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The War on Women

You hear about this, and the very phrase conforms so perfectly to rhetorical excess that it can become misconstrued, misused and made to seem meaningless. But it is real, as this list demonstrates:

1,100

Total number of reproductive rights-related laws introduced by state lawmakers in 2011.

604

Number of abortion and reproductive rights-related provisions introduced at the state level as of June 1.

8.2%

The US unemployment rate.

0

Number of jobs created by wasting time debating hundreds of reproductive rights-restricting laws.

408,425

Number of children who were in the US foster care system at the end of 2010.

96,772

Number of those children with caseworkers who said they were waiting to be adopted.

4,230

Number of adoptable foster children who would not have stadium seats if you tried to put all of them into the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California.

25

United States’ ranking on Save the Children’s list of best countries for mothers.

0

Number of podium pounding speeches given by “pro-life” Congressional leaders on how embarrassing it is that the US has the fourth highest maternal mortality rate of any industrialized nation.

Between $2 and $6

Amount of taxpayer money saved for every $1 spent on birth control.

$11 billion

Cost of unplanned pregnancies to the US taxpayer — per year.

$11.2 billion

Amount Broadway musicals contribute to New York City’s economy per year.

Read the entire list. Weep, then wipe your eyes and get real.

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Hug the Monster

via Romm, an article about a metaphor to change fear into action and extinguish the panic so deadly in a great crisis that seems well, a little too familiar:

“Hug the monster” is a metaphor taught by U.S. Air Force trainers to those headed into harm’s way.

The monster is your fear in a sudden crisis — as when you find yourself trapped in a downed plane or a burning house.

If you freeze or panic — if you go into merely reactive “brainlock” — you’re lost.

But if your mind has been prepared in advance to recognize the psychological grip of fear, focus on it, and then transform its intense energy into action — sometimes even by changing it into anger — and by also engaging the thinking part of your brain to work the problem, your chances of survival go way up.

Around the world, a growing number of people are showing signs of hugging the monster of what the world’s experts have plainly shown to be a great crisis facing us all.

See. Toldya. It goes on:

Established scientists, community and government leaders and journalists, as they describe the disruptions, suffering and destruction that manmade global warming is already producing, with far worse in the offing if humanity doesn’t somehow control it, are starting to allow themselves publicly to use terms like “calamity,” “catastrophe”, and “risk to the collective civilization.”

Sooner or later, everyone who learns about the rapid advance of manmade global warming must deal with the question of fear.

For many years now, the worlds scientists and economists have depicted  upheavals in security plans, financial networks, and food and water systems due to the rapidity with which annual global temperature is rising as a result of excess carbon emissions.

Read the rest. Transform the crisis, indeed.

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Radical Solutions, Inc.

That’s some kind of dystopian corporation of the future, sort of like Executive Outcomes. Remember that? Now try to dig up that Harper’s article from 1997; it’ll learn ya.

So… you wouldn’t think that an article on eliminating college football would be relevant on a blog like this. But then you didn’t name your blog this either, did you? Oh, Wall Street Journal, reminding me that Eco also stands for economy:

Who truly benefits from college football? Alumni who absurdly judge the quality of their alma mater based on the quality of the football team. Coaches such as Nick Saban of the University of Alabama and Bob Stoops of the University of Oklahoma who make obscene millions. The players themselves don’t benefit, exploited by a system in which they don’t receive a dime of compensation. The average student doesn’t benefit, particularly when football programs remain sacrosanct while tuition costs show no signs of abating as many governors are slashing budgets to the bone.

I’m down with his argument in many ways, but this part of it reminds me of a near exact parallel with the sacrosanctity of military spending in our larger budgetary reality. It is Eliot Ness. It is untouchable, all other things being up for negotiated elimination. Which is itself a reminder of what our government is becoming: an insurance company with an army.

But, to the point about college football green and the NCAA’s reluctance to part with it. No solutions are just going to prevent themselves, until the sport completes its slide toward boxing – and with solutions like, who needs problems? The idea of a triple AAA minor league paid for by the NFL seems like a no-brainer and will only take a little getting used to. In business speak, they’ve already created demand for their product, and maybe even overshot that. Time to re-route the supply.

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May Day

How far removed are we from understanding our society? Sure, it’s easy to demonize labor unions, but what have they actually accomplished?

Perhaps the first nation-wide labor movement in the United States started in 1864, when workers began to agitate for an eight-hour day. This was, in their understanding, a natural outgrowth of the abolition of slavery; a limited work day allowed workers to spend more time with their families, to pursue education, and to enjoy leisure time. In other words, a shorter work day meant freedom. It was not for nothing that in 1866, workers celebrated the Fourth of July by singing “John Brown’s Body” with new lyrics demanding an eight-hour day. Agitating for shorter hours became a broad-based mass movement, and skilled and unskilled workers organized together. The movement would allow no racial, national or even religious divisions. Workers built specific organizations—Eight Hour Leagues—but they also used that momentum to establish new unions and strengthen old ones. That year, the Eight Hour Movement gained its first legislative victory when Illinois passed a law limiting work hours.

The demand for an eight-hour day was about leisure, self-improvement and freedom, but it was also about power. When Eight Hour Leagues agitated for legislation requiring short hours, they were demanding what had never before happened: that the government regulate industry for the advantage of workers. And when workers sought to enforce the eight-hour day without the government—through declaring for themselves, through their unions, under what conditions they would work—they sought something still more radical: control over their own workplaces. It is telling that employers would often counter a demand for shorter hours with an offer of a wage increase. Wage increases could be given (and taken away) by employers without giving up their power; agreeing to shorter hours was, employers knew, the beginning of losing their arbitrary power over their workers.

And that’s not merely a worker’s point of view.

via.

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Dead Malls

mall_dead

This adds a whole other dimension to the concept of Lake Eery:

A local billionaire built it, and they did not come. The South China Mall was the most ambitious and largest retail space every conceived in China, if not the world, when it opened in 2005. Constructed smack in the middle of the Pearl River Delta between Shenzhen and Guangzhou, about 4 million people live within six miles of it, 9 million within twelve miles and 40 million within sixty miles. Nonetheless, six years later, the South China Mall only maintains a 1% occupancy rate at best. This unabatedly empty temple to consumerism remains unfinished on top floors and is only sporadically visited thanks to the attached amusement park, Amazing World. For the time being dust and dismembered mannequins reign over the 6.5 million square foot venture. Although China might be the fastest growing consumer market in the world, the South China Mall reveals the vulnerability of this burgeoning economic giant. Also, check out this short film done on the place by Sam Green.

Without looking back through, I’ve written about this before… but, yikes. Not a whole lot to say, just noting the passing of an epoch, I would hope.

Via Romm.

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Graphic Inequality

Height

So… after stumbling upon a rather devastating piece by Hitchens on JFK and the Camelot business, I’ve been mining some other back issues of the Atlantic that I found around the house – must’ve had a subscription in 2006. I am no fan of that magazine – the trove seems to run out in 2007 – but this piece on inequality by Clive Crook is worth mentioning for a few reasons, not the least of which is the above graphic and his use of the 1% coinage from this, several years back. Surely things have gotten better, right?

In 1971, Jan Pen, a Dutch economist, published a celebrated treatise with a less-than-gripping title: Income Distribution. The book summoned a memorable image. This is how to think of the pattern of incomes in an economy, Pen said (he was writing about Britain, but bear with me). Suppose that every person in the economy walks by, as if in a parade. Imagine that the parade takes exactly an hour to pass, and that the marchers are arranged in order of income, with the lowest incomes at the front and the highest at the back. Also imagine that the heights of the people in the parade are proportional to what they make: those earning the average income will be of average height, those earning twice the average income will be twice the average height, and so on. We spectators, let us imagine, are also of average height.

Pen then described what the observers would see. Not a series of people of steadily increasing height—that’s far too bland a picture. The observers would see something much stranger. They would see, mostly, a parade of dwarves, and then some unbelievable giants at the very end.

As the parade begins, Pen explained, the marchers cannot be seen at all. They are walking upside down, with their heads underground—owners of loss-making businesses, most likely. Very soon, upright marchers begin to pass by, but they are tiny. For five minutes or so, the observers are peering down at people just inches high—old people and youngsters, mainly; people without regular work, who make a little from odd jobs. Ten minutes in, the full-time labor force has arrived: to begin with, mainly unskilled manual and clerical workers, burger flippers, shop assistants, and the like, standing about waist-high to the observers. And at this point things start to get dull, because there are so very many of these very small people. The minutes pass, and pass, and they keep on coming.

By about halfway through the parade, Pen wrote, the observers might expect to be looking people in the eye—people of average height ought to be in the middle. But no, the marchers are still quite small, these experienced tradespeople, skilled industrial workers, trained office staff, and so on—not yet five feet tall, many of them. On and on they come.

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Don’t think so

Climate games seem to take a turn for the weird, but not really:

At the beginning of 2012, I received an anonymous document in the mail describing what appeared to be details of the Heartland Institute’s climate program strategy. It contained information about their funders and the Institute’s apparent efforts to muddy public understanding about climate science and policy. I do not know the source of that original document but assumed it was sent to me because of my past exchanges with Heartland and because I was named in it.

Given the potential impact however, I attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information in this document. In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name. The materials the Heartland Institute sent to me confirmed many of the facts in the original document, including especially their 2012 fundraising strategy and budget. I forwarded, anonymously, the documents I had received to a set of journalists and experts working on climate issues. I can explicitly confirm, as can the Heartland Institute, that the documents they emailed to me are identical to the documents that have been made public. I made no changes or alterations of any kind to any of the Heartland Institute documents or to the original anonymous communication.

There are no rules for playing fairly. That was a period, right after that ‘y’. But the political landscape is laid all the more bare when the opposition (to climate change?) observes nothing but the mantle of lies, obfuscation and dependency on liberals to preserve rational debate:

You can’t have a”rational public debate” with people whose whole reason for existence is to obfuscate the truth by paying big bucks to scientist/whores for whom ‘scientific inquiry’ means first posing the question “How much does it pay?” to be followed (after a brief period of haggling) with “What do you want it to say?”. From there corporate fronts like the Cato Institute, the Hoover Institute, the Heritage Foundation take the scientific 3-card monte game that has been handed to them and they round the edges, smooth out the rough spots, couch the language  and cherry-pick the most easily digestible nuggets of bullshit which they dole out on 3×5 cards to Fox News, English tabloids, and an assortment of conservative bloggers and lesser whores who are paid to appear objective and thoughtful.

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Pink and Green

So… very much of the intertubes is all Komen all the time over the past 24 hours. What I did not know is that their ridiculous disaster scripted right out of the Republican b-school leadership playbook coincides with the release of this film:

Unbelievable lack of awareness. As T-Bogg says, hubris or stupidity. And you don’t have to choose just one…

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Self-deportment

Ask not what your country can do for you . Ask when you can get the hell out of your country:

This is the right-wing’s answer to the question of how you deport eleven million unauthorized immigrants: You don’t. You force them to “deport themselves.” Although immigration reform advocates would prefer a solution that involves a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants already here, Romney and his top immigration advisers believe they can remove millions of people through heavy-handed enforcement that makes life for unauthorized immigrants intolerable. This approach is notable for its complete lack of discretion and flexibility. Unauthorized immigrant parents with citizen children who need to go to school? Americans who are married to an undocumented immigrant who needs medical treatment? “Self-deportation” hits them all with the same mailed fist.

I would ask what the ___, but that would seem as though I (or you) haven’t been paying attention to these heartless clowns. In fact, the horse meant to carry the rider that has some idea and concern about the future of North American society left the barn long, long ago. I have no idea what they want the country to be like in 10 or 20 years, other than some 1950’s theme park America, which, even if this could be done, begs only more questions. Needless to say, that wasn’t a good time for many people.

And also, the very idea of justice and opportunity as the connection to a better future for them/us seems to have no meaning for the fearful among us. Their right to be fearful, constantly re-enforced by being, and being reminded to be, fearful is in heavy feedback loop mode, I guess blinding some of us to the suffering our laws inflict on the recipients thereof. But the notion that perhaps we don’t mean to be so vindictive and cruel, in addition to being shortsighted and unimaginative, seems to give some us a bit too much credit.