Womens Rights in the 21st Century

I found a fascinating post on one of the blogs I regularly read: Weekend Diversion: An Amazing Group of Women. It is mostly about the Asgarda women of the Ukraine, a small group of (mostly young) women working for the rights of women in an environment plagued with sex trafficking and other abuses of women, Eastern Europe. There is also a video of Loudon Wainwright singing "Daughter". Well worth clicking over to hear the song and see pictures of essentially a modern tribe of Amazons. Meanwhile, I wondered if the United States is the only nation in which there are so many groups of women actively protesting against rights for women. Like Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, who worked diligently to persuade women to vote against the Equal Rights Amendment, and continue to agitate to prevent any laws from passing that explicitly give women protections already enjoyed by men. Pro Life groups are also essentially anti-women's rights, and largely manned by women. It is basically a matter of whether the government or a women may legally decide who or what may live within her body and what may be expelled. Men already have this protection, granted by their reproductively deficient bodies allowing them to claim any foreign internal organism as a hostile alien.

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Homeland Security seeks to “simplify” color warning system

Two weeks ago I briefly pointed out that Janet Napolitano, Secretary for Homeland Security, said that she wanted to reduce the level of fear in this country through improving preparedness for a terrorist attack. Now Homeland Security is seeking to do away with any pretense that we will ever be safe. Their latest proposal is to improve the "public credibility" of the system by"simplifying" the color scheme. If the recommendations are adopted, the new color scheme would consist only of yellow, orange, and red. Or, as Wendy McElroy put it, "the new levels are 1. Be Afraid, 2. Be Very Afraid, 3. Panic!" While I'm heartened that they at least admit that it's "institutionally difficult" to lower the threat level, I still don't believe that the color scheme is an ideal solution. Keeping one's citizens in a constant state of fear that they will be attacked is, I believe, one way for the government to keep the public's attention diverted from the causes of terrorist attacks-- namely, our governments policies. If we were to stop killing innocent civilians around the world, we may just find that people around the world no longer wish to kill us in retaliation.

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Idiocracy Plurubus Unum

It is refreshing to hear someone from time to time call something by what it actually is. Frank Schaeffer is a former evangelical christian whose father was one of the most influential in the budding fundamentalist movement back int he Sixties and Seventies. Schaeffer recounts his life in the memoir Crazy For God. This is a man was was there, involved, part of it. Doubtless many who did not snap out of it along the way think he's a traitor, that he's been possessed by Satan, that he is evil. Yet that still doesn't answer the criticisms he brings to the subject. A recent poll in New Jersey has revealed that one in three right wing voters believe Obama is the Anti-Christ. I will let the video take it from there. LaLa Land. That's about as accurate as one can be. What the fundamentalist movement has created of itself is a situation in which absolutely nothing can penetrate the wall of doublespeak and obfuscation they have built around themselves. They are a community living within a tautology, and they cannot allow themselves to see it. I agree with Schaeffer that it is time to encircle them and move on. But this is a democracy, wherein all voices have at least a theoretical right to be heard. We do not have a pat, rigorous response politically to the introduction of absurdisms into the public discourse. We waffle, we try to be polite (which they do not) we try to be reasonable (which they take advantage of and disrespect) we try to, ironically, turn the other cheek in the face of their fallacious onslaught of nonsense. As Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar....and sometimes an idiot is just an idiot.

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That OTHER guy: Alfred Russel Wallace

Darwin gets the lion's share of the acclaim, even though both Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace co-announced the discovery of natural selection to the Linnean Society in 1858. Thing are changing, and it's now time for Mr. Wallace to get a bit more of the stage. This, according to an in-depth article on Alfred Russel Wallace called "The Man Who Wasn't Darwin," in the December, 2008 edition of National Geographic. Reading the article I leaned that Wallace was by no means a one-trick pony. Rather:

[Wallace's] writings, on subjects from evolutionary theory and social justice to life on Mars, are coming back into print or turning up on the Web. He is recognized among science historians as a founder of evolutionary biogeog­raphy (the study of which species live where, and why), as a pioneer of island biogeography in particular (from which the science of conserva­tion biology grew), as an early theorist on adaptive mimicry, and as a prescient voice on behalf of what we now call biodiversity. That is, he's a towering figure in the transition from old-fashioned natural history to modern biology. During his years afield Wallace was also a prolific collector, a ruthless harvester of natural wonders; his insect and bird specimens added richly to museum holdings and the discipline of taxonomy. Still, most people who know of Alfred Russel Wallace know him only as Charles Darwin's secret sharer, the man who co-discovered the theory of evolution by natural selection but failed to get an equal share of the credit. Wallace's story is complicated, heroic, and perplexing.

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Ideology Be Damned!

This is the reason we need healthcare reform in this country. Crystal Lee Sutton has died at age 68 because her insurance company diddled and dawdled over whether or not it would pay for the medicine necessary to save her life. Don't know who Crystal Lee Sutton was? She was the real-life inspiration for Norma Rae, Sally Fields' excellent portrayal of a small-town union organizer who went to bat for workers' rights. This kind of thing should not happen. When profit---or overhead, however you wish to consider the problem---is placed ahead of life, those arguing against reform should hang their heads in shame. They cling to an ideology about free markets and consumer choice as though such things are part of the Ten Commandments (which most of them don't follow either) and always at the expense of lives. Dammit, people, we're talking about a system which should operate for people's benefit, not for its own. A system is simply a method of approach, a way of doing something, and if it can be changed once, it can be changed again if the reforms are found insufficient! It is no argument to reject reforms on the basis that the reforms might cause harm, since the present system is already causing harm. It is a foulness to our present system that many people find that in order to vouchsafe their own health or the health of their loved ones they must fight for the very thing they were told they had purchased in the first place. This is in no way different from lending predators who lied to people in course of borrowing money to buy a home. The average person has neither the time or expertise to understanding every clause and addendum in a complex contract and must rely on what he or she is told. Either you have insurance coverage or you do not. It should not come as a surprise after you are already sick and discover that there are codicils which protect the insurance company from having to pay out what in principle they obligated themselves to do if not by the letter of the policy then by the spirit of agreement with a customer. Yet thousands, millions of consumers daily learn to their dismay that they don't actually have what they thought they had bought. This is not a game. If the private sector is more concerned over profit margins than providing service, then they should lose the privilege of offering said service.

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