Linkety-linkety

[moominmuppet]

Feeling like warmed over crap today, but it should be a quiet one at work, thankfully. Also, X has managed to vanish herself in the house somewhere, and we haven't been able to find her in 24 hours. Frustrating, because it's not a reason to be legitimately deeply worried yet -- she does this every so often, and has yet to not be somewhere of her own choosing inside the house (at our old place, often inside the back of the couch, making the cushions purr!) -- but mildly stressful nonetheless.

On the positive side, if I didn't already mention it (I'm full of brainfog, I have no idea what I've said or haven't), Jer picked up Max Headroom!!!! Can't wait!

The Anatomy of a Call Out (And Why It Needs To Change) -- Really useful and relevant to me, in regards to my current disinterest in engaging on ontd_feminism, especially. The first linked article is also fascinating and gave me some good insight into my own activism tactics and weak points. I'm on the appeaser side of the scale, and have a very hard time dealing with nukers (I have a very hard time emotionally with conflict, and I wish I were better at that in general actually), although I fall on both sides of the logic bomber/emoter scale about equally. Paradox_dragon has a lot to say in the comments that I find additionally valuable, in terms of preventing this argument from swinging too far the other way, back to problems of expecting oppressed groups to smile nice and educate politely all the damn time (and it should be noted that this conversation is about tactics in activism, not a declaration of what those not functioning in an activist role should do in response to offense and hurt). As I've found in face-to-face activism work, the point that we need multiple different strategies and personality types in order to make the most progress rings very true to me. I think I've found it most difficult when I've been denigrated as 'not a real activist' simply because I don't use the same tactics as another person. Over the years, I've come to describe my primary activism technique as being educational in nature, rather than confrontational. It makes me good at dealing with some situations, bad at dealing with others, but on balance, I think it's the most effective path for me to take if I want to maintain my sanity and my interest in changing the world around me. It suits how my psyche and personal philosophies work, and it generally leaves me feeling more psychologically rewarded than punished for the experience. I neither expect nor want everyone to do things the same way I do, but I do think the questions raised about how "swarming" has been happening in the feminist blogosphere, and what that does to our ability to build functional activist community, are relevant and worth examining.
Related: i don’t know when it happened. but somehow somewhere in “social justice blogland,” the whole point of blogging became “calling people out” rather than having conversations and engaging people.

Oliver Sacks on face blindness

Mind-Bending Optical Illusions

Petraeus: Church's Quran Burning Will Endanger Troops

Raw Video: Colour film of London Blitz found

Feisty Fennec Fox Kits for Drusillas Park

Latest leaked draft of secret copyright treaty: US trying to cram DRM rules down the world's throats

A. Schulman Inc.'s 'whole wheat plastic' is lighter, stronger and greener

Even if you're a massive science fiction fan, there are probably still some great shows you've yet to discover. But for massively long-running shows, where to begin? Here's our guide to how to start watching twenty classic science fiction shows.

It's confirmed: bed bugs are back. Here's what you can do about them.

New Study Proves Organic Strawberries Have Better Taste and Nutrition Than Conventional

Olympia, 2-war naval veteran, battles for survival

How to open a new book

Yes, you can fix stuff…

FTA Study: $77.7 Billion Needed to Bring Rail and Bus Transit Systems into 'State of Good Repair'

Ohio declares war on exploding wild pig population -- Problems I did not know we had.

High-tech carts will tell on Cleveland residents who don't recycle ... and they face $100 fine -- I definitely think they need more warnings before the tickets. We got one, for miswrapped trash several months earlier, and it was a big hassle and mess to sort out. I think a ticket on the second offense is reasonable, but first offense should get a warning so the person has a chance to correct things they may not have known were wrong.

Buried by advice on Web? Health libraries across Cleveland can find authoritative answers

Nearly 50 percent leave Obama mortgage-aid program

Death Row Inmates Catch a Break as Lethal Drugs Run Out

U.S. Soldiers Film Themselves Pranking Iraqi by Planting a Grenade In His Trunk

Those of you familiar with my main tattoo will probably get why I love this vid so much: All Creative Work Builds on What Went Before

A professional voice coach critiques 5 classic metal singers

That Mitchell and Webb Look: Homeopathic A&E

The Jehovah's Witnesses redefine irony

FedEx tries to tap taxpayer resentment by portraying proposed labor law changes as a "bailout" for rival UPS

A good piece on the relationship between slut-shaming and fat-shaming

American Muslims Ask, Will We Ever Belong?

Female Refugees in Vermont Lead as Breadwinners

Gender Pay Gap Underestimates Economic Inequality

What's Killing the Babies of Kettleman City?

The world's foremost certifier of safe and sustainable fisheries has just been slapped down in a new op-ed by a top-shelf collection of scientists in the latest issue of Nature.

Wild chimps outwit human hunters

Many wrongly assume there is a process you can easily go through to become legal. In reality, our immigration system is a bureaucratic nightmare.

Best Cities for Working Moms (If You Can Afford the Daycare)

Indian Woman Forced to Parade Naked for 6 Miles for Alleged Illicit Relationship

I knew I wasn't going to like Nancy Folbre's post on the New York Times' "Economix" blog from the moment I read the title: "Why Girly Jobs Don't Pay Well."

California Zoo Becomes First To Earn LEED Gold Certification

Teen sex not always bad for school performance -- I think they're really overstating as causative issues that may only be correlative (they keep phrasing it as if casual sex causes bad grades, and I can think of a number of other explanations there).

California Moms Live in Breastfeeding Haven

Federal Judge Reinstates Gray Wolf as Endangered in Idaho

Terahertz Detectors Can See Through Walls, Packages and Clothing

Belated but interesting links from RM

How Much Do You Spend on Transport? New Web App Aims To Show You

Officer Sues to Block His Discharge Under Gay Ban

TO appreciate how much and how unexpectedly our country can change, look no further than the life and times of Judith Dunnington Peabody, who died on July 25 at 80 in her apartment on Fifth Avenue in New York.

Are Email Attachments Bad for the Environment? Part II

Ooga Booga Porn!

5 Ways Of Looking At "Sarah Palin Feminism"

Study: Simple Intervention May Reduce Reproductive Coercion

California's Military Women Support Our Freedom. Shouldn't We Support Theirs?

Access to Abortion: Red State, Blue State, Interstate

"Natural" Family Planning? Women in Africa Deserve Better

Becoming a Mother Made Me MORE Pro Choice

Study: C-Section Rates To Keep Rising?

Reproductive Rights in the 21st Century: The Effects of the Hyde Amendment

50% decline in pollination imperils world food supply

electro-chemical toothbrush kills plaque without toothpaste

Inside West Point's Lesbian Subculture

Anthrax Kills 83 Hippos in Popular Ugandan Park

52 percent of American women would take a summer without sex over gaining 10 pounds. A quarter of American men said they would make the same sacrifice.

Edujobs Money: How Can It -- and Can't It -- Be Used?

Oldest evidence of tool use, meat eating identified among human ancestors

Re­cent stud­ies re­port­ing that the Moon has un­ex­pectedly high amounts of wa­ter seem to be wrong, a group of sci­en­tists says.

What hit the Moon? New crater makes a splash

Tracks may tell tale of reptilian land conquest

Battle against barnacles goes genetic

Company floats giant balloon concept as solution to space mess

“Best-ever” Mars map online; public invited to work on it

Exiled stars may have merged to form speeding giant

Planets found sharing strange dances

A new poly site: Openly Poly

The Weird World Of Illness Entertainment

Iris Scanners Create the Most Secure City in the World. Welcome, Big Brother

Buck Angel gyn PSA and Drew Deveaux prostate PSA -- these are awesome, and the first time I've seen trans reproductive health needs addressed in a PSA. Go, them!

Flight Attendant Gets Fired For Saying She Qualifies For Food Stamps

Bumble Bee Conservation

The Secular Coalition of America calls for action against the Texas School Board's Curriculum

Did you know that Wednesday, September 23rd is Celebrate Bisexuality Day? It is! Circlet Press is celebrating by releasing a thematic book!

Snopes.com debunks a current email forward about the dangers of CFL bulbs

Keep using the word "SLUT" as an insult if you're petty, hateful and bigoted

FDA wants movie theaters, airplanes, and grocery stores to list nutritional information

Health Reform Reality Kicks In: Costs Still High -- Useful reading if you might need and qualify for the High-Risk Pools (which are now open).

Critics Petition Obama on HHS Abortion Ban

The Moon is shrinking

SMOS satelite can measure soil moisture, predicting where floods will mvoe next

Not-so-charismatic species need protection too!

Map of Night life in prohibition Harlem

Roe v. Wade is Not One-Size Fits All: More Reflections on Burton v. Florida

Student Insurance and Abortion: A Battle at University of North Carolina

Specialized Care for Female Vets May Reduce Access

Does Refusing a C-Section = Child Abuse?

In Illinois, Doctors Refusing to Treat Women Who've Had Abortions

How to cite unusual sources *chuckle*

The Annotated Galactic Center

They Crawl, They Bite, They Baffle Scientists

Drug-resistant germs found to help their brethren through the attack

Palaeon­tol­o­gists are always claim­ing that their lat­est fos­sil dis­cov­ery will “rewrite ev­o­lu­tion­ary his­to­ry.”
Is this just boast­ing, or is our knowl­edge of ev­o­lu­tion so fee­ble that it changes eve­ry time we find a new fos­sil?

Attacked, tobacco plants call their enemy’s enemy

Ending with a couple of amusing metaquotes:
I see London, I see France, I see OWW MY EYES
last time I saw something like that, it was covered in lube

Comments

Part 1.... most things.

[jajy1979.livejournal.com]

Holy crap is that bad bedbug advice! Diatomaceous earth is NOT something you just sprinkle around! It can lacerate your lungs and cause severe problems, and constant breathing of it can result in something akin to Potter's Lung which is a NASTY way to go!

I have a BIG problem with mandatory recycling, particularly when it really isn't that economical for many things. Landfill waste, properly capped, produces methane which can be used to heat homes. Biodegradable products fuel this. Metal is the only real profitable recyclable, and the energy usage is less than the counterparts. Glass is second to metal and can be retrofitted. Paper recycling is among the worst, and plastics are iffy (depends on what we're talking about specifically) because of the chemical release. The resulting products are not as durable either. The worst problem is the damned quota they've set. 4,000 intentional citations. I view that the same way as I view cops being told they have to give tickets, a complete and utter violation of the ethical way to treat citizens fairly.

The JW in my class is trying to work on me. It isn't working since I refute her with biblical verse and she has to go look them up to verify what I told her.

I'm tired of the US government looking through my clothes. Maybe during my custom build jeans business plan I can incorporate some small layer of resistant material into the crotch area that will withstand the dryer. I wonder how mirco-plated carbon fiber would work...

The only way I'll include Palin and Feminism in the same sentence is as I have just done with the caveat that the two really don't belong together.

I thought the moon cloud water analysis was bullshit. It seemed entirely too convenient for the political demands of NASA at the time.

I'm tired of medicine and psuedo-medicine being the center of entertainment. Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, and whatever else can go take a long walk of a very high cliff.

The bigger risk isn't the moon shrinking, but the moon moving away from us and eventually breaking orbit. Still a multi-million year prospect.

The WWF is doing what it thinks it has to get funds to save what they can. I get annoyed periodically that they prefer the cute and cuddly over the really endangered, but that only really gauls me when it's for a subspecies or local population of an otherwise relatively secure species. The Florida Panther is one such example of wasted funds that could be going to protect other species which really are on the brink. (I think the manatee, which is going extinct naturally is also a waste of money.)

I saw the UNC dust up. Didn't get all the details of the fight.

I'm tired of the rise of C-sections, and the decisions that they're some how better or safer. More convenient is more like it, and they're still major surgery. Electing not to have one isn't child abuse.

Reading the second bedbug article gives me two ideas. One is create a trap to see if you have them, you'd need a small heat source, a glue trap, and a small CO2 emitter. The other is to allow your house, during two to three very cold days (below freezing) to either kill or retard the infestation. This coupled with the other suggestions from the CDC might help some, but I am still against indoor use of D.E.

[fireba11.livejournal.com]

Burning the Koran on 9/11? That's EXACTLY what bin Laden and Al Qaeda want you to do. Another ignorant redneck playing right into the hands of hate.

Yeah! Let's fight hate with... hate? There's an estimated TWO BILLION Muslims on this planet, and a few of them are doing some very bad things. Let's not... forget - all of our blood shed, all of our American soldiers dead in the Persian Gulf - has been done with the goal of, among others... HELPING MUSLIMS LIVE IN PEACE and with FREEDOM.

The ignorance of some people just never ceases to amaze me.

[jajy1979.livejournal.com]

The rage right now: lots of numbers and no one has a clue what they actually mean or say, and everyone wants their spin on them.

There are a shit load of erroneous assumptions in there and I expected better from that quality of researcher, starting with the assumptions about age groups. There's a generational break involved in this, which goes back to previous arguments I've made about the breakdown of how you analyze the progress being based on age categories. She's lumping men and then trying to break the women down to give an excuse as to why they'll fail. She's not looking at the corresponding reports that have come out which have male income stagnant since the 1970's. Nope, all men versus segments of women. Bad stats and regularly used by a lot of "women are still mired in 1960" arguments I see out there.

The "numbers" she's citing are mostly the same ones used in the HDI, which are estimates (.75 assumed number, not based on any statistical reality for the US), and the presumption that men are almost universally all full employment, which is blatantly not true. More to the point the HDI points out that the US does NOT keep such data. The part time issue is there, but what isn't mentioned right now is that more women are in the workforce than men. Another discussion which is NEVER had, has to do with how many multiple part time workers there are. Those jobs wouldn't be any higher paying if they were men. For the roughly 9 million part time employed men? They suffer just like their female counterparts.

Let's add to that the heavy tail men have (Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Tiger Woods, etc.) and the old money, and yes we have a significant monetary advantage, I don't dispute that. Hell, it's why I argue for removing lagging tails from statistical analysis of the mean. But it does mean that you're not getting a clear image of where the money is flowing. The money, the bulk of the top 10% in this nation, is in the hands of our grandparents and parents (depending on your age). They have most of it, despite the cries of elderly fixed incomes there are people doing very, very well in that generation to a level that our generations will probably never see.

What I dispute is that my age group and younger will reach the same levels of monetary dominance that previous generations have, and that this trend is somehow a fluke. I don't think it is, and I don't think this author understand that. Particularly since the BLS doesn't like to keep separate records for men suffering from under-employment (it extrapolates from the female numbers), hell they have to be forced to do it for women, and then there's the presumption that all those women want to work full time. Do I need to get into the societal bias that presumes that I, as a male, want to spend 60+ hours of my week in the office?

Men also no longer dominate the workforce, women took that spot last year. There are now more unemployed men than women. So start factoring in those unemployed and seeking work, or even the disillusioned who have stopped looking but would like it, and you've got a very different picture of the American Male worker than this over-hyped stereotype that she seems to be putting up against the downtrodden female worker.

The problem is vastly more complex than the light she puts it in, and it is not nearly so harrowing once you look at it from a dissected standpoint which breaks down age categories, which have systematically made near or above the male counterparts (BTW the stat is 98% as far back as 2002 for the under 28 group, not 90%). As for the two major blockages in the road ahead? Birth and the ceiling, those will only be verified or dismissed as this generation moves toward them, but at this point it is not strictly in male hands, because even now women are moving into the middle and upper management, and I've already posted about the rise in female executive pay over male executive pay. Women make more when they get there, the question is only about getting there, and that takes time. If not this generation, then the next.

Did I forget to mention that the wage income also eliminates agricultural earnings from the numbers? Yeah, another error in the system.

[jajy1979.livejournal.com]

So where is all this ranting going? It gets to the root of a problem I see in a lot of very progressive feminist oriented literature which is trying very hard to fight the fight without ever taking an ounce of satisfaction in what has been accomplished. Yes, I'm on my male privilege pillar here so those of you who want to dismiss me go right ahead, but I'm tired of it. Article after article spend the time doing segmented female studies showing how little women have progressed against the fictional male, who frankly often comes across as an enemy in the way these things are written. Like a bad boogy man. It's a horrible tactic if you're trying to reach equality to make every guy think that they're the devil incarnate. I have the same problem with male-bashing jokes which are seen as ok, but female bashing jokes are sexist. Double standards aren't welcome. To that end I get very tired of being stuffed into a box by these authors with an agenda (and we've all got them) to promote women. Yet even as they talk about all the problems with this segment or that, I can point to any number of problems among the male demographic that they're ignoring to make their point. The lower graduation rates among males to start with.

Another is framing the argument as a solely female problem. The problem of paid vacation, sick leave, parental leave, those aren't just women's issues, they're both gender's issue. They should be fought as such. Pregnancy discrimination is one I have deeply divided issues with, one because I've seen pregnancy used as an excuse not to do work (anecdotal), on the other hand it's a natural biological issue and should be treated as such. I've got a very hard time calling it a disability though. But even so, the ability to take time off for family, be that a child birth or the care of a sick family member? That's universal and should be fought for by everyone. Framing it as a female only issue (which I've seen done too often) is only going to make the males combative, and all stereotypes aside, if there's on thing that this society teaches men, it's how to be stubborn in the face of combat.

Another thing I hate is that the wage data, which is what started this whole rant, is NEVER the whole picture even from a purely financial standpoint. Any accountant can tell you that benefits, which study after study are more a lure for women than men, cost a fortune to provide. Remind me sometime to show you Anna's earning statement and then her annual benefit analysis statement. You'll be amazed at how much her income jumps because of the nifty benefits she accrues. Thus a lower wage does not always equate to a lower standard of living and my statement in a previous conversation stands:

You are entitled to the same pay, for the same work, at the same level of experience, as I am. Adjusted for any disparity in benefits given. Right now, in my field? I'm not likely to earn as much as my female counterparts with my age and experience. The promotion potential remains to be seen.