stupid, lurid,...really, just everything you can't ignore

I suppose there are several reasonably rational explanations for the durability of this pathetic love-sick astronaut story. Is there really something new in this news?

• Juxtaposition of the modernity of space flight with the primitive passions, the seamy familiarity of domestic violence shot against the exotic backdrop of an orbiting space shuttle.
• Juxtaposition of the image of uber-competent, quick thinking, steel nerved astronauts with the tale of an unthinking astronut unhinged by affections any high school kid could summon with little help
• The surprise on the part of some readers that a jilted woman would single-handedly take physical and potentially violent action to bandage her love-wounds...isn't it always the jealous ex-boyfriend or ex-husband that does mayhem when the prop of love is pulled out from under them?

The first two stand on their own merits as observations but in the third, is a small trap. For a twosome in trouble, yes, the stats tell us the male hurts or kills his own partner in the majority of cases. For any one incident, violence by a male is generally far more damaging. The exact ratio, in 2001, was 85 female victims to 15 male victims in every 100 domestic violence cases according to Bureau of Justice Statistics. My speculations on why that is so will not interest anyone but I can't resist pointing out that if you cannot see that your own behavior is the root of a bad relationship, it doesn't matter how much you escalate your attempts to control the other party to the relationship. There is an intriguing omission in this data because it specifies the gender of the victim but not of the perpetrator: if same sex domestic violence data are buried in these figures, you would not know it.

But our soured astronaut was/is in a love triangle. For that more specific motivation, which I will characterize as trying to heal a self inflicted wound by smashing the knife, the statistics tilt slightly toward gender parity. The FBI keeps a separate line for that in its Uniform Crime Report statistics. You have to cross check three different tables in this FBI report to find the info. It may work to hit this link to the cached page where "Romantic triangle" is highlighted. Roughly speaking, the story told is this:

• The victim is far more likely to be the rival than the significant other of the aggrieved lover [table 2.11]
• In order of preference: guns, knives and in distant third, blunt instruments [table 2.12, our astronaut packed all three...these astronaut types are well versed in the value of back-up systems]
• 78 female to 22 male victims out of 100 [table 2.14, for the latest year, less than 100 victims total]

Keep in mind too that the FBI stats report murders. By leaving out non-fatal violence I muddy the comparability of the gender themes and do so in the direction of under-reporting aggressive responses of female partners due to the fact that male violence is generally more often lethal.

Conclusion: This violently jealous astronaut is not so unusual after all.

Advice: If you are fooling around, don't get stupid with your email.

Afterthought: I feel sorry for the woman. The signs are that she feels she has lost everything and is desperate. But really, she should think more deeply: of exactly what is she the victim? Of exactly what is she in control?

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Note: since posting, I discover via Pandagon that March 8th is blog-against-sexism day. Amanda tells us where she's coming from [Alpine TX;] and in the comment thread there, many are confessing the roots of their feminism, such as it may be. Here is a bit more of my perspective.

Is religion a one-way-street in the traffic of political thoughts?

...and are liberals going the wrong way because idealism holds that it should be a two-way street?

Lindsay's caught another fine thread of comments over at Majikthise. This one, prompted by her own observations on the matter, is on the asymmetries of right wing uses of religion vs left wing treatment of religion. I am satisfied enough with the perception this thread called forth from my experience to repeat my comment here:

There are some assumptions so wide spread and taken so much for granted that they seem to bias perceptions across the political spectrum.

One of these assumptions appears to be that pro-religious statements, which includes everything from affirmations of Christianity as one's fount of charitable social "values" to very narrow definitions of "life" to be enforced on all citizens...what ever is said in the vein of "this thinking is brought to you by my religion" are either assumed to be hypocrisy or felt to be oppression by the jaded audience our body politic has become. Who wore them into this state it is fruitless to determine. Why so many let them selves be this jaded a slightly more fruitful investigation.

The other side of this assumption or bias that affects this nation's consumption of news and opinion regarding religion and its place in civic life is that denouncing things religious, i.e. anti-religious statements are always given and taken in dead earnest. The atheist is taken at her word and not accused of not really believing her own statements or of failing to act according to the claimed moral compass of her own words. The statements, for instance, dismissing or discrediting bans on abortions or gay marriage as policies fit for every human in the country, are regarded as meaning all they say and more, rather than positions some convention or pro forma political rhetoric require.

There is more to develop on the idea that the issues only seem beyond civil discussion because many people have mouths and keyboards and unexamined emotional attachments but few have more than the rhetorical equivalents of "blunt instrument" in their kit:

• Ad hominem confusion of person with position
• Confusion of non-religious stance with anti-religious stance.
• Mild to severe group paranoia, believing your own press releases.
• Cynical zeitgeist, categorical believability of various kinds and contexts of statement.
• "he hit me first!" [no sh_t, this is a huge derailer of dialog]
  

... but by now you either disagree with me or you too start to see our problem here.

Do go read.

The world is watching

...perhaps they have not yet given up hope that some semblance of justice and constitutional government may yet emerge from our little foray into fascism. 58 different sources of the guilty verdict against Dick Cheney's assistant "Scooter" Libby have shown up on the web in the hour since the verdict was delivered.

Free and personal speech is different from paid and public speech.

The coarseness of politics festers and hardens in the hands of right wing bigmouths who have media reach out of all proportion to either the number of minds they have changed or the positive accomplishments their ideologies can claim. The excesses lately got so blatant that my local NBC nightly news gave almost a minute of (bleeped) coverage to incredible slurs against John Edwards [among others] spewed by the guest pundit that Mitt Romney introduced to warm applause at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

I have misgivings about doing this horrid creature-with-no-conscience the favor of denouncing her vomit. But even Mitt Romney and Senator John McCandidate have denounced her words so as to be able to claim they have not stepped in it. My, haven't we come to a low point for me to be in the same company with those two on any matter! She definitely operates in the strata where "any publicity is good publicity" holds. That is how she eats.

So I sent my $50 off to Edwards' "Coulter Cash" fund. You could do the same. And I announce this fact here to any who might read it because I want it known that the desperate derogation, whatever its sick motive, has backfired completely. She is now a more potent indicator of what liberals should support than what, let alone how, conservatives should attack. But I do not thank her for this service. When my money talks, it speaks against hatred and manufactured ignorant animosity.

Sexual and personal slurs against decent candidates are certainly bad enough but I quote other recent idiocy of Coulter's here because it slanders whole causes and classes of good people whom she finds it profitable to hate:

But global warming is the most insane, psychotic idea liberals have ever concocted to kill off "useless eaters." If we have to live in a pure "natural" environment like the Indians, then our entire transcontinental nation can only support about 1 million human beings. Sorry, fellas -- 299 million of you are going to have to go.

Fighting with the likes of her is a distraction from real problems whose solutions are being delayed by that handful of political junk dealers. Upsetting greens is clearly one of her aims and I admit she has succeeded in that pointless and purely negative objective. Who is she pleasing with these lies? She has not been reclassified as a comedienne. If you know which rock to turn over, you can find the parties who see Coulter as "hilarious" In the selection of conservative blogging about Coulter's CPAC crack, the rebuke is portrayed there as muffled and they glibly equate broadcast speeches at a political convention with blogging:

Conservative bloggers should get credit for roundly denouncing "Just Ann's" statement, unlike the majority of liberal bloggers who refused to denounce the anti-Christian comments of the Edwards' bloggers. The current demands from liberal bloggers for condemnation of Ann seem sort of silly compared to the way they dug in their heels to defend the offensive and disgusting comments about Christianity made by Amanda Marcotte.

Nuagle who sampled a variety of blogged conservative opinions into that post in humane vents seems to have picked the paragraphs to the benefit of a fellow columnist: in the preceding paragraph of Powers' post in fact, she demolished Coulter for the abusive attention whore she is.

Whenever one of the right-wing hosts does the evergreen segment about the crazy left wing loonies who are running the Democrat [sic] Party, inevitably the Democrat on the set will bring up Ann Coulter as evidence of hateful speech on the right. The response is always the same: oh, that's "just Ann." It's a bizarre world where Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage are not representative of conservatives, but anonymous posts on a blog are representative of liberals.

Who is benefited by such "punditry"? Getting back to global calamity and class calumny, who benefits from claiming greens are bent on genocide? The under-reported fact is that ignoring the problems of sustainability is already causing mass migrations, drownings and starvations. When do we start ignoring her? When has her audience shrunk back into the the closets and truck stops where half sane, hardly informed hatred was marginalized before the sick tilt that also gave us Reagan, Bush I, Newt and Bush II? Perhaps it may be that Academy Awards and IPCC publishing the nearly unanimous findings of the world scientific community about humans wrecking the the only climate we've got have all finally soaked in to a sufficient portion of her dimwitted audience that to a working approximation, they will just STFU and at least stand back if not help us right the climate.

Perhaps, but if not...then the most positive outcome of this most negative political proxy for the Bush league might be to goad us into a bit of research: Let's learn enough to make sure we aren't inadvertent enablers of the degeneration of America's public conversations about political topics.

The staged outrage of A.C. is done for money. There are ignorant skin heads and sociopaths at the back table in barrooms, tongues loosened by drink, who say things equally vile and distant from reality...but they are not syndicated and paid to spew. They pant their mistakes into a few nearby ears where only similarly disposed minds would leave ears downwind of such stink. But hate speech, categorical denigration and lies as big as "those people want to kill you" are the poorest case you can bring before us in the name of free speech. Systematically offending large segments of society is this woman's chosen career. It pays her well enough to set one demographic at the throats of another that Ms. Coulter gets books contracts and syndication deals. Here is one way she gets paid:

uclick, LLC , an Andrews McMeel Universal company
4520 Main St., Suite 500,
Kansas City, Missouri 64111

Liberal bloggers have recently had stark reminders that the extreme right only accords complete freedom of speech for liberal viewpoints if the speaker can hardly be heard...what was said, for how long and how consistently matter little compared to the size of the pulpit. I find my self saying the same things as commenters well to the right and well to the left of political center: quit buying her a podium. I looked for advertisers. These three were in paid locations on web pages that offer A.C.'s fine sensitive words:

• Lincoln Continental,
• Audible.com
• Norwich University

These four advertisers seemed accidentally present on the page via the insensitivity of Google's AdSense and the desire of the agency, Uclick.com, for traffic for its products.

• Dish
• Lowermybills.com
• bowflex
• t-mobile

Uclick plays both sides of the street with a stable of "conservative" and "liberal" columnists...I can not fairly say to Dish or LowerMyBills.com "why do you sponsor inflammatory lying?" In this case, the worst fault lies with the syndicator themselves, so hungry for a dollar they are blind to the pollution of political discourse. The rest of uclick's list of conservative columnists, though I may fault their criteria, their choice of facts or their logic, are all readable. WF Buckley is one writer in particular whom I still delight in reading just for the diction. It was his "Firing Line" where, in my youth, I developed my ear for political speech. I cannot imagine he much cares to be electronically funneled through a cash-for-clicks cloaca that has Coulter's incurable spewage in it. Taking out Innocent bystanders in the search for a bit of justice and self restraint in media would not be acceptable to me...so I don't know if we can solve this problem anytime soon.

Flame throwers aimed at the far left by the far right only scorch the politics of the middle.

And don't give me crap like "Hey! the poor gal has a right to make a living!". Other, more traditional, forms of prostitution are vastly easier to defend on the moral grounds that there are no victims made in the process of earning the buck.

---

Yes, some people are so twisted they drive thought on the right and the left to similar conclusions. Kirsten Powers sees right through Coulter:

Everyone is in a lather about it, which of course is exactly what she wanted.

I have long been an advocate of ignoring her, but nobody seems willing to take me up on that idea. Can you imagine the epic depression that would engulf her if she made one of her pre-fab attacks and all she got was a collective yawn? What happens to the caricature when the audience disappears? A few cackles at a conservative conference isn't going to satiate whatever drives her -- the drive that forces her to hike up her skirt, drape her cleavage with a cross and insist repeatedly that she is a devout Christian as she spews her famous brand of hateful rhetoric. No, she needs the world to react to her.

And Scott Galindez, editor at Truthout.org concludes:

... she has the right to say whatever she wants, but at some point responsible media and political organizations should stop giving her the megaphone that ensures that the rest of us have to hear her hate.

While chopping wood.

I spent the afternoon chopping wood. Long thoughts would not coalesce but this thought walked back and forth in my mind:

The more outwardly visible, the more distinguishing the manifestation of mind. The clothes we choose to wear, the fears we support as well founded, the beliefs we attack as mistaken...each of us seems to go a slightly different way in these workings of our thought. In contrast, at our core of simple and singular awareness, obscured and slumbering though it may be, rests the very same thing in each mind, the identical agent in each of our beings. But that commonality is generally missed because few try and fewer succeed in removing or penetrating the debris with which accident and culture burden and entangle the pure observer within. Discipline is needed to reach that spot and then sit still, attending all.

Cause and Effectiveness

PZ Meyers is in high dudgeon in this post exhorting those who lay any claim to an understanding of the processes and the overwhelming logic of evolution to stop laying low in the company of deniers and fence sitters. Comment there is split over whether the fierce charge is helpful to the cause or merely reassuring to those who are already comfortable with the power of Darwin's idea. If you work in the biological sciences, you might have seen this paper but, being about the "tribe of science" [Dr. Free-Ride's term, most handy] rather than science, I doubt it made it to the top of your stack of papers to be read. OK, so its meta-science, but it appears to be a pretty well designed study from what I can read. The contention, to get right to the point, is that there is a clear and measurable reluctance by researchers who are in fact involved in the evolution of pathogens to actually call a clade a clade and use the "e-word". The frequency of occurrence of the word "evolution" in the titles of articles in three categories of journal: general science, evolution research and biomedical research is almost monotonic increase from 1990 until now. This is interpreted to indicate the growing understanding of genetic basis of most biological phenomena and the understanding that the gene is the key link forever on the anvil of selection pressures. But an unmistakable chill in the use of the word shows up in the graph of frequency in titles of research grants from the federal government beginning early in the rein of Bush the second: a rapid rise of frequency in NIH grant titles suddenly plateaus and a general up trend in NSF grant titles abruptly slopes down.
The authors used a very large set of observations. This is no anecdote. And remember that this is being said of research you are paying for with taxes, research that is supposed to be curing or understanding diseases you may have or get:

This reflects the growing importance of evolutionary concepts in the biomedical field, and highlights even more the strange rarity with which the word “evolution” is used in the biomedical literature dealing with antimicrobial resistance. It has been repeatedly rumored (and reiterated by one of the reviewers of this article) that both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation have in the past actively discouraged the use of the word “evolution” in titles or abstracts of proposals so as to avoid controversy. Indeed, we were told by one researcher that in the title of one proposal, the authors were urged to change the phrase “the evolution of sex” to the more arcanely eloquent wording “the advantage of bi-parental genomic recombination.”

I have to wonder what happened to the research ideas of scientists like PZ who would rip heads off, [figure of speech, OK?] if asked to censor one of his grant proposal's for the e-word? Does the Bush Stooge looking over the shoulders of competent administrators at NSF round file those? Such titles would not even show up on these graphs, one of the ways in which bush league government is a black hole.

This is not some tempest in an academic teapot. Medical science can not work fast enough and damn well knows it. None of us should be quiet about an administration that puts the brakes on research we need.

Nowadays, medical researchers are increasingly realizing that evolutionary processes are involved in immediate threats associated with not only antibiotic resistance but also emerging diseases [1,2]. The evolution of antimicrobial resistance has resulted in 2- to 3-fold increases in mortality of hospitalized patients, has increased the length of hospital stays, and has dramatically increased the costs of treatment [3,4].

I am not a strategist who could devine the optimum tone of a campaign to remove the shackles of superstitions banded about a sound and vital category of research. But certainly, I can no longer begrudge PZ his anger and contempt at the damage to the effectiveness of science by this administration and its abettors.

Elections for sale, cheaper than Gov't Surplus!

Spend like hell to keep a hell-on-earth administration: $30million
Get fined by the FEC for trying to lie and buy an election: $0.75millon

Knowing that 2.5% is all the more you need allow as a penalty for buying elections? Priceless for people to whom money and political ethics are no object.

This is why clean elections is one of MoveOn's big issues.