Thanks to Lauren McLaughlin for pointing this out:

Starbucks has capitulated to Christian fundamentalists who protested Starbucks putting a quote from Armistead Maupin on its cups. So now Starbucks cups have an expressly Xian message: ?You were made by God and for God, and until you understand that, life will never make sense.?

Boycott those cowards! Show ?em what we want on our cups! ? er ?

If you?re mourning the relative failure of Serenity and the fact that, barring some miracle, there won?t be any more Firefly adventures, there?s one bright spot in the ?Verse. Apparently Pocket Books are gearing up to release at least two original novels set in that universe, and a dozen authors have submitted proposals, including Keith R.A. DeCandido, who novelized the movie and is one of the best writers of media tie-ins. (That?s not faint praise, incidentally. Good media tie-ins are hard to write, and when they?re done well, they can be downright literary.)

Well-known speculative fiction author Steven Brust has apparently written an entire Firefly novel on spec for Pocket Books. This strikes me as somewhat insane, because if Pocket rejects the thing, what is he going to do with it? I always assumed with media tie-ins that you would just submit a writing sample and an outline, which would probably be subject to change.

But it sounds like a pretty great read, and hopefully we?ll get to see it one way or the other.

It just shows how much love people have for that show/movie (even though I understand from Claire?s complaints about the lack of Asian characters to go with the trappings). And it shows that the line between fanfic and ?official? products is getting blurrier all the time. Especially with things like Doctor Who, which is now being made by avowed fans.

How cool is this? The seeks to use public pressure to get more actors of color cast in major roles in Hollywood. More specifically, you send postcards to major directors asking them ?to cast minority actors as the main protagonists and Euro-Americans (whites) as main antagonists for two years.? Pipe dream? Sure, but a nice one.

Which brings us back to the controversy that seems to have died down now over at Hyphen magazine?s staff blog, where I posted a complaint about Joss Whedon using Chinese language to indicate Chinese cultural/economic dominance in his future world in Serenity, without using any Chinese or Asian actors or characters at all. (Liz posted a similar, but less angry, complaint below.)

What was annoying about the comments on my post was that they assumed that I was simply uttering the now-familiar truism about minority casting in Hollywood, and somehow deciding to pick on poor Joss Whedon while I did it. This was not, in fact, what I was doing. There are two seperate issues here:

1. overall lack of minority casting in Hollywood, especially for major, positive roles, under which there are two sub-issues:

1. a. lack of casting of actors of color in any roles i.e. in roles that were written without a specific race or ethnicity in mind that could technically be played by anyone (who is American and can act white, that is)
1. b. lack of creating characters that are specifically people of color, i.e. creating important or central characters who are specifically supposed to be of a particular non-white race or ethnicity.

Issue #1 has become a truism, but is no less true for all of that. Not enough minority actors are cast in Hollywood. Not enough minority characters are created in Hollywood. They need to do more. Period. Argue with that, if you dare.

Issue #2 is a seperate thing, something which has become common enough to identify (see Star Wars and Blade Runner,) without actually becoming a trend (yet). Opponents of Issue # 1 want the American public cultural forum to recognize the diversity that already exists within American society and to promote a much-professed and little practiced multiculturalism by mirroring this existing diversity in our cultural products. Opponents of Issue #2, on the other hand, want the American public to recognize that culture does not exist seperately from the people who make it. Issue #2 is about facile appropriation of aspects of non-western cultures, without respect for those who created the culture, and without respect for the integrity of culture itself. It?s cultural syncretism without understanding of how syncretism works, without understanding that syncretism is an utterly two-way street; without understanding that you can?t meld without ? uh, melding. Issue #2 protests the increasingly popular idea that American culture can be ?conquered? or infiltrated by non-western cultures without white people, or current European American values losing supremacy. Do I really need to explain why this is problematic?

Sad as this is, movies are our best way of getting ideas across to each other and of reaching mass audiences. why is it so hard to get Hollywood directors with their massive budgets to call in a consultant or script doctor every now and again, to make movies that don?t have so many huge, yet simple, problems in them?

Not to be simplistic and cynical, but I don?t think the current clash of cultures between the largely Christian , Western Kulturraum and the largely Muslim, middle-eastern one, is religious, ethnic, or even entirely cultural. I think it?s economic. But I?m pretty ignorant on the complex of subjects and am totally willing to hear a variety of viewpoints, telling me I?m wrong.

Especially if they come couched in good prose ? and especially if well-padded with fun and fiction. So I?m really excited about my novelist friend Nicole Galland?s current project. Her third novel is going to be a historical fiction based on the monty-pythonesque comedy of errors known as the fourth crusade. Although the crusade never made it to the Holy Land, the political machinations are illuminating, when viewed in a contemporary context. Plus, fun!

Nicki?s been sending back terrific journal entries from her ports of call, giving crusade history tidbits and narrating her ? often comical ? efforts to find the sites of crusade events buried under the asphalt, diverted rivers, and military installations of the modern urban landscape. I convinced her to let me put them all together in a blog, called Chasing the Fourth Crusade by Nicole Galland. Check it out. It?s a good read.

Opera on ESPN! Other magazine contributor Elizabeth Searle has written the libretto for an opera about Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan called Nancy and Tonya: The Opera. Even though it won?t be performed until next spring, the opera has gotten covered on ESPN and MSNBC. Because it?s about sports! But also because of the chicks and jealousy and violence thing, of course.

Searle constructed the libretto from her story ?Celebrities In Disgrace? as well as actual quotes from Tonya and Nancy, as well as other participants in the scandal, from newspapers and FBI reports.

?Adjusting gender attitudes is the open heart surgery of the soul, and there?s no anesthetic. However, the thing about surgery is that it?s a lot better than the alternative.?

Dear God, please turn me into the essayist who wrote this blog entry/essay. It?s long but reads like a dream, and makes so, so much sense. Would that we all wrote so intelligently, clearly, forcefully, and well.

The threat of physical danger focuses anyone?s mind, male or female. When faced with an unknown man, women go through some millisecond decision-making about the need for fight or flight or whether they can go off red alert. After all that, if he?s trying to be friendly, comes the question of whether he was worth all the bother. The sexual landscape women have to live in is so different from the one inhabited by men that obvious male sexuality is often considered repellent rather than attractive. That makes as much sense as men being put off by sexy women. Imagine how much damage it would take to achieve that effect, and you start to have an idea how much crimes against women complicate everyone?s life, male and female.

thanks Wendy for the link!

When I first started watching Firefly earlier this year, I remember blogging about how it?s funny that you never seen any Chinese people in that universe although people are speaking Chinese. In fact I annoyed everyone around me by trying to extrapolate the society?s history. How come you never see them? Maybe because they?re super privileged and the characters aren?t and don?t come into contact with many people who are. If that?s the case you would expect the Alliance officers to be mostly Asian. But no! At least I don?t remember it if they were, and at some point in the series, I started looking. In the movie, we did see River?s teacher was east asian? supporting my theory. I thought that maybe Simon looked a little bit hapa, and sometimes Kaylee if you look hard enough. But really? I couldn?t make a good theory to explain it and it?s pretty clear that? they just didn?t think about it, which is disappointing.

I kind of liked it that the actors seemed to be speaking actual Chinese. Then I looked up transcriptions and read some interesting criticisms by Chinese speakers saying that obviously the translations or scriptwriting of those bits were done by an ABC, american-born chinese, basically that no one in China would talk quite that way. (Whether they could even assert this with certain authority, I?m doubtful; I don?t know all the dialects of the U.S. or how people could be expected to talk ?naturally?.)

But also, how come people swear in Chinese? Obviously, the out of character reason is because they could get away with doing that on TV in the U.S. In character, it seems against the principles of historical linguistics that a population would swear mostly in the language of the dominant culture. They don?t just swear, but they seem to bust into Chinese when under stress or feeling emotional. I?d love to hear what linguists have to say about this. It seems unlikely for a whole culture to do this. Though I?ve done it myself with Spanish, to avoid being understood by little Anglo kids on the playground; swearing or scandalous gossip.

So, I also thought about other examples of cultural mixing-up or appropriation in science fiction, where you have a future of U.S. and Asian mixing. This could be a huge long essay, but I don?t have time so I?ll just mention a few books it would be worth talking about. There?s The Man in the High Castle where Japan conquered and colonized the west coast of the U.S. There?s Neuromancer, that has a bunch of scenes in Japan, and I remember thinking in some ways it was a book expressing something about 80s meme of ?Japan is going to take over economically & culturally,? a meme that comes and goes and is back right now as a sort of ?everything from Japan is cool? anime-o-philia, or the idea that everything happens faster there, their culture and tech is more cutting edge somehow, and while the U.S. is not directly conquered in the Neuromancer-future, the future is less U.S.-white-culture-dominated than most. I thought of Geoff Ryman?s recent novel Air, set on the border of western china. I also thought of some fantasy novels where the ?exotic? culture is based on something vaguely asian, like in Tamora Pierce?s Protector of the Small series where Keladry, the preteen warrior cadet, is super good at martial arts and using the Not-Japan weapons, and it?s taken to the point of pleasant ridiculousness, like when she suddenly busts out into some kind of razor-blade fan juggling group folkdance with the visiting Not-Japan palace women. I wrote something about this a year ago maybe, but couldn?t find it on my blog?

All of those books seem to me to have done a better job at extrapolating than the Firefly series. Firefly, it?s like someone said, ?Hey, I know, we?ll make it so that in the future, China kind of won the space race, or at least shared it, bigtime, instead of that old-school future history thing where there?s some Russians. ? And someone else went, ?Yeah, neato, they can swear in Chinese, and there?ll be some samurai swords, and they can wear kimonos, and people will eat dim sum all the time, and worship both jesus and buddha, and yet, they?re all white redneck space cowboys, wouldn?t that be mindblowing? ? And then someone else went, ?Duuude! yeah, let?s hire someone to write some of the script IN CHINESE and hire a language coach for the actors, and we won?t subtitle it!? And that?s about as deep as it went, and it didn?t occur to anyone that maybe some actors in the series should be Chinese or at least asian. It?s just not particularly thoughtful, and so? it ends up being annoying. Or thoughtless. Or fluffy. Or cultural appropriation. Or rude. Or racist. In fact, all those things. It?s part of racism and of imperialism for white people in the U.S. and Europe to do that. (And then to expect people not to notice or if they notice, not to care.)

Class is the focus, and race/ethnicity thrown in thoughtlessly as a sort of decoration.

I?m in a mode where I enjoy watching it and then I want to pick it apart — not in a ?dammit, how racist? mode, but more like ?oh look, it?s That Thing again, that the U.S. does, it?s a perfect example of it.? I still love the series and the movie. (The same way I love Gene Wolfe?s Book of the New Sun series, and think it?s amazing, but could talk about gender problems in his books for a year without stopping.) I would have liked Firefly and Serenity even more if the history were deeper, and the ?multiculturalism? well thought out. If it were really hybrid - I like Guillermo Gomez-Peña?s ideas about hybrid culture. In fact I had hopes that the movie would fix some of the problems of the series. The good thing is that our expectations are higher. I think more people are noticing and pointing out loudly that ?surface multiculturalism? is not only annoying but actually racist and harmful. It?s good to point it out and to expect better of our best writers!

Which is what I hope everyone does ? go see the movie and support it, but write to the producers in detail about what was done wrong, and write more articles about it, so that Joss & co. will pay attention.

And I haven?t even scratched the surface of other races and what goes on with blackness in the movie - you could write a whole book about it.

***update - This whole post really should be a footnote on Claire?s article over at Hyphen - thanks for the link, Laura! Now I feel like a dirty apologist for Joss. I might have to see the movie about 12 more times for purposes of analysis. ***

So apparently Unicef has decided people are numbed to images of violence and destruction in the third world. So for their latest ad campaign for a fund to help former child soldiers in Burundi, they?re using a film of the Smurf village being bombed. It?ll only be shown after 9 PM, but a clip was shown earlier in the evening, on the news, and traumatized some kids. Apparently the footage of the smurf baby crying amongst all the burned smurf corpses is pretty chilling stuff. The ad agency that made it wanted to go further ? with Smurfs losing heads or limbs ? but they were told to tone it down a bit.

?It?s so un-Smurf-like,? a spokesman said. ?It might get people to think.?

I love boingboing. They pointed me to this, the perfect stereotype of male desire: twats ?n? beer.

I was reading this article about the ruckus in the House over an energy bill? and this bit about Nancy Pelosi caught my eye:

But as the vote stretched beyond 30 minutes, Pelosi took to the floor to denounce the process.

?This is bringing dishonor to the House of Representatives for this body to act in the shameful way it is acting,? Pelosi said.

?The gentle lady is not stating a proper parliamentary inquiry!? shouted Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, the presiding speaker, banging his gavel to silence her.

Gentle lady? How odd it sounds, especially for someone who was standing up to denounce. Like? Simpson wishes she would be a gentlewoman.

My friend Laura Quilter of Chilling Effects and Derivative Work was giggling with me about this, and she said that in Massachusetts, lawyers on opposing sides have to call each other ?my sister? and ?my brother? instead of ?the opposing counsel? That?s so odd.

Maybe we can start a new custom, extending this kind of enforced polite discourse, so that at rallies and protests, and on giant bloggity flame wars, opposing ranters must call each other sweet endearments. will be all like, ?As always, I completely disagree with my beloved snookums and life partner, Amanda Marcotte.? And Amanda will go, ?Darling pumpkin, Dawn, honey, your eyes outshine the stars, but, you?re batshit crazy about politics and women?s rights.?

Two totally unrelated news stories today caught my eye, both of them from Europe. In Italy, the Vatican ruled that gay men can be Catholic priests as long as they can prove they?ve been celibate for three years. This raises the fascinating spectacle of would-be priests having to produce all the names of people they didn?t have sex with. Or possibly demonstrating absurdly high sperm counts. How do you prove a negative? I?m dying to find out.

Meanwhile, in England, a judge sentenced two hackers to nine months in jail despite accepting that they didn?t use the TK internet worm for any nefarious purposes. Andrew Harvey and Jordan Bradley were able to prove they were only using the worm to set up a secure Internet chatroom, not to spy on people?s computers or mount distributed denial-of-service attacks. The judge commended them for their restraint, but still imposed a stiff sentence for infecting computers with a tool that had such devastating potential.

So let?s recap. The Vatican says that gayness is no problem as long as you don?t, um, exercise it. But Judge Beatrice Bolton says a tool, such as the TK worm, can be inherently bad and destructive, even if you don?t use it for any destructive purposes. To be fair, at first read-through of the hacker story, I didn?t realize they?d actually infected some computers, which does sound worse. Still, which is it? Is it the facility for evil, or the use of it? Inquiring minds want to know!

Not to use this as an excuse to plug my own writing, but? my first legit fiction publication last year, entitled ?Pigs In Space?, had humans collecting porcine methane in installations in solar orbit. Yep, they were collecting pig shit and farts to convert to an energy source.

After telling him about my story, my friend Jose Marquez turned me on to ?Pig City?, a four-year architectural project by Dutch architectural company MVRDV . The Netherlands is the primary producer of pork in the EU and MVRDV estimates that, with the greater space needed per pig in an entirely organic pig farming scenario, plust the amount of land dedicated to growing pig feed, 75% of Dutch land would be dedicated to pork production. Mmmmm ? bacon. In addition there are issues of energy expenditure, pig waste management, and disease prevention, and transportation of the product into urban centers. In a nutshell, ?Pig City? proposes centralized high-rise pig farms to solve the problems of space, disease prevention, recycling, and transportation in pig farming.( Here is the MVRDV ?Pig City? site, which I can?t make give me any information about the project itself.)

I can?t tell you how exciting it is to find that great minds think alike. But the discussion about the project on the architecture website, makes me want to scream. Why must every speculative project have a political message at its core? Couldn?t this have been something, oh, I dunno ? investigative? You know to come up with a feasible, self-sustaining, urban pastoral plant out of sheer field-of-endeavor exuberance? Plus, if all it is is a way of getting a message across, as a prompt for an extended discussion of ethics Pig City is a bit underwhelming for a writer. I mean, they spent 4 years on this project? They could have come up with a plausible sounding project (using a science fiction writer) in 4 days.

Anyway, maybe the following comment proves that I live too much in my future scenarios, but I don?t see why this is so ethically compromising. To produce the amounts of pork they already produce means they rely on battery farming anyway. So anything?s an improvement, even ? no especially sanitized high rises. But I guess to have architects and engineers openly, publicly treating contemporary western pastoralism as what it is ? a highly mechanized industry ? is still a no-no to a western population so desperate to cling to its illusions that parts of it still think ?intelligent design? is ? well, intelligent.

I go for weeks and months without ever thinking about the way I talk. Because I usually have better things to worry about. But last month I gave a reading from a story that appeared originally in , a story which I guess in some circles could be called a little racy, though nothing graphic or ourageous. An audience member (who apparently identifies as a Christian and claimed to be employed by Homeland Security, which sounds dodgy to me) was so outraged by the reading that he left a frothing phone message to complain about it: although six people read that night, he saw fit to single out only two of us. ?The Lesbian? (Katia Noyes, author of the brand new novel Crashing America), and me.

?The woman with the stutter.?

And suddenly I had that third-grade-playground feeling, the same way I felt when I would be told as a kid, ?don?t act upset when they bully you, you?re only making it worse.? Every year in elementary school, my concerned teacher would send me off to the sad little speech therapist?s office for a screening, and the lady would talk to me in a slow and condescending way, wary, like you would talk to a person who doesn?t speak English, and ask me to repeat sentences back to her. And invariably she would report back that although I did repeat some words and sounds and get stuck in a few spots, it didn?t fall under a category serious enough to qualify me for therapy. And on I merrily went, into adolescence and adulthood.

It?s only come up a handful of times, and all of them hurt. In high school I asked a teacher to write me a letter of recommendation for a scholarship intended for kids who had overcome some major hardship. Having gone from psych hospital inpatient to straight-A student in a short period of time, I assumed this was what she would write her letter about. I ended up not applying, and opened her letter, out of uncontrollable curiosity, to see what glowing things she?d said about me. I was horrified to discover that she?d written instead about my ?disability"— the stuttering. ?Just saying a sentence out loud in class is excruciating for her,? she wrote, ?but Suzanne has earned the respect and sympathy of her classmates.? Sympathy. I found this letter again recently and a decade later it still makes me want to punch something. A year or so after the letter incident, a college counselor told me that speech therapy would improve my chances of getting into a good school. ?You only have a short time to make a good impression in an interview,? she said. I stopped speaking to her at that point, fearing she?d pull out a diet plan next.

Stuttering is a strange and mysterious condition. No one really knows what causes it or how to fix it. It affects men far more often than women, which makes me an even rarer bird. I?ve bonded over stuttering stories many times with male acquaintances, but I?ve never met another female stutterer. I did listen very carefully to a few Joan Didion interviews, where she seems to pause, repeat herself, and draw out words in a practiced way, and I suspect she is a (post-therapy) member of the c-c-c-club. Stuttering typically stops when speaking in unison with others, singing, or when you can?t hear yourself talking. Two different friends with very bad stutters have told me that they ?graduated? from speech therapy because they no longer stuttered in the therapist?s office, though there was no effect on their speech in normal life. Maybe it?s an aftereffect of having to distract the world from the way you talk, but all the stutterers I?ve met have been very quick, funny, charming people with active social lives, jobs, romantic attachments. You would never suspect this from the despairing tone of the various stutterer?s advocacy organizations.

A severe stutter is absolutely a disability, and I?ve met people who say that speech therapy saved their lives. Mine is so mild it?s barely an annoyance, and the annoyance comes from the reaction of others. I would LOVE to never hear the following sentences again:

1. ?You should just relax and speak slower.?
Wait, I should what? Oh my god! I never thought of that, but now thanks to you all my problems are solved. I am forever indebted to you, Amateur Armchair Speech Pathologist. Turns out there was no need for the foundation, the in-ear mechanical devices, the clinical trials, or this cafepress shop.

2. ?Wow, it?s so weird! Ever since I started hanging out with you, I stutter too!?
When dating a stutterer, the moment you utter this sentence is the moment the relationship ends. And yes I?m talking to YOU, Every Every Guy I Dated Between The Years 1998 And 2002.

Are you out there, stammergirls? let?s hhhhear your story.

check in to express more screamin? Katrina outrage.

Former FEMA chief Michael Brown?you know, the one directly responsible for the 1000+ deaths?? while he ?transitions out?. Yes, that?s right, folks. He?s being paid to explain why he fucked up and destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives. I guess there would have been no other way to compel him to stay and answer some questions ? like, say, a subpoena?

Here?s another idea: You know those swear jars some workplaces have, where you have to put in a quarter for every swear word you use, and at the end of the month the money buys everyone a treat or something? What do you think would happen if FEMA instituted a dead body jar, where they took $100 out of the responsible person?s paycheck for every person who died in an emergency, then used the money to ? I don?t know ? pay for aid to the victims? Ya think Brownie woulda taken that job in the first place?

Here?s a report from a gay Iranian man who recently escaped from Iran and is seeking asylum in a gay-friendly country. He was denounced by a gay acquaintance, then caught in a sting operation set up by the basiji (a para-police force tasked with the regime?s dirty work) on a gay chatline. He has been arrested, harrassed and tortured in the past several months, and finally threatened with death.

I don?t know if this sort of thing has been happening in Iran consistently in the past 25 years, or if we?re just seeing a recent upsurge of anti-gay feeling. The recent election of a conservative hardliner to the presidency could have touched off an anti-gay campaign. Or, it could be that the recent hanging of two gay teenagers in Iran has simply focused media attention on a problem that?s been bubbling along quietly this whole time. There is now some controversy over the conviction of the two gay teenagers, who may have been hanged for consensual homosexual acts, or for the rape of a 13-year-old boy. As US Reps. Barney Frank, D-Mass., Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., and Tom Lantos, D-Calif put it in a recent letter to Condi Rice, asking her to get to the bottom of the story:

The exact details of the case remain unclear, and because the conflicting reports about the nature of the charges against the two boys make it difficult to react appropriately, we urge the State Department to do everything it can to clarify the circumstances of this case. Initial reports were that the 16-year-old and 18-year-old boys ? were punished for homosexual activity with each other. In other reports, the Iranian authorities claim the teenagers were accused of raping a 13-year-old boy. Some human rights groups suspect that this charge may have been trumped up as an excuse for the brutal treatment of gay people and to undermine public sympathy for the boys.

Project GayRussia.Ru interviewed editors of the online gay Iranian magazine MAHA shortly after the election about the hangings and about the state of homosexual tolerance in Iran. They had this to say to the question of what the situation of gays in Iran was:

The GLBT situation in Iran has changed over the past 26 years. The regime does not systematically persecute gays anymore, there are still some gay websites, there are some parks and cinemas where everyone knows that these places are  meeting places for gays, furthermore it is legal in Iran that transsexual applies for sex change and it is fully accepted by the government. There are some medias which sometimes (not often) write about such issues. Having said that, the Islamic law, according to which gays punishment is death is still in force but it is thought not much followed by the regime nowadays.
 
You may remember the Soviet days, there was not much info about homosexuality in your country, families and the society could not accept it and the regime did not allow GLBT to have their organisations or to spread info about the issue. The situation is pretty much the same in Iran today. But thanks to Internet and contact with the International community, people get the info and Iran society has changed a lot and support for GLBT rights is growing in Iran though we still have a long way to go.
 
In the recent elections there was a candidate who put “RESPECT FOR DIFFERENT LIFE STYLES” in his program. And it was something new. We do not know if he really meant gay life but we know that his front is not anti gay. In addition there is a famous political person, Mr. Akbar Ganji, who also openly talks about RESPECT FOR DIFFERENT LIFESTYLES. Add to that GLBT which is still in the beginning of its journey but it is young and determined to fight for GLBT rights. There are also opposition political groups in exile and some of them voiced their support for GLBT rights in their program.
 
So, on the whole, we are optimistic about the future as Iran’s situation can not continue like that and people are pushing for reforms and changes.

I suppose improvement in one?s situation should be looked upon with optimism. However, the editors noted elsewhere in the interview that there is still very little information available for LGBTs in Iran ? and of course, the death penalty for homosexuality, even if not enforced, still applies. What can we do?

Please do keep an eye on Iran and demand a better life and respect for Iranian GLBT. Your support means a lot for us and gives us energy and encouragement. Despite the fact that you may not hear from Iran GLBT regarding your support, please rest assured that we hear about it and we welcome it but sometimes it is not easy to work and be in touch with our friends abroad.

I can?t possibly bear to write or speak another word today about disaster relief work. Until 10 minutes from now when I start babbling again to anyone who will listen.

So what to write about? Something witty and clever and cheering? Something ranty, yet not using the words ?FEMA? or ?inbred assclownz"?

Kids? books? They?re pretty cheerful and silly. Aren?t they?

I?ve talked before about how the Harry Potter series is moving towards this interesting subtext. Its message is that truth is a fluid concept, and authority is not necessarily to be trusted. That?s fairly subversive, though on the surface the books never seem particularly radical. I?ve talked about this on my own blog, and a reader, blog-friend, and mild-mannered librarian, Elsewhere, pointed out to me that J.K. Rowling pays homage frequently to Jessica Mitford, a radical political activist and notorious over-the-top prankster.

How about another insanely popular series, the Captain Underpants books by Dav Pilkey? I?ve got ?Captain Underpants and the Invasion of the Incredibly Naughty Cafeteria Ladies From Outer Space (and the Subsequent Assault of the Equally Evil Lunchroom Zombie Nerds)? right here in front of me.

The heroes of Capt. U are two fourth grade boys who draw comic books about their principal, Mr. Krupp. (Oddly, I just read Neal Stephenson?s first novel, The Big U, and noticed that the school?s top administrator is named S.S. Krupp. Coincidence? I think not.) Mr. Krupp by a trick of fate turns into Captain Underpants, a superhero, if he hears fingers snapping. If you pour water over him, he turns back to the mean principal. So, I have never quite figured out why the boys are so hot to rescue him and restore the status quo! They freak out and save him every time! They like him, and worry that he?ll get into trouble! It?s all about exposing that adults have secret, scary dark sides that get exposed suddenly, and how then they have to be helped to stuff their Ids back into a box. So it?s training in a way for the kids to do that with themselves: the book, like many great children?s books, is like a little hegemony installation system. While it?s on the surface an annoying book about fart and booger jokes, it?s deeply ?status quo restoring?.

But the 2 comic-book drawing bad kids also save the world by their abilities of naughtiness and prank-playing.

Both HP and Capt. U. share the idea that naughtiness, in fact, extreme, dangerous, thuggish badness, can be a very strong site of political resistance. That?s kind of cool!

Then, thinking about the gender politics in play? I wondered if I could come up with examples of that level of thuggishness being a site of resistance for girls. The Akiko books? Nah. They?re great, but Akiko triumphs over adversity by being Nice and having lots of cool geeky friends. That?s fine? Hmm. Nausicaa or other Miyazake books? Nah again. Girls win by being nice. Gail Carson Levine?s Princess series? That?s more fruitful? the rewrite of the story about the sister who drips jewels from her mouth vs. the one who spits out disgusting vermin and insects was quite excellent. The jewel-drooler does okay in life, but is dull. The bug-spitter has a rip-roaring time. But it?s not? socially or politically subversive.

Where are the kids? books about nasty, lying, weaselly, booger-joking, shoplifting, rule-breaking, bitchy little hellcat girls who set off bottle rockets in school? And then who grow up to be bomb-throwing revolutionaries or who save the world from alien invasions? Instead, girl-badness in stories comes later, with sexual maturity and misbehavior. That seems so dumb and limited. I?m just wondering.

Citizen! Stop living your life! Do not attempt to be an individual! Or you risk discovering that your life is wrong according to the most venerable of journalistic bludgeons, the unsourced trend piece. The New York Times is here to tell you the way ?many? people are living their lives ? which of course just happens to be the most conservative wet dream possible.

The most recent example, of course is the Times? which allegedly proves that ?many women? at elite colleges are planning to abandon their careers for husbands and kids, pretty much as soon as they graduate. As various bloggers, including Kevin Drum, have pointed out, the story is based on nothing. Basically Louise Story had a good hit of a crack pipe and then decided that she glimpsed a trend in the fumes. There are not only no statistics, the piece is based on a handful of interviews and a smattering of emails that Story sent out to a skewed sample of women.

The Times also recently had a trend piece about South Asians in the U.S. deciding to have arranged marriages, only with veto power. This piece was similarly conservative, and similarly based on absolutely no data, except for a few interviews. And the liberal use of the word ?many,? as in ?many people think the New York Times is full of crap.

I still haven?t forgiven the Times for letting Judith Miller hype non-existent ?intelligence? about WMDs in Iraq.

But really, the Times is just one example of the decrepitude of print journalism. The goal is to present a stultifying world view that encourages people never to try and challenge any of the idiotic aspects of the status quo. Remain in your brain-dampening chambers, citizens! ? Do not attempt to exercise brain activity! ? The brain-orderlies will come and administer an extra dose of Soma shortly!

I?ve thought a lot lately that we don?t talk about the central facts of our age nearly as much as you?d expect ? global warming, extreme income inequality, our massive debt, and other signs that we?re living in a way that is drastically unsustainable in the short term. (Plus the housing bubble, and the widespread predictions that the world?s supply of oil will peak soon.) People have said that sort of thing for decades but it seems truer than ever now. And we do talk about all those things ? but at the same time, we sort of talk around them more than we talk about them. They?re sort of on the horizon but not squatting on our heads like ugly birds. They should be all we talk about, not just things we talk about occasionally.

And I think the media actively work to keep us from discussing the only things that matter in our world. In favor of bullshit celebrity news, or manufactured controversies. But also by focusing us on ?trends? that let us know that everything is fine, ?many? people are behaving in an orderly, obedient manner.

So I was away, then dealing with job transitions and general madness, have not posted in a long while and may not post regularly, but here I am now. I admit to feeling a bit inadequate when my fellow Otheries know all kind of stuff about the news and stuff, and I know about Mr. T. Now, I also know about ?Dog The Bounty Hunter", which may be the greatest show on TV and I have been watching the A&E marathon all week.It?s a reality show about a bail bondsman and the bad guys who he hunts down and helps with his own brand of tough love, with the help of his gigantically breasted wife Beth and really, really attractive son Leland. I can?t help thinking, though, that spectacularly mulleted Duane ?Dog? Chapman calls himself ?The world?s greatest bounty hunter", but they are based in Honolulu. How hard could it be to hunt down impoverished meth-heads?on a small island? Especially when their moms and girlfriends call your office to tell you exactly where they are? But quibbles aside, my heart was in my throat when hot, hot Leland was sent to capture a kickboxer during a match. He waited until the guy won the fight, then arrested him IN THE RING to the boos of the crowd. But he got through it, and not one hair on his waist-length ponytail was out of place. (everybody on this show has excellent, highly dramatic, enormous hair.)

I?m fascinated by the show because of the respect they have for the suspects. I don?t know if it?s a Hawaii thing, or just a Dog thing, but they routinely do things like give jobs to the teenage kids of the women they arrest, or help a guy get out of jail quicker because they know he?s the only one who can lift his legless mother in and out of bed. When they have to arrest a broken-down Native Hawaiian for public drunkenness, they acknowledge that ?alcohol is the white man?s curse on native people.? If all cops in this country acted like these guys?looking every arrested man in the eye and acknowledging him as a human being with a family who is having some serious problems and needs a lot of help, problems of his own making as well as economic and racial realities that he is up against?I think the crime rate and the prison population would drop dramatically. But it?ll never happen.

And my first ever post got several bitchy responses from an American Apparel employee. As far as I can figure, Am. Ap. gets google alerts when they are mentioned in a blog, and then an employee posts an indignant message about how professional they are and offers a factory tour to prove how saintly and good they are and not coke snorting, orgy-having ass grabbers. I honestly don?t care enough about the subject to keep talking about it. So there.

I meant to blog about stuttering, and stutterers as an overlooked minority group. I promise to write about that next time. I have a lot to say about it. And I?d rather say it in print so I don?t have to see that look people get when watching me get through a moment of Stop-Plosive Consonant Disfluency.

In the meantime, please have a look at Fixed Gear Enthusiass, a site for anyone who likes bicycles and/or men in underpants.

Some of you may have seen this by now: a group in Massachusetts is publishing online a list of names and addresses of people who sign an anti-same-sex-marriage petition. .

The website, KnowThyNeighbor.org, states about this campaign:

In the fall of 2005, extremists will attempt to convince 65,825+ Massachusetts voters to sign a petition that would add anti-family language to our state constitution. Those who sign it will be listed here.

Quite straightforward. Now, there is nothing illegal in this. It?s all open and aboveboard. And furthermore, I have no objection to activists using social pressure as a tactic. That?s the point of boycotts, protests, letters to the editor, and pretty much every other weapon in the arsenal of the political activist. Plus, this seems like it might actually be more effective than most of the small arms lefties carry. So there?s that.

But I?m just not comfortable with the fact that this tactic so obviously employs intimidation. Because it?s clear that this will only work if people are too afraid to be seen by their neighbors online to actually sign the petition. If people didn?t care, or were passionate enough about restricting same sex unions to do it anyway, then this effort would be wasted. What?s having petition signatories available online gonna hurt, if the petition gets delivered with sufficient signatures anyway?

The org itself indirectly acknowledges its intimidation tactic by warning the sites users not to actually, ya know, intimidate people:

KnowThyNeighbor.org hopes to inspire Civil, Legal, and Respectful Discourse on the topic and discourages with its fullest conviction the actions by anyone to harm a person or their property in retribution for exercising their democratic right to sign the petition.

Yeah ? right. You know what this reminds me of? The whole argument for permitting the government to use torture to interrogate terrorists. The threat of possible torture has been shown to be very effective in interrogation. Therefore, proponents argue, if you publicly permit torture, you mostly don?t have to use it. But if you really do prohibit torture and everyone knows it, then you?ve lost your most effective, non-torture tactic.

Likewise, this effort only works if the threat of neighborly retribution for ?exercising their democratic right to sign the petition? stops people from signing. If they know that those lefties are too pc pussified to attack, then the website has failed. Like with torturing terrorists, KnowThyNeighbor.org operates in the shadowy zone between threat and fulfillment.

Furthermore, if we move out of the shadowy zone, KnowThyNeighbor can?t be expected to take responsibility for the actions taken by those who read the website and actually exact retribution. But the cause benefits from the added intimidation factor that would create.

I don?t like it. I know, I know ? but I don?t like it.

My new favorite author is Ken MacLeod, a Scottish science fiction writer whose political space operas always have three crucial ingredients: fully-realized characters, lots of interesting speculative politics, and super-cool aliens (or cyborgs). Plus, spaceships. Did I mention the spaceships?

I fell in love with MacLeod while reading a manuscript version of Newton?s Wake that had been sent to me gawd knows how long ago when I was a book review editor. It languished in my ?to read? pile for over a year before I read the first paragraph, noticed that the main character was an ass-kicking female ?combat archeologist,? and dug in. Combining witty pop culture references (separatist, Christian farming communities on terraformed planets call themselves ?America Offline") with a tale of gray market interplanetary trade routes ruled by a group of off-the-hook capitalist Scots, the novel manages to explore both the future of social democracy and the sexuality of synthetic humans.

I promptly went out and bought MacLeod?s ?Engines of Light? trilogy from Borderlands, and I?m about half-way through the second book, Dark Light. There?s more political intrigue ? communists vs. anarchists vs. capitalists vs. tribalists ? and a lot of terrific commentary on gender roles. Two of the main characters in the novel are more or less cross-gendered: one is a male-to-female transsexual from a tribal culture which views gender as a function of social role, and therefore people can switch genders if they want; the other is a female machinist from a proto-social democracy where her interest in a male-dominated profession makes her something of an oddity. Plus there are polyamorous aliens, computer geeks, and a mysterious alien plot to relocate humans from all eras in earth?s history to a bunch of remote planets in a ?second sphere? of the universe.

Even better, I found MacLeod?s blog, where I discovered to my great pleasure that he is a terrifically thoughtful Marxist and all-around leftist curmugeon. I highly recommend the novels and the blog ? but mostly the novels. Smart, politically-astute science fiction with a leftist, queerish, feminist bent is hard to find. I?m glad I found MacLeod.

The Republicans have been arguing for years that private charities are better at caring for the poor and vulnerable than the government. Either because private non-profis are more efficient (!) or because they won?t encourage people to become dependent the way government programs allegedly will. I?ve had a number of problems with this argument, not least the fact that often private charities are stretched to their limits before the government cuts social spending, and private donations or volunteer resources don?t increase enough to pick up the slack.

But also, my pretty extensive experience with homeless charities left me feeling as though there are a lot of people whom non-profits can?t help. Non-profits, especially ones which rely on volunteers, tend to be kind of capricious about whom they help and how much. I sat through hours of discussions with people who only wanted to help the ?deserving? homeless, or the homeless people who acted grateful and kissed our hands. The rude homeless, the angry homeless, the ones who didn?t grovel or who obviously had major behavior problems, nobody wanted to help. And the last homeless charity I tried to get involved with had wanted volunteers to ask people why they thought they were homeless, and then the volunteers would write why we thought the people (whom we?d just met) were homeless. And then we were supposed to make a judgment about whether the homeless people were sincere about wanting to change, or else they?d be tossed out of the shelter.

So I ended up feeling as though a major strength of government programs was that there wasn?t as much scope for individual volunteers, or even managers, to discriminate. If you qualify for a government program, you get helped, regardless of whether you look nice, or seem to be the ?right? kind of person. Of course, in practice, every government program spawns some horrible bureaucracy that?s designed to frustrate and confuse people, especially people the individual bureaucrats don?t like. But at least with a government program, you have clear criteria for receiving benefits.

The performance of government agencies in the wake of the Katrina disaster has shaken my point of view. Not just becuase of all the horrendous inefficiency, but also because there are so many stories floating around of people with FEMA and the National Guard and various other agencies behaving in a capricious and discriminatory fashion. Some of the stories of functionaries and soldiers pushing people around and denying people access to stuff reminded me very strongly of my worst charity experiences.

So I?m not sure what the take-home message is now. Having good, well-funded government programs is only the start, but then you also have to rules in place to prevent abusive behavior and discrimination? And find ways to attract the best people to those sort of agencies? Or maybe the message is that discrimination is endemic to human endeavors, and no amount of standardization can eliminate it?

It was the worst of times, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of credulity, it was the season of darkness ? in short some of this season?s noisiest authorities insisted upon its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Bitches.

FEMA chief Michael Brown, apparently still stinging from the one-two punch of being removed from NOLA relief and being spanked by the press, sent out a ?candid? email to family and friends this week in which he complained:

?I don?t mind the negative press (well, actually, I do, but I try to ignore it) but it is really wearing out the family ? No wonder people don?t go into public service. This country is devouring itself, the 24-hour news cycle is numbing our ability to think for ourselves ??

Poor baby! I mean, my God, people were actually expecting him to do his job? It?s almost as if the press didn?t know that FEMA Director is just a neocon sinecure. No wonder people don?t go into public service! Where?s the gratitude? The way they pick at you when the slightest little thing goes wrong! I mean really, what?s wrong with Brownie?s resume?

Meanwhile, on the other side of metaphorical town: nonprofits that rely on public charitable giving (i.e. most nonprofits) were already taking a hit in favor of Katrina relief. While an L.A.-based cultural center cancelled a major fundraiser for lack of ticket sales, United Way fretted about its ability to maintain:

?It?s important that people realize that the nonprofits that are here are providing resources for a critical safety net that would not otherwise be there,? said Elise Buik, the group?s president and chief executive. ?We have 90,000 homeless right here in Los Angeles County.?

Social service and cultural nonprofits may have already taken a hit this year because of the overwhelming response to the call for tsunami relief. The generosity Katrina has called out in folks is truly awesome. But everyone, please keep in mind that the hurricane was so devastating because it came on top of all the problems of homelessness and poverty and poor education that America already has.

This year is extra harsh. Please try to give a little extra this year, even if it isn?t money. Don?t let this year be a tale of two competing generosities.

New Scientist reported a few days ago on a study showing that stem cells degrade as they replicate over time. Basically, they begin mutating wildly as they ?grow older.? This comes as bad news to the scientific community, which has been limited by law to using only a few elderly stem cell lines in federally-funded experiments. Privately-funded and state-funded research has no such restrictions, and several states have set up their own stem cell research centers for this reason. But as New Scientist points out, many stem cell therapies rely on replicating these pluripotent cells into liver cells, nerve cells, or whatever. So even if scientists have access to ?fresh? stem cells, the whole basis of the therapy might be undermined if it turns out that these cells have a tendency to mutate when they?re replicating (genetic mutation usually leads to cancers).

Even though I?ve supported stem cell research, and fought the religious hocus-pocus behind the idea that embryonic stem cells are ?unborn babies,? I?ve always been suspicious of the idea that stem cells could become the cure-all for cancer, aging, and inherited diseases. At this point, there?s religious zealotry on both sides of the stem cell debate. The stem cell true believers often claim that new therapies will grant us eternal life as we replenish our ailing organs with new cells that keep us going forever.

A lot of money is being thrown at stem cell research, despite the fact that we haven?t reached a point where we know much about how stem cell therapies will work. The therapies look promising, but mostly on paper. We?re only just now discovering how stem cell lines function over time, as this new study suggests. I wonder if stem cell ?cures,? like electrotherapies of the nineteenth century, will turn out to be more fad than fact?

I wish I had something smart or insightful to say about Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans. Unfortunately, I?m stunned in a particularly unhelpful way.

Meanwhile, though, I?m going to blog about something I?ve been vaguely obsessed with lately. I wish there were an umbrella term for people who are queer, but not gay or lesbian. In other words, a term that encompasses trannies, bisexuals, genderqueers, pansexuals, intersex people and whoever else calls themselves queer. Just not gays or lesbians.

The word ?queer? is great as an umbrella term, but given how much visibility gays and lesbians tend to have in the ?queer? scene, it?s easy for everybody else to disappear into that term. And I feel as though there are a lot of people who are queer-but-not-gay who get lumped into the ?gay? category. Maybe we?d be surprised how many of us there were if we had a word for us.

Is this divisive? I don?t know. But in my experience of both the bi/pansexual and the trans/genderqueer scenes, I?ve found that people spend a lot of time whining that the ?mainstream? queer community doesn?t include them enough. I?d like to see us doing a better job of building our own scenes and including each other. Maybe if trans/genderqueer people had scenes that included bi/pansexual people, and vice versa, the gays and lesbians would see how cool we were and beg us to come play in their sandbox.

My suggestion for a word that means ?queer but not gay or lesbian"? I really don?t have one, I?m afraid. I thought of ?wanderqueer,? which sounds like ?wanderlust,? but is also too cutesy. Any other suggestions? Or do you think this is a bad idea in the first place?

I don?t know why I can?t look away from Katrina, but I?m riveted, like a bunny in headlights. This must be the most blogged disaster in the history of the world, simply because it?s American (and because it?s the most recent.)

Here?s a bitter and empassioned tirade by Anne Rice. Yes, the vampire lady. She says:

Now nature has done what the Civil War couldn?t do. Nature has done what the labor riots of the 1920?s couldn?t do. Nature had done what ?modern life? with its relentless pursuit of efficiency couldn?t do. It has done what racism couldn?t do, and what segregation couldn?t do either. Nature has laid the city waste - with a scope that brings to mind the end of Pompeii.

and:

But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us ?Sin City,? and turned your backs.

Well, we are a lot more than all that. And though we may seem the most exotic, the most atmospheric and, at times, the most downtrodden part of this land, we are still part of it. We are Americans. We are you.

Okay, how fucked are we that we are taking a huge, moderate-to-liberal gulp at the death of a Nixon/Reagan appointee? Here?s the Guardian on Rehnquist?s legacy:

He dissented on some landmark decisions during his career on the bench. They included Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that women have a constitutional right to an abortion. He also objected to a 2003 ruling that struck down laws criminalising gay sex, and to a ruling that preserved affirmative action to favour black student admissions at public universities.

The chief justice pressed for the expansion of states? rights at the expense of central government; he backed the death penalty and opposed the separation of church and state.

As the highest judge in the land, he presided over the impeachment trial of president Bill Clinton.

He played a pivotal role in the contentious 2000 presidential election, siding with the conservative majority in a bitterly divided court to stop ballot recounts in Florida and hand the White House to Mr Bush.

This is what we are sincerely mourning in the anticipation of something much, much worse? I?m exhausted from bad news and have no comment to make.

What we really need now is a good insult. I can?t believe the Department of Homeland Security wasn?t prepared for this eventuality. We pay all these taxes, and they don?t even have a Disaster Plan.

A good disaster response plan has really catchy disparaging terms. Like, in the early 20th century we had the word ?Wop", ?Without Papers? to insult refugees. Who could forget the Okies, and all those hobos and bums in their shantytown Hoovervilles? Then later after WWII, we had D.P.s, ?Displaced Persons?. Since I grew up partly in Houston, I had the handy term ?wetback? to add to the plethora of racial insults available to insult Latinos living in the area.

Now, post-Katrina, we need something catchy so we can talk smack about hurricane refugees. I was thinking at first ?Nolas", but then realized that would leave out all the people from Biloxi and Gulfport. FEMAbots? No. Too technical-sounding. So how about ?Caners?. It?s short. It?s simple. It rolls off the tongue beautifully. You can say it, then lean over a little and spit expressively on the sidewalk. ?Goddamn filthy Caners, messin? up our city.? *spit* See?

How come I had to think of this? Imagine all those decent, hardworking people who live in Houston. They?re being flooded with dirty homeless people who mostly talk funny and who probably just finished looting some DVDs, Huggies, and Fritos out of a Quickie-Mart, and who?s going to hire them when they can?t prove who they are? Why didn?t they have their birth certificates and social security cards into ziplock baggies, stapled into their underwear, just in case the levees broke? They keep freaking out and crying like howling animals. They can?t even act like civilized people. Shooting?s too good for them. And when that?s the case, you need a good catch-all term to make them seem more like desperate subhumans - to encourage the proper state of paranoia and suspicion among decent citizens.

The people in Houston and Atlanta can breathe easy, because while the Dept. of Homeland Security and FEMA have fallen down on the job, I am here in the breach, extending the glorious English language.

Reading the website for Force Ministries is a forced lesson in the inclusive and exclusive power of context. I don?t live in the non-denom (and therefore evangelical) ?Christian? alternate America. So me no speaky lingo. Near as I can tell from their self-evident-style (and poorly written) text, Force Ministries is an evangelical organization dedicated to members of our armed forces. Near as I can tell, but this is as far as I get in that direction.

Perhaps the main problem I?ve been having is that the language of American evangelical Christianity has been melded here with the language of American militarism, and it?s not a happy marriage, either to my ear or to the part of my brain that wrests meaning from words. Here?s the ?Mission Strategy":

Mission: Christ-centered duty
Purpose:
- Impart faith in Christ.
- Instill patterns and principles for victorious Christian duty.
- Ignite individual calling and destiny.
Defining Passage: ?From the days of John the Baptist unitl now, the kingdom of heaven has been forcefully advancing, and forceful men lay hold of it.? (Matthew 11:12) NIV

Elsewhere, the ?Mission Strategy? is broken down into three major areas: Evangelism, Discipleship and Deployment. ?Discipleship? is obvious: it is their program for developing a congregation among members of the armed forces. It includes bible study, online teaching and interaction, providing chaplains, etc. ?Deployment? is their missionary branch. How missionaries on military bases differ from chaplains is probably one of those things you have to be in context to understand.

What?s really interesting here, though, is the first component: ?Evangelism?. The Evangelism branch of Force Ministries is ? you guessed it, a skydiving team! ?FORCE skydiving is a ministry to the military and through the military ? comprised of current and former Navy SEALs.? Why? you might ask. Well, ?in this era of Gen-X extremism, it?s proving harder and harder to capture the attention of the world?s youth. If it doesn?t go over 100 miles per hour, make a lot of noise, put a hole in your lip, or turn your hair a different color, it probably won?t get a second glace (sic). This, no doubt, makes evangelism challenging for many of today?s ministries.?

No doubt. Thank goodness some evangelists have the ability to take the following flights of fancy:

?Imagine a group of today?s youth standing around with their skateboards and piercing?s (sic), when all of a sudden, one of them looks up and sees an aircraft at 12,000 feet, with a smoke trail. What appear to be 5 human beings have (sic) exited the airplane, all of them trailing a stream of smoke. Nearly a minute later, brightly colored parachute (sic) with the single word, ?FORCE? boldly visible, begin to open. All witnessing these daring stunts are curious to see if these guys can pull off a landing and live to tell about it. They quickly make their way to the ?drop zone? where they notice a thousand other kids watching the beautiful parachute formations and spectacular landings.

?Immediately following the jump the jumpers quickly make their way to a stage were (sic) they began (sic) to speak a truth never before heard by many in the audience and soon a life changing realization comes over the newcomers ?? etc.

What?s disturbing me about the whole scenario isn?t that evangelicals are missionizing the military ? in fact, good for them for doing it, for concerning themselves with the spiritual welfare of soldiers deployed in horrifying war zones. What?s disturbing isn?t evangelicals trying to borrow the cred of xtreme sports to appeal to youth ? in fact, good for them for doing it, for bothering to take note of our Zeitgeist and attempting to fit their spiritual message to the needs and interests of today?s youth. As the language makes clear, this stuff is straight out of the imagination of someone standing on the wrong side of the generation gap, but maybe today?s pierced youth will respond to sky divers.

What?s disturbing to me is the implication that Force Ministries is using military personnel to missionize non-military-affiliated kids for the military. It?s an indirect (and completely unacknowledged) military recruitment tool: first you get them for Christ, then you sign them up for Uncle Sam. No, there?s nothing on the website that says this, but why would you use an organization called ?Force Ministries", dedicated to the military, to recruit kids for Christ, unless the point was to also prepare them for military life? Why, otherwise, the military-style language on the website, and the glorifying images of soldiers holding weapons for Christ?

Force Ministries isn?t awkward or stupid enough to glorify militarism in its text, but it is savvy enough to call itself ?Force Ministries", with all the possible concomitant meanings and implications of the word ?force", and the power of the idea of ?force? to those who feel powerless. Do you really think that they haven?t thought that word through? So what is it that they?re really trying to do here? Recruit kids for Christ and then recruit Christians for soldiers? Sounds complicated, doesn?t it? Or are they maybe going to skip the first step (or leave the first step to other organizations) and just move straight to the second by ?deploying? sky divers over existing Christian youth gatherings? That is actually what the fantasy scenario rather sounded like: militarize the already-Christian and rake in a few unbelievers, too. Kill three birds with one parachutes (sic).

What do you suppose? Is this a solution to the Bush admin?s impending recruitment crisis? Onward Christian soldiers?

I?m deep in translating ?Cadáveres", a long poem by Nestor Perlongher. And I was thinking about all the things I read and hear that are in translation or aren?t. And I think it?s important to look at all levels of culture in another language, whichever language you choose, to make an effort not to be monolingual & an effort that goes beyond language classes or tourism.

How not to be a tourist? How to translate, and bridge between cultures/languages, without exploiting or ? er? engaging in cultural appropriation, a long mouthful of jargon for ?not being an asshole?. Translators lately talk a lot about this, about two-way translation, not expecting everything to be in English, about particpating in the culture you?re translating from, about being aware of your own subjectivity or subject position.

This weekend at , an anarchic nerdfest, I talked all morning with Peter Kaminski of Socialtext - about collaboration, wikis, science fiction, and translation? He believes strongly in reading newspapers in other languages that aren?t your first language; that you are jolted out of your perspective (and you learn the language too.) You can also try listening to the radio? try the Pocho Hour of Power, at Pocho.com.

I spend a bit of time puzzling out people?s blogs in Spanish. It?s harder than newspapers or books, and more like trying to eavesdrop on the slangy, intimate conversations of strangers who know each other well. Slash fanfic in Spanish is vastly entertaining, and you can warm up if your spanish is rusty with the Spanglish translation of Don Quixote by Ilan Stavans.

In my translations of Perlongher, a great poet who is foulmouthed in Spanish, Portugues, Portuñol, and French, I?ve had to look at a lot of tranny porn, or actually, travestí porn; in Latin America, LGBT organizations are LGBTT, because transexual and travestí are fairly well-defined different identities with specific political histories and problems.

Mmm, internet porn. It?s got so many serious literary and political uses! And you should read it in its original down and dirty International Espanglish. The Swearsaurus Global Swearing Archive at Insultmonger is a good starting point to understanding the dirty slang of particular countries, but going right to the porno source teaches you much faster. I?m being flip about it, but the dynamics of the international porn trade are complicated and important. Porn and sex work continue to become globalized, like most other industries.

Anyway, listen to Perlongher?s amazing poem Cadáveres and read along if you dare.

According to every blog I read, Scott Westerfeld?s new vampire novel . Very exciting, very exciting.

I haven?t read it yet (it?s just out today) but all signs point to a great reading experience: Peeps is apparently a new spin on the vampire legend, doing for vampires what 28 Days Later did for zombies. I can vouch for Scott?s writing chops; he has me completely at his mercy, awaiting the third installment of his Young Adult magic trilogy , and the second installment of the sci-fi teen cosmetic surgery trilogy (no joke, it?s great) that begins with .

Here are some reviews of Peeps. And now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.

Okay. So it?s a tragedy that this teenage girl in Kansas got inside the tiger?s cage last week and was easily slaughtered inside its feline jaws. But cold-hearted question number one: Why didn?t anyone inform her that tigers and nature?s other megafauna weren?t made for cages or, in general, for humans to play with? Question number two: Since said tragedy occured in the enlightened state of Kansas, will we have to give her both a Darwin Award AND an Intelligent Design Award? Heartless question number three: If there is, in fact, no such natural principle as so-called evolution, will the filtering out of her genes in any way affect the collective intelligence of our species?

And in international news? Newsweek magazine outdid itself last week, and wrote a fairly even-handed, in-depth article about the pull-out of Jewish settlers from Gaza. It touched thoughtfully upon all the key elements of this historical moment: the woes of the settlers, the terribly young Jewish soldiers weeping as they led out the farmers who had planted their hopes in the soil, and the pathos of the Palestinians, their hopes, their suffering. There was even an interview with an orthodox settler who showed the Newsweek correspondant a potato he had dug out of the ground with his own hands. And he told the reporter to look closely at the earthy potato, with its lumps and eyes?wasn?t that obviously the face of Moses? Okay. So, forget that for a thousand years people have been seeing the Virgin Mary in their pasta fazul and that kind of thing, and now one Jewish guy in the middle of the summer in the southern desert under a lot of stress says something crazy, forget all that. My question is this: Didn?t the other settlers know that Newsweek would be coming? ?Avi, Avi, whatever you do, don?t tell the American press your potato story. The Jewish and Arab newspapers, they know you?re just the potato guy, but, please, Avi, please, it?s Newsweek, goyishe-kop, you know they?ll just eat it up.?

My other question: Is Thomas Friedman a piece of shit or what?

I love superhero comics. I wasn?t a big comics reader as a kid or adolescent ? I got into comics after I graduated from college and had a period of brain-mulching unemployment and temp jobs. I started buying lots of old superhero comics from the ?bargain bins? and found them a nice escape from the utterly cruddy life I was having at the time.

Since then, I?ve been into superhero comics, and I occasionally read other comics. I like some ?art? comics and ?indy? comics, especially Evan Dorkin, Adrian Tomine and Ivan Brunetti, plus of course Michael Kupperman, who did the cover for other #1. But I pretty much only read superhero comics ? if I want to read a serious literary story about ordinary people, I?ll read a novel. Or watch an indy movie. I know there are some ways comics can do the ?serious literary story about ordinary people? differently or better than a prose-only narrative, but I find I just prefer prose-only narratives. I went through a Manga phase years ago, but I?m not into Manga any more.

But when I want to consume a superhero narrative, I read comics. I don?t like movies about superheroes, and I?ve read very little prose-only superhero narratives. In other words, I don?t read comics to read comics, I read comics to read about superheroes.

Mostly I still read things from the bargain bin, plus the occasional new issue by a creator I especially like. But lately the new superhero comics seem to have gotten more boring and ?event-driven.? ?Event-driven? is a term of art in the comics industry that refers to comics where, for five months or a year, everything is about The Death of Superman, or the Gotham City Gang War. Plus, most comics are being written so they?ll read well in collected editions, meaning the story moves at a snail?s pace.

Online comics critic Paul O?Brien ripped the Internet in half when he announced he was . He cited creative stagnation at DC and Marvel, and the lack of any interesting new titles lately. And people jumped down his throat. Mostly there was a flood of people suggesting that O?Brien just wasn?t reading good comics. (Good defined as non-superhero comics, natch.) If he?d only stop watching Bruckheimer movies and start watching Aguirre: Wrath of God! Even though O?Brien very carefully included a caveat that said his column only applied to superhero comics, and he?s only interested in superhero comics, everybody assumed he must just be an idiot who didn?t realize that Peter Bagge is God!

What bugs me isn?t the lack of reading comprehension of O?Brien?s column. It?s the silly snobbery, or the assumption that people who read superhero comics ?need to be gently led,? as one person put it, towards better comics. As if I?m too stupid to have noticed the huge wall of indy comics at my local store.

Daniel Clowes? main competition for my time isn?t Spider-Man, it?s Graham Greene and Ursula K. LeGuin, and a bunch of other authors I have unread books by. If I?m in the mood for something escapist and light, then Spider-Man gets to compete with television and movies. (And actually, that?s part of why mainstream superhero comics have gotten so boring: they?re not even fun escapist reading any more, because of the emphasis on some highly dubious sense of ?realism,? and the aforementioned five hundred-part storylines.)

It all started with those Dove ads that show all the hot, mostly naked girls in weirdly desexualized lingerie with the tagline: ?Real women have curves.? I can only assume it?s from this sentence alone that we are supposed to guess that the women in the ad are fat or have otherwise culturally unacceptable bodies (a few are people of color, one has a large tattoo, another is sort of tomboyish). The ads are part of Dove soap?s ?campaign for real beauty,? another tip-off that we?re supposedly looking at women larger than the usual ?unreal? models.

And yet if it weren?t for Dove?s helpfully-condescending slogans for these women, I would never have pegged them for ?real.? Sure, their underwear is kind of drab, but every model has flawless skin, shiny hair, a radiant smile, and not a dimple of cellulite anywhere on her ?real? body. None of them have flab or wrinkles. And their breasts are perfectly perktacular! I?m definitely in the audience of ?real-bodied? women the ads are aimed at, but I don?t see my body up there. I see the same old airbrushed cuties, except with less makeup, slightly more muscle, and no Victoria?s Secret.

In New York, people with magic markers started doctoring the ads with occasionally fat-phobic, occasionally anti-corporate, and occasionally utterly random comments. In Dusseldorf, a local branch of zippy advertising agency Ogilvy took up space on local bus stops with a parodic campaign for real men?s bodies.

That?s when the new craze for ?real? women took off. Nike launched its ?big butts, thunder thighs, and tomboy knees? campaign, which only exists in print and online ? perhaps because the TV audience isn?t ready for such ?frank? representations of unfeminine body parts on women. Like the Dove ads, these Nike spots revel in women whose bodies are supposedly unlike those of fashion models. They also include unusually beautiful women of color in with ?real? unskinny or boyish women. According to an AdAge story:

Trend expert Faith Popcorn of Brain Reserve, New York, said the shift did not start in advertisements. “No copywriter did this,” she said. “It started when we started to celebrate the black and Hispanic culture. In those cultures you can be a little ‘butty’ and even have a little mustache, too, and it’s considered cool and attractive. Now these white girls are looking at themselves and saying, ‘I don’t want to be a stick, I want to be natural.’”

One is left with the weird sense that not being white is somehow the cultural equivalent of being fat or hairy, two natural feminine states that advertising often tries to cure.

When I watched a commercial on Nike?s website of a woman caressing her ?thunder thighs,? I was once again struck by the unreality of the body in front of me. I saw two muscular thighs, not particularly large, framed by a pair of trim (Nike) gym shorts. If those delectable gams were supposed to be almost unacceptably heavy, then my own body is much farther beyond the pale than I ever realized.

As for the Gap?s new lines of women?s jeans – ?curvy,? ?original,? and ?straight? – I stared and stared at pictures of the three supposedly different body types the jeans are designed to fit, looking for differences. But I was only able to discern that the model who wore ?straight? actually stood perfectly straight, while the ?curvy? model had cocked her hip into an exaggerated C shape. An AP article about the new jeans tells us helpfully, ?The new curvy fit is for the woman whose waist is considerably smaller than her hips - whose jeans often gap at the back of the waistband. There?s a deeper curve in the seam shape, eliminating extra fabric at the top.?

What the hell does that mean? Julie Vaughan, Gap?s senior director of denim design, clarifies: ?We designed the jean on a curvy model. The curvy has a contoured waistband. It hugs the waist, and it has an easy fit through the hips and thighs.?

So curvy means curvy and you figure out what they?re trying to get at. You?d never know from actually looking at the Gap?s ads for the new jeans featuring preternaturally firm asses. The other day, as I headed to the men?s section of the Gap to buy pants, I reflected once again that I never see myself represented in fashion ads aimed at women. I only see myself in the men?s ads. Men have such reassuring ways of sizing their pants – I can buy 34 30 instead of ?curvy? or ?thunder thighs.? I guess I?d rather be a number than a ?real beauty.?

First off, my apologies to all Trekkers and Trekkies: I have no idea when it is appropriate to say which for whom.

That having been said, check out this bloggage about the link between Star Trek fandom and pedophilia, as reported by the L.A. Times. Apparently, 99 out of 100 pedophiles prefer Star Trek paraphernalia in their houses.

I don?t know if I believe it, but here?s my take on the whys and wherefores: Trekkers, Trekkies and other fans of Star Trek are nerds. Nerds inevitably gravitate towards Star Trek because, well, the nerd mansion has a special room for Star Trek and that?s where all the cookies and conversations are. Pedophiles are maladjusted, which means, among other things, that the world clocks them as nerds. (This isn?t true; there?s a huge difference between socially awkward and sociopath, but cheerleaders aren?t making that distinction this week.) So pedophiles tend to live in the nerd mansion too, and will, so to speak, inevitably pass the Star Trek room on their way to the bathroom or the kitchen at some point.

Caveat for those of you about to defend nerddom to me: me nerd. In fact: me Star Trek fan, although not a fan of the original series. My irony doesn?t extend that far out.

I?m sure everyone?s heard about how great the Austin music scene was in the 80s until they want to throw up. And in writing about musicians when they?re dead, they?re always saints. Well, brace yourselves because I?m about to wax sappy.

But? Biscuit is dead! I?m a sad fan girl. Imagine me in 1986 as a little pink-haired kidlet newly hatched into the world, and bopping around Austin with my neurotic performance artist junkie girlfriend. We?d dress up in lime-green pantsuits, carry clipboards, and demand of everyone we met to let us draw mustaches on them in charcoal. Fu Manchu? Hitler? Walrus? Dastardly Dan? Which mustache would you like? In the 100-degree heat at some party or at Liberty Lunch or something. And there was Biscuit. He was cheerful! He was never serious, never pretentious! I feel like I?m praising the family dog from 20 years ago, like Karen Finley?s essay on Dead Pets in Shock Treatment. ?She was a bad dog, she peed on everything, but that?s Lady. Yup, she barfed on everything, but she was Lady.? Biscuit was Lady! Up with a microphone telling everyone to get on up, and he meant it, and everyone would do it. ?Go start your own band, now, y?all hear?? Dressed in something strange and fluffy with plastic dinosaurs epoxied to his head and an enormous grin. Biscuit was about infectious artistic empowerment. And I totally worshipped him! His art was good? I remember him doing an elvis shrine for the huge Dia de los Muertos exhibit one year. He made people feel like anything was possible in life, art, whatever.

And all I have is some 20 year old audio mix tapes. I got to get downloading! There do seem to be CDs? The Fat Elvis & the Skinny Elvis are definitely available.

I loved how they could play anything and mixed everything up. The happy funk of ?We Got Soul", ?Funk Off", ?What?s the Word?"— witty pop of ?Influence", ?Self Contortion", or ?Identity Crisis? like the happier moments of Glass Eye or the Dead Milkmen — glorious punkosity with a velvet underground/MDC/Ramones beauty to the driven guitar in songs like ?Authority? ? thrashing rhythms but with velvety textural complexity. Or just plain silly a-la-Ed-Hall? ?Frat Cars! Frat Cars! I can?t stand those Frat Cars! Fucking with the freaks!? & the later psychedelifunkpunk discoqueer weirdness of Cargo Cult?.

I was thinking of this just last night because of something Pandagon said in her blog about an Austin-American Chronicle article on Biscuit. And remembering him fondly, and thinking of his band?s swirling legacy in the late 80s in Austin where he would come into a party and the party would suddenly reconfigure. Because ? BISCUIT!!! In little reality-warping ripples all around the room. And then I woke up this morning to final_girl?s lj and ? he?s dead.

As for the mixing-up of the music, it was beyond genre-crossover. The Big Boys just had fun and didn?t give a fuck what genre people expected. Again like Glass Eye, who refused to market themselves as one slick thing. That in itself is admirable even without Biscuit?s larger than life glowing saintlihood.

When I say that I love porn, I?m not speaking rhetorically. I didn?t adopt this stance in an enlightened, women?s studies kind of way. It?s just that ever since I got my sweaty hands on my junior high school best friend?s mom?s tattered copy of Nancy Friday?s , followed precipitously with my parents? stash of Penthouse Variations, I?ve been a porn fan. I just love reading the stuff, especially now that the internet brings it to me fresh and free everyday. And yeah, I read it for wanking. As it turns out, my textual habits are now being defended by none other than President George W. Bush and various religious right wing zealots.

It all started when Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln proposed a 25% porn tax on internet porn sites. She and several other Dems hope that their wildly unconstitutional Internet Safety and Child Protection Act of 2005 will help make the internet a more ?child safe? place by forcing adult website owners to pay a ridiculous, blood-sucking one quarter of their revenues back to the government (who can then, one supposes, use it to subsidize defense spending which makes the real world child-unsafe). But here?s the beauty part: the religious right opposes the proposed law.

Randy Dotinga at Wired News reports that Rick Schatz, president of the religious advocacy group National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families, told him: ?We?d not necessarily be pleased if the U.S. gets into what some people would call a ?sin tax.? There would be the concern that the government would change its focus to tax pornographic materials rather than control production and distribution.?

In other words: to tax a thing is to legitimize it. I?m glad my Christian allies are keeping my favorite mom ?n pop porn sites afloat by fighting this evil sin tax. But I think their strategy may be more canny than it seems at first. Let?s leave aside the fact that taxing a form of speech based on content is unconstitutional on its face. And let?s also leave aside the fact that it will be impossible to determine which kinds of sites should be taxed because there are so many kinds of sexual and erotic expression on the web, both commercial and noncommercial. (Although the bill?s architects say their definition of adult material will be based on the same rules that define ?sexually-explicit conduct? in Title 18, section 2257 of the US Code ? note that these rules are actually borrowed from section 2256 ? that isn?t much help. This definition of sexual explicitness was developed in the context of identifying child porn, not ?adult material.? It?s vague and strange, and its use in the application of a sin tax would no doubt lead to a whole host of litigation epiphenomena.)

Back to the bizarre canniness of Schatz? camp. I think they?re opposed to the bill because it will impose such a burden on sites with sexual material that it could actually tip the balance of the nation?s sympathy back towards pornographers. After all, these are just Americans out to make a buck on sex. If it appears they?re getting beaten down by a tax-happy government, they may become martyrs rather than evildoers. So I say: bring on the porn tax. I want to watch the legal smackdown. I want to see anti-tax right-wingers and pornographers fighting side-by-side, shaking their fists at Big Government.

Today the right wing made another move to help me get more internet porn. The Bush Administration, possibly in response to a call from the conservative Family Research Council, has asked that ICANN delay plans to implement a ?xxx? top-level domain on the net. ICANN ? or, for non-wonk, non-geeks, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ? is a controversial US nonprofit which serves as a domain name gatekeeper. In June, it suffix [note to self: buy www.othermag.xxx!]. You?d think conservatives would rejoice, right? Instant porno ghetto, complete with a really easy way to filter out ?nasty? material based on the domain name.

But no! Conservative website FamilyNews :

Daniel Weiss, Senior Analyst for Media and Sexuality at Focus on the Family Action, says there are nearly 260 million porn web pages already. A .xxx domain would only make matters worse. “Basically they’re creating an entire new domain that can be populated with pornography.” Weiss says once a .xxx domain is officially established, there would inevitably be a feeling that pornography is normal and given an official stamp of approval.

So now I have the Christian right?s full approval to keep surfing porn in all the usual places ? no pesky changing my bookmark file; no rules forcing adult sites to get ripped off when they buy those $75 xxx domain names.

Damn I love America.

One of the most frustrating things about the federal government?s obsession with cracking down on is that it diverts resources away from serious drugs. Now one serious law-and-order Republican, at least, is admitting that other issues are way more pressing. In a Aug. 1 letter Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) takes the Office of National Drug Control Policy to task for ignoring the rise in popularity of methamphetamines. Not only does meth destroy people?s lives (and facilitate the spread of HIV), but meth labs leak toxic chemicals into water supplies.

?Marijuana is a much more popular drug in terms of the number of people who use it. However, methamphetamine causes much more destruction in a much shorter period of time than marijuana. We believe that reducing drug use is not just about reducing the number of users of a drug, but reducing the overall harm to society caused by the drug,? Grassley writes. ?While we agree that any drug use is harmful to users and those around them, the problems associated with marijuana are not comparable to methamphetamine in terms of cost to society.?

He goes on to list positive steps to curb the spread of meth that the Bush administration either hasn?t taken or has actively opposed. I don?t have much to add, except that it?s refreshing to see a hard-line Republican talking sensibly about drugs.

A bizarre adoption case in Indiana has taken a strange turn recently, begging questions about race and adoption policies.

A 58-year-old single male New Jersey school teacher wanted to have kids. Through a surrogate birth adoption agency in Indiana, he arranged to adopt twin girls, born prematurely (in Indiana) to a surrogate mother from South Carolina. Problems arose at the hospital when nurses became nervous about the adoptive father?s seeming lack of child rearing skills for the medically fragile preemies and alerted authorities.

What came out of an ongoing investigation is that the father, Stephen Melinger, apparently went to Indiana to adopt because New Jersey law renders surrogacy contracts illegal, while Indiana law is ambiguous on this point. The surrogate mother gave birth in a different county from the agency that arranged the adoption, apparently because the agency had had problems before. Also, the home study required by law before adoption was never performed in Melinger?s home (which is in New Jersey.) Further, it is illegal, according to Indiana law, for someone from out of state to adopt an Indiana-born child unless the child is ?hard to place?. No one would have caught any of this if the nurses at the hospital hadn?t become suspicious of Melinger himself.

The twins were originally reported in the legal papers to be the biological children of the adopting father, Melinger, and of the surrogate mother, Zaria Nkoya Huffman. However, Huffman is black (and was incorrectly reported in the papers as being white) and the children appear to be white, not biracial. The most recent twist, reported in the Indianapolis Star, is that Melinger now appears not to be the twins? biological father after all. All this should, in hindsight, be obvious, since why would a biological parent need to apply for adoption of his child?

The report in the Indianapolis Star does not state for a fact that Huffman is not the biological mother. The speculation around the identity of the mother appears to be based solely upon the appearance of the babies, which is white, compared to the appearance of the mother, which is black. And now it seems that if Huffman is not the biological mother, if, in fact, the biological mother was a white egg donor, then the monoracial children will no longer be the ?hard to place? adoptees that biracial children would be, and therefore will no longer be permitted to be adopted by someone out of state. This raises the question then of why Melinger chose a black surrogate mother. Was he playing the laws the whole time? Was this a strategy to get the kids born and then get them out of the state under the rules governing ?hard to place? adoptees?

Simply the reporting on this story raises a whole host of issues, aside from the issues of the story itself. Is there really a medical question as to Huffman?s biological motherhood or is it entirely based upon appearance? Is it the reporter questioning her relation to the babies or is it the investigators? And if there?s really a question as to the provenance of the girls? DNA, then why don?t they just do a damn test already?

As everyone should know, but most people don?t seem to, the background of multiracials ? especially newborn babies ? cannot easily be determined by appearance, especially when the interpretation of appearance is so subjective. It?s rare to find a child whose appearance is an exact 50/50 meld of its two parents?, or whose hue is exactly midway between that of its ethnically varied parents. Babies? complexions ? ALL babies? complexions ? are lighter than their complexions as older children, which is lighter than their complexions as adults. Furthermore, the way this story is reported underlines the one-drop rule: Huffman (the surrogate mother) is black, period. There?s no room in this ?assessment? for a description of her actual appearance, which could range from dark-skinned and African-featured to light-skinned and European-featured. African America is a very multiracial community to begin with. As we?ve all seen time and time again, but have not seemed to recognize, there?s nothing to prevent a ?black? mother from having very white-looking children.

That aside, adoption policy needs desperately to be cleaned up, if multiracial children can be blithely assigned to a ?hard to place? category based upon the racial categorization of those who contributed their DNA. These rules originate in the practice of not placing adoptees interracially; i.e. not placing black children in white homes and vice versa. This is a serious problem for multiracial children, for whom almost ANY adoption would be interracial, unless it were by an already multiracial family of their exact mix. Add to this the fact that, in essence, all adoptees are interracially adopted, since there are infinite significant variations in ethnicity and family culture within the monolithic structures of single races in this country. I?m not suggesting that the rule against interracial adoption should be entirely dropped. But this case shows to what a ridiculous extreme it can be, and is, taken.

Spoilers ahead for the new Harry Potter novel?
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OK then. So apparently it didn?t take long for super obsessive compulsive fanboys to create a site called Dumbledore Is Not Dead to advance the view that, well? you can guess. The site includes tons of ridiculously detailed ?clues? that Dumbledore didn?t die at the end of Half-Blood Prince as well as lots of wacky speculation.

But one of the main reasons why people seem to think Dumbledore lives is because he appeared to plead for his life. When Snape shows up, Dumbledore gets all freaky and desperate and says ?Severus? please?? a few times. So the theory goes that either Dumbledore wanted Snape to kill him, or Dumbledore wanted Snape to help fake his death. They refuse to accept the idea that, at the moment of imminent death, Dumbledore simply freaked out and didn?t want to die.

After all, didn?t Dumbledore say in an earlier book that he saw death as the next great adventure, and didn?t fear it? Well, then, he obviously couldn?t change his mind. Or realize when it came down to it that, yeah, death actually freaked the shit out of him. Because that never happens in real life. People are always completely consistent and live up to things they said years earlier.

In fact, Dumbledore?s last night on Earth is sort of an interesting encapsulation of what it?s like to watch an aging relative or friend careen into the grave. It?s not generally crisp or glib. You have to watch all of the structures and ramparts of their personality melt a little. Even if they don?t have Alzheimer?s or dementia, just the process of a body ceasing to function by degrees is sort of infantilizing. So in the book, we have Dumbledore being force-fed the nasty potion and becoming increasingly whiny and incoherent. It?s a really disturbing scene as all of his trademark serenity vanishes. And then he stumbles into a trap, almost talks his way out of it, and winds up pleading with his murderer.

Part of what makes dying of ?old age? so demoralizing and humiliating is that you get poked and prodded a lot by medical science. Half the Medicare patients who died in Miami spent time in an ICU in their last six months of life, and nearly a third saw ten or more doctors, according to testimony at a conference on end-of-life care. And yet Medicare patients who died in other places were much less likely to see as many doctors or spend time in the ICU. And yet their ?outcomes? were much the same as the people in Miami.

Here we have to pause and ask what they mean by ?outcomes.? Well, duh. Everyone died, that?s how they got included in these statistics. But we don?t know if the people in Missoula would have lived a few more months if they?d gotten the same care as the people in Miami, or if they?d have considered those months worth having.

It?s a cliche to say that Medicare could save billions if it didn?t go overboard on ?heroic? measures for people in the last six months of life. The trouble is, you never know when someone?s in his/her last six months of life. Patients don?t wear T-shirts with their approximate date of death on them.

By law, patients can?t get hospice care under Medicare unless a doctor is willing to certify that they?re in the last six months of their lives. In some cases, a doctor will swear that a patient has less than six months to live, and then the patient will fuck everything up by living another few years. A few years ago, the federal government tried to investigate doctors for fraud if their patients lived longer than the doctors had said they would. Because the doctors had sworn the patients only had six months to live, and obviously they had lied.

I?m not sure where I?m going with this, except that the issue isn?t as simple as anyone would like it to be. We?d all like a dignified death, and less medical poking and prodding after there?s already no hope. But at the same time, sometimes the medical poking and prodding actually works, and people get a few more good years. And it?s really hard to predict which people will benefit from more care.

Once again Kos of the popular political blog DailyKos puts it out there that ?women?s rights? as an issue is interfering with ?politics?, which is way more important than any petty single issue. Therefore, obviously, we should vote for an anti-abortion Democrat over a pro-choice Republican. It?s not just what he and his toadies are saying it?s how they say it?

?? clearly they don?t understand that good politics ? turning the Senate Democratic is far more beneficial for their issue (women rights) than anything the Republicans can muster. Until NARAL (and the rest of the single-issue groups) understand that building a movement is more beneficial to their causes than singular devotion to their pet causes, I can?t take them seriously.?

?There is no issue ?much, much bigger? than abortion rights? responds fedupnyc in the comments. ?Roe v Wade is about the very humanity of women.?

Oh, those silly women ? I can never take them seriously either. If only they understood what?s really important! You can see them chasing their tails here on Mediagirl.org, Rox Populi, and Feministe.

Imagine if it were all about men. If men got pregnant, or even just ended up with the kids and a whole lot of downward mobility, maybe they?d be fighting bravely for the right to vasectomies. There?d be do-it-yourself vasectomy classes becasue the clinics were being blown up by mad-eyed fundamentalist militia.

Here?s a plan. Make a law that whenever a woman gives birth, a random guy who voted against abortion rights is selected from the population in her neighborhood. Force-feed him to be 30 lbs heavier, operate on him to make his boobs sag down to his belly & give him hemorrhoids, and tax half his paycheck for the next 20 years. Also: as an extra-refined torture, make him join the PTA.

No, wait. Here?s an alternate plan.
You know those pregnancy simulation vests? All guys should have to wear them for a few months, maybe when they hit 16 years old. At the *very least*. Nevermind simulating the hemorrhoids and lifelong downward mobility. The state?s brutal interference with their bodies should go a long way to scare ?em.

And to get the simulation vest thingie removed they should be required to travel to another state, run a gauntlet of Operation Rescue simulators, spend at least 500 bucks - or they have the choice of back-alley vest removal which involves a life-threatening unsanitary rectal exam with a coathanger.

That?s disturbing isn?t it? That packs a punch. I really shouldn?t say things like that. It?ll just alienate people! I shouldn?t sound like I want the government to have scary power over men?s bodies. That would be SO wrong!

A few thoughts about life in the age of the sound-bite. Why, when speaking to the nation that invented the t.v. dinner, would anyone use the phrase ?Global Warming"? Americans all secretly think it sounds like a dream come true. Not so with the phrase: ?Global Climate Destablization.? Likewise, ?Ozone Hole? doesn?t sound nearly ominous enough?most Americans secretly suspect ozone to be the problem. A better phrase: ?Punctured Oxygen Layer.? This is all so obvious that eight year olds should be laughing about it in Mad Magazine.

I sometimes think that the Left is losing the media war for the same reason nobody liked my film studies teacher in college. Whatever brilliant ideas he might have had were immediately disqualified by a humiliating nervous tic: He could never respond to his students without eventually relating everything back to ?the great poet Bob Dylan.?

On a lighter note, regarding the intelligence of the American public, two weeks ago I finally read an article that gave me hope. A study has shown that the average IQ in America has gone up dramatically among youngsters born in the last fifteen years. This was being attributed, of all things, to Harry Potter. (The people doing the study belonged to the less intelligent generation.) Funny. Just a few days earlier, I had read an article suggesting that, due to the phasing out of leaded gasoline in the seventies and eighties, the amount of lead in children has gone down by 8600 percent in the last fifteen years. Anyways, just surfing some food for thought.

I don?t have time to do justice to the subject, but I?d like to mention two events: this year?s Blogathon and the Blogher conference.

I participated in the Blogathon a couple of years ago. For 24 hours, I posted every half hour. For me this translated into nearly continuous writing with bathroom breaks & interludes of reading other people?s Blogathon entries. I didn?t sleep. I raised a few hundred bucks for charity through reader pledges. It was a wild rollercoaster of a writing exercise! It was writing as a spectator sport or as performance art. This year?s Blogathon looks exciting? I have only cruised a few of the ongoing 24-hour freakouts, revelations, streams of consciousness, explorations, and art projects, so this is not a ?best of? list. Take a look at:

Seeworthy?s 24-hour exploration of fat lib and body issues
Portraits for a Purpose: two artists draw portraits of each other every half hour, and post the results. Watch them go insane for hours!
Three Moms and a Single Lady - ?Four sexy ladies talking about sex?. It?s sort of touching and earnest. Oh, those ladies!
Disconnected - Driving around posting from a different hotspot for every post. On the Road! this guy doesn?t have a huge amount to say, or time to say it in, but you have to admire the extreme nerdiness.

The Blogher conference was a hoot. Reality and the recording of reality were happening at such a fast pace no one could keep up. I skipped all the political panels and talks about technology & instead went to storytelling, identity blogging, and mommyblogging sessions. What a lot of fierce mouthy loud activist right-on feminists! It was like flying an airplane into a hurricane. I?m still reading the fallout on blogs like I am Dr. Laura?s Worst Nightmare, Multidimensional Me, and .

I?m so out of touch that it surprised me that some women dissed the idea of mommyblogging as ?dumb arguments over whether to breastfeed or not.? Stuff like that, as if just because we were breeders and talked about it, we had no brains and as if everything we talk about must be takedowns of each other?s parenting. NOT. The mommybloggers were powerful strong women who never shut up. Never! Part of what makes it political to blog and be a mom is the immense pressure on women, once they breed, to be self-abnegating. Case in point, people think that blogging as a parent endangers children. ("What if some creep off the internet stalks your kids?") We heard stories like Alice?s from fussy - how one of her readers threatened to call Child Protective Services on her because she wrote about her 4 year old son?s penis. ?Try getting HIM to shut up about his penis,? she responded. Take my word for it, the pressure is huge on moms to stay out of public discourse, or to keep their mom-ness out of it and live out a schizophrenic divide that does no one any favors. What the mommybloggers think of each other is that it?s a brave political act to refuse to divide whatever else you?re writing about from your role as a mom and a feminist.

For example, Jo Spanglemonkey?s discussion of an obnoxious transphobic post by Ambra Nykol, a conservative Christian attendee of Blogher:

What I was thinking about Ambra was that she thinks she is exempt. She thinks that because she knows herself to be an individual, not actually reducible to her skin color or her gender (or god only knows how she thinks of herself: the mind boggles to think of the kind of self-co-opting and self-flagellatory participation in one?s oppression that is implied by her political affiliation) that she can rise above the kind of discrimination that might be aimed her way. She thinks, in other words, that it won?t happen to her.

A final note about Blogher: Everyone should take a look at Ka-Ping Yee?s nifty tool, Regender, which he developed the night before the conference. It lets you surf the web with pronouns and first names gender-swapped. I can?t recommend it highly enough! It?s mindbending to read the news, or just everything you normally read, with genders reversed. You can neutralize gendered language too; try the other buttons at the top of the page once you start surfing.

Ok, I was supposed to post yesterday and I forgot. Besides, I don?t have a whole lot to say. Though I did notice that one of my fellow bloggeteers below made reference to the infamous 1986 Incident at Lake Forest, which is well on its way to being enshrined in urban legend. The truth, as far as I can make out, is that when Mr.T bought his estate, he had all the trees cut down because of his allergies. And as someone who was up ALL NIGHT two nights ago with sneezing, watering eyes, and asthma, I sure as shit would?ve chopped down the offending tree that has done this to me if I had a chainsaw handy. The T-man said, in a 1993 interview with the Onion A/V Club:

?Back in 1986, I bought a mansion in Lake Forest, Illinois, and then I cut down my trees and the neighbors got mad. How dare my neighbors get mad about my property? But the issue wasn?t the trees, as if they don?t cut down trees; the issue was that I was the only black man moving to a town of about 15,000 people. Stuffy people. Some of them were rich, some of them barely scraping. Actually, the really rich people didn?t even say nothing. The people that got little houses, their house ain?t bigger than my garage. So I?m sort of the black version of the Beverly Hillbillies. My driveway?s about a block and a half long, most unusual for a black man to have.?

He did not, as some claim, chop the trees down to ?piss off the white man.? He chopped them down so he?d stop sneezing, and it was only the middle-class, striving white man who got pissed off. The very rich don?t feel threatened by other people?s tree-chopping habits. The anxious middle class do. If I had the time and energy, this could actually be a complex and compelling discission about race and class and entitlement over the environment. But I?m sneezing too hard. Anyone want to tak eit up, feel free?

The American Society for Journalists and Authors has changed its collective mind, and decided not to give Judith Miller the prestigious Conscience in Media award after all. The original vote to give her the award was a narrow one, but the new vote was unanimous. The society apparently yanked the award after looking at the whole of Miller?s career. Were they concerned by her hyping of incredibly flimsy evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Or maybe her hijacking of an army WMD search unit?

Actually, Anita Bartholomew had it right: the real reason not to give Miller the award is that she was protecting confidential sources who were trying to silence whistleblowers instead of blowing the whistle themselves. It?s a pretty basic distinction, and one the mainstream media seems to have forgotten. Back when I was starting out as a reporter, we were warned to use confidential sources sparingly and to be aware of their agendas if we did use them. If your source works for the government and is pushing the government?s agenda (or ditto for a corporation) then he or she is just a cowardly shill. Forbidding reporters from talking to off-the-record-but-official sources would be the first step towards cleaning up the putrid relationship between the media and the establishment.

Have you noticed, these last few years, the striking preponderance of wood grain in the ?fine arts"? Next time you go to a show at any contemporary gallery or museum or leaf thru an issue of Art Forum or any other trendy art magazine, keep your eyes peeled for: faux wood grain, actual chunks of wood grain, drawings of wood grain, or anything else either faintly or boldly suggestive of wood grain.

So, what?s up with the wood grain? Is it all a coincidence? In those arts we used to call the avant garde, which, whatever they are called these days, are still supposed to over-exert themselves and remain ever on the unfamiliar edge of the new, how could one ?original? or ?maverick? artist after another be inspired to use wood grain? Does this dangling signifier hold some key to the modern condition? Is it an inside joke? Clearly it is a trend?but in that case, is it *gasp* trendy?

& what does wood grain mean to the art world? Does it signify, um, Authenticity, which is not actually authenticity, but rather, um, the campy and ironic appropriation of ?natural? texture into the artificial ?canvas? of Big Art, as if to say, ?In our lives, as in art, the Authentic is dead"? Is this a reference to, or a recapitulation of, that by now ancient cubist piece by George Braques, the famous one, where he pasted a sort of hardware-store-grade linoleum wood grain panel onto his illustration of a chair, so that the fake real is glued onto his real fake? Yawn. Am I missing something?

The whole thing reminds me of the alleged time in the 80s when Mr. T, star of the A Team, bought a house with acres of lovely property in a lily-white wealthy suburb north of Chicago. For the benefit of his stuck-up neighbors, the week he moved in, he fired up a chain saw and took down all of the old beautiful trees on his property. But to really mess with his neighbors, he made sure to leave the ugly stumps. I myself am not into cutting down hundred year old trees, but of all the people working in wood grain, I appreciate Mr. T as truly an artist.

Just in time for you to be finishing up the latest Harry Potter tome, there?s the world?s cutest and most subversive web comic to read. It?s called ?HD Comic,? and it?s made by a friendly livejournaler who posts regular updates for many adoring fans. For anyone who is familiar with Harry/Draco fanfic ? in which fans recount the glorious, queer love affair between Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy ? this will be an amusing delight. For people who have no idea what I?m talking about, reading the comic will be like traveling to another planet where homosexuality is accepted by all and giant entertainment corporations don?t sue fans for creating their own stories using copyrighted characters.

Imagine a Ziggy cartoon entirely devoted to the snuggly, magical romance between a lightening-marked sorcerer and his devilish blond boyfriend. HD Comic is sweet, friendly, and happily queer. Every strip is a silly affirmation of love, with just a little bite to it. Check it out ? you may find yourself hooked.

The old news is that a lesbian couple were denied fertility treatments by their doctors back in 2000. Guadalupe Benitez was trying to get pregnant. Apparently, after charging Benitez and her partner for 11 months of fertility counseling and treatment, the doctors, Christine Brody and Douglas Fenton, refused to do the insemination procedure for Benitez, who sued them. Five years later, the lawsuit continues.

The is that the California Medical Association filed an amicus brief in support of the doctors who refused to treat Guadalupe Benitez. Here?s the CMA rebuttal to the GLMA press release. Then - Lambda Legal rants up a storm right back at the CMA.

Whatever you think about gay marriage, assimilation, breeders, and people?s right to insurance coverage for IVF; put that aside for a moment and think about the California Medical Association defending a doctor?s ?free exercise of religion.? Doctors can?t legally refuse a patient based on sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or transgender status. But they can refuse a patient for not being married. Nice end run, fundie sleazebags!

Is this a ?right of conscience?? How come ?conscience? so often means ?control over women?s bodies? and fertility? You can?t have a baby? you have to have a baby? we won?t fill your birth control prescription because you?re not married? we?ll sterilize you because you?re not married. Oh, and by the way, if you?re already pregnant, remember that God meant you to suffer labor pain & hope that your anesthesiologist doesn?t have a religious conscience.

The world of IVF, fertility treatments, and IVF is brutal and strange. I began to intersect with it in 1998 or so, after having a miscarriage. Then I had an ectopic pregnancy and blew out a Fallopian tube. I found out why many women don?t talk about miscarriages. Everyone had an opinion on whether I should be pregnant, what was best, what was ?for the best,? what I should do and what I should feel. Another thing I hadn?t realized was that a miscarriage with complications was as expensive as private adoption; around $10,000. That?s also about what a hospital birth or an IVF treatment costs. My insurance wouldn?t cover any investigation of why I had miscarriages until I?d had three in a row, as if to keep getting pregnant and miscarrying were a minor inconvenience.

Fertility/infertility blogs like A Little Pregnant and The Naked Ovary give the bitter, witty, details of the insanity women go through: obnoxious things people say, horrible things their doctors do, and their own emotional rollercoaster, hopes, doubts, and fears. I think it?s interesting that the blogging world has opened up personal discussion of pregnancy and fertility issues; it?s something that hasn?t been done anywhere else. We should talk about our miscarriages, abortions, pregnancy scares, birth control, tube-tying, and all that messy stuff.

While I ramble all over the map, here?s another pregnancy tangent for your enjoyment: the Annouen archive of LOTR mpreg slash fanfic. Yes - you can fulfill your need to read Elrond?s diary as he agonizes over his own magical elfy uterus and what he and Frodo?s baby is gonna look like and what it means for his career as head of the Council. And when universes collide, and Galadriel knocks up Voldemort? what could be better? And what would the CMA say about it?

The Califonia State Supreme Court recently ruled that you can sue your boss for sexual harassment not just when you are directly being pressured for sex, but also when the boss? sexual relationships with other employees prevents you from being treated fairly. The case involved the warden of Chowchilla women?s prison, who was apparently sleeping with three of his employees concurrently. (I was going to say ?simultaneously", but that makes it sound way too much like a porn movie script.) ?the demeaning message is conveyed to female employees that they are viewed by management as ?sexual playthings? or that the way required for women to get ahead in the workplace is by engaging in sexual conduct,? wrote Chief Justice Ronald George, according to the CNN article above.

This ruling, methinks, does not do much to help out Dov Charney, creepy mustachioed CEO of American Apparel, who is being sued for sexual harasssment by three women in his employ. Charney has made a name for himself by selling socially-responsible American-made t-shirts on the one hand, and selling a sweat-soaked porny persona on the other. He readily admits to being overtly sexual at work, walking around in his undies, having an employee give him a BJ in front of a Jane magazine reporter, et cetera. He says it?s just part of his

But the ruling would seem to make Charney?s ?it was all consensual? defense is neither here nor there. It may have all been consensual, but this sort of work environment doesn?t bode well for the future job prospects of any employee who the boss doesn?t consider hot enough to bang. If he were a rock star, a photographer a la Terry Richardson, (who Charney seems to be channeling), or a writer, I wouldn?t give two shits about his under-the-desk masturbatory habits.

As the owner, operator, and beloved perk-bestowing benevolent overseer of a garment company, employing mostly young Latina seamstresses in a non-union factory, his ?first amendment right? to sleep with women who depend on him for their livelihood smacks a bit of droit du seigneur.

It?s not a good time to be a pornographer, or even just somebody who enjoys posting dirty self-portraits on the Interweb. First the Justice Department came out with of the 2257 rule. In the new version, anyone who posts on the Internet any images of ?an actual human being engaged in actual sexually explicit conduct? must maintain records of the performer(s). These records include actual name and any aliases, plus a driver?s license or other Picture ID. You must make them available during normal business hours (9-5) and post on your Web site a street address (not a P.O. Box) where someone can view these records. In other words, anyone who posts adult photos on the Web has to make the performers? personal info available to anyone, and has to maintain an address where they?re available during the day to talk to the feds or anyone else. The bad news is the main group challenging this hideous rule is the Free Speech Coalition, which seems mostly interested in gaining minor concessions that will help big adult companies ? such as more exemptions for porn made overseas. (See the FSC?s for more about these concessions, which don?t help indy porn makers or small-time exhibitionists.)

And then a federal appeals panel refused to find the Communications Decency Act unconstitutional ? even though the judges admitted it had led to self-censorship by photographer Barbara Nitke, and that Nitke had good cause to fear prosecution. The judges conceded that ?community standards? in the most conservative town in America could be used to squelch online expression in more permissive communities. But they said Nitke hadn?t given enough evidence about community standards to clinch the law?s unconstitutionality. The Nitke case may end up before a newly conservative Supreme Court.

As the New York Times article on the case notes, a California couple served federal prison time in 1996 after a Tennessee postal inspector downloaded some images from their bulletin board system and decided they were obscene.

I remember visiting Canada after that country passed the Dworkin-MacKinnon obscenity law. I was told several places that Roberta Gregory comix weren?t available because they were obscene. But you could buy XXX porn featuring California blondes with silicone breasts almost anywhere. That?s how these things work ? the 2257 crackdown and Nitke defeat won?t worry the big porno companies at all. They can afford attorneys and custodians of records and age-verification services. But if you ever post an image of yourself or someone else involved in ?actual sexual conduct? on the Internet, you could find yourself behind bars for a decent stretch.

Blog-a-thon tag:
EFF15


I hope you?re not reading this blog entry using somebody?s open wireless network. It could get you arrested for trespassing. Earlier this month, a Florida man was arrested for sitting outside somebody?s house in his car and using their open wifi network. What the hell? The network was open, people. But as Engadget reports, another guy was arrested for the same thing in the U.K., and found guilty last week of ?dishonestly obtaining an electronic communications service.? Law enforcement in both instances claimed that the problem with accessing an open wifi network is that it allows people to commit crimes anonymously. And yet we have only a very few examples of such crimes, comparied to the millions of examples of happy people using open networks without doing anything illegal.

All this bullshit about arresting people for sucking free bits out of the air with their antennae makes me think back to a time, many years ago, when I first realized the social injustices suffered by geeks didn?t originate entirely from groups of jocks and generic popular kids in the halls at my high school. When I was a teenager, many of my friends met on a local BBS where we could chat and exchange cracked software ("cracked? meant the copy protection had been stripped away by a friendly geek who thus enabled all the poor teenagers of Orange County to have amusing games and nifty applications). While we infringed copyrights blithely, without any opinions about the justice of the intellectual property system, we took hacking very seriously. It was an art, and a way of being conscientiously disobedient. Nobody who broke into systems ever defaced them. The idea was to go in, look around, and leave no trace.

Only a few of us were hardcore hackers, people who had seen WarGames and taken it to heart. But one pretty day in spring, a few people in my extended group of online acquaintences were arrested and had their computers confiscated by the FBI. These guys weren?t criminals, and they weren?t trying to steal military secrets. They were just exploring the nascent Internet, peeking into any computer network they could find to learn about it. I don?t want to say that they were as innocent as the guys I described earlier who were arrested for accessing open wifi networks. My online pals knew they were breaking into computers. Nevertheless, to my teenaged sensibilities, they were heroic explorers being punished for daring to ask questions and go where the adults didn?t want them to. How could the quest for knowledge be so violently censured?

This question has continued to haunt me twenty years later. As the Internet has grown into a fully-adult communications medium, packed with everything from motion pictures to poetry, our ability to access it and publish to it unmolested is more critical than ever. But government and private industry are working to erode the distinction between harmless exploration and crime. Most of my activities involving high technology could probably be deemed unlawful in the right court, under the right circumstances. I rip CDs, access the Internet from open wifi networks, download Doctor Who from BitTorrent, play DVDs using an ?unauthorized? media player on my computer, run port scanners on random computers I encounter on the Internet, republish sexual images online, and own a modded Xbox. I?ll leave it to you to unbury all the laws that could make any one of these activities unlawful ? suffice to say that they exist, and they?re being used right now to punish people who dare to use their technology in ways that defy convention. In my own humble way, I am still honoring those brave teenage geeks who were arrested in my neighborhood two decades ago.

With my work, I?m trying to create a world where fewer explorers will be punished for what they do, and for teaching others how to understand technology better. July marks the fifteenth anniversary of one of my beloved workplaces, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a high tech civil liberties group in San Francisco which fights to keep freedom of expression and privacy alive on the Internet. This blog post honors EFF on its birthday. May its team of attorneys, geeks, and activists make the future better than my past.

Elisabeth Lloyd, who recently published The Case of the Female Orgasm : Bias in the Science of Evolution, is blogging on the heritability of female orgasms:

The gist of her statement is that surveys and other studies haven?t shown any evolutionary basis for human female orgasm, and that in fact the evidence they have all points away from female orgasm being an adaptive trait.

In this post she criticizes a study by Tim Spector that concludes women?s ability to have orgasms during intercourse, and the ease and speed of those orgasms, is inherited. Lloyd?s cheerful ranting builds up a great head of steam. Nobly, she refrains from making fun of anything other than their faulty understanding of statistics and heritability. I?m not noble. I?m giggling madly picturing the Scientific Study of ?sperm upsuck? and time-to-orgasm of the Doublemint Twins.

to help beat the crap out of Spector et al:
??not only is female orgasm supposedly entirely genetic, it’s also a means of mate selection, and something you can blame your mother for.? Dr. Petra points out that , with no evidence cited, Spector and his fellow orgasm survey analyzers think that female capacity for orgasm is ?probably inherited from the mother.? Petra also slams the Spector crowd for saying that women never or rarely having an orgasm with intercourse is ?sexual dysfunction? and that ?some women orgasm too quickly?. The implication is that if you?re slut enough to come too quickly (remember, this is with intercourse) then you aren?t going to be very good at ?mate selection? which is an evolutionary disadvantage. Er, what?

Rowan Hooper, writing for New Scientist, has a good summary of the issue. Hooper mentions three main theories to explain the evolutionary importance of female orgasm:
1) The wonderfully named ?sperm upsuck? theory: Orgasm?s motions give a shove to sperm, slurping it up closer to that mighty traveler, the ovum.
2) The man-tester theory: If the guy?s fiddly and patient enough to get his mate off, he is a better child-raising mate. This theory is mentioned often in the press but apparently there?s zero evidence for it.
3) The social bonding theory: Orgasms promote social ties and give an evolutionary advantage. I wish this were true and that we were more like bonobos, who have the best naughty housewife lesbian leg-humping child-raising co-ops ever invented.

Hooper?s article ends on a note of promising weirdness. What Spector is hoping for is to do pharmaceutical or genetic fixes so that women can have just the right number of orgasms in just the right way. Not so many as to be indiscriminatingly slutty, and not so few as to be labeled neurotic and frigid, or whatever the ?problem? is defined to be.

Not too long ago, when screening emails of prospective new roommates, one of the candidates described herself this way: “I work at a marketing firm, I love Harry Potter and Desperate Housewives. I’m also a total chore nazi in the kitchen, because a clean home is very important to me. It’s just the way I am.” I didn’t write back, because, well, if we squared off, we might have a conversation I’d regret:

Her: Hey, did you leave that dish in the sink?
Me: Hey, did you gas my relatives?

Why is it that this particular murderous regime became synonymous with a clean kitchen? Phrases like “chore nazi”, “kitchen nazi”, and “dish nazi” turn up lots and lots of Google hits. At this point it’s become so widespread that if it bugs you, you’re liable to be branded as “too sensitive.” So, I’m not going to let it bug me. The more the merrier, I say. There’s nothing problematic or scary about turning a term for perpetrators of genocide into a morally neutral phrase meaning Neat And Tidy. Here is my roommate ad:

I’m a writer, I like music, and I’m a total Kitchen Klansman: I’m always scrubbing that grout to keep it white. I’m also a bit of a House Hutu, a Sink Serbian— an “Ethnic Cleanser” if you will! I like to keep a clean house, it’s just the way I am.

What? Stop being so sensitive.

Don?t blame bisexual African American men for the high rate of HIV among African American women, says a . The article, called ?Focusing ?Down Low?: Bisexual Black Men, HIV Risk and Heterosexual Transmission,? claims that only 2 percent of African American men are behaviorally bisexual. But at least one study showed ?black MSM? who were ?on the down low? were less likely to engage in risky behavior than men who were open about their activities.

?The flawed logic that is often perpetuated by the media is that ONLY homosexual men have HIV, bisexual men ONLY contract HIV through homosexual behavior, and the ONLY way black women contract HIV is through sexual contact with these bisexual men,? said one of the report?s authors in an interview.

The JAMA article doesn?t present any new research, and it?s basically just a survey of the existing literature. In exonerating bisexual African American men from HIV infections among women, the study reaches for other stereotypes, including the idea that blacks are more promiscuous or likelier to trade sex for drugs than other ethnic groups. Black heterosexuals are likelier to have unprotected anal than vaginal sex, the authors claim. They also point to a higher prevalence among African American women of vaginal douching, which may increase their susceptibility to HIV. They admit that the causes of HIV in the African American community need further study, but make a plea for people to treat the issue as more complex than just secretively bisexual men on a rampage.

Until recently, you could deduct the entire cost of a $100,000 SUV on your taxes, but you couldn?t deduct the cost of a vaginoplasty or other genital reconstruction surgery if you were transgender. Deirdre McCloskey, in her memoir Crossings, talks about writing checks for $10,000 or $12,000 knowing that her treatment ?was going to be paid out of her own pocket and was not tax deductible. Blue Cross and the IRS take a dim view of gender reassignment surgery.?

The reason for this was simple: the IRS viewed GRS as cosmetic, and the tax code, at 26 USC Section 213, states that cosmetic procedures aren?t deductible, unless they?re ?necessary to ameliorate a deformity arising from, or directly related to, a congenital abnormality, a personal injury resulting from an accident or trauma, or disfiguring disease.?

Transgender advocates had been fighting to change the IRS? stance on GRS for years, and now they?ve finally succeeded. The Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders announced that the IRS had reversed its position. Rhiannon O’Donnabhain can indeed deduct the costs of her 2001 surgery from her taxes because it was part of a legitimate treatment for her gender dysphoria. This doesn?t just open the door for other trans people to deduct necessary surgeries on their taxes (possibly including top surgery for transmen). It also means private insurers will have a harder time turning down coverage for GRS as well.

On the one hand, this is wonderful news. The government should be funding GRS for everyone who needs it. Many transwomen view GRS as a life-saving operation that enables them to feel free to live fully as women, without a body that retains such a crucial male signifier in our culture and without the fear of being exposed.

But at the same time, it would be nice if we could have achieved this victory without reinforcing the idea that all transgender people suffer from a ?deformity? or ?congenital abnormality.?

Deep in the heart of Texas, I have no idea what?s happening. But here?s what?s going on deep in the asshole of Texas.

A few miles from where I grew up in a corner of unincorporated Northwest Houston, the Spring school district is making kids of all ages carry RFID cards. The kids ?swipe? on and off the school bus and then in and out of the school building. The principal?s office and the local police can track the movements of individual kids on a little video-game like screen. Since the kids often forget their cards, there?s already talk of implanting them with chips just under the skin.

How cool is that? I love it when my dire predictions come true. I thought that chipping everyone in the country would start with kids, to ?protect? them — but I thought it was maybe 10 years off. Maybe it can be combined with cool tattoos and body piercings!

It would be great if an electric shock capability was built into the chip! The police chief in the Panopticon would ?joy buzz? anyone who pissed him off or cut class.

I?m just stupid and technophilic enough that I?d go get chipped on purpose. But forcing kids to do it WILL happen and it?s incredibly fucked up. The ACLU has an interesting Position Statement on RFID that?s worth checking out; the EFF wrote one too.

Meanwhile, thought crimes are being averted and diverted in Plano, which is deep in the diseased, swollen tonsils of Texas - sort of the early warning alert of the country?s immune system.

There, a small-town school has TWIRP Day, a tradition which in my East Texas high school was called ?Sadie Hawkins Day,? on which everyone reverses gender to some degree; girls are supposed to ask boys out to a dance. Apparently in Plano they take it a little further, and actually cross-dress for one day during football Homecoming Week. But no longer! Complaints from homophobic parents and the Liberty Legal Institute have changed Cross-Dressing Day into Camo Day, so that kids can be trained up for the Army. Because dressing like you?re going to kill somebody is moral, and crossdressing threatens the very fabric of society, or maybe the very thin crepe paper of society.

It?s not like queerness and crossdressing are diametrically opposed to war and killing. Think of the Sacred Band, or the male teenage fighters in Liberia who put on pink wigs and wedding dresses for the most incredibly disturbing battle uniforms ever. Maybe we can join up with the noble ?queers in the military? movements to promote crossdressing in the military. Crew-cutted jarheads will don regulation lipstick and those cute little dresses that WACs or WAVES or whatever used to wear. Embedded fashion magazine reporters will accompany our troops to war, chirping brightly about stockings that match one?s machine gun over their satellite phones.

Looking at management theory sites like this one makes you realize the true goal of management: to reprogram your brain. ?Most people don?t like change because they don?t like being changed,? the site?s author writes in between weird charts and highlighted buzzwords. In other words, the ?continous revolution? of business processes really involves changing your employees themselves, not just the way they work. Books like or The Unshackled Organization: Facing the Challenge of Unpredicability are designed to tell managers how to create more malleable employees. Reading these breathless blurbs, one gets the sense that managers ought to be pushing change even when it?s not particularly necessary ? just to win employees? acceptance of change and the submissiveness that comes with it.

It?s all part of how corporations are ?colonizing and redefining our private, inner world? to make us ?more pliable employees and consumers,? as Madeleine Bunting writes. (Scroll down past all the stuff about the pop group to get to the management theory stuff.) Corporations want to supplement their business logic with ?emotional logic? to capture the hearts of consumers, but also of their own workers.

So today?s Washington Post makes it sound as if John Kerry?s chance of becoming president is wafer-thin unless he:

a) wins Florida, or
b) changes the ?dynamic of the race.?

It?s amazing how quickly this has become the conventional wisdom. And yet who could be surprised? John Kerry hasn?t given voters any positive reason to support him over Junior, and in particular he has no credible plan for fighting terrorism and sorting out the mess in Iraq.

Kerry?s mistake was focusing entirely on his distant war-hero past, instead of on projecting a tough-guy image in the present. Americans want a badass who will spank Osama Bin Laden, not a wuss who earned some medals 30 years ago. Whether or not they agree with the occupation of Iraq, most Americans want to prevent another 9/11 and punish the people behind it.

Which leads to the Democrats? other problem: they?re acting as if George Bush is the bad guy. He?s not. Pretend for a second that this is an action movie, and that John Kerry is the renegade hero who?s going to take down the bad guy, no matter what it takes. The ?bad guy? in this scenario is Osama Bin Laden. Dubya is just the mealy-mouthed authority figure who tries to prevent the action hero from doing what?s necessary. He?s ?Dickless? in Ghostbusters. He?s the Commissioner who takes away the tough cop?s badge. He?s Cornelius Fudge.

OK, you can stop pretending now. Obviously, in the real world, John Kerry is Dickless/Cornelius. But if Kerry could reverse the dynamic and cast Bush in the Fudge role, we might actually get somewhere. Kerry wouldn?t have to mislead anybody, either. There are a lot of smart, constructive things we could be doing to crack down on terrorism that Bush hasn?t been willing to do, including nuclear non-proliferation and port security but also including a harder line with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia on their support for Al Qaeda. Couch it in language that makes it sound as if Kerry will take a tougher line with terrorists than Bush has. It may not be what progressives want to hear, but it?s probably the only way for Kerry to ?change the dynamic of the race? at this point.

It?s official: mixed race people are sexy. Reflecting our racially swirly world, the fashion and pop industries seek people whose beauty reflects a combination of ethnic strands. Sure, there?s more than a bit of ?exoticism? involved in these images (like Christina Aguilera wearing Arab/Indian drag). But for a media culture that scowled on interracial marriage a few decades ago to adore its fruits seems like a step forward. And pundits claim ?Generation Y? takes racial interweaving for granted.

?The current fashionable genes seem to be the super-mongrel genes,? writes blogger Martin Willett. He argues that as people learn to be ?color blind? in their attractions, they?ll automatically gravitate towards an image of desirability that blends attributes of different groups. In fact, anyone who looks racially pure will be deemed less attractive, he claims.

, models and escorts are flaunting their mixed-race status as an extra point of attractiveness. When the mainstream definition of beauty broadens or changes to include people who were shut out before, that seems like a good thing. But if a group that used to be singled out for abuse now gets singled out for its exotic sexiness, people are going to feel fetishized.

Drug companies are pouring rivers of cash into pathologizing the fact that you don?t have sex the way you?re supposed to. So perhaps it?s not surprising that there are more and more sexual diagnoses in the International Classification of Diseases. Doctors, including shrinks, use diagnoses from the ICD, created by the World Health Organization, to get paid for the work they do.

The ICD version 9 has only seven diagnoses for sexual dysfunction under the grouping of 302.7. These are psychosexual dysfunction, inhibited sexual desire, low libido, frigidity/impotence, male orgasm inhibition, female orgasm inhibition, and premature ejaculation.

The newer set of diagnoses, known as ICD-10 and revised in June 2003, includes all of these under the new F52 heading, although it replaces psychosexual dysfunction with ?hypoactive sexual desire disorder (including anhedonia),? and ?inhibited sexual desire? with ?sexual aversion disorder?. ?Frigidity? is now considered to be part of ?female sexual arousal disorder,? which is still the companion to male impotence. (And yes, it still uses the word ?Frigidity.")

But the new set of diagnoses also includes diagnoses for ?vaginismus,? ?dyspareunia? or other sexual dysfunction, all of which aren?t due to a substance or known physiological condition.

Meanwhile, a lot of are up in arms over the treatment of sexual minorities in the ICD-10. Flip to the psych section, and you?ll find gender identity disorders listed right after ?pathological gambling,? ?pyromania,? ?kleptomania? and compulsive hair-pulling. And then after GID, you find the dreaded F65, for paraphilias. Fetishism, transvestitism, exhibitionism, voyeurism, sadomasochism and ?frotteurism? are all sick, sick, sick behaviors. And just in case you thought maybe the F65 section was for things that are basically fine as long as they don?t keep you from holding down a job, the section includes F65.4, ?pedophilia.? This is sandwiched right between voyeurism and sadomasochism.

Oh, and just in case you?re wondering, according to an article in the British Medical Journal, these behaviors aren?t paraphilias if they?re incorporated into ?usual adult lovemaking.? (Except, presumably, for pedophilia.) BDSM only becomes a problem if ?such behavior becomes the erotic end in itself.? Consider yourself warned!

You can get the latest issue of other magazine at Tower Records for only $4 a copy, reduced from the $5 cover price. Tower is giving the magazine an extra promotional push by reducing the cover price and stocking extra copies of issue four. You can help by picking up a copy for yourself or a friend!

It?s not all that surprising that Republican Sam Walls lost his runoff for a state House seat in Texas after it was revealed that Walls liked to crossdress. A fairly recent picture of Walls in a wig and makeup started making the rounds during the election. And Walls served as treasurer of the local ?heterosexual crossdresser? society in 2000.

What is somewhat surprising is how many of Walls? friends and GOP colleagues came to his defense. OK, so they were saying things like, ?he?s not a murderer,? and ?at least he doesn?t smoke.? But there was definitely a recognition among many local Republicans that this doesn?t make Walls a bad person.

It was a little unnerving, though, when county GOP Treasurer Roy Giddens said he didn?t have a problem with crossdressing because ?J. Edgar Hoover was one of the greatest Americans who ever lived.?

When the quoted a prominent black preacher as saying he would ?ride with the KKK? as long as they opposed gay marriage, it caused a stir. It added to a lot of people?s feelings that the Republicans had succeeded in coopting African American religious and political leaders into standing on the front lines against same-sex marriage. (Of course, it sure didn?t help when the Advocate claimed that black people no longer face overt discrimination.)

But as usual in American politics, people are leaving class out of the discussion. Antagonism towards queers has a lot to do with the fact they?ve perceived as not just whites, but upper class whites. Though there are many working class queers (and queers of color) out there, the media routinely present gay men, in particular, as rich snobs. Shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy portray gays as snotty and materialistic, obsessed with haute couture and fashion. It?s a running joke on Frazier that everyone thinks Frazier and Niles are gay, because they act like wealthy aesthetes.

Confirming these stereotypes, the San Francisco Chronicle paints the same-sex newlyweds as mostly doctors and/or lawyers. It seems as though marriage is the one piece of middle class respectablitity that working class hets can still claim that queers can?t, and now that?s being taken away.

It all plays into the Republican strategy to divert class warfare from economic issues to cultural antipathy. George Bush seems to have learned one thing from his openly patrician dad: act like a working stiff, and people will forget your silver spoon and ties to the mega-rich. If queers succeeded in projecting an image that wasn?t so snobbish, they?d not only improve their own lot, they?d hand the GOP a major setback as well.

The other day I read a newsgroup post that said Mariposa County sheriff was indicted for something or other, and might have to spend time in his own concentration camp-style jail. Apparently, this was wishful thinking, since I couldn?t find any reliable reports to back it up. But by the time I?d gotten to the bottom of that rumor, I?d already wasted too much time reading up on the guy not to write something about him.

Although he hasn?t been arrested for anything ?America?s Toughest Sheriff? has been accused of assault and faced numerous lawsuits involving harassment and wrongful death.

But Arpaio is most famous for his horrendous jail conditions. He made inmates wear pink underwear and black-and-white striped uniforms, work seven hours a day with only two meal breaks, and boasted that he?d slashed meal costs to only 40 cents per prisoner per day. And he replaced jail cells with Korean war surplus tents. Inmates complained of rotten food and unsanitary conditions, but he responded, ?If they don?t like it, they shouldn?t come back.? He boasts of creating the first all-woman chain gang and says he plans to set up the first all-child chain gang.

He also created a cult of personality around himself, selling ?official? souvenir pink boxer shorts with his name on them. You can also buy Joe Arpaio bobble heads.

But maybe the person who said Arpaio had been indicted was thinking of Davidson County, NC sheriff Gerald Hege, who also calls himself the toughest sheriff in America. If toughness is measured in terms of amount of pinkness, Hege wins hands down. No pink undies for him: he made his name with bright pink jail cells and paramilitary uniforms for his staff. But Hege was indicted for embezzlement and obstruction of justice. His pay has been suspended and is facing removal from office. But he still has time to worry about a local parody newspaper.

Harlan Ellison won a slight victory in his battle to destroy the Internet.

Ellison sued America Online a couple of years ago, after a guy Stephen Robertson posted some of his stories on a Usenet group called alt.binaries.e-book. AOL wasn?t Robertson?s Internet service provider, nor did he use AOL for Usenet access. But AOL gave its users access to Usenet (just like most other halfway decent ISPs) and cached Usenet posts for a couple of weeks. So Ellison claimed AOL was helping to rip off his works.

A District Court shot down Ellison?s suit, saying that a 1998 law protected AOL from liabilities. But now an Appeals court has overturned part of the District Court ruling and sent it back for more consideration. If the District Court decides AOL isn?t protected, it could make life difficult for ISPs everywhere.

In the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, Congress gave ISPs safe harbors from litigation for four common activities, including ?system caching? and ?information residing on systems or networks at the direction of users.? But you only get to take advantage of these safe harbors if you take reasonable measures to curb copyright infringement, including terminating repeat infringers.

AOL messed up ? the ISP changed the email address for reporting copyright violations from to . AOL forgot to notify the Copyright Office of the new e-dress for months, and didn?t check the old addy.

So the Appeals Court partly agreed and partly disagreed with the District Court ruling that let AOL off the hook. The Appeals Court found that AOL couldn?t be liable for contributory infringement (helping someone else to break copyright law) because AOL didn?t profit from it. But it?s not so clear-cut that AOL is protected from litigation by the DMCA safe harbors, due to its bumbling copyright protection measures.

If AOL?s incompetence leads to a new ruling that the DMCA safe harbors don?t protect it after all, this could be an important precedent that leaves other ISPs open to copyright lawsuits for passive activities like offering Usenet access.

Deciding that ?Jr.? or ?the second? was passe, ?engineering geek? Jon Blake Cusack decided to name his son Jon Blake Cusack 2.0. Cusack, a self-employed designer, spent months convincing his pregnant wife to go along with the idea, says USA Today. No word yet on whether Version 2.0 is free of that annoying ?hubris? bug.

Apparently, the capture of Saddam Hussein failed to spark the expected Wall Street rally. For some unknown reason, investor confidence in the bleary U.S. economy didn?t explode just because we nabbed a sick old mass murderer.

But not to worry ? stock analysts foresee a much more satisfying Dow bounce if we hook Bin Laden.

It?s hard to imagine an American political leader proposing to screen political candidates for marital faithfulness as Somchai Sunthornwat, chairman of Thailand?s Thai Rak Thai party has done. But it?s even harder to imagine American politicians clamoring against the proposal on the grounds that infidelity is natural, as many Thai members of parliament did. Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has voiced cautious support for the monogamy requirement, even as he works to legalize prostitution and gambling.

Thaksin ? who?s claimed victory in Thailand?s war on drugs ? says that casinos and brothels are part of reality and should be brought ?above ground? as part of an ?entertainment complex.? In other words, malls. It?s interesting to see how the battle over family values plays out in a country that practices Theravada Buddhism. As one commentator points out, ?law vs. morality is a long-running debate with no end in sight.? Kamol Hengkietisak notes that most of the things Buddhism considers a vice aren?t actually illegal, including being lazy and having bad friends.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney, the Mormon governor of Massachusetts, claims that thousands of years of ?history? speak unanimously toward the rightness of marriage equalling one man, one women, no ifs or buts. Apparently, his history book is a very thin and highly selective one, probably with lots of pictures and a few captions.

Remember how your mother always told you bullies were weak and insecure? Turns out it?s not true. A study of nearly 2,000 kids by UCLA researchers found that bullies are strong psychologically and receive lots of props from their peers. Victims of bullies are ostracized and psychologically damaged, but kids who are bullied and also bully others tend to be the most damaged of all. On the other hand, the UCLA study, published in , also suggested that other kids didn?t really want to hang out with the bullies, but merely treated them as ?cool? to avoid becoming victims themselves. The other striking thing about the study is how prevalent bullying was ? 22 percent of kids had bullied, been bullied, or done both.

It?s one of those rallying cries that means almost nothing: ?Small business.? What is a small business? The definition changes drastically depending on the political aims of the person using it. Even though the term conjures up an image of that tiny mom-and-pop bead store on your block that constantly skirts the edge of Chapter 11, it can include so many different businesses as to be meaningless.

The Small Business Administration defines a small business as ?one that is independently owned and operated and which is not dominant in its field of operation.? In other words, not part of a corporate giant, and not the 800 pound gorilla in its field.

This vagueness lets President Bush claim that his tax cuts give an average of $2,042 to every small business owner, when in fact . Meanwhile, another oddity of Bush?s tax cuts lets small business owners deduct $100,000 of the cost of a new SUV, whereas they could only deduct around $10,000 of the cost of a new Lexus. This is a tweak to an old tax break from the 1940s intended to help small farmers buy tractors and pickup trucks.

The point is not just that vagueness about what constitutes a small business lets fat cats roll in dough while genuine mom-and-pops are going under. The real point is that the Republicans have successfully portrayed themselves as the party of small business when they?re really on the side of big businesses. A Democrat who proposed genuinely pro-small business policies, including a change to the Alternative Minimum Tax and an end to double FICA taxation for self-employed people, could position himself or herself as revolutionary, moderate and pro-businesses owners, all at once. And the cost could come out of some of those SUV-sized tax breaks for the big guys.

At first glance, when you hear of Stephen Tidwell insisting that he should be called a ?sexually oriented offender? instead of a ?sexual predator,? you wonder why a rapist is splitting hairs. Is this a new form of political correctness for sex offenders?

No, it turns out. We?ve created a byzantine system where mind-numbingly small distinctions between assailants actually make a huge difference. It started because of laws requiring local authorities to register and track certain kinds of sex offenders. Because the authorities don?t have the resources to do this, they?ve figured out ways to apply it only to certain types of offenders. But the task of assigning classifications to these felons is, in itself, daunting and enormous.

Hence ?human error? like Tidwell?s incorrect label. Also, according to the Boston Globe, the Massachusetts Sex Offender Registry Board is so backed up with trying to classify the state?s sex perps that it may take years just to figure out which ones are dangerous enough to warrant a warning to local parents. Partly this is due to legal challenges. In Massachusetts, the least dangerous offenders aren?t publicized, the slightly more dangerous ones are publicized only if someone requests the information and the identities of the most dangerous are broadcast far and wide.

To make the classification process easier, legislatures are automating it as much as possible. A paper in the Buffalo Criminal Law Review criticized the prevailing form of actuarial justice, where courts try to come up with formulae and rules of thumb for determining which offenders are most likely to repeat their crimes. The problem with these risk tables is that they assume that certain types of offenders are doomed to slide back into bad behavior. They also ensure that people accused of those types of crimes won?t plead guilty, for fear of a lifetime of having their names in the paper.

In other words, all of this nitpicking over labels happens because we have no way of knowing which rapists and abusers will come back to the well. Instead of acting like insurance companies trying to predict a flood or fire, the authorities need to use a combination of treatment and assessment to identify the likely recidivists. But instead, to make our ?blunderbuss? approach (as the Review paper calls it) possible, we have to resort to a bizarre taxonomy.

Hooray for Bubba, the sex-change fish! Bubba, a member a rare and endangered species of grouper, was found in a bucket 16 years ago and brought to Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. Back then Bubba was a girl, and the aquarium kept him because of his rarity. Due to a process known as ?protogynous hermaphroditic,? Bubba became a boy ? and one of the stars of the aquarium. Unfortunately, his keepers discovered a tumor on Bubba?s head in 2001. Now, thanks to a ground-breaking operation involving a tumor removal and a pigskin graft, the doctors have been able to treat Bubba. Who?s doing fine, by all accounts.

A federal judge ruled that high school authorities violated Bretton Barber?s First Amendment free speech rights when they told the 17-year-old to take off his T-shirt and go home. Barber was wearing Kersplebedeb?s famous T-shirt that depicts George Bush with the words ?International Terrorist.? Now the Dearborn, MI high school must allow Barber to wear his shirt to school, thanks to a suit by the ACLU.

And yes, this is the same T-shirt that caused PayPal to shut down Kersplebedeb?s PayPal account back in April based on a highly selective application of PayPal?s policies. (PayPal restored the account after a week?s worth of angry emails from activists.)

DNA evidence from the crime scene indicates that the man who strangled Toronto transgender sex worker Cassandra Do also raped another sex worker (a genetic female) in 1997. The 1997 rape victim was able to provide a detailed description of her attacker. That?s great, because now the police have a lot to go on in tracking down the murderer. But you have to wonder if Cassandra Do would be alive today if the police had bothered to go after this guy in 1997. Of course, he might have served his prison term and been back on the streets by now if they?d caught him back then.

Do the Democrats actually have any popular positions? You have to wonder, given how unwilling the ten presidential candidates have been to propose any new ideas, and their ferocity in attacking Bush?s policies without proposing any alternatives. Now that Bush is weakened in the polls, it seems as though the major Dems believe, not that the American people are ready for new ideas, but that they can defeat Bush merely by pointing to his mistakes.

Much has been written about the Democratic malaise in the past few years. Commentators cite the fact that unlike Republicans, who can feed red meat to their more extremist elements (the Christian right, corporate bigshots and Tom DeLay-style nutjobs) while presenting a moderate face to mainstream America. Meanwhile, the Democrats have to bend over backwards to avoid even the slightest appearance of ?pandering? to interest groups like unions, environmentalists, queers, minorities, etc. The result is a world where Republican extremists like DeLay are taken seriously when they spout off, while all but the most jejune progressives are dismissed out of hand.

What to do? I?ve thought for a couple of years that the Democrats need their own version of the ?Contract With America,? which Newt Gingrich used to take over Congress in 1994. A list of positive steps the Democrats would take if they were in charge. If the Democrats can?t come up with a list of a dozen intiatives that would please their hardcore supporters and appeal to mainstream Americans, then maybe the party really is dead and it?s time for everyone to go Green.

People can quibble about what a Democratic ?Contract? would contain. But does a pretty good job of laying out some basics. Fiscal responsibility, real environmental protections, reduced dependence on foreign oil, etc. Some of the proposals are a bit vague and there?s not enough stuff about women?s rights, queer rights, workers, etc. But it?s a start.

If enough hardcore Democrats came up with a list of initiatives and demanded that all national Democratic candidates sign on ? much the same way that all Republican presidential candidates in 2000 had to sign a pledge not to raise taxes ? then the party might actually begin to generate some enthusiasm. Of course, you?d risk blunting the policy differences between the candidates. But it?s not as if those differences are particularly noticeable now, is it?

An Australian appeals denied an exemption to equal opportunity laws to LesFest, a lesbian gathering that happens in Daylesford, Victoria. The organizers of one of the country?s biggest Lesbian gatherings asked for the right to restrict the festival to female-born lesbians. LesFest spokesperson Anna Holland-Moore insists there?s a difference between lesbians who were born female and those who were brought up male. She says the gathering ought to be able to restrict its attendance to allow attendees to ?consolidate our culture?.

The organizers also wanted to ban boys over eight and non-lesbian girls over 15.

In Holland-Moore?s view, the objection of transgender lesbians to the ?woman-born lesbian? requirement is a ?technicality.? In her comments, she sounds a bit clueless, asserting that ?transgendered lesbians? and ?transsexual lesbians? are ?a different kettle of fish? from each other. She also announces that the ?homosexual community has quite a strong queer coalition.?

?Now you?re not gay and lesbian; it?s queer politics now - and the queer mob seem to want everyone to be the same and to be all inclusive,? she complains. Allegedly the LesFest request is the first time anyone has asked for an exemption to Australia?s non-discrimination laws based on ?gender identity.?

The festival will either reapply for an exemption or limit attendance to invitation-only, according to Al Jazeera. You have to wonder what Al Jazeera?s readers think of this imbroglio.

What?s really cool in youth culture today? Mixing libertarian/jingoistic conservativism with a porno aesthetic, according to this article in Newsweek online. Tim Wilson scanned half a dozen magazines, including Tokion, WYWS and Vice, and found a weird combination of explicit BDSM sexuality with homages to Pat Buchanan and G. Gordon Liddy. The makers of these popular magazines identify with conservatives? ?outcast? sensibility and indifference to political correctness. Plus celebrating the invasion of Iraq dovetails nicely with articles about ?resentment sex? and images of naked women holding steaks to their black eyes. Apparently the chicks dig it.

Wilson?s theory is that the consumers of these magazines are trying to overcompensate the uncoolness of being straight, white and middle class by embracing the most shocking expressions they can find. My feeling is that he might have come up with a different analysis if he?d left out Vice magazine, which is by far the most extreme magazine, in both conservatism and in raunchiness, of the six he covers. There?s a reason I haven?t read Vice in ages.

We just approved the proofs for issue #3 of other magazine, and we think it?s now error-free and immaculate. Not to mention it looks gorgeous. Soon you, too, will be able to discover Brittany Murphy?s views on human cloning and eavesdrop on Ed Rosenthal telling Lynnee Breedlove about nymphomania. Not to mention mass crucifixion, Mercedes Lackey, Japanese Noise music, B-boys, fag hags on the wagon, and much more. All coming in October!

from other #1, June 2003: How many times will you disclose your gender today? If you read the Washington Post on-line in the morning, you will be asked to check ?male? or ?female? in a dialog box before you get the news. If you go to work or school, you have already told a human resources manager or admissions officer what your gender is. Along with a great deal of other information about you, your gender is permanently attached to your name in a database of your fellow employees or students. If use a public bathroom sometime during the day, most likely you?ll have to pick a gender in order to do it? read the rest here!

A fifteen-year-old high school student, Lisa McClelland, wants to start a ?caucasian club? at her high school because she doesn?t feel like she fits into any of the other clubs. She sees her club as an alternative for people who feel like they don?t belong in the Black Student Union or other race-based clubs. She wants to create, according to the San Jose Mercury News, ? a haven for those who don?t fit into such categories.? Apparently, McClelland is mixed-race.

It?s funny that she would choose ?caucasian? as the umbrella term for people who don?t see themselves as any particular race. This was exactly what European immigrants of the nineteenth century chose to do as a way to erase their national differences and form a new, ?American? community. Of course, we all know that whiteness didn?t turn out to be a very inclusive category in the end. Hard to say if McClelland is calling for a new kind of reactionary race politics or if she?s just clueless. Why didn?t she start a club devoted to a hobby or something if she didn?t like the idea of racial clubs in the first place?

Various FTM activists have pointed out that it?s way harder to get breasts removed than it is to get breast implants inserted. The former procedure requires a psychological evaluation in many places, but anybody can walk into a plastic surgeon?s office and plunk down the cash for a boob job.

Now a team of Dutch researchers has suggested in a British Medical Journal article that maybe women seeking breast implants should have psychological screening as well. The researchers looked at 3,521 women who?d had breast implants and found they were three times as likely to commit suicide as other women in their age group. Whether the disappointment of life with bigger breasts led these women to kill themselves or women who are predisposed to suicide are more likely to get implants in the first place remains a mystery. Of course, we?re only talking about 15 suicides versus 5 suicides in the general population. But last week, a Finnish-American study found similar results, the third study in a row that found a breast implant-suicide link, according to .

Not surprisingly, the Aesthetic Surgery Association rushed to condemn the Swedish study as bad science and called for more research. It doesn?t appear the Association has had anything to say about the confirmatory Finnish study yet.

Beware, transgender travelers! The Department of Homeland Security has identified men who dress as women as a potential security risk. In its latest press release, the DHS says that terrorists may use ?novel methods? to evade detection. In particular, ?Male bombers may dress as females in order to discourage scrutiny.?

This means that anyone who is obviously transgender is going to be a major target for searches and harrassment. It also may increase public fear of TG people. But most of all, it seems slightly ludicrous: obviously, whoever thought crossdressing would ?discourage scrutiny? hasn?t talked to too many trannies.

Ewen McGregor says he feels like a girl compared to his macho fighter pilot brother. The actor ?admits his role as a thespian makes him feel effeminate when he considers the death-defying duties performed by his brother.? McGregor points out his brother is doing a ?manly thing? whereas I wear make-up for a living.?

Legal minds like numbers. They prefer the ?bright line? to the blurry curve. This causes problems in cases where things are hard to define precisely.

Like ?mental retardation.? Last year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states could not execute people who were mentally retarded. The Supremes left it up to states to define mental retardation for themselves, but noted that many mental health experts consider anyone with an IQ of less than 75 to be retarded. Never mind that the IQ test is notoriously subjective in itself, and the same person can achieve wildly different scores on multiple tests.

The state of North Carolina decided to use the number 70 as its magic divider between the killable and the retards. If your IQ is 69, you get to live. If it?s 71, you don?t. The state also chooses to look at factors like ability to function in society. But as some recent questionable cases prove, it?s hard to agree on who is fair game for the state?s axe. Take Travis Walters, who scored as low as 64 in one IQ test and qualified for Social Security payments from the federal government on the grounds that he was mentally disabled. But Walters also held down a job at one point and had a girlfriend. Apparently the ability to date proves that you?re sharp mentally.

The country prosecutor argues that 70 is too high a cutoff number, and Walters did score a 72 on one of his IQ tests. But nobody?s questioning the wisdom of using arbitrary numbers to judge ripeness for slaughter in the first place.

Apparently someone has coined a new word for people who aren?t transgender and who have a socially condoned gender identity. We?re now supposed to call such people cisgender, which sounds a bit like they have cysts or something. The idea is that defining the majority as other than ?normal? or ?default? will make transgender identities seem less like aberrations, and more like equal alternatives. Of course, it?s unclear how much power word games have to change most people?s perceptions.

Psychologists and social scientists have piled up tons of data on the ?cross-race effect,? which is pretty well accepted as fact now. In a nutshell, people are more likely to recognize (and correctly identify) a face of someone who belongs to the same race than the face of someone from another race. One study of 15 Latino students found the students were much more likely to recognize Latino faces than black faces. The study also found that this effect depends on the ?perceptual categorization of race.? The researchers used ?racially ambiguous? faces and still the subjects were more likely to recognize the ones they believed were Latino.

Now a new study finds that kindergartners and third graders are less likely to be able to pick someone out of a lineup if that person comes from another ethnic background. The study seemed a bit simplistic, but it did suggest that even at a young age, perceived outsiders blur together much more.

What the research doesn?t seem to do is explain why the cross-race effect happens. Is it unconscious racism, a belief that all people outside your ethnicity look alike? Is it that when you see someone of another race, you?re registering them as a member of that race instead of registering the facial characteristics you?d be noticing about someone of your own race? We need to know, not least because the cross-race effect makes accusers much more likely to provide a false identification of a criminal suspect of another race.

Legal newspaper The Recorder today that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that psychiatrists cannot testify against their clients in court. The decision grew out of a lawsuit in Oregon where a man was convicted on two counts of threatening to murder FBI agents based on two pieces of evidence: some things he said to a telephone operator, and his confession that he was having murderous thoughts in a therapy session. After the court?s decision, he was acquitted on the second count.

What this means is that while counselors/therapists/psychiatrists are obligated to report clients who seem homicidal or suicidal, information from their sessions with the client will not be admissable as evidence in court. On the one hand, this seems like a good idea: it will reduce the number of people convicted of thought crimes and (as the judges wrote in the majority opinion) it will allow people to get more therapy rather than making a decidedly non-therapeutic trip to prison. But the problem is that counselors who have genuinely dangerous patients will have to rely on law enforcment to find more evidence before they can take custody of a possibly suicidal or violent person. In some cases, perhaps involving angry Muslims, I could imagine law enforcement being eager to gather this extra evidence (unanswered question: does testimony from a shrink constitute enough evidence to merit a wiretap?). In other cases, though, I could see law enforcement dragging their feet, telling a shrink that just because some guy says he feels like raping his girlfriend that doesn?t mean he needs to be investigated.

So I?m on the fence with this one.

According to the archives of NPR?s Fresh Air program, Gene Simmons ?declined to give permission? for the Fresh Air web site to archive the audio of his interview with Terry Gross. (You can read a transcript here. Of course, that interview has been blogged to death, but what?s interesting is that half the people who discuss it believe that Terry Gross put Simmons in his place, and the other half see Gene as the undisputed winner in their smackdown. (Is it the battle of the sexes? Of the classes? Gene keeps talking about Terry being immersed in books and dust mites, Terry keeps asking Gene about his codpiece.) But if it?s true that Terry was willing to have the audio on the NPR site and Gene wasn?t, then that really settles the question of which of them felt he or she came out on top. (Of course, NPR may not have tried too hard to get Gene?s permission.)

It?s hard to imagine a more tawdry coda to the chest-beating legend of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway?s son Gregory, author of ?Papa: A Personal Memoir,? had a sex change and became Gloria Hemingway in the 1990s. Gloria blamed her father?s ?super-masculine? image for her need to transform. Then, in 2001, Gloria stripped naked on the street and got arrested. Soon after, she died of a heart attack in jail. Now, Gloria?s ex-wife Ida is claiming that Gloria and Ida remarried in 1997 (after divorcing in 1995) and Gloria left Ida all her money in a new will.

The whole controversy predictably raises questions about the legal status of transgender people, much like the famous lawsuit over whether transsexual J?Noel Gardiner could inherit part of her husband Marshall?s $2.5 million estate. Gloria?s kids are claiming that because Gloria was a woman in 1997, the second marriage to Ida was a same-sex union and therefore invalid. The judge in the case sounded gleeful to be tackling such ?cutting edge? topics.

Leaving aside the considerable Jerry Springer-meets-Moveable Feast titillation factor, it seems really sad that one of the main ways that society tries to grapple with serious issues of gender and social status is through a prism of greed. Ernest?s grandkids wouldn?t be affirming Gloria?s femaleness if they didn?t stand to inherit all her dough as a result.

Update Oct. 3, 2003: According to press accounts, the grandkids and Ida have settled out of court.

Identity theft, questioning sexuality, pickpocketing? and prog rock?

A man who impersonated Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy has been arrested in New York, the band?s web site claims. Not only did the unnamed man steal Portnoy?s identity using an uncanny knowledge of his band, his drum beats and his business contacts, but he also stole from people once he gained their confidence. One post on the band?s site claims that the faux Portnoy would hang out in bars and tell men he was ?questioning his sexuality? and uncovering memories of childhood sexual abuse. He would then go somewhere and ?get it on? with his victims ? then steal their wallets and whatever else he could grab, including house keys.

The real Portnoy is happily married, doesn?t drink, and works hard on producing ponderous two-CD sets of arty Pantera-inspired rock for the band, according to the official site. It?s interesting to see the different forms identity theft can take ? the imposter didn?t know Portnoy?s social security number or bank account number, but he still managed to do plenty of damage. And he showed just how slippery identity is these days ? how many people in New York now believe Portnoy is a gay kleptomaniac?

Wale wanted to escape anti-gay persecution in west Africa, so he fled to Russia. There, he fell in love with Sergei and the two of them moved in with Sergei?s mother. But everywhere Wale went, officials and others harrassed him as a ?monkey? ? not to mention the abuse he and Sergei received from people who knew they were gay. They managed to find a Scandanavian country that would accept them as both refugees and as a married couple. But before they could get away, Wale?s body was found ? below the apartment?s fifth-floor window, his neck broken.

The story of Wale and Sergei reads like a tragic romance, but also something out of an older time, when we lived in a bipolar world. A world full of people trying to escape from the Nazis or Communists to the ?free world.? Only now the free world is a place where people like Sergei and Wale can live openly and safely. And at this moment, it?s hard to predict whether the U.S. will be part of the ?free world? ? or someplace that people flee.