From around the blogosphere

Workout Notes 5500 yards (5000 meters); 10 x 100 (fist drills), 20 x 50 (some drill/free, free alternating), 10 x 100 on the 1:45 (1:37 mostly; flip turns), 10 x (fly/free/back/free) on the 2 (high 1:40’s to low 1:50’s), 1000 pull in 16:42, 500 cool down (catch-up, free, side, back, etc.)

We started with 5 lap pool swimmers (4 lanes; I shared at first) and then I had a lane to myself for about 2000 yards. Then I got a lane mate: cute female in a tight tankini (tiny bottom). My other lanemates (got two more before I was done).

You know you have done a long workout when you’ve shared a lane with 4 different folks.

But I really enjoyed the swim as I wasn’t in a rush; no 8 am class today!

Obama
His race: yep, it is a factor.

Comments to columns about him have had to be turned off!

Today CBSNews.com informed its staff via email that they should no longer enable comments on stories about presidential candidate Barack Obama. The reason for the new policy, according to the email, is that stories about Obama have been attracting too many racist comments.

“It’s very simple,” Mike Sims, director of News and Operations for CBSNews.com, told me. “We have our Rules of Engagement. They prohibit personal attacks, especially racist attacks. Stories about Obama have been problematic, and we won’t tolerate it.”

CBSNews.com does sometimes delete comments on an individual basis, but Sims said that was not sufficient in the case of Obama stories due to “the volume and the persistence” of the objectionable comments. [...]

CBSNews.com has no plans to disable comments on stories about the other presidential candidates, according to Sims. As for comments on Obama stories, he said the site is open to eventually bringing them back.

Obama has had to get Secret Service Protection at this stage of the campaign. Leonard Pitts writes:

No other presidential candidate, no matter his or her polarizing positions, has felt it necessary to seek protection from the Secret Service. But last week we learned that Obama has sought and will receive that protection, the only candidate ever to do so this early in the process. Only one other candidate even has a Secret Service detail: Hillary Rodham Clinton. And that’s because she’s a former first lady.

You know who else required early protection? Jesse Jackson, when he ran for president in 1984 and ‘88.

Neither Obama’s campaign nor the Secret Service will comment on precisely what went into the decision to assign a detail to the senator, beyond saying it was based on no specific threat. But one need not be a seer to divine the reason. Put it this way: The darker the candidate’s skin and the more serious his candidacy, the earlier he seems to need protecting.

All of which adds a telling dimension to the ongoing debate about Obama and blackness that has percolated for months beneath the surface of his candidacy.

On the one side, you have earnest white people insisting that, because his mother was white, Obama is not really black, but “biracial.”

On the other side, you have earnest black people insisting that, because his heritage does not trace to slavery, Obama is not really black enough — that is, not black in a cultural sense.

Apparently, however, he is both black and black enough for whatever individual or individuals unnerved his handlers enough to seek Secret Service protection.

That’s a truth that cuts the clutter.

Hmmm, I wonder how many of these who are doing this to Obama are Democrats?

Iraq
Hat tip to the Daily Kos for alterting me to his

Feminism
I have to admit that I find this amusing. I won’t say anything other than pointing you to this article:

It was the summer of 2002 and I was traveling through a medium-sized town in Hungary when I looked up and saw a young woman coming toward me. Fifteen or sixteen years old, she wore a shirt that proudly proclaimed her to be a “Dirty Girl.”

Six months later, in Philadelphia, I found myself speaking at a women’s studies conference to an audience which included several young women wearing shirts with “Cunt” or “Bitch” written on their chest in an angry scrawl. Shortly after, I found myself in Panama watching a rotund 7 year old prance around in a hot pink tank top that shouted “Bling, Bling.” When I checked the web upon returning home, I discovered that “Dirty Girl” had been updated to “Stupid Dirty Girl” while another T shirt insisted “As long as I can be on top.”

Are the young women wearing such T-shirts liberated women who have taken control of their own bodies and now reap the benefits of the women’s movement — or are they simply dupes? These experiences, and countless others like them, raise a broader question for me. They make me ask how the insights and goals of the Women’s Movement have been transformed and translated as they have been integrated into popular culture and daily life? [...]

In a world that is not safe for us, why would you dress your child to look like a sex object? Why would you dress yourself to look like a porn star? In a world where violence against women is rampant, why would you wear a t-shirt that says “Discipline Me.”

It’s easy to imagine the rejoinder from the women at that women studies conference in Philadelphia: shouldn’t women be able to dress they way they want? The answer seems unambiguous. Of course they should. But first we need to create a world in which women are genuinely free to choose. Yes, retort those same young women, but isn’t wearing such a t-shirt a way of asserting one’s right to self-define and challenging the system? To this I answer that it can be, but the fashion choices that many women make today do not represent a challenge to patriarchy, let alone capitalism, instead, these “choices” reflect a total submission to those systems. We have come full circle. Girls and women now believe that they show how liberated they are by dressing like the ultimate male sex fantasy. Men used to have to go to adult sex shops to see women and girls dressed the way some of us dress to go to school and work every day.

In fact, women have been sold a bill of goods. We were told that the Women’s Movement was about the right to choose. Corporate capitalism and patriarchy happily co-opted the slogan of the Second Wave so that any choice was defined as a liberated and empowering choice. But what did “the personal is political” really mean? I remember when it meant that what appeared to be purely personal choices made by women of their own free will (to marry, to have children, to dress and behave a certain way, to engage in certain sexual practices, the choice of whether or not to work and if we worked which career path to follow, etc) needed to be understood in the context of a system of domination where issues of race/ethnicity, class and sexuality intersected with gender to radically restrict women’s opportunities and possibilities. This system had been so effective because it is virtually invisible, because the privileges at its core have been effectively rationalized and normalized in a myriad of ways through out time.
[...]
To say then that “the personal is political” was to point out that you could start with individual women’s lives and move straight from their realties to institutionalized privilege and hierarchy. We began to understand that what looked like individual choices were really social in nature and reflected the values and interests of those in power. As a result, we came to be highly suspicious of our choices.

Today the personal is simply personal. And that understanding has been incorporated into popular culture in the absence of any political context or analysis, Katha Pollitt puts it this way: “Women have learned to describe everything they do, no matter how apparently conformist, submissive, self-destructive or humiliating, as a personal choice that cannot be criticized because personal choice is what feminism is all about.”

When feminism in the 60s and 70s demanded the right to choose for women, it was in the context of recognizing the coercive force of institutionalized racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class privilege. Women had begun to understand that what appeared to be individual issues turned out to be social problems, social problems for which there were few if any individual solutions. Women looked at the things that limited and coerced our choices and asked how we could change them, not just for ourselves, but for all women, all people.

Today there are no social problems. Thanks to the efforts of recent Republican administrations in Washington and the efforts of the conservative right in general, we live in a world where there is no longer a social dimension and there are no social problems. There are now only individual human beings who are worthy or unworthy, deserving or undeserving. The complex web of interlocking factors that once required serious and respectful attention to every aspect of social and economic life has been replaced by a simplistic and reductionist worldview. Social problems require broad solutions – changes in the way we do business. Individual problems get individual solutions.

The rest of the article goes on similarly. The tone is “damn it, do what we tell you to do!”. It is amazing to me how much some feminists have in common with the religious wingnuts.

Sometimes, the break-down isn’t “liberal versus conservative”; sometimes it is economic, sometimes it is free trade versus what is good for the American Worker (this is why I continue to subscribe to the American Conservative), someimes it is war versus anti-war (I am more with Chuck Hagle than Joe Lieberman here, though the latter person agrees with me on most social issues), and sometimes it is “law and order” (e. g. “do what we say”; religious wingnuts and some feminists) versus “social libertarianism”.

Unintended Consequences of a law

Sometimes, a law can be made for the best of reasons can have unfortunate, unintended consequences. This is why law is written the way that it is; still these unintended consequences happen. Here is an example: sometimes, a larger business will move into a market and drive out the competition by charging unfairly low prices (e. g., below wholesale or so far below wholesale that a small business would lose money). Then the small businesses go under and the larger business establishes a local monopoly.

So people write laws to guard against that. But sometimes these laws have bad consequences, as Different River points out here:

AP reports:

MERRILL, Wis. – A service station that offered discounted gas to senior citizens and people supporting youth sports has been ordered by the state to raise its prices.

Center City BP owner Raj Bhandari has been offering senior citizens a 2 cent per gallon price break and discount cards that let sports boosters pay 3 cents less per gallon.

But the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection says those deals violate Wisconsin’s Unfair Sales Act, which requires stations to sell gas for about 9.2 percent more than the wholesale price. [...]

So, there you go. Set higher prices, get sued for price gouging. Set lower prices, get sued for “unfair sales.”

Religion
A nice review of The God Delusion (hat tip to RichardDawkins.net)

[...]
This project could have gone wrong in so many ways, but The God Delusion is lucid and enjoyable, sometimes passionate but never shrill, certainly not stodgy, and frequently laced with cunning humour. It confirms that Dawkins is one of the supreme communicators of ideas writing in the English language.

Einstein’s God

In expressing his scientific insights, Albert Einstein often made metaphorical references to God, but he was at pains to explain that he did not believe in anything like a personal deity. Dawkins laments the false impression given by many physicists who have subsequently adopted religious language in their public statements, even though they lack any theistic belief.

But us secular types sometimes forget this
Stephanie Merritt writes

It seems equally futile to offer comparisons with the gods of ancient Greece; neither Harris nor anyone else will persuade a born-again Christian that their faith is as risible as a belief in Zeus. Grayling tries the same trick by arguing parity between all beliefs in the supernatural, reducing God to the status of unicorns and fairies. Those who agree already will be amused by the simile; those who believe that Christ is the way, the truth and the life will simply reply that the author cannot understand the revelation of the gospel.

Both authors argue that the rise of fundamentalism in the West is directly attributable to a declining respect for intellectual values. ‘We are building a civilisation of ignorance,’ says Harris of the erosion of science by religion in American schools. Grayling’s most controversial argument is that the ‘weakening of intellectual rigour’ began when polytechnics were allowed to call themselves ‘universities’.

There is a further tendency on the part of both authors to disregard the good that comes from religious faith in terms of charity and spiritual comfort. ‘Is truth less important than comfort, even for the lonely and afraid? Are there not truthful ways to comfort them from the resources of human compassion?’ Grayling asks. Well, yes, is the answer, but he fails to acknowledge that, too often, it is only the churches which bother to comfort the lonely and the dying; part of their attraction is that there is too little kindness in the world.

(emphasis mine) The author of this column should realize that books such as those she is reviewing are not designed to convert the hard core believers. Rather, they are aimed at basically two type of people:

• the already skeptical or atheist; they let us know that we aren’t alone
• Those who might currently be believers but aren’t getting much out of it; they have doubts but are too fearful to explore them.

But the point about the giving comfort is well taken; one of the ways we can help is to make it a point to provide comfort to those in pain.

One note: I got this review from the Dawkins site; how many sites post stuff that is openly contrary to their own view?

Speaking of contrary, I’d like to say something to our dear Dr. Andy:

Thanks for checking in and giving your opinion. Yeah, I’d love to be smug and to believe that I am smarter than those who disagree with me, but you are an example that it would be completely delusional for me to believe that. So I hope that you continue to check in and post often!

So, in honor of your being one of the .1% (that is, one tenth of one percent, or .001) of the Republicans that actually publically acknowledge evolution and openly oppose so-called intellegent design and creationism, (ok, a slight exaggeration ) I’ll give you the blueollie “Touched By His Noodly Appendage” Award!