Whoops, sorry – don’t know what got into me. That’s clearly the wrong title to cover this:
The federal government’s “no sex without marriage” message isn’t just for kids anymore.
Now the government is targeting unmarried adults up to age 29 as part of its abstinence-only programs, which include millions of dollars in federal money that will be available to the states under revised federal grant guidelines for 2007.
Um… These are grownups, people. You know – consenting adults? Between the ages of 20 and 29, nearly 100% of the population has had sex, so this seems like a policy doomed to do little more than make the religious allies of this administration feel good about their anti-sex campaigns. More slop for the faith-based trough…
And people accuse liberals of wanting a ‘nanny state’. Yeesh.
The Boy has spent much of the day happily breaking down my old PC into its smallest constituent parts. I, on the other hand, have spent much of the day trying to make parts…
The metaphor was nailed perfectly by a commentor on Orcinus – like Lady Macbeth in her tortured, sleepwalking state, Congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave seems to be… shall we say… somewhat troubled by her use of Terry Schiavo as a political tool:
A sitting member of Congress asked the police to remove me [ed. Michael Schiavo] – a taxpaying citizen – from a public debate. Obviously, I misunderstand the concept of a political debate. I thought a debate was a place to share ideas, answer questions, defend your record and tell citizens what you’ve done and what you will do. Marilyn Musgrave believes, I have to gather, that debates are places to have the police remove people who don’t agree with you.
After the police talked with obviously irritated Musgrave staffers and the debate organizer, the Musgrave campaign complained that my seat, next to the timekeeper, was inappropriate because – get this – Marilyn Musgrave would have to look at me. In an effort to appease the Musgrave camp, the debate organizers moved the timekeeper to the other side of the stage – about 15 seats away.
So, someone who had no trouble speaking on the floor of Congress about Terry Schiavo, someone who questioned the morality and intentions of Michael Schiavo quite publicly for political gain, can’t actually bear to face him in public. Hmmm…
Foul whisp’rings are abroad; unnatural deeds
Do breed unnatural troubles; infected minds
To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets.
More needs she the divine than the physician.
God, God, forgive us all!
– Act V. Scene I, The Tragedy of Macbeth
Posted by protected static as politics at 9:24 AM UTC
In today’s episode of What Stupid Crap Am I Selling? we have the following subject line:
Impossible growth today!, urgently to you
*sigh* You know that some sort of cultural Rubicon has been crossed when you can’t tell the pump-and-dump stock scams from the penis-enlargement scams.
Posted by protected static as spam at 11:35 AM UTC
On a tangentially-related note, I’ve been wrestling with an uncomfortable insight I had over the weekend. My wife was working on a puzzle, and I mentioned something to the effect that I just didn’t get it, didn’t understand the appeal. She talked about the little internal burst of pleasure she gets upon successfully finding and matching up a particularly difficult piece, and went on to talk about some brain research she’d read that looked at brain activation and problem-solving. Crudely put, it seems that when you solve a problem, your brain releases dopamine, and your pleasure centers light up.
You can see how this would provide a chemical underpinning for internal motivation: finish a task, and your brain rewards you, even in the absence of any kind of external reinforcer. I observed that no, I didn’t get that when I worked on puzzles… But on further reflection, I realized that I really don’t get that feeling at all.
Sure, it happens every now and then, but for the most part, I don’t get any real satisfaction from completing, well, anything. And when I do, it isn’t a particularly strong feeling, nor is it a terribly long-lasting one. I used to say that it was my perfectionist streak that kept me from finishing things, but now I’m wondering what else is at work here…
In the scientific literature, there’s a well established chicken-and-egg relationship between our thoughts and actions: the way you act can change the way you think (and alter your brain structure in the process), and the way you think can change the way you act (and alter your brain structure in the process). It’s one big feedback loop – and I’m beginning to think that I’ve got a loop running that I want to interrupt.
See, my life is filled with half-finished stuff: hobbies, sports/fitness, work ideas… Regardless of the domain, in the absence of hard and fast deadlines I struggle with finishing projects quickly. Period. In so many areas, I began to see that I need a lot more external motivation to get things done than I previously realized… and that this pattern has existed for as long as I can remember.
More importantly (currently, at any rate), I think that because I don’t derive any particularly strong satisfaction from accomplishing things, I find it harder to praise The Boy when he’s successful – and this is not a Good Thing. This is not to say that I think he should expect praise every time he gets something done, because he sure as fsck isn’t going to get that out in the real world. But a certain amount of recognition will go a very long way towards reinforcing his own internal satisfaction.
I think part of it is related to my depression – I have a much harder time getting things done when I’m at a low point. But how much of my depression is related to my difficulties in getting things accomplished? Yeah, I’m probably over-analyzing this, but still… Dealing this should be as easy as getting off my ass and doing something.
But that’s the biggest hurdle in the first place.
“It’s as simple as a flower/And that’s a complicated thing”
– Love & Rockets, No New Tales to Tell
Posted by protected static as random at 9:59 AM UTC
Appearances to the contrary, I haven’t stopped blogging. I just haven’t been, well, blogging… There. Aren’t you glad that’s all cleared up? Moving right along…
The last couple of weeks have been a real roller-coaster – there was one week of high drama at The Boy’s school (yes, even better than the Wiffle Ball/wire cutters episode) preceded by an opening act of slowly accelerating interpretive dance and freeform musical improv performed by The Boy, his peers, and his teacher. It was… ugly. Discordant. Strained. The critical reviews were deservedly unkind.
The long and short of it is that The Boy isn’t all that different from his peers at his new school – he’s just the one who pushes his teacher’s buttons the hardest and fastest. And she’s new; this is her first year flying solo, so she’s got Firm Ideas about How Things Work. Hah. ((green teacher) + (rigid attitude)) / 18 freaky-smart kids = ? (Please show your work.)
Me, I’m thinking that leads to a buffer overflow somewhere in the instance of the Teacher object…
So after a couple of meetings with the administration, I think we’ve got things on more of an even keel. We’ve got The Boy working off of a behavior chart, based upon specific feedback from his teacher, and while we can see that he’s got very specific problem areas, they aren’t nearly as bad or as widespread as his teacher perceives them to be. Don’t get me wrong: The Boy can be sorely vexing, and I pity any teacher he takes a dislike to, but in this case if it wasn’t him, it’d be another kid in the hot seat.
Posted by protected static as random at 9:25 AM UTC
“It was one of the quiet, colorful afternoons of sheer beauty which we have in October in New England, and as I looked toward the fields at the east, I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale, if sent up from the meadow at my feet.”
19 October 1899, folks – the day Robert Goddard climbed into a cherry tree and daydreamed about building a machine capable of travelling beyond our planet. His journals show that he thought of that date as his “Anniversary Day”, and labeled it as such for years afterwards.
Given that one-hundred and seven years have passed, I wish we’d made more progress – we’re still futzing around with chemical rockets and trying to ride columns of fire to the sky. But regardless; anyone who has visions of worlds beyond ours has had their line of sight improved by standing on Goddard’s shoulders.
Happy Anniversary Day, Dr. Goddard.
Posted by protected static as random, space at 12:01 AM UTC
Having been tapped to write about what feminism has done for me, I found myself somewhat at a loss for words… It isn’t that feminism can’t be for men (it can) or that I don’t consider myself a feminist (I do), but rather that my initial thought was that for me the benefits of feminism have been far more indirect. Upon further reflection, I realized that this was also the case for many of the female bloggers: the right to own property, to have an education, to vote, to control reproductive choices – given that the bloggers that I read and I are all more or less the same age, they too are largely beneficiaries of battles that were initiated by people some generations removed.
And it’s funny – once I jumped that mental hurdle, this piece became a lot easier to write. So, five things feminism has done for me – it…
1. …allowed our family to develop a detailed birth plan for our child. Being able to assert one’s rights as a patient (and as a family) in the face of a well-entrenched community of medical professionals and their disease-based model of pregnancy is directly due to feminism and struggles over abortion and birth control. Midwifes, doulas, squatting deliveries, massage, natural childbirth – these have moved beyond the fringe and (back) into more mainstream practice as a direct result of feminist challenges to the authority of a male-dominated field.
2. …gave us tools to respond to the boneheaded gender stereotyping that still exists today. When The Boy came to us and said “H said that pink is a girl color and red is a boy color and her mom says so”, we could respond with “So… H’s mom thinks the color red has a penis and pink doesn’t?”
3. …made it far harder for me to be legally persecuted for being bisexual. The Gay Rights movement of the ’70s drew much of its inspiration from feminism and its tactics.
4. …broadened my perception of the world by insisting upon the inclusion of the voices and views of women and minorities. For instance, the private high school I attended integrated less than a decade before I attended it – the older sister of one of my best friends was in the first class to admit girls.
5. …provided me with my first real introduction to grassroots politics and direct action – escorting patients and their companions at abortion clinics in the metro-DC area and the St. Louis area. It also provided me with a stark view of some of the forces working to undermine or overthrow our secular state: the broader agenda behind most of the so-called Right to Life groups is about far more than ending abortion, something a surprising number of commentators are only now just starting to realize. You may not like abortion, but you’ll like submitting to their version of God’s Law even less…
There are probably other things, but these were the first that occured to me. As for further tagging, I’ll leave that up to anyone else who wants to play.
(The title of this piece comes from Theodore Sturgeon’s underappreciated 1960 novel by the same name.)
Posted by protected static as politics at 10:49 AM UTC
Thus we arrive at a sobering truth. In order to crush the Islamic radicals abroad, we must defeat the enemy at home.
This, from the forthcoming book by one of the Right’s ’serious’ thinkers – Dinesh D’Souza, scholar at Stanford’s Hoover Institute. This ‘enemy at home’ is, of course, defined as loosely (and with as much regard for the truth) as the ‘enemies’ of Medved, Limbaugh, Beck and Coulter.
I got yer crush right here, think-tank boy. Do you really want to go down this path? Really?
Posted by protected static as cultcha, politics at 11:09 PM UTC