Ann Miller: "Too Darn Hot"
Random YouTubery: Thumbs Up for Rock and Roll!
[Video transcript by Liss: A little white boy in a bike helmet is standing outdoors; he is very excited. "I feel, I feel, I feel—" A man (presumably his dad) behind the camera offers: "You feel alive?" The little boy continues: "I feel happy of myself!" Dad says: "I feel happy of yourself, too," then asks: "You got any words of wisdom? What about for all the other kids, trying to learn how to ride their bikes? Can you say anything to them?" The little boy steps up onto the curb as if it's a stage, positions himself, takes a deep breath, and says: "Everybody! I know you can believe in yourself! If you believe in yourself, you will know how to ride a bike! If you don't, you just keep practicing! You will get the hang of it, I know it! If you, if you keep practicing, you will get the hang of it, and then you can get better and better, and then you can do it!" Dad says, "Gimme some thumbs-up." The little boy gives two thumbs-up and shouts: "Thumbs up, everybody! FOR ROCK AND ROLL!" Dad laughs. Fin.]
Number of the Day
15.8%: The real unemployment rate in the US: "The official unemployment rate hit 9.1% in May. Including all of those who had part-time jobs but wanted to work full-time as well as those who want to work but had given up searching, the rate was 15.8%."
DO. SOMETHING.
Jobless claims are up again this week in the US, marking "the ninth consecutive week that claims were above 400,000," despite the constant predictions that unemployment was going to start falling. (Magically! Care of voodoo economics!)
It's a terribly grim landscape, and the only viable solution is government intervention, fast and serious, because whooooooooooooops the market is not solving this problem.
"I'm sitting this one out."—The Invisible Hand.
Problem is that we've got President Bipartisan unwilling to do what it takes (spoiler alert: national infrastructure investment), because the Republicans might whine at him for governing like a sensible person who gives a fuck about his country.
Instead, the Obama administration is considering "seeking a temporary cut in the payroll taxes businesses pay on wages." A fucking payroll tax for corporations. You have got to be shitting me. We're in a national economic crisis, people all over the country are losing their jobs, their healthcare, their homes, their lives, and the best our president has to offer is some tepid, half-assed, pusillanimous gesture, which will starve the government of revenue it could be putting toward a real (and necessary) national reinvestment plan.
Krugman notes that the stupendously useless Tim Geithner has been a major opponent of stimulus, which he dismisses as "sugar," and advocate of austerity to achieve debt reduction. "Not what anyone should be saying in the modern world, least of all a top official in an allegedly progressive Democratic administration," says Krugman.
At this point, I can't imagine there is anyone left with illusions this administration is progressive.
Being a progressive means doing something, just for a start.
Question of the Day
What phrase, word, or situation evokes an entire family tradition or memory for you, or represents something that is an "in-joke" in your family?
Long ago, when my mother was raising four children, working full time as a high school teacher, AND getting her Masters by driving 90 miles each way five nights a week, she devised a way to save her children from my father's lack of cooking skills.
She got a book called "365 Casseroles" and she proceeded to march through the year, preparing and freezing five casseroles from the book on the weekends, and leaving detailed thawing/cooking instructions for my dad.
This went well -- for the most part.
Then, she prepared a casserole called "Chicken on a Cloud". It was some kind of dumpling-y, chicken-y thing.
I honestly don't know what went wrong -- whether the recipe was bad, or the chicken was bad, or she did something wrong, or what.
I only know that my father cooked it as ordered, dished it out onto our plates, and took a bite from his own plate. He looked up at us.
We all had the same expression as he had, our mouths full of "Chicken on a Cloud".
He stood up at the head of the table, silently took our plates one by one, and scraped them back into the casserole dish.
Then, he said to my older sister, in a terse, final tone:
"Marcia, get the weiners."
Oh Dear
Huma Abedin, wife of Rep. Anthony Weiner, is reportedly pregnant.
If indeed all of this did come as a surprise and betrayal to Abedin, I can only imagine how much more difficult it is to make decisions about the future with one's partner while expecting a child together.
I would hope that this news, even if turns out to not be true, would serve as a reminder there are humans at the center of this story and give pause to the people who are treating this entire story like one long dick joke and an excuse to make vicious misogynist attacks on Abedin. But I'm guessing it won't.
UPDATE: [TW for sexual harassment] In other news, conservative ethicist Andrew Breitbart went on the Opie & Anthony show today and showed the [TW] rape-loving shockjocks a photo of Rep. Weiner's naked penis on his cellphone, which has now gone viral on the internet. Weiner knew Breitbart had that photo; Breitbart blackmailed him with it; and then he whooooooops showed it to the world, anyway.
This entire thing has just made me absolutely sick.
Real Science: Men and Women Not Totally Different After All!
by Shaker Moderator and Navy Veteran Aphra_Behn
[Trigger warning for institutionalized sexism; gender essentialism; nonsexual and sexual violence.]
Just when I've learned from awesome evo-psych pseudo-science that Ladybrainz are totally hard-wired for crying and emotion and shit, while Manbrainz are from Mars, and hard-wired for aggression and sex and stuff, NO DOY...
...just then, some Real ScienceTM has to come along and do a university-sponsored, peer-reviewed, carefully controlled academic study that suggests something quite different:
In what is believed to be the first published study on the topic, researchers affiliated with the Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) believe female military service-members from Operation Enduring Freedom OEF)/Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) may be as resilient to combat-related stress as men.... "Contrary to our hypothesis that associations between combat-related stressors and post-deployment mental health would be slightly stronger for women than men, only one of 16 interactions achieved a conventional level of statistical significance and this interaction suggested a stronger negative association for men rather than women," explained lead author Dawne Vogt, PhD, an associate professor of psychiatry at BUSM and researcher at the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in the VA Boston Healthcare System. "This finding is important because it appears to suggest fairly comparable levels of resilience to combat-related stressors for women and men, at least during the timeframe evaluated in this study," she added.This is very significant. Even before this study, VA researchers suggested that the apparent gender difference in rates of PTSD might result from non-combat factors, like previous trauma. But others predictably turned to things like tired old evo-psych to explain that women responded to combat differently because evolution!
For example, male rats are more prone to develop memory impairments in response to stressors...In addition, women have been shown to ruminate over nontraumatic negative events more than men, who tend to use more distraction-based coping techniques. While these behaviors may pose evolutionary advantages for each sex, they also may contribute to the increased incidence of PTSD in women.(Disclaimer: I am not a behavioral scientist, but I do know that (a) humans aren't rats and (b) instead of saying that military women "ruminate" too much over "negative" events, we might consider that they experience negative events like rape and sexual assault at a higher rate than do military men. Just sayin'.)
It's been 110 years since the founding of the US Army Nurse Corps, and military women say with depressing frequency that they still get told "women don't belong here" and that they are "taking men's jobs." There's a Facebook group (sorry, not linking) named "Women Don't Belong in the Military." There's a tremendous amount of cultural energy in the U.S. and elsewhere devoted to conflating military service with essentialist masculinity, and that has shifted depressingly little over the 20th and 21st centuries.
But the military is an outcomes-based organization, and sometimes, just sometimes, enough evidence piles up to promote change. The argument against women's participation in ground combat has already been rendered ridiculous by the actual performance of women in combat situations. Military commanders routinely subvert the prohibition on ground combat, because, quite bluntly, they need women to do the job. When your patrol goes through a rural Afghan village, American women have a much better chance of talking to Afghan women than American men do. As for why this matters: Women on the frontlines still don't serve officially in combat units and that limits their careers and promotions.
Another harmful result of the old attitude that only cis men are fit for military service is that it stigmatizes men with PTSD, specifically by feminizing them. U.S. culture already has problems admitting that men need to tend to their psychological health; in the U.S. military there is even further stigma. To be blunt, a man with PTSD is "like a woman." This study helps remove some of the stigmatizing associations between feminized "weakness" and PTSD, and that's a win for both men and women who need treatment.
Real ScienceTM! It's pretty darn useful.
Daily Dose of Cute
Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk / I'm a kitty cat—no time to talk.
Purring loud and snuggling warm / I've been looking cute since I was born.
And now it's all right; it's okay / And you may look the other way
While I knead my little paws / To the confusion of big dogs!
Whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother / You're stayin' alive, stayin' alive.
Feel the catnip breakin' and ev'rybody shakin' / And we're stayin' alive, stayin' alive.
AH! AH! AH! AH! Stayin' alive! Stayin' alive! / AH! AH! AH! AH! Stayin' alive! Stayin' alive!
Purrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…
RIP Fairness Doctine
Really, the Fairness Doctrine has been dead since Reagan took a giant suffocating crap on it back in the 80s, so it's probably more accurate to say RIP All Hope of the Reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine:
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski said his agency will remove the Fairness Doctrine from the rule books in response to a recent request from House Republicans.It was perhaps not until the Citizens United decision that a ruling had more devastating consequences for the health of the US democracy than the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine.
"I fully support deleting the Fairness Doctrine and related provisions from the Code of Federal Regulations, so that there can be no mistake that what has been a dead letter is truly dead," Genachowski wrote in a letter Monday to House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.).
Now, where the Fairness Doctrine used to be, there's just a giant hole in the shape of Rupert Murdoch.
I Get More Letters
[Trigger warning for rape culture.]
Hey, remember this guy, my charming correspondent who had been banned or engaging in rape apologia and acknowledged having read in the commenting policy that people banned for violating that very policy are not welcome to bring their grievances about being banned to my inbox...? And remember how I pointedly explained that ignoring someone's clearly delineated boundaries is not just rude, but hostile to the notion of consent, and thus finds itself on a continuum at the other end of which is sexual violence...?
Well, I don't guess I need to tell you what colossal dipfuck has just sent me yet another email, the subject header of which is—I shit you not—"Sorry for invading your boundaries," that is, in fact, not (surprise!) an apology for disrespecting my boundaries, but is, instead, (spoiler warning!) a massive textwall manspalining to me how he TOTES IS NOT a rape apologist, even though he doesn't think it's victim-blaming to tell women not to drink so much if they don't want to get be raped, insisting that "rape apologist" is a slur (lulz), telling me that I'm being "hurtful," asking me to forward to him a copy of his original email (because he didn't bother to keep one, so now I'm his personal secretary), auditing my boundaries by telling me he can't figure out what my "publicly published Contact link [is] supposed to function as," if not a resource to whinge at me, and then concludes with this gem:
Apologies if you believe this e-mail also crosses any boundaries. If you do not wish to receive any more correspondence, please tell me (although I would appreciate my original e-mail if that is alright with you).No. None of this is all right with me. That's why part of my published comment policy, in big bold letters, is: Being banned from Shakesville is not an invitation to take your issues to the email inbox of Liss and/or any of the other contributors or mods. And fauxpologizing for disrespecting clearly-delineated boundaries is worth a squirtload of good to the person whose boundaries you must disrespect to deliver it.
Of course, my correspondent has audited my boundaries and determined them to be bullshit, which is why he is still emailing me to try to convince me how much not an apologist for a rape culture the cornerstone of which is a disrespect of boundaries he is.
Lest there be any confusion: I am not writing about this because I am scared or hurt or offended. (As the masthead says, I'm just contemptuous.) I am writing about this because, when I write about things like this ongoing exchange, there are men (and women), more interested in living a life truly respectful of consent than my correspondent, who email me to say they have learned something about how better to respect other people's boundaries in everyday ways, and there are women (and men) who email me to say they have learned something about defining and defending their own boundaries, and their right to do so.
I also write about it because sometimes people think the moderators here take too hard a line on rape apologia, that we don't give enough leeway. Well. This is where leeway lees to.
And I write about it because I write about the rape culture, and the rape culture starts with every person who says, "I know you said not to, but I'm going to do it anyway."
You can't claim to be anti-rape, unless you're pro-consent.
Culture of Control, Cruelty & Jackassery
[Trigger warning for misogyny; rape culture.]
Last Friday Kate posted about the current anti-abortion effort in Louisiana, noting that it is out to ban abortion all together. The LA House was supposed to vote on it yesterday but the main sponsor, Rep LaBruzzo, asked for it to be held off because of concern it would affect the state's Medicaid funding. It is scheduled for floor debate today (nearly all the way down the page, under #5).
I'd like to highlight some of the things said by the people behind this legislation. The main sponsor is Rep. John LaBruzzo and he's very upfront about his goals:
The bill by Republican state Rep. John LaBruzzo defines human life as beginning at the moment of conception and makes it a crime to terminate a pregnancy except when the birth would endanger the mother's life.This new legislation removes exceptions that had existed regarding cases of rape and incest. It only allows an exception for the health of the woman. Which, while not reasonable, doesn't sound as horrifying as it could be without the medical exception...right? Well:
"Our first intent is to save unborn babies' lives," LaBruzzo told Reuters. "Our second intent is to have an opportunity to mount a challenge that makes it to the Supreme Court."
Last week, a Senate committee passed state Rep. Frank Hoffman’s (R) bill that would further imperil woman’s access to health care by allowing anti-choice health care providers to summarily reject providing any kind of abortion service even if the woman’s health is at stake. In 2009, Louisiana passed a law allowing any health care provider to refuse abortion-related services if it “violates his conscience to the extent that patient access to health care is not compromised.” Hoffman’s bill would eliminate “the qualifier that a medical professional’s decision cannot threaten patient’s right to care.”Which makes the medical exception pretty much useless.
In debating the bill during a hearing, LaBurzzo was questioned regarding the efficacy of banning abortion in reducing abortion rates. Labruzzo responded:
It’s not our stance here to say, “Just because people smoke pot and break the law, or people use heroin and break the law, that then we should legalize it.” There are many who say we should. But we don’t agree; we don’t think so. We think it’s wrong and it’s best to keep it illegal … and that’s where I am with this bill. If we believe this is wrong, this is the ultimate question you are going to have to ask yourself. It doesn’t matter if you’ve voted for every pro-life bill that’s come to this committee. This is the pro-life bill. This is the pro-life bill. And I think you’d be in a difficult situation if you voted against this bill and tried to convince everybody that you are ardently pro-life. And I would not want to be in that situation.Women who need or want medical procedure = just like heroin addicts. Gotcha. In this same hearing, Personhood USA (remember them?) had a lawyer who also testified saying:
During the hearing, Keissling [Rebecca] said that abortion “protects the perpetrator,” and that if rape or incest victims have their baby, the rape will likely stop on its own: “We know with incest, it is the perpetrator who is protected by the abortion. Not only does the rape typically end after she gives birth, but also for all the other young women in the household who are being raped.”I cannot believe someone is testifying at a congressional hearing that a rapist is protected by abortion. WHAT. That a person who is a victim of incest should "keep the baby" to protect anyone else in the home who may be raped? WHAT. No. No. NO. How about "we" convict the fucking rapist and not force his victim to carry a pregnancy as a way to protect others in the house? Then there's everything else she said. Just...what. I don't even. The depths of cruelty are astonishing.
According to Keissling, “all the major research on abortion” shows that, after an abortion, women are ”four times more likely to die within the next year. They have a higher murder rate, higher rate of suicide, drug overdose, domestic violence, divorce, abuse throughout their lives, depression and on and on. … So if you really care about a rape victim, you would want to protect her from an abortion and not the baby. A baby is not the worst thing that could ever happen to a rape victim. An abortion is.”
Speaking of illogical bullshit, let's go back to LaBruzzo who said, when questioned about how declaring a fertilized egg to have full person rights may affect contraception use/ability since some forms of contraception can prevent implantation:
This is not about interfering with anyone's ability to receive or participate in birth control," he told Reuters. "What the bill says is that life begins at conception, and a baby who is pre-born should enjoy all the rights that a 1-day-old baby does."*headdesk*
This person, this person who said THAT, is trying to pass legislation he wrote to control the autonomy of women in Louisiana--and all over the country. And he's far from alone.
Cruel and Usual
[Trigger warning for transphobia, self-harm, and prisoner abuse]
I've been spending a good deal of time thinking about the intersection of trans*ness, gender, class, race, and healthcare lately. It's an occupational requirement, I suppose.
Anyhow, I came across [TW] this story about a woman incarcerated in a Virginia men's correctional facility who is suing the state over her right to sexual reassignment surgery (or whatever one chooses to call it). All I can say is that I was utterly unsurprised. Hey look, it's Tuesday!
That's pretty much the most damning indictment of this country's treatment of trans* people that I can think of.
So:
1) A trans* woman of color does not have access to adequate healthcare.
2) At a very young age she begins stealing, in hopes of securing healthcare.
3) She is subsequently arrested, and locked up in a men's prison for a long, long time.
4) She is not allowed to grow her hair out.
5) She is not allowed to have SRS/GRS.
And we have:
Republican Virginia Del. Todd Gilbert says he would seek state legislation if De'lonta's lawsuit is successful.No. You sir, are ridiculous.
"The notion that taxpayers are going to fund a sex change is just ridiculous," says Gilbert.
...and
Harold Clarke, who became Virginia's corrections director last year, says it would be a security risk to allow the surgeries because Virginia's inmates are housed according to their gender at birth, not anatomy.Oh! If only there were a solution to this dilemma. (I have a solution to this dilemma.)
The article itself is pretty sorry. I definitely award bonus points for framing Ms. De'lonta's cutting as central to the issue. If there's one thing I've seen over and over and over again, it's people (trans and cis alike) framing self-harm as a central reason why trans* people should have access to medical care. False. Our shared humanity is reason enough.
Via
[Commenting Note: Comments will not be open on this post. Given the principles of this space, the story should be considered self-evidently awful, and given the nature of transphobic trolls, we're disinclined to open up this particular story to their bullshit commentary. On rare occasions, we share something because of its newsworthiness that we do not feel needs public comment.]
Wednesday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, proud distributors of Lissie's Spatulars.
Recommended Reading:
I had the very interesting and intense experience of reading these two pieces back-to-back this morning [TW for discussion of sexual violence]: karnythia's "Don't Be a Rapist: Of Survivor Parenting & Young Males" and SuperMommy's "It Wasn't My Fault."
Shark-fu: [TW for violence] A Community in Sorrow…Standing for Peace
Tami: A Conversation with New Black Woman about Who Gets the Blame for Sabotaging the Image of Black Women on TV
Amber: Something Interesting Happened at the 2011 MTV Movie Awards
Resistance: [TW for racism and misogyny] These People Are Educators
Andy: Ann Coulter Won't Say How She Would Feel if Her Child Was Gay
Melissa: Hillary Clinton Supports Women's Sports as the US Women Prepare for the World Cup [If anyone locates a transcript for the video at the link, please drop a note in comments.]
Leave your links and recommendations in comments...
Quote of the Day
"I was born with [a thick New York accent], frankly. And then I went to school to get rid of it. And then I've been hired to do it again about 400 times, so it's kind of funny."—Edie Falco, stage and screen actress best known as Carmela Soprano and Nurse Jackie.
Hee.
My love for this observation may or may not have something to do with the fact that I thought the word "spatula" ended in an R until I was about ten years old.
Why Santorum is a Comprehensive Dipshit
[Trigger warning for torture]
While I may not be a fan of John McCain, I dare say his first-hand knowledge of torture would make him more of an authority on the subject than other members in Congress, certainly more than any GOP presidential contenders.
Still, that doesn't stop the hopeless wonder that is Santorum from coming up with this award winning disagreement with McCain on how torture enhanced interrogation works:
"He doesn't understand how enhanced interrogation works," the former Pennsylvania senator told Hewitt. "I mean, you break somebody, and after they're broken, they become cooperative. And that's when we got this information. And one thing led to another, and led to another, and that's how we ended up with bin Laden."FAIL.
Let's set aside for a moment Santorum's ponderous logic that someone who has experienced torture doesn't understand how it works. We can break this one down rather simply.
If, for example, you are repeatedly forcing someone to experience the sensation of drowning until they produce information, that person will tell you anything to make you stop, which could very well include false information that the person being tortured believes to be true.
Which, totally aside from the many, many ethical problems with torturing people, is just one of many reasons why torture doesn't work.
However, in Santorum's infantile mind, it always works just like it does in TV and the movies.
[H/T to ThinkProgress]
An Unrested-Upon Laurel Gathers No Moss
Weren't you just thinking it was time for Professor James Franco to release an album? Yeah, me too.
Franco and his creative partner, drag performance artist Kalup Linzy.
Kalup and Franco is the duo of Kalup Linzy, a video/performance artist who frequently performs in drag, and James Franco, an Oscar-nominated movie star (127 Hours, Spider-Man) who has quickly become one of Hollywood's biggest weirdos. The partnership formed after Franco invited Linzy to perform on "General Hospital" during Franco's stint on the soap opera, and they've since become a performance duo and a musical act. On July 12, they'll release their debut EP Turn It Up on Dutty Artz, the label co-founded by the globe-trotting, genre-mashing theorist DJ /rupture.Please let one of the surprise guests be Rip Taylor. Please let one of the surprise guests be Rip Taylor. Please let one of the surprise guests be Rip Taylor...
The EP will be available as a digital download and as a limited-edition 7". It features two songs, "Rising (Both Sides Now)" and "Turn It Up (So We Can Turn It Out)", co-produced by DJ /rupture and his Nettle bandmate Brent Arnold, and "Rising" also features production from /rupture's Dutty Artz partner Matt Shadetek. Linzy produced a third track, "Fly Away". The duo intends to make music videos for each of those three songs, which will feature "surprise guest cameos."
Know why any super-awesome megastar (like Rip Taylor) would agree to make a surprise guest cameo in one of Kalup and Franco's videos? Because James Franco, no doy.
Blog Note
It's not you: Comments are now taking around a half hour to post to the blog. Unfortunately, it's nothing that we can control, and hopefully Disqus will resolve it soon.
My sincerest apologies for the inconvenience.
UPDATE: Seems to be working again now. (Thanks, Disqus team!) If you're still having problems, fire me a(nother) email.
Atlas Shrugged Part 2!
It's live, folks! I'm talking about the Atlas Shrugged Part II website. Okay, so there's not much there yet except for a too-pixilated slideshow (stills from the first film?) and the text "in theaters fall 2012."
But hey, it shows a real commitment by the producers to plunk down $4.99 at godaddy and get the ball rolling. Or the train rolling. Or something. Not sure what the best Randian metaphor is. Wevs.
No word on a DVD release yet. As soon as I know, you'll know. Because I know you want to know as much as I know. You know? I'll be at Redbox the moment it arrives. And no, I will not park in the fire zone. You shouldn't either!
I suspect the producers are waiting on the theatrical run to wind down. It's still playing in seventeen theaters. Seventeen! Huh? Okay.
Oddly, it is running in Austin, which I had thought, you know, according to legend, was some weird lefty outpost in the red and dusty state of Texas. Maybe not. It's also in "Cape Girandeau" (sic), Missouri, birthplace of Rush Limbaugh. Go, Missouri!
Also, the Ayn Rand vs. Jesus debate is heating up. Check your local listings. I hope George Stephanopoulos hosts. "Why don't you wear a flag pin?" I'd wear a flag pin if it were made of Reardon Metal™. (Take that, Lacoste shirt!)
p.s. Link.
