…to The Green Knight and The Dark Wraith!!! (Sorry I’m a little late, guys.)
Both of them have been great friends to me, along with just being two of my favorite bloggers. Both of them have unique voices in the blogosphere—The Knight speaks eloquently as a religious liberal, and The Wraith makes economics issues understandable and appreciable for those of us who maybe never had more than a high school econ class. If you missed their first year, don’t miss their second. Congratulations, guys!
Happy Blogiversary…
Question of the Day
Got any cool scars? (Sure you do! Everyone does!) How did you get them?
My coolest scar runs down the base of my spine, from a back surgery I had years ago. Now, the same surgery is done through a keyhole, so I'm lucky I got it when I did, or I'd never have my awesome scar. I also have a good one on my left wrist, from a psychotic cat we had when I was a kid (who was later done in by car he met while chasing a massive German Shepard across the street - a guard dog who was constantly terrorized by this nasty cat).
I've got other assorted scars here and there, but none others as impressive as the two mentioned, for which I consider myself lucky, but only because it means no serious health problems. I happen to find scars, even nasty ones, quite beautiful and interesting, and love to hear the stories behind them.
Shrinking Violet
Via Broadsheet, I see that Katha Pollitt has responded to the recent column in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on women in the op-ed pages, in which its author, Connie Schultz, asked, “What does it take to get a woman to speak her mind?” Pollitt retorted, in part:
Women now make up half of all med students (Blood! Gore! every day you could kill someone with a tiny mistake!), half of all law students (arguments! crazy clients! people being really mean to you all day long!). Women are increasing their numbers in virtually every male-dominated profession from engineering to politics -- except opinion journalism. For this, and this only, women are just too shy and nice. I don't believe it.I don’t believe it, either. And I don’t know who the hell these women are, those so supposedly reluctant to speak their minds. Frankly, I can’t quite fathom what it would take to get me to stop speaking my mind, short of hog-tying me. And even then, I’d still be grousing about it. “This is total bullshit, you totalitarian fuckwits!” If that brought on a duct tape muzzle, I’d resort to hand gestures, and if my fingers were chopped off, I’d be giving the stink-eye. There’s just no stopping the ’tude when I’m determined to deliver.
As Mr. Furious says, he can tell when I'm pissed just by looking at my hair.
Heady Stuff
Well, my head exploded.
No, it didn’t. Not yet, anyway. I just sat around the hospital with my mom, talking about how funny Larry David is and recounting some of my favorite episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, because she doesn’t have HBO. (I can now add Larry David to my Lexicon of Impersonations That Make My Mom Laugh Hysterically, bringing the grand total to two—Dick Cheney being the other one.) My mom told me how she blew her Bible study group’s collective mind by pointing out the etymology of “holiday” is “holy day.” Then I got blood drawn, peed in a cup, and had an EKG. Then we had some lunch in the hospital cafeteria, and I had some mystery meat that was mysteriously delicious. Quite a day!
(For info on how the special effect pictured was done, see here.)
Brace yourself... you might want to sit down for this
Take a deep breath...
Michelle Malkin is stretching the truth to support her unhinged opinions.
I know, I know... you didn't see it coming.
She's squawking on and on that the majority of deaths due to hurricane Katrina were "not African-American." As is usually the case with Malkin, this isn't exactly the truth. (No link to Malkin... I refuse. There's one from this link if you really want to experience the slime.)
Newsmax is claiming and Michelle Malkin is making a big deal that the majority of deaths in Katrina were not African American. They base this upon preliminary identifications of victims at the St Gabriel Morgue. And that is a problem. Of a total of 883 at St. Gabriels, demographics for 562 was given. The race was determined for only 514. At this point 48% were African American, 41% Caucasion. However 321 more bodies have yet to be included and the the race of 48 bodies of the 562 was stated as unknown. To make any pronouncements based upon 58% of the victims at this point is just wrong.(Scout Prime has more at the link.)
In a previous post I wrote "After going through the list of the 338 identified victims I determined that 76% were 60 years of age or older."
But note I also said this...
"As the demographic breakdown below is only for about 1/3 of the dead it seems pre-mature to draw anything from the stats. It remains to be seen if any of this will stand after all bodies are recovered and processed."
I would certainly not have concluded the victims of Katrina were 76% elderly based on ~33% nor even 58%. And it is wrong to draw any definitive conclusions on racial demographics for only 58% of the victims. It is just statistically dishonest.
Again, she blames the "Bush-bashing, tinfoil-wrapped demagoguery," (I'm amazed she didn't include "Unhinged moonbats") as is her usual technique, but this doesn't change the fact that she's playing fast and loose with statistics. As much as Malkin loves to call the left "Unhinged" and full of hate, she's been getting really blatant with her racism these days. I think it's very telling that she's expending so much energy to make the deaths of hundreds of African-Americans seem statistically insignificant and unimportant.
I think we all saw who had it the worst during that tragedy, Michelle.
And guess what? She's still a coward. Hey Michelle... when are you going to stop letting other people do your work for you and respond to your critics?
(Tip 'o the energy dome to Dependable Renegade. I'm cuckoo for cross-posts!)
Morning
Hi, Shakers. The light-headedness I've been experiencing has turned into random bouts of numbness in my face, so my doctor has ordered me to the hospital for a day full of fun tests to see if they can figure out what the heck is up with my head. If you don't hear from me again soon, check the Discovery Health Channel's "Mystery Diagnosis," and see if I pop up there.
Also, if my head explodes, implodes, or falls off, please make sure the world knows it was Bush that did it.
Rachel Maddow Promoted
Some great news about Air America Radio's 2006 line up. Rachel Maddow's show will move from 5-6am to 7-9am. Maddow fans can hear her hosting Al Franken's show this week from noon to 3pm (all times eastern). You can stream it here.
I'm a huge Maddow fan, and I have to say that as a lesbian political blogger, Maddow has become something of a role model for me. Check her out on Franken this week if you're unfamiliar, and download iTunes (free) to podcast (free) her show on your computer at work.
It's what I do.
(x-post)
manliness is ripping up 'O' magazine
It's time for the Women of Wingnutia to rejoice! Now they can start objectifying men. Not just any men. Manly men. We learn from the Focus on the Family website, Family.org, that a pastor in MA has decided to fight that sinister homo agenda by holding a Mr. Straight contest:
The homosexual community has flooding the marketplace with products and opportunities exclusively for gays and lesbians. Now a talk show host in Massachusetts is turning the tables. Tom Crouse, pastor of Holland Congregational Church and host of the radio program “Engaging Your World” is launching a “contest” to name the most heterosexual guy in Massachusetts.
“We’re just looking for tolerance for heterosexuals.”
Can someone please tell me where there is no tolerance in society for hetero people? Please leave examples of crimes against them because of their sexuality and laws passed against them. Thanks. What's that? You've got nothing? Shocking.
So, what goes on in the Manly of Manliness contest? Why, Oprah and duct tape:
The contest will feature such manly events as how many Oprah magazines you can tear at once and a sixty second dissertation on the uses of duct tape.
Other events listed are "Name That Food" and in the "Intellectual" category is: "answering random questions such as your favorite heterosexual role model". Now that is mental calisthenics for you!
They're also going to have "somebody who formerly lived the homosexual lifestyle give a testimony of how they’ve been transformed by Jesus Christ" in the middle of the event.
Mr. Hetero will be coming to a town near (some of) you, as events are planned for Albany (NY) and Louisville (KY).
(hat tip Pam; cross-posted at expostulation)
Jingle Bells, Batman Smells...
...Robin laid an egg...
Eew.
I've posted three more songs in my little holiday music bonanza. Head on over to spudville if you're interested in downloading them. The other songs are here and here.
If you need a little perspective on the "War on Christmas," you can head on over to this website and get a chuckle while you sip yer eggnog.
Out Sick
I'm feeling way crappy today - I've had terrible light-headedness for days, and I'm running a fever, so I'm taking the day off.
Please feel free to use this as a blogwhoring thread, and there may be some guests stopping by today with some good stuff.
Snark is Impossible
...when you're reading stories like this one. (Bolds mine)
Family Upset Over Soldier's Body Arriving As Freight- Bodies Sent To Families On Commercial Airliners
Seriously. And you thought hand-stamping condolence letters to families was bad.
SAN DIEGO -- There's controversy over how the military is transporting the bodies of service members killed overseas, 10News reported.
A local family said fallen soldiers and Marines deserve better and that one would think our war heroes are being transported with dignity, care and respect. It said one would think upon arrival in their hometowns they are greeted with honor. But unfortunately, the family said that is just not the case.
Dead heroes are supposed to come home with their coffins draped with the American flag -- greeted by a color guard.
But in reality, many are arriving as freight on commercial airliners -- stuffed in the belly of a plane with suitcases and other cargo.
Holy hopping Jesus Christ.
I took two flights this weekend. I wonder if there were any bodies of soldiers in the cargo hold?
Jesus Christ.
The bodies of dead service members arrive at Dover Air Force Base.
From that point, they are sent to their families on commercial airliners.
Reporters from 10News called the Defense Department for an explanation. A representative said she did not know why this is happening.
They don't know.
Right.
Right.
This is how they support the troops?
Oh Jesus. This is just... there are no words.
(Energy Dome tip to Yellow Dog Blog, who has a thing or two to say.)
Question of the Day, or Tell Me a Story
I’ve stolen this from the Dharma Bums (who, in turn, stole it from Yllstonewolf), and I had such fun answering it at the DBs’ place that I wanted to do it here, too. What is your favorite memory of a time you spent with Shakespeare’s Sister? Or Mr. Shakes, or Paul the Spud, or Tart, or D., or Mr. Furious, or any combination thereof? It can be anything you want, good or bad, clean or dirty, held by the properties of the space-time continuum or not, but it has to be utterly fabricated.
In other words, make up a memory.
I’m Mad at You Just Because I Know Who You Are
Every once in awhile, I get completely annoyed by the fact that there are things in my head which have managed to seep in, in spite of my unwillingness for them to be there. Sometimes they’re useless bits of trivia, like the name of a z-list celebrity’s dog, sometimes they’re words to irritating advert jingles, and sometimes—the worst!—it’s just knowing who someone is, and every time I see a picture of them, I get angry at that person for existing in my sphere of consciousness.
So I’m starting a new feature, called “I’m Mad at You Just Because I Know Who You Are,” and will, from time to time, post pictures of the famous or infamous who drive me insane just because I know who they are for no earthly reason.
To christen this feature, I give you Carrot Top.
Sometimes I take time out of my busy schedule
of being an unfunny prop comic and pseudo-drag queen
to train to be the next governor of California.
Anti-Choicers: Not So Fast
A Norwegian study has found that women who have abortions can suffer “mental distress” longer than women who miscarry.
A study in Norway compared a group of 40 women who suffered a miscarriage with 80 who chose to have an abortion, questioning them ten days, six months, two years and five years after the event.Great, I thought. Just what we need. Of course, I’m an anthropologist both by training and by nature, and so I had a few questions about this study. So I took a look at it and noticed a couple of things that might be of interest. For a start, the researchers set out with a hypothesis that women who abort will experience more mental distress than women who miscarry:
The team found that women who had a miscarriage suffered more mental distress up to six months after losing their babies compared with those who had an abortion. But women who had an abortion experienced more mental distress long afterwards compared with the miscarriage group.
[…]
Pro-life campaigners said the research confirmed the emotional consequences of having an abortion could be massive.
The process of deciding to have an abortion can be difficult, and the reason for electing to have an abortion can affect the psychological responses after the event. Thus, the social, moral and psychological context of an induced abortion may be more complicated than that of a miscarriage, and may result in different psychological responses. We hypothesized that women who undergo an induced abortion will have a more protracted course of mental disturbance than women who experience a miscarriage. (p6)I don’t have a problem with the hypothesis in and of itself, but I do have a big stinking problem with the fact that, even after noting abortion can have a more complicated context than a miscarriage, the study itself seems to have made no attempt whatsoever to control for the contributions of external pressures as a control for any distress experiences by its participants, particularly as they did control for other “possible confounders,” including marital status, number of children, vocational activity, and former psychiatric health. And in fact, when scores for the mental health outcomes of the two groups were compared with those of the controls, “differences in IES avoidance [at the first two benchmarks] were no longer statistically significant.” So, couldn’t it be that the scores for women who had abortions and “had significantly more guilt [at the last three benchmarks], and more shame at all interviews” would no longer be “statistically significant” if external factors—such as religiosity, family influence, societal pressure, etc.—were taken into consideration? Unfortunately, we don’t know, because the authors of the study didn’t bother to find out.
The preexisting mental health of the study’s participants before the abortion or miscarriage is another issue that runs throughout the study.
[T]he mental health of aborting women was poorer (almost statistically significantly) than that of miscarrying women prior to the pregnancy termination event. Therefore, we cannot infer that induced abortion caused the elevated anxiety of the induced abortion group relative to that of the miscarriage group. (p18)So the mental health of the participating women who sought an abortion was almost statistically significantly poorer than the participating women who had a miscarriage, and the complexity of the abortion issue may account for discrepancies. That’s the problem with poor controls; you can end up with a study that has a completely meaningless conclusion. And yet here it goes—out into the world, reported as fact. Women who get abortions are more highly traumatized than women who have miscarriages. Even though it may be the women who got abortions and participated in the study were more inclined toward mental distress irrespective of their abortions, or that societal views of abortion—and specifically, women who get abortions—may facilitate feelings of shame and guilt.
Other mental health outcomes, such as depression, trauma responses, quality of life and feelings, may likewise be poorer for women in the induced abortion group because of their mental health status before the abortion. (p19)
The responses of women in the miscarriage group were similar to those expected after a traumatic and sad life event. However, the women in the induced abortion group had more atypical responses. This may be because the mental health of the aborting women was somewhat poorer than that of the miscarrying women before the pregnancy termination event. The more complex nature of the induced abortion event may also account for differences in the course of psychological responses between the two groups.(p22-23)
An explanation for the unusual and divergent courses of the IES scores in the induced abortion group is not obvious, but may result from the characteristics of the abortion event. (p19)It sure may. Maybe something worth finding out before the study is published, though.
The elevated scores for guilt, shame and IES avoidance for women who had had an induced abortion may require more attention. … It is possible that feelings of guilt and shame associated with the induced abortion contribute to a slower improvement in mental health. (p20-21)Yep, that’s possible. Or it’s possible that preexisting mental distress unrelated to the abortion could be to blame. Or that the underlying causes of the guilt and shame might not be the actual abortion, and therefore aren’t ameliorated by the passage of time. Lots of things are possible.
Also missing from the reporting on this study is the fact that, along with grief, loss, guilt, shame, and anger, researchers also tracked relief.
Women who had had an induced abortion had significantly more relief at all interviews than women who had had a miscarriage. (p16)We certainly wouldn’t want to broadcast the relief women feel at having aborted an wanted pregnancy. It might undermine the message that they ought to be suffering from guilt and shame.
The authors conclude that “Women in both groups should be given information about common psychological responses to pregnancy termination,” but without any depth of understanding of the driving forces behind those psychological responses, I’m curious as to what, exactly, they believe that information should be.
Casualties of War
Bush gave a speech this morning to the World Affairs Council, and in a Q&A afterward, answered a question about Iraqi casualties with:
"I would say 30,000 more or less have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis," the president said.Immediately, the machine spun into action:
White House counselor Dan Bartlett said later that Bush's estimate of the number of Iraqis killed was not an official figure but that the president was simply repeating public estimates reported in the media.Mind you, “30,000 more or less” is what Iraq Body Count estimates, based on news reports, but it’s kind of stunning to hear the president say it, since the administration has been so loathe to discuss it and has, in the past, basically said it was impossible to know.
Bubble Boy
There’s a lot not to like about Newsweek’s latest cover story, “Bush in the Bubble,” not the least of which is its timing—three years too late, at least. But it does give further credence to the assumptions many hold about the president.
Stubborn:
The chance that George W. Bush will give a top White House job to an establishment moderate (say, Brent Scowcroft, his father's national-security adviser) is about the same as that Texas will become a province of France.Disengaged:
What Bush actually hears and takes in, however, is not clear. And whether his advisers are quite as frank as they claim to be with the president is also questionable. Take Social Security, for example. One House Republican, who asked not to be identified for fear of offending the White House, recalls a summertime meeting with congressmen in the Roosevelt Room at which Bush enthusiastically talked up his Social Security reform plan. But the plan was already dead—as everyone except the president had acknowledged. Bush seemed to have no idea. "I got the sense that his staff was not telling him the bad news," says the lawmaker. "This was not a case of him thinking positive. He just didn't have any idea of the political realities there. It was like he wasn't briefed at all." (Bush was not clueless, says an aide, but pushing his historic mission.)Unstable:
His close friends agree that Bush likes comfort and serenity; he does not like dissonance. He has long been mothered by strong women, including his mother and wife. A foreign diplomat who declined to be identified was startled when Secretary of State Rice warned him not to lay bad news on the president. "Don't upset him," she said.Additional evidence of his infamous incuriosity, manipulativeness, self-isolation, and the remainder of the lexicon of unflattering traits associated with Bush is on full display as well. This guy is totally out to lunch.
I’m hard-pressed to think of a job that necessitates constant connectivity to a variety of opinions and sources as much as leading a country would, if the leader had even a passing interest in doing the job well, and yet Bush’s little bubble seems to become ever more restrictive, even as its dire consequences are increasingly obvious. He appears patently incapable of acknowledging that his hermetic existence is not the solution to many of his administration’s problems, but the cause. Someone get this guy some oxygen, because he’ll suffocate from his own stupidity and stubbornness before he crawls out of this box. One a bubble boy, always a bubble boy, I guess.
Nice
This is a picture of a billboard spotted alongside an Atlanta highway, via Mike the Mad Biologist. Annoying enough is its deliberate misconstruing of Murtha’s position. Further annoying is the insistence on ignoring the reality about withdrawal advocates, recently well-noted by Ezra:
Withdrawal advocates believe that Iraqis, who overwhelmingly want us to leave, can build a better democracy and a stronger country without our presence. As the argument goes, by exiting, the sections of the insurgency that our Jihadist in nature will calm, leaving only separatists who'll be attacking their countrymen without the excuse of a foreign enemy. …[T]o tar withdrawal advocates as somehow anti-democracy -- particularly when every poll and every survey shows 80% of Iraqis would vote for us to leave -- is truly reprehensible.Tarring them as “cut-and-runners” or cowards is just as bad, and, really, no different at all, since "staying the course" has been inextricably linked with patriotism.
Perhaps the most annoying thing about the billboard however is that, per Mike, “Apparently, a Republican Georgian state senator is co-owner of a billboard company and has decided to put this up”—after Ohio congresswoman Jean Schmidt had to apologize for saying the same shit on the House floor. Seriously, GOP, get a grip.
Domo Arigato, Ryōri no Tetsujin
| You Are Japanese Food |
 Strange yet delicious. Contrary to popular belief, you're not always eaten raw. |
Via Rana, who is also Japanese Food, of course.
Stern on O’Reilly
So apparently, Bill O’Reilly is doing some three-part interview with Howard Stern, probably because O’Reilly is hoping some of Stern’s ratings rub off on him—and maybe a little of his ability to have fun, too. Or perhaps he was just hoping Stern could introduce him to someone who was into falafels. I dunno. Anyway, Media Matters has a partial transcript from part two, which is just hilarious. Aside from definitively proving O’Reilly is even more obsessed with lesbians than Stern, it also excerpts Stern telling O’Reilly his merchandise “looks like you emptied out a junkyard and slapped your name on everything,” asking “who's walking around with a Bill O'Reilly briefcase,” and telling O’Reilly he won’t wear the Factor jacket O’Reilly offered him, but will “give it to a crack whore.” Good lord, lol.
