shame-faced Boiseans pleading for money at street corners lately, and I have to wonder how many of these people know what services are available to help them.  From some tentative investigation, it seems like not a lot of people know where to go when they can't feed their family.  This is absurd.  Social services can be the difference between homelessness and permanent housing.  Assistance doesn't always work out, but it's an option people should know about.

I think there should be classes in high school about navigating social services.  Intervention tends to work better before you're out on the street, panicking about where you'll sleep tonight.  And!  Services usually need to hire someone to do outreach so that the people who need them know they exist.  That's not really the most productive use of their budgets.

Miniblogging

I've been unhappy about how little I've blogged in the past few years, and am going to try out something new - I post links and some thoughts on Facebook often, and they're not nothing.  I'm thinking I'll export that stuff to here.  Expect a lot of links, and much shorter entries.  Hopefully, this will inspire more frequent long pieces, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for them.  

Jobs, debt, and resentment

More than one left-leaner I know has been complaining that Democrats are walking into a trap when it comes to talking about deficit reduction, and that it really should be jobs that they go on about instead.  I think there's an intersection of the two issues that is being ignored: all these un- and under-employed people are struggling with their own finances, and giving up a lot to balance their own budgets.  It's not fun to do.  

When everyone's sore about cutting their own spending, it's easy to (falsely) compare the Federal budget to a household one, and act like it really is that simple.  Mr. and Mrs. Public have been cutting back so they can make their student loan payments, and if anyone should be cutting back, it's that wasteful Federal Government.  They're throwing away billions every year on the governmental equivalent to daily Starbucks stops!  Even I know better than that!  

I was disappointed to see that Obama himself is going for the "household budget" frame.  We may well go broke underestimating the American public.

My American feelings

I'm  glad Osama bin Laden is dead.  I'm not thrilled, not at all.  I have been of the opinion for years that he's just a symbol, and not of much strategic importance.  Still, symbolism reverberates a lot in geopolitics.  My very very very cynical reaction is that the bright side is that no one's going to torture him in my name.

I'd have been disappointed if he hadn't been captured or killed, to be sure.  It's something the US military put a high priority on, and they ought to be able to do the things they set out to.

Anyway, on to the speculation.  (It would be irresponsible not to)

In Obama's speech last night, I heard hints that the absurd security theater we've been enduring could be stepped up.  I'm very concerned that Pakistan will be shown to have been harboring him on purpose.  If that's the case, I don't expect to see Af-Pak wind down any time soon.  Actually, even if Pakistan is clean, I don't expect it to.  A lot of people are concerned about Al Qaeda retaliating, but I think they used up their best idea in 2001.  They will continue to be dangerous for at least a decade I'm sure, and do something awful but small in scale pretty soon.  

Dear Unilever and Procter& Gamble,

I'm a woman, age 25-32, and you make many products I'd like to use, except they contain irritating fragrances.  What is up with that?  Who would notice if their Pantene smelled of nothing in particular?

And, Dear Readers,

I've been in Boise for a little over a month now, and things are going pretty nicely.  The move was a little disastrous, as our car DIED in an area without phone service.  We knew the car was getting long in the tooth and would need to be replaced soon.  With the help of my fantastic in-laws, we were able to get a used Nissan Versa that we've named Vice.  Luckily, I was driving a U-Haul, and we were able to get to the new place before the landlord left for the day.

More interestingly, I've been able to start some volunteering stuff at the Idaho Food Bank and the Idaho Discovery Center (a children's science museum).  I've always fantasized about being Bill Nye the Science Guy when I grow up (despite the fact that my name rhymes with nothing), and I'm now one step closer!

Being in Boise, I will probably be able to be more politicky than I have lately, so blogging will be more frequent.  

Away We Go

I am leaving my hometown.  I love Moscow, but I'm not comfortable with the idea of living here forever.  I graduated high school 10 years ago, so it's definitely about time for me to get the heck out.  My husband just finished law school and got a job, so we're going to head to Boise next week.  I'm still in a career/life limbo, so what exactly I'll do is not really clear to me.   I think I'm going to concentrate on studying for the PCAT, and then apply to pharmacy school ASAP.  I've gone through a few "what will I be when I grow up" fads while I've been side-tracked, and trying to get in there seems like the best solution.  However, I've begun to take writing seriously again, so I'm going to stick with it as much as I can.  

Hypocrisy is one thing

Amanda's post about wingnut urban legends made me think about how gleeful everyone seemed to be to find out that when Ayn Rand came down with lung cancer, she applied for medical benefits from the government.  That makes her a hypocrite, and her political positions far stupider, but I still think it's her right.  I draw the line at humiliating physical harm as a fair consequence for being a crappy person.  This may be melodramatic, but it reminds me too much of how rape is a way to make a woman or other victim sorry that she tried to assert herself.

Amanda discusses her approach to questioning  anecdotes about some poor person somewhere not trying to improve their lot in the hardest way possible (apparently a sin to a conservative), e.g. a mother on welfare doing the math and realizing that she can devote her time to raising her kids and come out financially and emotionally better than she would if she worked a minimum-wage job.  I feel that it's better to loudly dismiss such things as boring and irrelevant.  The same is true of the anecdotes that back my arguments up.

It doesn't change the principle that people deserve some dignity and free will.  Systems should be gamed, if they result in an increase of dignity and freedom of choice.  Ayn Rand has as much right as anyone else to panic in the face of mortal harm, and take whatever steps are necessary to get on with her life.  A homeless guy has a cell phone?  Besides the fact that consumer electronics aren't all that expensive anymore, WHO CARES?

If I may add another example of being disappointed when people get too caught up in how other people live their lives:

I once was in a discussion about reparations for slavery in the US.  The Chris Rock joke about everyone spending their cash on rims and clothes came up, and I naively suggested something like a scholarship program, which caught on really quickly.  I tried to point out that this money was stolen from people who would otherwise have been able to choose how to spend it, and we don't really think twice about our right to occasionally blow a significant part of our paychecks on a round of drinks for everyone at the bar , but everyone was wearing their social engineer hat already, and too stoked about putting today's black youths on the hard road to success to listen.  

A drain on society

The thing that doesn't get mentioned when people whine about the cost of supporting people on disability and paying for Medicaid is that these measures give us more productive people to contribute to our society and economy.   All anyone calculates is the cost of the programs.  But there are dividends to the investment!

Actively sick people don't work as well or as much as they could.  People with stabilized conditions (say, someone who can afford their antidepressants) are going to be a lot more useful in the workplace, and pay taxes in to the system.  The same perverse system plays out with social security disability.  

You can't get social security for disability unless you're completely unable to do any work.  This forces some people to choose between working below their true capacity and not working at all.

If a pianist gets rheumatoid arthritis, she can probably still work some retail, so she's not eligible for any support, even as she gives up the prestige and pay of her old career.  Maybe she could be a successful music teacher, but if she loses her status in her profession (along with class status - dressing like the kind of person you'd pay well to teach your kid piano is tough to do on social security), it's going to be hard for her to get a foothold in a business suited to her talents, so she may well end up organizing the sweaters at Old Navy 15 hours a week.

Private-sector disability insurance sometimes works in terms of long- and short-term tiers of disability.  If you're disabled for only a little while, you have some support to get back into work.  If you are just relying on social security, you have to wait until you're completely disabled to get any income support (and then a couple of years to get through the process of applying).  Under-funded Medicaid is hard to rely on to bring you back to your previous capacity, especially if you are out of work while you're under the weather.  Living without income is not conducive to recovery.

This system is a lot more sustainable, since it keeps more people in the workplace and paying premiums for those who won't ever get back (e.g. the pianist who has a massive stroke and can't process language anymore).

An added bonus to the tiered system is that it works for parental leave as well.  You don't have to just cut ties with the working world if you need a year of maternity leave.  American men and women have shown that they're not willing to let work swallow up their entire lives, and the American workforce is fractured into a million dysfunctional pieces when having children means exiting the workforce, or even mommy-tracking your otherwise brilliant career.

But we can't have fakers suckling at the government's teat until they're ready to work again.  It's fraud!  And theft!  Who do these people think they are?  

Warm and fuzzy patriotism

Jacob Weisberg is right that it's pretty understandable to mess up the Star Spangled Banner, even at the Super Bowl.  I really thought Christina Aguilera was more talented than that, but I guess I was fooled.  This all reminded me of one of the neatest moments of patriotic pride I ever had.

In Summer 2000, just after I graduated high school, I was fortunate enough to be sent to Finland in a Lions Club social exchange.  While I was there, I participated in a camp that gathered all of the exchangees in the country that summer, which created a really neat international group of people.  At one point, on a hiking trip, there was a sudden, huge rain storm, and we all had to hide out in a little room with no power, but a fire for light.  How romantic.  This meant we had to actually entertain ourselves, and everyone decided we'd sing our national anthems for each other.  Of course, I was terrified to sing ours, but I went ahead and did it, and despite my complete inability to sing, it was very well-received.

Everyone said it was very beautiful, and hearing that made me realize for the first time that it sure is.  It has clumsy lyrics and is technically challenging, but to me that embodies a lot of the best qualities of the USA;  we're ambitious, and going to do things our own way.  

In my little school, I was lucky enough to have some pretty good free, public musical training (I was not really concerned with voice, I played flute.).  Mr. Murdock did everything the hard way.

Carry a sign, pat yourself on the back

Ta-Nehisi Coates featured a bit of Matt Yglesias' observations on Ayaan Hirsi Ali's editorial warning about Islam being a form of fascism, and rightly pointed out that it went a little far.  I noted this paragraph in particular:

But surely she must see, I counter, that the majority of British Muslims are moderates? Sitting in her publisher's office in an elegant grey-flannel trouser suit and pearl earrings, she fixes me with her lucid brown eyes. "If the majority are moderates, why did the Muslim community never take to the streets to abhor the 7/7 bombers? Why is it that the only time we see Muslims protesting en masse is when Islam is allegedly insulted, like with the Danish cartoons, or the Pope's comments?" 

TNC goes on to say that this isn't a very good test, and I agree with him, but I think it's a challenge white North Idahoans should take up.  We're embarrassed and horrified of our white supremacists, but that's not necessarily clear to everyone.  If we're so anti-racist, why aren't we making a big stink about the racists?  There's a significant stink in the area's press, but that hasn't made much of a difference on the ground.

There is, still, the problem that "taki[ng] the streets to abhor" isn't really a thing, especially when what's abhorred is pretty much officially abhorred.  Racist views aren't illegal, though.  The discussion at TNC's applied this thinking to Take Back the Night-type rallies, which don't make a lot of sense if they just exist to say, "Stupid rapists, please stop raping me," since rape is already illegal.  However, I'd argue that Take Back the Night is more about calling attention to the pervasiveness of violence against women (It's pretty bad if just going outside when it's dark is scary.) than scaring or shaming rapists themselves.  The problem that someone pointed out is that the Take Back the Night name implies that the main issue is strange men attacking random women when they're going about their own business.

Applying Take Back the Night logic to GTFO White Supremacists demonstrations requires the recognition that, like with violence against women relying on widespread misogyny, there's something in our particular local culture that allows these outposts of bigotry to remain, when most of the country has avoided it.  I feel pretty confident saying that there's little virulent racism in the area*, but subtler problems are really really widespread.  I had to give up on a local blog's comment section when someone joking-but-not-jokingly proposed banning the word "racist" instead of "fuck" in the discussions.  White people often need a lot of hand-holding when it comes to talking about race, but that's completely ridiculous.

I was awfully disappointed when my clumsy attempt to start a discussion about what more needs to be done was completely and defensively ignored.  Admittedly, it was a little of-topic where I attempted.  An elevator pitch of, "You're racist, do something about it," isn't a big winner.  I started talking about things I've learned in my own struggles with ignorance about race issues, and my personal racism.  No one liked that, especially since I'm a bitchy, arrogant confrontational writer even when being diplomatic.    I tried some hand-holding in passing on lessons I've learned the hard way.*  There's no real legislative solution to the problem, so work needs to be done on a more subtle, social level.    A GTFO campaign is more like it, but easily co-opted and pretty toothless.  Idaho has been "too great for hate" for probably two decades, but the slogan has done little beyond making people feel less racist-by-association.   Apparently some of our best friends are black, but no one wants to look much deeper than that if they're at risk of being called racist in the process.

Racism isn't exactly our fault, but it's a legacy we're obligated to fix, even when it means being embarrassed and feeling guilty.



*The average amount of virulent racism is much higher here than in the rest of the country, but it doesn't take a lot to bring up an average in such a small population.  The corollary should be that it doesn't take much to bring it down either.