gravity’s rainbow

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Indexed expresses a little anger with an awesome Venn diagram.

Hollywood’s five saddest attempts at feminism.  [via Feministing]  Lays out how those “strong” female characters are so very disappointing.

Some Iraqi’s have no hope left:

do you know
that your tomorrow
has no tomorrow?
that your blood
is the ink
of new maps?

Unsurprising news of the day: Many women leave the church because of its “’silence’ about sexual desire and activity, and because of its hostility to single-parent families and unmarried couples.” [via A Spritely Oolong]

Sciencewomen point to an awesome statement by Michelle Obama:

I was raised to believe I could do it all, and that was very empowering. Then I got into the work force and realized there was really no support for me to do it all. … We either have to fix that or be honest about it.

An awesome video - my new crush raps about the LHC.

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In order to avoid doing something about pollutants, the White House simply refused to open the email from the EPA.  (via The Scientific Activist)

I really hope we don’t invade Iran. (via pebkac thoughts)

You know how US soldiers were tortured by the Chinese during the Korean War?  Well, we’re using the same techniques on Iraqis. (via Gadfly)

The “good old days” weren’t good.

Beautiful Darren Waterson paintings at Le territoire des sens.

Yasumasa Morimura dressed like famous female movie stars and photographed himself.  (via Manolo’s Shoe Blog)

Reminder from Angry Astronomer: prayer is bullshit.

Congress still pushes for abstinence only funding.  The ACLU’s Caroline Fredrickson says it best:

It’s hard to imagine a good reason why, in these tight economic times, Congress would intentionally flush taxpayer dollars down the drain by spending them on disproven, ineffective abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. We are floored that they continue to ignore study after study, and the consensus of the public health community, all concluding that these programs censor vital health care information, teach gender stereotypes, discriminate against lesbian and gay teens, and in some cases promote religion in the classroom in violation of the Constitution.” (via Feministing)

Pharyngula links us to abiogenesis in a nutshell.

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Since the military isn’t doing enough to care for the mental health of our soldiers, private counselors are offering free help to veterans.  Suicide rates are way up in the military right now, which is probably indicative of how much help our veterans are going to need when they get back.  It’s not really surprising considering war is generally horrifying and things like Standard Operating Procedure at Abu Ghraib and other prisons (via 3QD)

what happened at Abu Ghraib was not only tolerated but condoned and encouraged. Harsh treatment wasn’t punished; it was rewarded. When First Lt. Carolyn Wood of the Army was in charge of the interrogation center at Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan in 2003, she established a policy that allowed prisoners to be held in solitary confinement for a month, to be stripped, shackled in painful positions, kept without sleep, bombarded with sound and light. Three prisoners were beaten to death on her watch. She was awarded a Bronze Star, one of the armed forces’ highest combat medals, promoted to captain and sent to Iraq.

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I finished reading Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream today. It was an amazing book that detailed our response to 9-11 and compared it to how we responded to another national crisis: the conflicts with Native Americans when the nation was forming. Basically, we create a myth of weak women as a way to make the men look good and give us a good excuse to commit atrocities. We should stop lying to ourselves and ask (and answer) some hard questions. She also included a summary of what’s happened to the women we said we were invading Iraq and Afghanistan to save.

Not only did White House vows to safeguard the rights of Afghan women prove hollow, our woefully inadequate attempts at “reconstruction” only served to make their conditions worse. By 2006, the news was bleak: honor killings were dramatically on the rise (with 185 women and girls killed in the first nine months of the year), about 40 percent of women reported that they had been forced into marriage, about 50 percent had been beaten by their husbands, three hundred girls’ schools had been set on fire in the last year and several teachers killed, as little as 3 percent of girls were enrolled in schools in some regions and many had retreated to secret home classes, no women were appointed to the new Afghan cabinet, and the director of the women’s affairs ministry in Kandahar had been gunned down in her own front yard.

The pattern would repeat in Iraq, a nation that had made significant progress in advancing women’s rights from the sixties to the eighties. Once more, the United States promised heightened security and freedom for Iraqi women, and once more our policies helped accomplish the opposite. By 2005, human rights organizations were reporting a sharp rise in rapes, abductions, and sexual slavery; severe restrictions on women’s ability to travel, go to school, and work; and the return of Sharia law in a U.S.-brokered constitution that also restricted women’s reproductive, employment, marital, and inheritance rights. “Misery gangs” roamed the streets, tormenting and beating women who did not dress or behave “properly.” In Basra, it became a capital crime for a woman to wear pants or appear in public. By 2005, several women’s rights activists and female political leaders, along with one of the three female members of the Iraqi Governing Council, had been murdered, and even Bush’s former female supporters in Iraq were in despair. “I want the American people to know that our dreams are gone, our work was in vain,” wrote Raja Kuzai, an obstetrician and former member of the Iraqi assembly’s constitution-drafting committee, who once hailed Bush as “My Liberator.” “There will be no future for our children and our grandchildren in the new Iraq,” she said. “The future is for the clerics.”

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The current Iraqi government, which we put in charge, is brutally murdering people and stealing money.

Radhi recounted how one staff member “was gunned down with his seven-month-pregnant wife,” his security chief’s father was found dead on a meat hook and how the body of the father of another staff member was riddled with holes from a power drill. [link]

And then we have the audacity to wonder why the Arab world isn’t too fond us of.

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This is a terrible story. An injured Iraqi vet was forced out of the military for admitting he was gay. Not only did they kick him out before taking care of his severe knee injuries, he now owes them money:

With his two-year anniversary in the Army coming up, marking a promotion and pay raise, officials acted swiftly to discharge him. It also meant he had to pay back a sign-on bonus he had already spent because he didn’t fulfill his commitment.

Perhaps the army wouldn’t have to lower its recruitment standards if they would let gay people openly serve in the military.

Via The Frontlines.

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We should be paying attention to this:

While Americans have focused on President Bush’s “war on terror,” Iraq, and the Middle East, democracy has been under siege in another part of the world. India — the most populous of all democracies, and a country whose Constitution protects human rights even more comprehensively than our own — has been in crisis. Until the spring of 2004, its parliamentary government was increasingly controlled by right-wing Hindu extremists who condoned and in some cases actively supported violence against minority groups, especially Muslims.

What has been happening in India is a serious threat to the future of democracy in the world. The fact that it has yet to make it onto the radar screen of most Americans is evidence of the way in which terrorism and the war on Iraq have distracted us from events and issues of fundamental significance. If we really want to understand the impact of religious nationalism on democratic values, India currently provides a deeply troubling example, and one without which any understanding of the more general phenomenon is dangerously incomplete. It also provides an example of how democracy can survive the assault of religious extremism.

Via 3QD.

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I’ve posted before about the damage farm subsidies can do to the economies of other countries. Corn is one of the most heavily subsidized crops and it’s being used to create ethanol, which is currently more profitable than selling the corn for food because ethanol is subsidized, too. This is causing some very serious problems in Mexico: the cost of corn, a staple of mexican food, has gone out the roof. People are hungry enough to protest.

Ethanol isn’t significantly better for the environment than oil, but the government needs to look like it’s trying to become more energy independent because of the mess we’ve made in the Middle East. Things don’t happen in a vacuum. The war in Iraq and Afghanistan is linked to hunger in Mexico.

The high price of tortillas and other, crueler vagaries of the international order illustrate the interconnectedness of events, from the Middle East to the Middle West, and the urgency of establishing trade based on true democratic agreements among people, and not interests whose principal hunger is for profit for corporate interests protected and subsidised by the state they largely dominate, whatever the human cost. [link via LMB]

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Justin has found a fantastic interview Cheney gave in 1994.  In the interview Cheney argues that invading Iraq would be a huge mistake and predicts many of the problems the US is having there today.  He even uses the word “quagmire.”

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