Tell it like it is, Krugman

Just the other day I was talking with my coworkers over lunch and we were discussing the 2008 presidential election. I said I thought John Edwards had the best shot, and someone else said "is it because he's a white, male, Christian and therefore electable?" Another coworker, new to the company, whom I'll call "B" said "and from the South." I said "exactly - the only way a Democratic candidate can be elected in this country is if he's from the South - ever since Kennedy. That's because so many people from the South are really gung-ho about being Southern, in a way that I've never seen any Northerners be about the North. I never thought of myself as a "Northerner" in opposition to the South. If anything, you'd think people from the South would rather think about themselves as Americans, since to say you're a gung-ho Southerner evokes the Civil War and the fact that the South seceded from the North in order to avoid the abolition of slavery they thought was coming, and then they proceeded to attack the North!

It turns out B is from North Carolina although she doesn't have an accent because she's spent so much time up here. She disagreed that a certain sub-section of people in the South are gung-ho about being Southern. I said I was sorry for saying that about the South, the way you do when you don't want to get into a fight with someone at work. But she herself disproved her own point a little later on - the subject came up again, and she said "the South will rise again" and I thought she was kidding, or being ironic, or whatever. So I said "yeah, and then we'll kick their ass again!" - several of my great-great grandfathers fought for the Union. And instead of kidding back, she said, pretty seriously "no, I don't think so." Clearly she has plenty of "Southern Pride." And it's easy to find plenty of gung-ho Southerners online: Unreconstructed Confederate Pride lists John Wilkes Booth as a "hero" - Southern Loyalists has a problem with the Fourteenth Amendment - Confederate American Pride plays a sickening, tenderly-sung rendition of "Dixie" - that charming ditty expressing nostalgia for the plantation system to name just the first nauseating three I found.

So anyway, what about Paul Krugman? In his latest editorial, Seeking Willie Horton he writes:

Ronald Reagan didn’t become governor of California by preaching the wonders of free enterprise; he did it by attacking the state’s fair housing law, denouncing welfare cheats and associating liberals with urban riots. Reagan didn’t begin his 1980 campaign with a speech on supply-side economics, he began it — at the urging of a young Trent Lott — with a speech supporting states’ rights delivered just outside Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964.

And if you look at the political successes of the G.O.P. since it was taken over by movement conservatives, they had very little to do with public opposition to taxes, moral values, perceived strength on national security, or any of the other explanations usually offered. To an almost embarrassing extent, they all come down to just five words: southern whites starting voting Republican.

In fact, I suspect that the underlying importance of race to the Republican base is the reason Rudy Giuliani remains the front-runner for the G.O.P. nomination, despite his serial adultery and his past record as a social liberal. Never mind moral values: what really matters to the base is that Mr. Giuliani comes across as an authoritarian, willing in particular to crack down on you-know-who.

The Republican Party has disgracefully gone from being the party of Lincoln to the party of racist-panderers. I don't know how anybody can admit to being a Republican these days.

Ladyboys of Bangkok

We saw the Ladyboys of Bangkok do their show at the Edinburgh Fringe. You haven't lived until you've seen Thai Ladyboys dressed in kilts singing Auld Lang Syne - all the Scots around us were misty-eyed.

You can watch their promotional video here but it doesn't include the kilts section, alas.

We were suprised to see the big circus tent venue filled mostly with middle-aged women. We had expected more gay men to be into the Ladyboys. The Ladyboys are apparently popular for "hen parties" - I'm so happy that that phrase has not caught on big in the US!

Tip for unsuspecting American travelers - don't ask where the bathroom is - they'll look at you funny. It's always called "the toilet."

The New Globe

The highlight of my trip to MOEAS so far is taking the tour of Shakespeare's Globe. It's an awesome thing. I videotaped the whole thing and will have excerpts here ASAP.

Katha Pollitt delivers a righteous smackdown

To Michael Ignatieff and all the other Iraq war proponents

Once, just once, I'd like to see a repentant war proponent acknowledge in a straightforward, non-weaselly way that Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Scott Ritter, Code Pink and, yes, The Nation--to say nothing of the millions around the world who demonstrated so ardently against the war--got it right. But no: "Many of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgment but by indulging in ideology," Ignatieff writes. "They opposed the invasion because they believed the President was only after the oil or because they believed America is always and in every situation wrong."

Excuse me while I set myself on fire. I remember the run-up to the invasion very well, and "It's all about oil" and "America is always wrong" were hardly the major arguments on the table. Since Ignatieff must know this--surely he listened to Mark Danner and Robert Scheer when he teamed with Hitchens to debate them at UCLA--his calumny is not only self-serving, it's disingenuous.

Let's review. You wouldn't know it from Ignatieff's piece, but Bush's stated reason for war was not the liberation of the Iraqi people; it was that Saddam Hussein promoted terrorism, colluded with Al Qaeda, possessed WMDs and presented an immediate threat to the United States. Long before the war there was quite a bit of evidence that none of this was true. Were Hans Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei ideologues who hated America? Remember the yellowcake, the aluminum tubes, the Niger documents the International Atomic Energy Agency determined were forgeries? It was possible to say, and many did, that Saddam was a murderous tyrant but that unilateral pre-emptive war against a country that presented no threat was a dangerous upending of settled international law.

Thank you Katha.

Off to MOE

So I'm off to Merrie Olde England in a few days and blog posts might be scarce - or not, depending on my Internet connection situation.

If anybody from England reads this and wants to recommend places to see - please do!

I'm also going to Edinburgh, so technically I'm off to MOEAS. I will have a report from the Edinburgh Fringe presently.

Damn, McCartney!

McCartney rocks the mullet in '73.

I was recently listening to Paul McCartney's "My Love" which he released on his "Red Rose Speedway" in 1973. I've heard this song dozens of times, and I never got the naughty reference until now.

And when the cupboards bare
Ill still find something there with my love
Its understood , its everywhere with my love
And my love does it good.

So when there's nothing to eat in the cupboard...

DAMN McCartney!

Not that I'm all that suprised by the naughty reference, the Beatles often put semi-veiled sexual references into their work. Like the "tit-tit-tit" backing vocals of "Girl" or "the man in the crowd with the multi-colored mirrors on his hobnail boots" from "Happiness is a Warm Gun" or "four-afish and finger pie" probably the oddest one of all, considering it's in the nostalgic "Penny Lane." And that last one is pure McCartney.

Yeah, everybody thought the Stones were such bad boys. The Beatles were just more subtle about it.

On second thought...

To hell with those other guys. I'm gonna marry me that Paul Krugman! I don't care if he's already married:

The bill is so good that it has Republicans spluttering. “The bill uses children as pawns,” declared Representative Pete Sessions of Texas. Yes, the Democrats are exploiting children — by providing them with health care.

The horror, the horror!

From A Test for Democrats

Oh that righteous scorn!

The Tierney Fallacy

Here it is, in the words of John Tierney:

If nothing else, the results seem to be a robust confirmation of the hypothesis in the old joke: How can a woman get a man to take off his clothes? Ask him.

He says it's an old joke, and I believe him, but I still think that this "hypothesis" should be called "The Tierney Fallacy" in his honor.

John Tierney is a huge fan of evolutionary psychology, and has been, as I blogged just the other day, for at least nine years. And I believe it's because he thinks that it WILL confirm all the old jokes.

The odd thing is that the "study" he cited - and I find it impossible to take anything authored by David Buss seriously - actually goes against the standard traditional stereotypes that David Buss normally trades in. As Tierney reports:

The results contradicted another stereotype about women: their supposed tendency to use sex to gain status or resources.

“Our findings suggest that men do these things more than women,” Dr. Buss said, alluding to the respondents who said they’d had sex to get things, like a promotion, a raise or a favor. Men were much more likely than women to say they’d had sex to “boost my social status” or because the partner was famous or “usually ‘out of my league.’ ”

Dr. Buss said, “Although I knew that having sex has consequences for reputation, it surprised me that people, notably men, would be motivated to have sex solely for social status and reputation enhancement.”

Damn right it surprised him, one of the tenets of evolutionary psychology is that men have sex, with the youngest most attractive women they can find, purely for pleasure, while women want to have sex with older men to get at that sweet status and money. And not because for millenia men have set up a system where women couldn't hold jobs and had to marry well to survive, they believe it's an innate preference.

Really I am surprised that Buss is able to admit just how much his latest study contradicts all his beliefs about human sexuality, since he believes that any social situation proves natural inclinations. I never tire of quoting from David J. Buller's demonstration of Buss's amazing ability to discount nurture in sexual behavior (From his book Adapting Minds):

...in a well-documented study, the anthropologist William Irons found that, among the Turkmen of Persia, males in the wealthier half of the population left 75 percent more offspring than males in the poorer half of the population. Buss cites several studies like this as indicating that "high status in men leads directly to increased sexual access to a larger number of women," and he implies that this is due to the greater desirability of high-status men (David Buss 1999 "Evolutionary Psychology the New Science of the Mind").

But, among the Turkmen, women were sold by their families into marriage. The reason that higher-status males enjoyed greater reproductive success among the Turkmen is that they were able to buy wives earlier and more often than lower-status males. Other studies that clearly demonstrate a reproductive advantage for high-status males are also studies of societies or circumstances in which males "traded" in women. This isn't evidence that high-status males enjoy greater reproductive success because women find them more desirable. Indeed, it isn't evidence of female preference at all, just as the fact that many harem-holding despots produced remarkable numbers of offspring is no evidence of their desirability to women. It is only evidence that when men have power they will use it to promote their reproductive success, among other things (and that women, under such circumstances, will prefer entering a harem to suffering the dire consequences of refusal).

But something so blatantly wrong as this will not stop the EPs, and certainly not the mental midget John Tierney, from considering Buss one of the world's foremost authorities on our "nature."

EPs are normally amazingly evidence-proof though, and so what WOULD John Tierney say if I told him that I've been unable to get men to undress on demand? That I am not truly a woman? Or a "natural" woman? I've been impregnated and given birth in the standard female fashion - isn't that enough? Ain't I a woman?

Is it that I'm too unattractive? But he and the joke don't say "attractive" woman, they just say "woman." Does the joke, and Tierney (but I repeat myself) expect us to automatically assume the adjective "attractive?" I certainly don't believe that anybody considers me a babe, but I HAVE been able to convince men to have sex with me, even offer to marry me in two cases. Do the joke and Tierney expect us to infer they mean "desperate" men? I admit that few of my lovers have been mistaken for hunks, but they weren't THAT bad. Other women had sex with them too. One man with whom I did not have sex was married to someone else when he propositioned me. He was a newly-wed, actually. But then, he was German, maybe that's not so weird over there.

But oh if only what Tierney believes were true. How painfully I desired my co-worker, "C", and how much would it have alleviated my pain to make sweet sweet love to him. I haven't seen him in over ten years and I still have erotic dreams about him.

My dear departed Earl knew how much I longed for him - knew how much many other women desired him, and never took his clothing off (is it necrophilia to get happy at the thought of his getting naked, right now?) for any of us. If he had done so, on demand, he'd have caught his death from pneumonia, not motorcycle crash.

And the sweet kind gentle sensitive coolest-straight-guy-in-the-world actor for whom I've carried a torch for months now - I'm just this side of burning offerings to his graven image - and who recently broke up with his girlfriend - if only I had such power over HIM! But I KNOW he'll say he doesn't think of me that way, or something less crushing, like, we're working together on a project and it would be too weird, or some other tactful thing - he's so charming and tactful. So I can't ask him.

IF ONLY women had such power over men, I would not be unpacking my heart onto a blog post, I would at this very moment be ripping every shred of fabric from his body.

WILMA!

Discussions of evolutionary psychology crop up now and then at the Pandagon and Echidne blogs, and I always like to participate because basically, I know alot more about evolutionary psychology (EP) than most people, even those who subscribe to its theories, and it makes for an easy debate victory.

Well why wouldn't I know more than most people, it was introduced to me, back in the 1980s under the name "sociobiology" (EP promoters sometimes claim there are differences between EP and sociobio, but I've yet to find anything solid) through the work of the mighty cultural materialist Marvin Harris, whose biography I hope to finish writing before I die.

I've also been arguing about EP with media types and EP bigwigs (like Steven Pinker,) since I picked a fight with John Tierney before he had his own op-ed column, way back in 1998, when he was promoting one of its various theories of female inferiority. He actually responded a couple of times, I think mainly because email was still a bit of a novelty and our media overlords found a piquant charm in communicating directly with the rabble - that wore off soon enough. I must look for that exchange in the archives one of these days.

In a recent thread at Pandagon, while arguing with an EP defender, I said that the EP view of human society seems to have been largely informed by The Flintstones. A bit hyperbolic, right?

Guess again.

During another discussion of EP, someone referenced "The Female Brain" by Loanne Brizendine, without irony as an authoritative source for understanding the Mysterious Female. I knew it was standard EP wackiness, but imagine my amazement when I discovered that at long last, evolutionary psychology has now become impossible to paradoy.

From a publishers statement, posted at Amazon:

Brizedine is not above reviewing the basics: "We may think we're a lot more sophisticated than Fred or Wilma Flintstone, but our basic mental outlook and equipment are the same."

I am sorely disappointed by Gail Collins

And my expectations were not that high in the first place when I heard the second XX entity permitted to have a regular opinion column at the NYTimes Op-Ed Smurf colony would be Collins.

Gail Collins was found to be non-threatening enough, and conventional enough by The Powers that Be to get the post of Op-Ed editor at the NYTimes, and I knew she said this, in defense of the male newspaper establishment's problem with female opinions:

There are probably fewer women, in the great cosmic scheme of things, who feel comfortable writing very straight opinion stuff, and they're less comfortable hearing something on the news and batting something out."

But I thought, well, she can't be as bitchy and as shallow as Maureen Dowd, can she? Could ANYbody?

Well. She's not quite as bitchy as Dowd. But let's just say toddlers would be perfectly safe to wade in her journalistic outpourings.

Her first column, about McCain and Hillary Clinton, was respectable if not exactly exciting. Her next was about how Hillary isn't folksy enough - which goes over some of the same ground as the previous column.

Then she goes after the Edwardses:

“I’d have to think about it,” he said during a press conference later that day. This was actually his second answer, the first being a short, utterly unrelated disquisition on food safety inspections. The Edwards campaign has devoted immense effort to beating back the image of their candidate as The Man With the Expensive Haircut. They don’t want to make August the month for The Man Who Would Take Away America’s Citrus Fruit.

How's that for meta-editorials. She seeks to turn August into Citrus Fruit month for Edwards through this very column. I hadn't read anybody else going on about tangerines - but then I don't read People. So by column three she's shading into Dowd territory.

But in her latest, she reveals she isn't just boring and unoriginal, she's also lazy. It never ceases to amaze me how NYTimes writers make a great living out of doing half the work that poorly-paid or non-paid bloggers do.

In her latest, Collins goes on about the 'fat is contagious' meme, the meme that is perhaps the ultimate source of Dick Cavett's pearl clutching and smelling-salts huffing over the sight of fat people on TV.
Collins starts out like this:

8 p.m. — “Friends.” In a much-anticipated reunion special, the gang has all bought condos in the same strangely affordable Manhattan apartment building. Tension mounts as Phoebe and Rachel notice that Monica is putting on weight. Well aware of the new study showing that obesity travels through friendship networks, they evict her. “The body mass of the many is more important than the survival of the one,” says a saddened Ross. “ Even if she is my sister.” Later, the rest of the group reminisces about good times past with their now-shunned buddy. Nicole Richie guest stars as Chandler’s new love interest

But unlike lazy-ass homework-shirker Collins, Amanda at Pandagon points out that the study actually found that the contagiousness of fat friends DOES NOT APPLY TO WOMEN.

Hoyden About Town asks: Yet another case of “male” being the default for “human”?

I think that's about right. I would maintain that it's because Gail Collins subscribes to this traditional view, that male = human, female = other, that she wouldn't notice the study points out that it's primarily a male-friend phenomenon. And that's why she's had such a successful career playing ball with the Big Boys.

And so Paul Krugman remains the only excellent op-ed columnist at the NYTimes. And Collins is a semi-Smurfette.

Your suspicions were correct all along...

Dick Cavett IS a tool:

"It was only a few years ago that I first noticed an obese person in a commercial. Then there were more. Now, like obesity itself, it has gotten out of hand.

This disturbs me in ways I haven’t fully figured out, and in a few that I have. The obese man on the orange bench, the fat pharmacist in the drug store commercial and all of the other heavily larded folks being used to sell products distresses me. Mostly because the message in all this is that its O.K. to be fat.

As we know, it isn’t.

It isn’t, mainly, because of the attendant health issues. The risk of several cancers, crippling damage to joints, heart attack, stroke, diabetes and sleep apnea —a much under-publicized life-threatener — defies sense.

So why is it so prevalent in our culture and in the media? Could it be that the ad agencies — always with our best interests at heart, of course — are making use of the appalling fact that obesity in the United States has doubled and rapidly redoubled to the point where one-third of the population is imperiled by gross poundage? Fat people, the commercial-makers may feel, are entitled to representation. What’s wrong with that?

Everything."

More swillage

Like right-wing scolds everywhere, and Cavett uses that favorite phrase of the Right "politically correct" in order to plead dispensation for his toolishness, Cavett finds it pleasing, comfortable and self-esteem-enhancing to tell people whose appearance he dislikes to shape up or get the hell out of his world.

Fat Michael Moore has done a thousand times more to try to improve the health of Americans than Dick Cavett has ever dreamed of - as if Dick Cavett would ever dream of something so noble and non-pretentious as that.

Dick Cavett likes to pretend it's about his humantarian concern for the health of the obese, but what it's really about is Dick's delicate sensibilities and how those fatties have trampled upon them. Boo hoo!

My new favorite movie

Well I raved about Idiocracy, but SiCKO is my new favorite movie. It is a great movie in every way. If you haven't seen it, go see it, and then you can read the rest of this post, which contains a spoiler.

SPOILER ALERT



So in the movie, Moore mentions the web site set up by bitter hate-filled rightwing creeps called Moorewatch, in order to constantly attack Moore.

They almost had to shut it down because one of the guys who runs it JimB, was being hit with MEDICAL BILLS for his wife.

So Michael Moore sent him a check to cover the amount, anonymously, but then mentioned it in the movie.

So I'm wondering - how are these bitter, hate-filled rightwingers going to react? I did not expect it would be to rethink their bitter hate-filled ways. I thought maybe they would respond by pointing out that Moore has lots of money and did it as a publicity stunt. But instead their main tactic was to attack Moore's supporters.

JimK, it seems, is an independent libertarian - I don't think he used the term libertarian, but by his stated beliefs manifesto, that's what he is. But here's the really really weird thing - he looks like Michael Moore.

Maybe the bitterness comes from the realization that Michael Moore made a great success out of his life through promoting his (righteous, in my book) political causes, while a guy who looks like Michael Moore is a loser who has to accept charity from Michael Moore. But at least that charity didn't come from no guv'mint.

I didn't mention the best part of the movie - if you don't get a little misty-eyed, you are made of stone. You will know what I mean when you see it.

All the critics of Michael Moore seem to have one theme - he's not a saint, so why should anybody care what he says?

Crazy Dictator Syndrome

If I put a little more effort into it, I could probably have other people produce my plays more often. Currently a group out in Pueblo Colorado wants to do my adaptation of Huckleberry Finn, but that’s it.

I’m currently working on an adaptation of Jane Eyre that I plan to produce myself. Producing theatre is a big money pit, but it’s worthwhile to me because I get to have control over everything associated with my play, and more importantly, I get to avoid people with an advanced case of crazy dictator syndrome.

I work for Corporate America which has its share of people with authoritarian personalities. But those dictators have nothing on the crazy dictators. While dictators may have arbitrary, stupid, pointless rules that must be followed, or else, what truly distinguishes crazy dictators is that they have secret rules that must be followed or else.

I have two competing theories for why the world of the arts has such a high percentage of crazy dictators. One is that the world of the arts is to an extent a dumping ground for the insane and the incompetent. Which is probably not an entirely bad thing for society. A badly written play doesn’t kill the way a badly performed operation does. Although I’ve seen plenty of plays that made me want to rip my own head off, but it hasn’t come to that. Yet.

My other theory is that the crazy dictators are aspiring or practicing artists who find themselves in a bureaucratic position of an arts organization and they resent the hell out of it. Of course they have to keep the job, because arts administration pays much better than actually doing anything artistic. Also, chances are they got the job because they know some bigwig associated with the arts organization who had to pull a few strings and it would seem ungrateful to quit too quickly.

So they’re gonna keep the job so they don’t have to work for Corporate America to pay the bills, but they sure as hell are not going to become some dull gray efficient little bureaucratic. They are still an Artiste, and as we all know, Artistes don’t concern themselves with details, and hierarchies and time schedules.

So they approach the issues of details and hierarchies and time schedules with what must surely be deliberate incompetence.

I recently worked with a crazy dictator, and from the very first meeting with him I sensed that things would not go well, by the way he refused to discuss details about the theatre in which my group would perform. I kept asking questions, and I kept getting these vague responses and shrugs and “we’ll sees.” He did make some vague mention about a platform on wheels that we could use, but since he wouldn’t give me anything definite about the platform, like, say its dimensions so that I could determine whether or not I could use it in my set, I ignored the platform suggestion.

Now the Artiste crazy dictator abhors a rigid hierarchy, as long as everybody knows that the crazy dictator is at the top of the heap. But it isn’t enough to be at the top of the heap. The crazy dictator wants to believe that those below truly want the crazy dictator to be on top, out of admiration and affection. And so it is doubly difficult to challenge the crazy dictator because to even hint that you aren’t thrilled to submit to him is to admit that you don’t adore the crazy dictator. He will mark you as one of the Ungrateful.

The crazy dictator I mentioned, we’ll call him Mal, must have got it into his head somehow that I did not admire and adore him, and he responded by being continually bad-tempered and nit-picking. I worked hard to make sure my group – we were part of a festival so there were lots of groups – observed all rules and were as courteous and considerate as possible. But there were those secret rules, which Mal would only reveal to us after we broke them. Through the use of secret rules he was able to remain in a constant state of indignation towards us.

Of course, as is common with dictators, we were held to much, much higher standards than the dictator himself. Like the time that he scheduled us to rehearse in the theatre, and then left us out in below-freezing weather while another group – friends of his – used the theatre to rehearse during our scheduled time. Whether this was sheer incompetence and carelessness on his part, or yet another screw-you is hard to determine. Crazy dictators are a lot like George W. Bush in that respect. I think that Mal technically apologized, but in such a way that it managed to sound like an accusation.

And when a flat that was part of the set almost fell forward and crushed the audience (members of the crew held it up until intermission, but it ruined our scene changes), you can't prove that the carelessly-placed C-clamp was deliberate sabotage. But at the very least, it sure was carelessly placed. I heard that one of the actors bumped into the flat, but it was hard not to, since Mal insisted that we had to have the platform – the one that he mentioned at the beginning of the production, but then wouldn’t give me details about – in the extremely narrow area that constituted “backstage” of our set. It seems that Mal believed that he acquired the platform for our benefit. Even though I never said I wanted it. But in his mind, no doubt, I was capricious and ungrateful, and he was going to make me pay for that.

I’ve heard from lots of other people about nightmare arts administrators who want to make sure that all the artists they know suffer for their art. And I personally had contact with two other crazy dictator arts administrators in the past year. That makes a total of three, counting Mal. The total number of arts administrators I’ve dealt with in the past year – also three.

Sure, they’re irritable in part because they don’t like having a desk job, but at least they aren’t working for Corporate America, which has an even lower opinion of artists than arts administrators. I work with a group of people who are typical, I expect, of Corporate America. Occasionally I go to lunch with them in an attempt to seem semi-social, and I suffer through their deadly dull conversations about the latest consumer items they purchased, and what a great deal they got on them, because occasionally I’ll hear some useful gossip about the big bosses. I did make the mistake of discussing my theatre work once, resulting in the following conversation:

Them: So why do you do theatre?

Me: I really love it.

Them: How much money do you make?

Me: None. I lose money.

Them (ignoring me from now on): lose money? Why would you do something that loses money?

Them: must be some kind of hobby.

Them: yeah, I guess so. So I got one of those automatic pool-cleaning gadgets. Forty bucks.

Them: Forty bucks? You can get it at Costco for thirty-five.

But like I said, it’s probably just as well for society that these unfair, irrational people, these crazy dictators, end up in arts administration. Look what happens when they get real power, like in North Korea. Or the present US administration.

GO MICHAEL MOORE!

Michael Moore is MAD AS HELL and he isn't going to take it any more!

on CNN - he rips Wolf Blitzer and the MSM a new one!

Via Alicublog

The Abbess of Barking

I'm off to Great Britian soon, so I bought a map of London. I was doing a little research on Regent's Park, and read that:

The area was originally part of the vast forest of Middlesex and was called Marylebone Park after the village and manor nearby. There were thick woods, particularly going up the slope towards Primrose Hill. But on the lower ground the woods were more open and were perfect for deer.

This caught the eye of King Henry Vlll. In 1538, he seized the park from the owner, the Abbess of Barking, and turned 554 acres into a hunting chase.

The "Abbess of Barking"! This struck me as an hysterically funny phrase. I immediately checked with Google, and to my amazement, couldn't find any evidence that anybody had ever named their dog The Abbess of Barking. What is wrong with you people?


Barking "is a suburban town in east London, England and the main district of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barking

English places gots funny names, har har.

This is what I imagine the Abbess of Barking looks like:

Goddess Echidne smites Psychology Today

Her debunking series "Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters begins here.

And kudos to Ann Bartow for pointing out that although Psychology Today believes that Kingsley R. Browne is a psychologist, he is, in fact as Ann commented

...not a psychologist, he is a misogynistic law professor ( http://www.law.wayne.edu/faculty/profiles/browne_kingsley.html ) who writes articles arguing women are biologically inferior, see e.g.:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=877664

I exchanged emails with Browne a few years ago... I'll have to dig up that correspondence one of these days. My favorite fact about Browne comes from his web site: "Area of Expertise
Affirmative action, Sexual Discrimination White Male Victims, Employment Discrimination, Racial Discrimination, gender discrimination"


A fun series of debates at Pandagon, with a respectable complement of trolls along for the ride.

One of the most respected ev-psychs, Richard Dawkins, posted the Psychology Today article on his official web site, without comment. But then, I don't think I've ever seen an ev-psych criticize another ev-psych in public, no matter how insane the ev-psych sounds.

The Taliban in action - killing little girls

From the NYTimes

With their teacher absent, 10 students were allowed to leave school early. These were the girls the gunmen saw first, 10 easy targets walking hand-in-hand through the blue metal gate and on to the winding dirt road.

The staccato of machine-gun fire pelted through the stillness. A 13-year-old named Shukria was hit in the arm and the back, and then teetered into the soft brown of an adjacent wheat field. Zarmina, her 12-year-old sister, ran to her side, listening to the wounded girl’s precious breath and trying to help her stand.

But Shukria was too heavy to lift, and the two gunmen, sitting astride a single motorbike, sped closer.

As Zarmina scurried away, the men took a more studied aim at those they already had shot, killing Shukria with bullets to her stomach and heart.

I thought the US should have gone into Afghanistan BEFORE the 9-11 attacks to take out the Taliban. I remember sending a bitter email to the cartoonist Ted Rall, protesting a cartoon he had just published - maybe a week before 9-11 - suggesting that we leave Afghanistan alone to treat "their" women however they saw fit. For some reason I can't find any record of that cartoon anywhere now.

In any case, this is another example of the utter horror wrought by the Supreme Court - which is now EVEN WORSE - when they aided and abetted the Bush coup d'état in the 2000 election. Thanks to Bush, Afghanistan is reverting back to Taliban savagery while we are bogged down in Iraq.

The Krugman is sexiest when he is sarcastic

Sacrifice is for Suckers

The hysteria of the neocons over the prospect that Mr. Libby might actually do time for committing perjury was a sight to behold. In an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal titled “Fallen Soldier,” Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University cited the soldier’s creed: “I will never leave a fallen comrade.” He went on to declare that “Scooter Libby was a soldier in your — our — war in Iraq.”

Ah, yes. Shuffling papers in an air-conditioned Washington office is exactly like putting your life on the line in Anbar or Baghdad. Spending 30 months in a minimum-security prison, with a comfortable think-tank job waiting at the other end, is exactly like having half your face or both your legs blown off by an I.E.D.

I love that extra-spicy scorn.

And BTW - if you don't get it by now that Bush & Co. are utterly evil - WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOUR BRAIN????

Jane Austen smack-down

There was a recent discussion of the current popularity of the work of Jane Austen at Pandagon, with Amanda claiming that Austen was a better writer than the Brontes.

I posted a response quoting Mark Twain's observation about Austen:

To me (Poe’s) prose is unreadable–like Jane Austin’s. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane’s. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.

But today I got my copy of "The Brontes: A Life in Letters" by Juliet Barker, which reveals that Charlotte Bronte herself wrote the perfect smack-down of Austen.

============================
From Charlotte's letters to G.H. Lewes, (George Eliot's paramour), January 1848

"If I ever do write another book, I think I will have nothing of what you call 'melodrame'; I think so, but I am not sure. I think too I will endeavor to follow the counsel which shines out of Miss Austen's 'mild eyes'; 'to finish more, and be more subdued'; but neither am I sure of that. When authors write best, or at least, when they write most fluently, an influence seems to waken in them which becomes their master, which will have its own way, putting out of view all behests but its own, dictating certain words, and insisting on their being used, whether vehement or measured in their nature; new moulding characters, giving unthought-of turns to incidents, rejecting carefully elaborated old ideas, and suddenly creating and adopting new ones. Is it not so? And should we try to counteract this influence? Can we indeed counteract it?... Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzed on that point.

What induced you to say that you would rather have written 'Pride & Prejudice' or 'Tom Jones' than any of the Waverly novels?

I had not seen 'Pride & Prejudice' till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book and studied it. And what did I find? An accurate dageurrotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully-fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers - but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy - no open country - no fresh air - no blue hill - no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses."

***

"... You say I must familiarize my mind with the fact that 'Miss Austen is not a poetess, has no sentiment (you scornfully enclose the word in inverted commas) no eloquence, none of the ravishing enthusiasm of poetry' - and then you add, I must 'learn to acknowledge her as one of the greatest artists, of the greatest painters of human character, and one of the writers with the nicest sense of means to an end that ever lived.'

The last point only will I ever acknowledge.

Can there be a great Artist without poetry?

What I call - what I will bend to as a great Artist, there cannot be destitute of the divine gift. But by poetry I am sure you understand something different to what I do - as you do by 'sentiment'. It is poetry, as I comprehend the word which elevates that masculine George Sand, and makes out of something coarse, something godlike. It is 'sentiment', in my sense of the term, sentiment jealously hidden, but genuine, which extracts the venom from that formidable Thackeray, and converts what might be only corrosive poison into purifying elixir. If Thackeray did not cherish in his large heart deep feeling fo rhis kind, he would delight to exterminate; as it is, I believe he wishes only to reform.

Miss Austen, being as you say without 'sentiment', without poetry, may be - is sensible, real (more real than true) but she cannot be great."

Since I'm working on an adaptation of Jane Eyre for the stage right now (blog coming soon) I am especially touchy about anybody jumping on the Brontes these days.

Is Bill Clinton gay?

David Letterman v. Ann Coulter

Margaret Cho explains what's wrong with straight porn

Tell it girl - I've been saying the same thing for years.

Although I'm told by the young'uns that this has changed.

the Fish god-concept

Stanley Fish has been deluged by comments, mostly from atheists, about his critique of the trio of books written by Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris. Including me. As a playwright, I couldn't help but focus on his abuse of Shakespeare.

Fish said:

The criticism made by atheists that the existence of God cannot be demonstrated is no criticism at all; for a God whose existence could be demonstrated wouldn’t be a God; he would just be another object in the field of human vision.

This does not mean that my arguments constitute a proof of the truth of religion; for if I were to claim that I would be making the atheists’ mistake from the other direction. Nor are they arguments in which I have a personal investment. Their purpose and function is simply to show how the atheists’ arguments miss their mark and, indeed, could not possibly hit it.

At various points Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens all testify to their admiration for Shakespeare, who, they seem to think, is more godly than God. They would do well to remember one of the bard’s most famous lines, uttered by Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

My response:

Professor Fish seems to subscribe to the divinity of Shakespeare as much as his opponents do, since he apparently believes that quoting a well-known Shakespearean adage, regardless of context, is some kind of miraculous rhetorical coup de grace.

For what is Hamlet talking about, this thing not-dreamt of in Horatio's philosophy? The ghost of Hamlet's father. Presumably Shakespeare doesn't expect us to actually believe in ghosts. And presumably Fish doesn't believe in ghosts. But if a god can be imperceptible and yet exist, surely ghosts can too. And the third part of the Catholic Holy Trinity was once called the "Holy Ghost."

I would be perfectly happy if Fish's conception of gods was the one preferred by believers - an unknowable entity beyond human comprehension. Then there would be no more religions, since the existence of religions depend on a hierarchy of authorities who interpret god for others. Fish's god-concept would strip them of every last fiber of credibility, especially on topics of such vital interest to the vast majority of believers as whether or not god cares if you have sex outside of marriage, or whether or not you should suffer a witch to live.

Such a lofty, function-less god that Fish describes is the next best thing to atheism!

watch IDIOCRACY!!!!

Do you wonder why Fox decided not to promote this movie?



I just saw this movie via cable on-demand video. It is genius. And not just for slamming Fox.

I have to say the funniest part is the Carl's Jr.'s vending machine scene.

I wasn't familiar with Carl's Jr., since we don't have them on the east coast, but apparently Carl's Jr. is run by total scumbags and deserves to be mocked.

And the section on Brawndo is a virtual documentary of our current government-corporate relations.

But Brawndo's got what plants crave - it's got electrolytes.

The Guardian has some interesting things to say.

NYTimes promotes evolutionary psychology - yet again

Richard Conniff is the Times' latest evolutionary psychologist, along with Tierney, Brooks, Dowd, Merken, and scores of others. Conniff has important news for the masses - humans live in hierarchies. Egalitarianism doesn't exist, and if it did, it would be a recipe for disaster.

Well who on earth is promoting the idea that humans don't live in hierarchies? Who do you think? The rightwing's usual suspects - Academics.

A long line of academic thinking says the opposite: that hierarchy is a modern imposition on free-spirited, brother- and sisterly human nature. The traditional tribes to which we belonged through almost all of human history were fiercely egalitarian, according to anthropologists.
But the academics go wrong, I think, on several counts.

Note that Conniff can't be bothered to cite examples of these crazy academics. But we all know that those crazy academics are always coming up with insane shit that those of us with common sense know is wrong.

One of the commenters says:

The sociobiologists would have a ball with this piece.

Duh - Conniff IS a sociobiologist - or as we call them nowadays, an evolutionary psychologist, a hugely popular fad in pop psychology because it tells people that everything that everybody with common sense knows is true, IS absolutely true, in spite of the dastardly efforts by the Academics to sow confusion.

So humans live in hierarchies. Does that make hierarchies the ideal - the more hierarchical the better? He seems to think so. I guess the Allies beat the Nazis because they were just so much more rigidly hierarchical than those goose-stepping egalitarians.

What bugs me as much as his evolutionary psychology is the fact that Conniff is probably getting paid for his blog posts. I mean, really, how hard is it to write his entries? They are as well-researched and thoughtful as any rant about pointy-headed intellectuals from your crusty old grandpa. The Times really does like to promote mediocrity.

At least Stanley Fish seems to put some effort into his blog posts, although he is pretty massively wrong in his belief that religion and science are more similar than different. I'm definitely ambivalent about Fish, since he penned one of the most sensible responses to the Larry Summers controversy ever. Summers' remarks reflected his beliefs in evolutionary psychology, which he shares with Stephen Pinker, and also Richard Dawkins - who wrote one of the books about religion that Fish argues with in his column.

I am a stone-cold atheist myself, but I have a problem with Dawkins for his evolutionary psychology leanings, and with Christopher Hitchens for being an all-around asshole. Sam Harris I don't know too much about. Based on his web site, his entire career seems to be about debunking religion, which, if limited, is nevertheless dandy with me.

So although I am not a Fish-hater, I certainly do disagree with his statement:

Mine is not a leveling argument; it does not say that everything is the same (that is the atheists’ claim); it says only that whatever differences there are between religious and scientific thinking, one difference that will not mark the boundary setting one off from the other is the difference between faith and reason.

This only works if you make the word "faith" mean whatever you want it to mean. Or as commenter Bevan Davies remarked:

I “believe” that the sun will rise tomorrow, but I do not “believe” that I will go to heaven when I die.

But believers v. atheists is mostly a false dichotomy. Most believers are skeptical of faith - all faiths except their own. Atheists simply think more logically and coherently than religious types.

Cougar in the Times

Wow, I thought I was respectably ahead of the Times as far as using the term "cougar" but I was wrong. The Times is currently using the term, in this article subtitled: Women of a certain age find a home, and plenty of hot guys, on TV.

It almost makes me want to watch TV more - but who has time?

Movies, the home of male fantasies, still primarily treat women like wallpaper in front of which the important beings perform their acts of heroism and car chases and retro-rat-pack schemes. Unless it is a "chick flick" in which case it is taboo - any male who views such a movie will be polluted by girl germs.

Theatre of course, keeps getting into those unsightly tender "feminine" emotions, driving theatre critics into spasms of anxiety that theatre isn't as manly kewl as movies.

the latest killer app from Apple

I got my new MacBook Pro laptop, and in addition to GarageBand 3, it comes with PhotoBooth, so of course I went crazy making faces at my built-in camera with the "Glow" effect on. And also took my new "pensive librarian" headshot on the right.

Why I am not a "cougar"

I only recently learned that the term for a woman my age who pursues guys in their 20s is called a "cougar" - and there are many cougar-related web sites.

I certainly do like 20-something guys, although not exclusively. But more importantly, the term "cougar" belies the intense double-standard that our culture still holds dear. And you know the double-standard is still firmly in place because the term for a guy my age who pursues 20-something women is "a guy."

One of the fascinating aspects of running a playwrights group is that you get to hear what your members really think about things, and it's often quite revolting. I already blogged about the gender attitudes of members betrayed by their plays in my essay A Streetcar Named Biteme", and the retro beat goes on.

The most recent gender atrocity was perpetrated only a few weeks ago, wherein a member, whom I had previously thought was a pretty cool guy, since he's straight, but he wrote a really sensitive play about a gay couple, came up with a short play about a crazy old coot who gets the upper hand on an uppity bitch talent agent and a metrosexual. It was crystal clear to me that the subtext of the play was the author's deep-seated resentment that the rules of gender behavior are changing. The old coot was crazy-like-a-foxy-grampaw, while the metrosexual was thoroughly conceited and obnoxious, and cared about heirloom tomatoes. Crazy grampaw humiliates the bitch at the end, for preferring the metrosexual to him.

As if it wasn't torture enough sitting through this short play that went on for an eon, one of the actors, a friend of the author (and/or his sycophantic director), opined that we could all learn something from the play. I couldn't stop myself - I scoffed bitterly at the idea that anybody could learn anything from these cardboard cutouts.

The play's author stopped signing up for reading time after that and I think he's going to quit the group - which is fine with me, especially if he takes along with him his entourage - his numerology-believing, Mars/Venus gender-dichotomy-obsessed girlfriend and his sycophantic director, whom I discovered through Google is a hard-core rightwing Catholic and who, at least as of a few years ago, worked as a volunteer for an organization that tells homosexuals it's OK to be gay - AS LONG AS YOU DON'T HAVE THE GAY SEX.

But more to the main point of this blog post is the play I sat through a couple of months ago, written by a man fairly close to my age, about a New York lawyer who golfs down South with a bunch of good ole boys. She confesses to the good ole boys that she's such a big loser when it comes to men - why she even dated a man who was - gasp - HALF HER AGE!

Wow, what a big loser. And I don't even think the author for a moment understood why this pissed me off so much. It wasn't that the good ole boys thought she was a loser - she thought she was a loser. But the good ole boys didn't spend any time worrying that the girls at Hooters they loved so much were half their age.

So I will not accept the term "cougar" - it is utter bullshit. It's time the world got used to the fact that women like hot young men - we're called "women." The evolutionary psychologists are trying to hang on to the Mars/Venus myth for all they are worth, but every year that goes by proves them wronger than ever. Sooner or later they will shelve that tenet of their ideology too, along with the myth that men are "naturally" polygamous and women are "naturally" monogamous - a theory that was quietly retired when genetic testing began to reveal the fact that many children were not actually related to their mother's husband - although the ev-psychs covered their tracks by immediately turning it into a "women are looking for better genes" storyline.

More manly men of theatre

I've blogged here for a couple of years now about how the male critics of the theatre world (and the overwhelming majority are male) are anxious that the theatre world is becoming emasculated, and so they promote the work of manly man playwrights (in the mold of John Osborne and David Mamet) every chance they get.

But I couldn't have come up with this opening paragraph in Ben Brantley's review of Neil LaBute's latest play in my wildest parody:

Rehab as a spectator sport has become such a girlie affair, thanks to the pink-tinged public meltdowns of Britney, Lindsay, et al., that it’s kind of gratifying to watch Neil LaBute grease the road to recovery with his patented brand of testosterone.

Oh how Ben Brantley loves that testosterone.

The male critics are just trying to salvage the theatre world - they know if theatre is associated too much with females it will suffer a loss of status in this patriarchy-in-denial culture we live in.

Hot Adam expelled

The hot actor who portrays Adam in the Creation Museum's documentary about the Garden of Eden has a naughty past which is naturally, intolerable to the nutjobs who believe in creationism.

I would have gone to Creation Museum to watch that hot Adam though.

Hurray for the Weather Channel!

I admit it - I love the Weather Channel. It's both calming (except for those weather disaster shows they have at night - *shudder*) and scientific, and useful. I admit it, I am a weather geek.

I also hate and despise Fox "News" as anybody with a brain and a conscience and a fondness for the truth does.

So I am really loving that the Weather Channel is facing down Fox:

“If The Weather Channel isn’t talking about climate change and global warming, who is?” said Kaye Zusmann, the vice president for program strategy and development for the network. “It’s our mandate.”

The network, which had been gearing up for the opening of hurricane season on Friday, sees the engagement with the issues surrounding climate change as important for content and for business.

“We have a point of view, and we think it’s really important to articulate why it’s happening. Secondarily, it’s good business,” said Ms. Wilson, the network president. “Many consumers want to know, ‘What should I do?’ ”

The lightning rod for controversy, so to speak, is Heidi Cullen, the network’s resident climate expert.

In December, she raised the ire of Fox News and others by writing on her weather.com blog that the American Meteorological Society should not give its “seal of approval” to any meteorologist who “can’t speak to the fundamental science of climate change.” (There are now more than 1,700 comments on that one post.)

Dr. Cullen, a tiny woman who speaks with conviction, said she believed that people were “finally seeing climate connected to weather,” but that a lot of information still needs to be disseminated. “If you turn on the local forecast, you wouldn’t necessarily know that global warming exists,” she said.

Far from being intimidated by the political backlash, Dr. Cullen and executives at the channel say they have embraced the issue of global warming. Dr. Cullen is host of the weekly show “Forecast Earth,” formerly named “The Climate Code” where she has entertained such guests as former Vice President Al Gore. She also appears on the channel’s other programming with segments on hybrid taxicabs in New York City and the development of more fuel-efficient aircraft.

So THERE all my friends and relatives who think I'm weird for enjoying the Weather Channel - they are RIGHTEOUS! As well as calming and scientific and useful.

And that goes for you too, leather punk Jon Stewart!



Although you are so very hot, young punk Jon Stewart.

1/2 below average

Somebody said this to me a few years ago, and while it does explain many things, from the fact that GWB got "re" -elected to the fact that crappy movies and plays are often very popular, it is really scary if you think about it too much:

"Think of somebody you know whom you consider of average intelligence.

Consider that 1/2 of all the people in the world are less intelligent than that person."

Gender convergence

Reported yesterday in the NYTimes:

Now experts who shared their latest research at a conference this month say that far from reverting to more traditional sex roles, women and men are becoming more alike in their attitudes toward balancing life at home and at work.

The gender revolution is not over, they say, it has just developed into “gender convergence.”

But filmmakers and film critics are still living in the past.

What (the film "Knocked Up") does feel is honest: about love, about sex, and above all about the built-in discrepancies between what men and women expect from each other and what they are likely to get.

Apparently A.O. Scott doesn't read the rest of the NYTimes.

Bush's amazing achievement

By Jonathan Freedland From the New York Review of Books

One of the few foreign policy achievements of the Bush administration has been the creation of a near consensus among those who study international affairs, a shared view that stretches, however improbably, from Noam Chomsky to Brent Scowcroft, from the antiwar protesters on the streets of San Francisco to the well-upholstered office of former secretary of state James Baker. This new consensus holds that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a calamity, that the presidency of George W. Bush has reduced America's standing in the world and made the United States less, not more, secure, leaving its enemies emboldened and its friends alienated. Paid-up members of the nation's foreign policy establishment, those who have held some of the most senior offices in the land, speak in a language once confined to the T-shirts of placard-wielding demonstrators. They rail against deception and dishonesty, imperialism and corruption. The only dispute between them is over the size and depth of the hole into which Bush has led the country he pledged to serve.

Bush: I am the dictator

Bush is making a power grab that is so incredible, even the right-wingers are upset.

And if you don't think the Bush gang will come up with some excuse to use the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive to their advantage, you obviously haven't been paying attention.

Excerpt/analysis:

The directive assigns sole power to the executive branch of government.

"The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government. In order to advise and assist the President in that function, the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism (APHS/CT) is hereby designated as the National Continuity Coordinator. The National Continuity Coordinator, in coordination with the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (APNSA), without exercising directive authority, shall coordinate the development and implementation of continuity policy for executive departments and agencies. The Continuity Policy Coordination Committee (CPCC), chaired by a Senior Director from the Homeland Security Council staff, designated by the National Continuity Coordinator, shall be the main day-to-day forum for such policy coordination."

"The National Continuity Coordinator, in consultation with the heads of appropriate executive departments and agencies, will lead the development of a National Continuity Implementation Plan (Plan), which shall include prioritized goals and objectives, a concept of operations, performance metrics by which to measure continuity readiness, procedures for continuity and incident management activities, and clear direction to executive department and agency continuity coordinators, as well as guidance to promote interoperability of Federal Government continuity programs and procedures with State, local, territorial, and tribal governments, and private sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure, as appropriate. The Plan shall be submitted to the President for approval not later than 90 days after the date of this directive."

"The Secretary of Homeland Security shall coordinate the integration of Federal continuity plans and operations with State, local, territorial, and tribal governments, and private sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure, as appropriate, in order to provide for the delivery of essential services during an emergency."

"Continuity requirements shall be incorporated into daily operations of all executive departments and agencies."

more analysis at SourceWatch.org

Times like these call for a little levity - from Whitehouse.ORG:
Transcript of President's Call Reaffirming His Faith in the Competence of America's Alzheimer's Ravaged Attorney General

Hottest scene on TV ever

Since I'm thinking of BTVS and James Marsters...


The most erotic scene ever shown on TV was in the episode "Smashed" in season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Spike's poem

Just because...

My soul is wracked in harsh repose
Midnight descends in raven colored clothes
But soft, behold! A sunlight beam
Cutting a swath of glimmering gleam
My heart expands, 'tis grown a bulge in't,
Inspired by your beauty effulgent

Watch it read by James Marsters here

The next poem he is going to read "The Wanton Folly of Me Mum" refers to his vamping then staking his mother (in flashback) in the episode "Lies My Parents Told Me" of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

John Ashcroft - civil libertarian???

I never thought I'd read a story in which the hero turns out to be John Ashcroft.

The hospital visit by Mr. Gonzales and Andrew H. Card Jr., who was then White House chief of staff, has been disclosed before, but never in such dramatic, personal detail. Mr. Comey’s account offered a rare and titillating glimpse of a Washington power struggle, complete with a late-night showdown in the White House after a dramatic encounter in a darkened hospital room — in short, elements of a potboiler paperback novel.

Mr. Comey related his story to the committee, which is investigating various aspects of Mr. Gonzales’s tenure as Attorney General, including the recent dismissals of eight United States attorneys and allegations that applicants for traditionally nonpartisan career prosecutor jobs were screened for political loyalties.

Although Mr. Comey declined to say specifically what the business was that sent Mr. Gonzales to the bedside of Mr. Ashcroft in George Washington University Hospital, where he lay critically ill with pancreatitis, it was clear that the subject was the National Security Agency’s secret domestic surveillance program. The signature of Mr. Ashcroft or his surrogate was needed by the next day, March 11, in order to renew the program, which was still secret at that time.

Since the existence of the program was disclosed by The New York Times in late 2005, it has been reported that it was the subject of a tense debate at the highest levels of the Bush administration, with some officials concerned that the program was not adequately supervised, and others having more fundamental worries.

Around the time of the hospital incident, the White House suspended parts of the program for several months and imposed tougher requirements on the National Security Agency on how the program was to be used.Mr. Comey told the committee today that when Mr. Ashcroft was ill and he was in charge at the Justice Department, he told the White House he would not certify the program again “as to its legality.”

On the night of March 10, as he was being driven home by his security detail, he got a telephone call from Mr. Ashcroft’s chief of staff, who had just been contacted by Mr. Ashcroft’s wife, Janet.

Although Mrs. Ashcroft had banned visitors and telephone calls to her husband’s hospital room, she had just gotten a call from the White House telling her that Mr. Card and Mr. Gonzales were on their way to see her husband, Mr. Comey testified. “I have some recollection that the call was from the president himself, but I don’t know that for sure,” Mr. Comey said.

He said his security detail then sped him to the hospital with sirens blaring and emergency lights flashing, while he telephoned the director of the F.B.I., Robert S. Mueller 3d, from the car. Mr. Mueller shared his sense of urgency: “He said, ‘I’ll meet you at the hospital right now,’ ” Mr. Comey testified.

When he got to the hospital, Mr. Comey recalled, “I got out of the car and ran up — literally, ran up the stairs with my security detail.”

“What was your concern?” asked Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who was the chairman of today’s committee session.

“I was concerned that, given how ill I knew the attorney general was, that there might be an effort to ask him to overrule me when he was in no condition to do that,” Mr. Comey replied.

Mr. Comey recalled arriving at the darkened hospital room, where Mr. Ashcroft seemed hardly aware of his surroundings. For a time, only Mr. Comey and the Ashcrofts were in the room. Meanwhile, Mr. Mueller, who had not yet arrived, told Mr. Comey’s security detail by phone “not to allow me to be removed from the room under any circumstances,” Mr. Comey testified.

Minutes later, he said, Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card entered the room, with Mr. Gonzales carrying an envelope. “And then Mr. Gonzales began to discuss why they were there, to seek his approval for a matter,” Mr. Comey related.

“And Attorney General Ashcroft then stunned me,” Mr. Comey went on: He raised his head from the pillow, reiterated his objections to the program, then lay back down, pointing to Mr. Comey as the attorney general during his illness.

In the NYTimes

Sheplers on my shitlist

For several years I bought my cowgirl boots from Sheplers. But no more - I finally realized that their "western wear" includes "rebel" merchandise which features that emblem of slave-owning pride, the Confederate flag.

I told them to take me off their email mailing list since I'm a patriotic American - so instead they put me on their catalogue list and I received one of the catalogues the other day. So now - it's on!

Time to boycott Sheplers.


What the fashion-conscious asshole is wearing this season.

The re-emergence of Social Darwinism in the 21st century

In the NYTimes

Some of these thinkers have gone one step further, arguing that Darwin’s scientific theories about the evolution of species can be applied to today’s patterns of human behavior, and that natural selection can provide support for many bedrock conservative ideas, like traditional social roles for men and women, free-market capitalism and governmental checks and balances.

“I do indeed believe conservatives need Charles Darwin,” said Larry Arnhart, a professor of political science at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, who has spearheaded the cause. “The intellectual vitality of conservatism in the 21st century will depend on the success of conservatives in appealing to advances in the biology of human nature as confirming conservative thought.”

It's a miracle!

The NYTimes will now have TWO FEMALE OP-ED COLUMNISTS!!!!

Gail Collins may not be a Katha Pollitt, Anna Quindlen, or Barbara Ehrenreich, but at least there's now a Sassy Smurf to join catty Smurfette Maureen Dowd in the Times op-ed hive colony.

And here it is only the 7th year of the 21st century!

Another evil director thwarted

My friend Valerie is producing her own play and engaged a director who gave her a contract - as the producer, she should have given HIM a contract - and the contract included a clause that claimed "property rights." When she told me about it, I immediately told her to have the Dramatists Guild look at the contract. She did and, they took out all that SSDC-trying-for-a-director's-copyright crap and, although the director had tried to play it like it was his way or the highway, he signed it.

NO American playwright should sign ANY director's contract without having it vetted by the DG. The SSDC - Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers - is on a mission to turn the theatre world into a duplicate of the film world, where directors are gods and writers are nothing. And their lawyers were SUCH assholes to us during our trial last year - perhaps they thought they could intimidate us by insulting us in the hall after our court appearances, but they were dead wrong.

The SSDC must be forced to back down every single time they try to steal property rights away from a writer - and the Dramatists Guild is just the organization to do it.

The B Word

An excerpt from my play THE B WORD is online, along with excerpts from 8 other plays from the recent NYCPlaywrights Spring Reading Fundraiser. Check it out.

oh snap - Frank Rich on fellow media types

Frank Rich said:

That state of denial was center stage at the correspondents’ dinner last year, when the invited entertainer, Stephen Colbert, “fell flat,” as The Washington Post summed up the local consensus. To the astonishment of those in attendance, a funny thing happened outside the Beltway the morning after: the video of Mr. Colbert’s performance became a national sensation. (Last week it was still No. 2 among audiobook downloads on iTunes.) Washington wisdom had it that Mr. Colbert bombed because he was rude to the president. His real sin was to be rude to the capital press corps, whom he caricatured as stenographers. Though most of the Washington audience failed to find the joke funny, Americans elsewhere, having paid a heavy price for the press’s failure to challenge White House propaganda about Iraq, laughed until it hurt.

You’d think that l’affaire Colbert would have led to a little circumspection, but last Saturday’s dinner was another humiliation. And not just because this year’s entertainer, an apolitical nightclub has-been (Rich Little), was a ludicrously tone-deaf flop. More appalling — and symptomatic of the larger sycophancy — was the press’s insidious role in President Bush’s star turn at the event.

It’s the practice on these occasions that the president do his own comic shtick, but this year Mr. Bush made a grand show of abstaining, saying that the killings at Virginia Tech precluded his being a “funny guy.” Any civilian watching on TV could formulate the question left hanging by this pronouncement: Why did the killings in Iraq not preclude his being a “funny guy” at other press banquets we’ve watched on C-Span? At the equivalent Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association gala three years ago, the president contributed an elaborate (and tasteless) comic sketch about his failed search for Saddam’s W.M.D.

Who could ever forget THAT disgrace?

Excellent essay about OUR TOWN in the NYTimes

Jeremy McCarter says some of the same things I said a while back about OUR TOWN.

McCarter's essay here.

I do have to disagree with this bit though:

Grover's Corners is, in retrospect, an unbearable place: quite content to be homogeneous, conformist, anti-intellectual and lacking ''any culture or love of beauty.'' When staged properly, the play doesn't let us to feel simple nostalgia. We ought to weep at Emily's famous line not because she finds earth wonderful, but because she was unable to find it so during her close-minded life in her close-minded town -- which is, of course, our town.

While I have no doubt that McCarter would find Grover's Corners unbearable, Emily certainly does not. And it's surprising, since drama critics tend to be such irony mongers, that he doesn't get the irony of Wilder's line about lacking any culture or love of beauty, when it's all over the play, from the flowers that the women grow to the church choir to simple appreciation of good weather. I'm certain that Wilder's point is that snobs believe that culture and beauty don't count unless they're on display in a museum or featured in the NYTimes Arts section.

Most people would NOT find Grover's Corners unbearable, and whether drama critics believe it or not, they are people too. Those of us who can't live in Grover's Corners come to live in the city. But then some of us get pretentious and kewl and believe that our understanding of life is superior to that of the Grover's Corners townsfolk, when, what Wilder is saying, is that deep down we are all the same. Which is why theatre hipsters, who want their plays fresh from an angry young man like John Osborne from 50 years ago, heap derision onto OUR TOWN. Cause unlike Emily, THEY are going to live forever and they have no patience for tiresome mortals.

Smurfette Dowd strikes again

In case there was ANY doubt that Smurfette at the NYTimes Op-Ed hive colony is a complete idiot.

Smurfette believes that John Edwards is too attractive to be elected.

I'm sure she said that about JFK too.

I love me some Dahlia Lithwick

It's hard to fathom why Kennedy has so much more sympathy for the women who changed their minds about abortions than for those who did not. His concern for Inconstant Females might be patronizing in any other jurist. Coming from him, it's brilliantly ironic. Kennedy is, after all, America's Hamlet. The man who famously worried that "sometimes you don't know if you're Caesar about to cross the Rubicon or Captain Queeg cutting your own tow line," will long be remembered as the living incarnation of agony and indecision, And today he seamlessly rewrites his Stenberg dissent as a majority opinion that blasts his earlier Casey vote to its core.

I'm no psychologist but in light of today's Gonzales opinion one has to wonder: Is all of Kennedy's tender concern over those flip-flopping women really just some kind of weird misplaced justification for his flip-flopping self?

In Slate
via Pandagon

Twisty is a genius

I've had a few minor disagreements with Twisty, primarily with her debate style, but it cannot be denied that she is a fucking genius. When is someone going to give her a book contract, op-ed column or TV show?

Do you guys get, I mean actually get, that our society is a patriarchy? Patriarchy isn’t just a gimmick for a blog. It really exists. There are actual implications. Do you get that a patriarchy is predicated on exploitation and victimization? It’s not a joke! It’s not an abstract concept dreamed up by some wannabe ideologue making up catch-phrases while idling away the afternoons with pitchers of margs. Exploitation and victimization is the actual set-up! A person is either an exploiter or a victim, or sometimes both, but never neither.

This means me! This means you!

This means that, until patriarchy is smashed, we ain’t got a chance.

Meanwhile, do you guys see that there is no other possible outcome, in a society based on exploitation and victimization, than for the Don Imuses and the Daily Koses of the world to shit, frequently, on members of the lower castes? Shitting on the lower castes is a privilege built into the system. When exercised with macho aplomb, it attracts advertisers. It creates prestige. It makes money. It entertains the masses.

If, by some Stone Age fantasy-world turn of good fortune, our society had not been permitted by the clumsy aliens of the planet Obsterperon to devolve into a patriarchy, Kathy Sierra wouldn’t have done anything wrong. The Rutgers basketball team wouldn’t have done anything wrong. They would have just been human beings, doing whatever the fuck they felt like doing.

But it is a patriarchy. And in a patriarchy, where women are the lowest caste, a public woman is always wrong. Which is why Sierra and the basketball players and lard knows how many others over the millennia have been victimized by a gazillion patriarchy-enthusiasts. These women attempted publicly, in a society in which they are devalued as dirty jokes, hysterics, babymommas, and receptacles, to behave as sovereign human beings. It is one of the first laws of patriarchy that insubordinate females should be jeered at and harassed, from the moment they dare, as members of the sex caste, to step into the gray subumbra of proto-celebrity, to the moment the last blurb is written by some feminist blogger who criticizes their behavior as victims-who-let-the-terrorist-manbags-win.

I Blame the Patriarchy

The astonishing Bill Clinton

How different was our last president of the 20th century from the first president of the 21st century.

from Stephen Greenblatt in the New York Review of Books

In 1998, a friend of mine, Robert Pinsky, who at the time was serving as the poet laureate of the United States, invited me to a poetry evening at the Clinton White House, one of a series of black-tie events organized to mark the coming millennium. On this occasion the President gave an amusing introductory speech in which he recalled that his first encounter with poetry came in junior high school when his teacher made him memorize certain passages from Macbeth. This was, Clinton remarked wryly, not the most auspicious beginning for a life in politics.

After the speeches, I joined the line of people waiting to shake the President's hand. When my turn came, a strange impulse came over me. This was a moment when rumors of the Lewinsky affair were circulating, but before the whole thing had blown up into the grotesque national circus that it soon became. "Mr. President," I said, sticking out my hand, "don't you think that Macbeth is a great play about an immensely ambitious man who feels compelled to do things that he knows are politically and morally disastrous?" Clinton looked at me for a moment, still holding my hand, and said, "I think Macbeth is a great play about someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object."

I was astonished by the aptness, as well as the quickness, of this comment, so perceptively in touch with Macbeth's anguished brooding about the impulses that are driving him to seize power by murdering Scotland's legitimate ruler. When I recovered my equilibrium, I asked the President if he still remembered the lines he had memorized years before. Of course, he replied, and then, with the rest of the guests still patiently waiting to shake his hand, he began to recite one of Macbeth's great soliloquies:

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly. If th' assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success: that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all, here,
But here upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'd jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgement here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions which, being taught, return
To plague th'inventor.
(1.7.1–10)

There the most powerful man in the world—as we are fond of calling our leader—broke off with a laugh, leaving me to conjure up the rest of the speech that ends with Macbeth's own bafflement over the fact that his immense ambition has "an ethically inadequate object":

I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself
And falls on th'other....
(1.7.25–28)[1]

I left the White House that evening with the thought that Bill Clinton had missed his true vocation, which was, of course, to be an English professor. But the profession he actually chose makes it all the more appropriate to consider whether it is possible to discover in Shakespeare an "ethically adequate object" for human ambition.

I love me some Harvey Fierstein

In the NYTimes

For the past two decades political correctness has been derided as a surrender to thin-skinned, humorless, uptight oversensitive sissies. Well, you anti-politically correct people have won the battle, and we’re all now feasting on the spoils of your victory. During the last few months alone we’ve had a few comedians spout racism, a basketball coach put forth anti-Semitism and several high-profile spoutings of anti-gay epithets.

What surprises me, I guess, is how choosy the anti-P.C. crowd is about which hate speech it will not tolerate. Sure, there were voices of protest when the TV actor Isaiah Washington called a gay colleague a “faggot.” But corporate America didn’t pull its advertising from “Grey’s Anatomy,” as it did with Mr. Imus, did it? And when Ann Coulter likewise tagged a presidential candidate last month, she paid no real price.

In fact, when Bill Maher discussed Ms. Coulter’s remarks on his HBO show, he repeated the slur no fewer than four times himself; each mention, I must note, solicited a laugh from his audience. No one called for any sort of apology from him. (Well, actually, I did, so the following week he only used it once.)

Face it, if a Pentagon general, his salary paid with my tax dollars, can label homosexual acts as “immoral” without a call for his dismissal, who are the moral high and mighty kidding?

So it goes.

''When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes'.''
- Slaughterhouse Five

Last I looked, not even Vonnegut web was on top of the news.

Wikipedia, however, reliably was.

NYTimes: Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died Wednesday night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.

Survey Finds Girls Morally Superior to Boys

An article in today's NYTimes states:

The wink-wink methods have filtered down to the students, as this survey of high school athletes found.

¶43 percent of boys and 22 percent of girls said it was proper for a coach to teach basketball players how to illegally hold and push.

¶41 percent of boys and 25 percent of girls saw nothing wrong with using a stolen playbook sent by an anonymous supporter before a big game.

¶37 percent of boys and 20 percent of girls said it was proper for a coach to instruct a player to fake an injury.

¶29 percent of boys and 16 percent of girls said it was acceptable for a coach to urge parents to allow an academically successful athlete to repeat a grade in middle school so that the athlete would be older and bigger for high school sports.

¶6.4 percent of boys and 2 percent of girls admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs.

Imagine if the genders were reversed - I have no doubt that the headline would be screaming something about boys' moral superiority. But here the gender discrepancy is explained as the result of school sports. So it's not the boys' fault. Just as girls beginning to surpass boys in academics is also not supposed to be boys' faults - our school system is just too "feminine" and punishes natural male vigor and curiosity - although the system doesn't seem to have changed since the days when boys surpassed girls.

Isn't It Ironic? Yes, it is, Einstein.

It's common knowledge that Alanis Morissette's song "Ironic" contains no irony, which is itself ironic, hyuk hyuk hyuk.

Unfortunately for the pseudo-certain grammar scolds who think they caught a pretty chick singer being stupid - which is such a satisfying thing for a certain brand of hipster male and his female enablers - the song does in fact contain irony.

The most obvious example is in this stanza:

Mr. Play It Safe was afraid to fly
He packed his suitcase and kissed his kids goodbye
He waited his whole damn life to take that flight
And as the plane crashed down he thought
"Well isn't this nice..."
And isn't it ironic... don't you think

Since we can be fairly certain that Mr. Play It Safe doesn't want to die in a firey plane crash, his thought "Well isn't this nice" is indeed ironic. The rest of the song contains dramatic and situational irony. The people who claim the song doesn't contain irony don't know the meaning of irony.
And so here is the Merriam-Webster definition:

iro·ny
Pronunciation: 'I-r&-nE also 'I(-&)r-nE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -nies
Etymology: Latin ironia, from Greek eirOnia, from eirOn dissembler
1 : a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other's false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning -- called also Socratic irony
2 a : the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning b : a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony c : an ironic expression or utterance
3 a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity b : incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play -- called also dramatic irony, tragic irony

High school seeks to ban play about Iraq

Play About Iraq War Divides a Connecticut School
But even as 15 student actors were polishing the script and perfecting their accents for a planned April performance, the school principal last week canceled the play, titled “Voices in Conflict,” citing questions of political balance and context.

This on the heels of the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" controversy.

I got my t-shirt from Cafe Press

Stage Diving

My 10-minute play STAGE DIVING will be part of two different short-play festivals.
Learn more here.
In the meantime, check out these wacky stage diving videos:
A bride stage dives & crowd surfs during her wedding reception
Kurt Cobain stage dives - then gets into a fight with a bouncer.
A really high stage dive everybody cheers I think because the guy doesn't die.
Crowd's-eye view of a very successful musician stage dive/crowd surf combo

Is that really how they select op-ed pieces?

Currently the 11th-most emailed story, Stop the Presses, Boys! Women Claim Space on Op-Ed Pages begins this way:

Whatever other reasons may explain the lack of women’s voices on the nation’s op-ed pages, the lack of women asking to be there is clearly part of the problem. Many opinion page editors at major newspapers across the country say that 65 or 75 percent of unsolicited manuscripts, or more, come from men.

The author, Patrician Cohen, doesn't speculate about to what degree not trying impacts female under-represenation in the op-eds, although she believes it "clearly" is. The reason being:

Many opinion page editors at major newspapers across the country say that 65 or 75 percent of unsolicited manuscripts, or more, come from men.

Is that really how op-ed articles are chosen? Unsolicited manuscripts? The rest of the publishing world does not run on unsolicited manuscripts, so I'd be very surprised if that was the case for newspaper op-eds. But even if that is the case, 65 - 75 % unsolicited from males means that 25 - 35% of unsolicited manuscripts are coming from females. Does the op-ed world have 25-35% female representation? I rather doubt it.

Certainly the NYTimes roster of regular op-ed writers doesn't reflect those numbers, with one Maureen Dowd in a field of seven. That's 14%.

New Yorker annoys others

Looks like feminist bloggers aren't the only ones annoyed with the New Yorker, due to the lopsided gender ratio of its conference on the future.

- there's an essay in the NYTimes complaining about the New Yorker's attitude towards poetry.

The NYTimes has no room to complain about skewed gender ratios of course - the NYTimes op-ed columnist roster has the gender ratio of a Smurf hive colony, with Maureen Dowd playing the role of Smurfette to perfection. (Paul Krugman is Brainy Smurf of course.)

Over at Sivacracy, Liz Losh discovers a gaming conference, Living Game Worlds III that doesn't deny that females are half the human race.

The connection between female infanticide and autism

Surely I'm not the first person to speculate about this connection, but so far failed to discover anything via Google.

The nature-nurture debate rages on, especially now that Simon Baron-Cohen is claiming that Autism is associated with masculinity because autistics are systematizers and males are systematizers, while females are empathizers.

This is mostly based on speculation and big stretches, that are effectively countered by the work of Elizabeth Spelke.

But it is indisputable that more boys than girls are autistic, with estimates ranging from 4:1 to 10:1.

It is also indisputable that infanticide was practiced far and wide througout human history, but especially female infanticide:

Infanticide has been practiced on every continent and by people on every level of cultural complexity, from hunters and gatherers to high civilization, including our own ancestors. Rather than being an exception, then, it has been the rule.

There is ample historical evidence to document the incredible propensity of parents to murder their children under an assortment of stressful situations. In nineteenth century England, for example, infanticide was so rampant throughout the country that a debate over how to correct the problem was carried out in both the lay and medical press. An editorial in the respected medical journal Lancet noted that "to the shame of civilization it must be avowed that not a State has yet advanced to the degree of progress under which child-murder may be said to be a very uncommon crime.

Infanticide has pervaded almost every society of mankind from the Golden Age of Greece to the splendor of the Persian Empire. While there are many diverse reasons for this wanton destruction, two of the most statistically important are poverty and population control. Since prehistoric times, the supply of food has been a constant check on human population growth. One way to control the lethal effects of starvation was to restrict the number of children allowed to survive to adulthood. Darwin believed that infanticide, "especially of female infants," was the most important restraint on the proliferation of early man.

While female infanticide has at times been necessary for survival of the community-at-large, there have also been instances where it has been related to the general societal prejudice against females which characterizes most male-dominated cultures.

Infanticide is not necessarily actively practiced - that is, the parents don't outright murder the baby, but rather cause it to die through selective neglect. This from "Health care allocation and selective neglect in rural Peru."

This study of health care allocation to children in northern Puno, Peru, utilizes quantitative and qualitative data to explore differential resource allocation to children in rural Andean households. As part of a broader ethnographic study of health in two communities, quantitative data on reported health status, symptoms, and treatments (both lay and specialist) were collected for 23 children under the age of 7 over a one year period. Additional data were collected from local health post records. Data were analyzed by gender, and by three age groups (birth to 1 year, 1-3 years, 4-6 years) to determine if differences existed in the allocation of health care. The data suggest a pattern of discrimination against females and younger children, especially infants under age one, despite the fact that these groups were reported to be sicker. Differences were especially significant in the allocation of biomedical treatments, the most costly in terms of parental time, effort, and money. Ethnographic data on child illness, gender, and developmental concepts help to explain why children of different genders and ages may be treated differently in the rural andes. They provide a context in which to interpret health care allocation data, and, in the absence of a population-based study, reinforce findings based on the limited study sample. Female children are valued less because of their future social and economic potential. Females are also regarded to be less vulnerable to illness than male children, meaning that less elaborate measures are necessary to protect their health. Young children are thought to have a loose body-soul connection, making them more vulnerable to illness, and are though to be less human than older individuals. The folk illnesses urana (fright) and larpa explain child deaths in culturally acceptable ways, and the types of funerals given to children of different ages indicate that the death of young children is not considered unusual. Health care allocation and ethnographic data suggest that selective neglect (passive infanticide) may be occurring in rural Peru, possibly as a means of regulating family size and sex ratio. It is important to go beyond placing blame on individual parents or on culture, however, to address the underlying causes of differential health care allocation, such as poor socioeconomic conditions, lack of access to contraceptives, and female subordination.

In spite of the fact that infanticide was widely practiced, it was still a difficult thing to do. Anthropologist Marvin Harris suggested that infanticide was so repugnant that until the invention of more humane forms of birth control, societies responded to times of abundant resources by allowing more children to live - eventually resulting in scarcer resources due to overpopulation.

While it must be difficult to kill any baby, it certainly must have been easier for parents to kill babies that refused to interact with them. Two of the three classic symptoms of autism are stunted social interactions.

According to the National Autism Association:

(Indicators of autism include):
1. Qualitative impairment in social interaction, as manifested by at least two of the following:

marked impairment in the use of multiple nonverbal behaviors such as eye-to-eye gaze, facial expression, body postures, and gestures to regulate social interaction.

failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level

a lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people (e.g., by a lack of showing, bringing, or pointing out objects of interest)

lack of social or emotional reciprocity

2. Qualitative impairments in communication as manifested by at least one of the following:

delay in, or total lack of, the development of spoken language (not accompanied by an attempt to compensate through alternative modes of communication such as gesture or mime)

in individuals with adequate speech, marked impairment in the ability to initiate or sustain a conversation with others

stereotyped and repetitive use of language or idiosyncratic language

lack of varied, spontaneous make-believe play or social imitative play appropriate to developmental level

3. Restricted repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests, and activities, as manifested by at least one of the following:

encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus

apparently inflexible adherence to specific, nonfunctional routines or rituals
stereotyped and repetitive motor mannerisms (e.g., hand or finger flapping or twisting, or complex whole body movements)

persistent preoccupation with parts of objects

Is it really a stretch to suggest that the reason that the ratio of male:female autism is so extreme is because female infants that displayed symptoms of autism were much more likely to be victims of infanticide?

It isn't just rates of autism though - baby girls are hardier in general than baby boys, and it seems likely to me that a plausible explanation is that baby girls have been selected for hardiness - the weaker ones died from selective parental neglect that was not practiced as much on baby boys.

And there ends the debate on nature vs. nuture - because if my theory is correct, it is cultural selection that resulted in a higher incidence of autism in boys, rather than some testosterone-autism connection that Baron-Cohen suggests.

Obviously this hyposthesis needs to be tested. But it's no more implausible-sounding to me than plate tectonics.