Africa makes me sad sometimes

Newsweek had a fairly interesting article this week about women getting into government in Africa. I doubt I even need to say it, but I'm all for having women in government. I think that America has been horribly backwards with regards to this: we pride ourselves on being the best place in the world (like DisneyWorld, with nukes!), but we're so sadly deficient in some areas.

Anyway, I was reading the Newsweek article and it got me thinking, which is a dangerous thing for me to do sometimes. So I unleashed some of my super GoogleFu, and found the UN's Human Development Reports. Looking at their results sort of makes me want to live in Norway, or possibly Iceland, but that's not really what I was looking for. Of interest to me at the moment are the Gender Empowerment tables, such as women in parliament (or equivalant). Sort the table by percentage, and all the sudden, eclipsing Norway and Denmark, is Rwanda, which is ranked 159th overall for human development. The United States is way down towards the middle. Other unlikely nations whipping us in this category: Cuba, Mozambique, Guyana, Namibia, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Swaziland, and Eritrea, to name a few.

Granted, as I learned from Newsweek, one of the reasons why Rwanda (and presumably, a number of other nations) have so many women in high-ranking seats is because they're still recovering from massive civil wars and genocidal atrocities that killed huge percentages of their men. I am not in any way advocating mass murder of men in order to get more women into Congress here, because I feel comfortable stating that, without any exceptions, genocide is very bad.

But is that what it takes? If we want women to be allowed to be high-ranking government officials, if we want women to be seen as competant, to we have to have some stunning disaster first? Do we have to start from scratch, from an essentially decimated nation?

Sweden says no. So do Denmark, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands, Iceland, and Australia.

So: What's our problem? How on earth is it even possible, is it even concievable, that Rwanda (as in, nearly a million people murdered in a hundred days) is so very far ahead of us in something like female empowerment?

Now, at this point I could mention that Socrates said it was far better to suffer injustice than to inflict it, and I could mention that the US and pretty much everyone sort of looked at the genocide that happened in Rwanda and said, "Huh, genocide," and then moved on, and I could mention that there's been (amongst other problems) famine, civil unrest, and a touch of genocide going on in Sudan for years and we as a nation have yet to take any meaningful action.
But I won't mention any of that, because then, I'd really have to question how our Human Development ranking can be so high while we're such a backwards nation.

Entirely unrelated things

1. I (finally) got called by the IRS - they want me to start Monday night. So, I'm not making anywhere near as much as I'd hoped to make before leaving, but a week or three of full-time at $14/hr is better than nothing. Then I realized that I was really happy to get a phone call from the IRS, and I must sadly wonder at what my life has become.

2. Sometimes I wonder about Australia. In my mind they're vaguely similarto Canada: Canada is sort of America-Lite, so to speak, and I sometimes percieve Australia as Britain-Lite, or something. I'm fond of both countries, though I've only briefly been to Canada. They both seem friendly, and have given the world wonderful, wonderful things: hockey and wombats. Canada tends to be mild-mannered, and Australia? Well, they're really far away and mostly an empty island.

Then, every so often, along comes a news story that makes me say to myself: Holy crap, those Australians are hard-frickin'-core!. For example. Things I love about this story:
1. "Hey, dude, we need drug money. I know! Let's steal a koala!"
2. A cute fuzzy animal kicking the crap out of druggie thieves.
3. "Damn koalas. I know - let's steal a crocodile!"
4. They managed to carry a crocodile over a fence. An eight-foot fence.
5. This makes me think that there's some immensely bizarre drug market in Australia. That guy you meet up with at that part? He takes cash only. And sometimes, koalas and crocodiles.
6. I missed it the first time, but at the very bottom of the article: The reason why they didn't notice the lack of a crocodile was because one of the wombats got bit by a snake.

Australia, you have forever won a warm place in my heart, you koala-and-drug-dealing loonies.

Massachusetts: Enforcer of laws in 15 other states!

If you can't marry whoever you want in your home state, you can't do it in Massachusetts, either. That kind of pisses me off, because it's not up to the courts of Massachusetts to enforce other states' laws. But somehow, I sincerely doubt that those who are actually affected by this (ie, gay and lesbian couples) are going to just let it be.

How to read the news for fun and profit*, in 3 easy steps!

So, a few people have, at some point or another, asked me how on earth I find some of the crap I've mentioned here. I've also been asked on at least one occasion how (basically) to read the news and find out What's Going On. So: for those of you who care, I shall summarize it like this: the internet. (I just used two colons in one sentence, and I'm not certain I should do that.)

1. Bookmark things. I have a toolbar of my most-visited websites, or you can just make a subfolder if that floats your boat. GoogleNews is my start page, which lets me know early the morning if anything monumental has happened while I sleep. Then as soon as I get the chance I just glance at each front page: Yahoo! News, the Times, the Inquirer (for local news), BBC, the Guardian, Feministing, MediaMatters, and BoingBoing.

2. Find what works for you: obviously if you're, say, a young conservative man (and you know who you are, sir), you're probably not going to be interested in regularly reading a feminist blog. Similarly, I have very little interest in getting news from the Fox News website.

3. Talk to people. There are a few forums and bulletin boards I hang out on, too. I'm not going to link because that would reveal my SuperSecretIdentity, reveal my SuperSecret plot to violently overthrow the American government, and compromise national security (Hey, wiretapping FBI guys! How's it going?) But sites like Fark are good, too: generally a bit on the entertainment side rather than news, but you can A) find some interesting links there to real news, and B) see what people way outside of your typical circle are saying.

That's basically it. Once you figure out where you're going, it doesn't take that much time, and reading news and being interested builds strong bones and teeth. So do it!

*seriously, I don't know how to profit from this. Boo-hoo.

South Dakotan Miscellany

Cecilia Fire Thunder, president of the Oglala Sioux tribe in SD, is my hero. Why?

“To me, it is now a question of sovereignty,” she said to me last week. “I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction.” (indianz.com)

That is one pissed-off woman, and I say more power to her. (Seriously: of everyone who's been screwed over by various American governments, I think that a Native American woman from South Dakota has a pretty solid claim to some righteous anger.)

An interesting bit of synchronicity

Right next door to my beloved hometown is Camden. They've got a few decent things (nice minor league stadium, Campbells soup, and...um...an aquarium), but overall, Camden kind of sucks. They've got the dubious honor of being the most dangerous city in the country. Yay Camden!

Also, their school district just busted up a huge cheating ring. The perpetrators? The school board officials, pretty much. It's one way to cope with the stress of the exams American students are idiotically forced to take - the ones that school funding is pretty much entirely based on.

Meanwhile in Britain, they're also having problems. Students getting stressed by stnndardized exams is not a strictly American phenomenon. How are our friends across the sea dealing with it? Why, they're taking the radical step of having fewer exams.

SAT analogy (RIP): Britain : fewer exams :: America :
A) fewer exams
B) different exams
C) cheating on exams
D) Drug tests.

Really, either C or D will work.

Although only 10 percent of the global total of abortions happen in Africa, the continent accounts for almost half of the world's deaths from unsafe abortions, with one in 12 women dying, according to WHO. For every death, 20 to 30 women suffer permanent damage to their uterus, cervix, fallopian tubes, intestines or bladder.

From Reuters. All that aid money we say can't be used to provide abortions because Abortions Are Murder and Abortions Are Evil is well-spent, isn't it? Because the African continent as a whole doesn't have enough problems without us intentionally making it worse, do they?

So, yeah. Let's just keep doing what we're doing and sit back and watch.

I would have majored in procrastinating!

In case this bit from a few days ago wasn't enough to convince you that American schools, in general, are obscenely bad at what they're supposed to do, check out the lastest wackiness from Florida: forcing high school freshmen to declare majors. In my little corner of reality, incoming freshmen are, what, 14? When I was a freshman in high school, I was certain I wanted to go into journalism after getting a degree from a big university on the east coast. Four years later I graduated and went to study philosophy at an extremely tiny school in New Mexico. A year and a half after that, I'm not in school and moving (temporarily) to Europe in a month, and I'm fairly sure I don't want to go into journalism, but rather law or politics (or both). In my opinion (as someone who was 14 not terribly long ago), the average high school freshman doesn't really know what they want to do next weekend, let alone what they want to focus on academically for the next four years of their life.

It's funny because it's true

Minimum Security comic.

In most situations, I wouldn't link to anything containing someone's home contact information. But A) Bill Napoli willingly ran for public office presumably understanding it would mean a certain loss in privacy, B) he's a little bit wacky about virginity and such, and C) he's stomping all over the privacy of 50.4% of the South Dakotan population. So, sorry, Mr. Napoli: you're not, in my opinion, a religious-enough virgin for your privacy to be respected.

The Birds are coming! The birds are coming!

The BBC wants us to know why we're not all dead from bird flu yet. The reason for the distinct lack of human deaths and massive epidemics is because the avian flu can't effectively spread to humans, which is sort of like saying that the ground is not wet because it's dry. But the reason for that is that it can't thrive in human lungs very well.

So: tonight the important news isn't, in fact, "OMG teh bird flu! we all die!! o noes!!111one". Now it's "Huh, look at that! We're not dropping like flies! Wowies!"

Age, Cancer, and Potatoes.

I went to the gym today, and for a fleeting moment, almost just drove back home without going in. Why? The parking lot was crowded, which would lead me to believe that there would be other people in the gym, which would mean people would see me working out. It's possible I'm slightly overly self-conscious, but, hey, that's the way it is.

But I was brave, and went in. It wasn't exactly crowded - this particular gym never is. I scan my little keytag card, head back to the locker room, and am immediately transported through a hole in the fabric of space-time to a convention of little old ladies.

Seriously. (Okay, I made up the space-time hole thing, but the rest stands). The women's locker room is fairly small, smaller even than the one at the 400-student college I used to attend. And it's packed to the brim with older women. I was the youngest in there by a good forty years, easy. For one, this was a little bit weird: previous to today I've seen at most two other people in the locker room at any one time, and now there were seriously a dozen people. I then realized that a non-intense water-aerobics-type class had just finished, and that's why the elderly female population of South Jersey was in the locker room of my little local gym.

I retreated into the sole changing stall not so much out of modesty, but out of a desire to not be quite so crowded as I changed. There were two prominant conversations I picked up a decent portion of, though, and it was a frightening glimpse into what happens when we get old. One was several women talking about dermatology and skin cancer. The consensus seemed to be that at least three of them had at some point had something looked at and biopsied, and that the medical system in Britain is much more effective: one woman's nephew got the biospy results back while he was still under anesthesia. None of them seemed overly worried about their doctors finding suspicious things, and that made me think: Is that what happens when you get old? Your body starts to betray you, and it's just locker room chatter after your workout? 'Yeah, she [the doctor] said that if it has to be removed, she'll call me within two weeks." Just cool acceptance of the facts.

In other news: Villagers admire each other's potatoes must be the best headline ever written. Breaking news: Villagers! Potatoes! Admiration!

Go #2 pencils! Rah rah rah! Save our schools!

The Inquirer talks at great length about the "test prep madness" currently sweeping the region. After-school and weekend study sessions, pre-test pep rallies, and enormous pressure on these kids.

I don't remember ever feeling nervous about a standardized exam, outside of the SATs (which even then, I wasn't as stressed out as most - in retrospect, I really didn't even study all that much, and didn't study at all for the ACTs). I do remember taking the exams: the Iowa tests (first through seventh grade, I think), the CATs (third and sixth grade), the GEPAs (eighth grade; I think this was the year we never got our scores because the test was so flawed), the HSPAs (sometime in high school), and at least two others in high school. At least one standardized exam every year from first grade through eleventh grade. Of course, I'm disregarding the optional ones: The PLUS talent-search exam in fifth grade, the SAT in 8th grade (same program as the PLUS), the PSAT, the SAT, the ACT, and my IB exams. I want to talk about the required tests, the ones where a school's funding depends on it.

Why do they need prep sessions? Isn't the whole point of these exams to get a picture of how, on average, the students at a given school are doing? So, shouldn't the students just naturally be learning these things in class, without extra test-prep sessions? By which I mean: the exams should reflect a normal teacher working from a normal curriculum. Sure, if you're doing the idiotic things I remember from high school (eg, holding the ESL students and the Special Ed students to the same standard as the AP and IB students), some kids might need an extra hand. They need extra help anyway. But beyond those special cases, a student should be meeting the standards regardless. If they need to cram specifically for the exam, well, the system is broken. I'm certain that to anyone who's been in any way involved in American public schools recently, this will be a monumental surprise, that our schools suck.

They said it best on West Wing, season one, Six Meetings Before Lunch: Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes. We need gigantic revolutionary changes. Schools should be palaces. Competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be getting six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge for its citizens, just like national defense. That is my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet.

Amen, Sam. We shouldn't even need standardized tests. Placement tests, sure. But standardized tests like the GEPAs or HSPAs? No. Our schools should be so magnificently funded, our teacher so immensely well-paid and motivated, and our administrators so determined, that it should just be a given that our students are doing well. Heaping exam stress onto the students and teachers isn't doing any good: it's a band-aid solution. The problem isn't that students aren't doing well on the exam, it's that they're not learning because the schools are broken. Fix the problem, not the symptoms.

Something else to make me angry

"We will ask that women be required to share reproductive freedom with men."

Okay. A guy in Michigan is filing a lawsuit, trying to lift the requirement that a man help financially support a life he helps create. Allegedly, the mother of a kid this guy fathered told him he was incapable of getting pregnant. She also allegedly "knew he did not want to have a child with her."

So, she (perhaps in the heat of a moment, perhaps not) told him that she couldn't get pregnant. There was evidence to the contrary: she is, in fact, a woman who can clearly engage in intercourse. He decided to go ahead, take her word at face value, and got stuck with child support payments.

If you're with someone, would you take their word for it that they don't have AIDS, and know that you don't want to get AIDS, and therefore have unprotected sex with them? Presumably an intelligent person would either keep their pants on, or use a condom. Don't want to risk having a kid? Don't take the risk, and don't have unprotected sex. Simple.

To spawn or not to spawn, that is the question

The Guardian has an interesting editorial about the 'baby bust' currently going on in the UK. Essentially, fewer and fewer women are getting pregnant, and this particular writer believes it's because the UK is anti-motherhood.

My reaction has a few levels. Level one: Wow, I'll blend right in on that front there, with the having no great desire (nor even a weak desire) to ever reproduce. Level two: So what? Who cares that fewer women are having children? I'm certain that there's some economic reason behind the concern, but I'm not an economist. Level three: Hmm, interesting.

Personally, my desire to not have children comes from a few things. For one, I don't particularly like children, and for two, I do like the idea of having an uninterrupted career someday in a highly competitive field (politics or law). You could work for the most generous company in the world in terms of child care and maternity leave, but nine months of pregnancy and then actually giving birth is more likely than not to do Significantly Disruptive Things to your career. Plus then there's the hassle of dealing with an infant, such as their constant refusal to operate on an eight-to-five schedule, control their bodily functions, or feed and clothe themselves; these problems aren't likely to disappear for years after their actual birth.

Anyway, from various things I've read on the topic, I'm not quite sure what to think about this. Apparently, it's appropriately feministic to not feel pressured to mate and spawn, thereby sacrificing my own livelihood. On the other hand, as the above-linked article points out, feminism isn't supposed to be about not doing something 'typically' female, such as making babies: it's supposed to be about having options. So, if I try to spread the Gospel of NinjaGeek and say that women with careers shouldn't have kids, it's not being a good little feminist. But the same if I say 'yes! Spawn away! We need more snot-nosed drooling germ factories in the world!' Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Confessions of a book hoarder.

Today was Bag Day at the book sale at the library. You know how it works - take a brown paper grocery bag, fill it up with books, pay five bucks for the lot, then go home and relish in the booky goodness.

That got me thinking, about books in general, and about my relationship to them. I used to be a hardcore SF geek, but at some point my devouring of that faded a bit, and horror started to edge in. They're definitely still my two favorite fiction genres, but at some point fiction started feeling the pressure from non-fiction and what I suppose can be broadly classified as 'classics' (Note: I suppose it's possible that my three semesters at St. John's might have influenced this. Just maybe.). Amongst my finds: An intro-to-poli-sci text, a two-volume complete works of Shakespeare, a lovely little volume of "English literature: The beginnings to 1500", and a smattering of political and/or historical books, including a book about "thought and expression in the sixteenth century" in England (cleverly entitled The English Mind). Geeky, perhaps, but...well, that's no big surprise, really.

No, you don't count as having beliefs.

So, the military is doing all the crap they're doing because they buy into Bush's screed that we must protect liberty and spread democracy and liberate the Iraqis and the Afghanis (only the ones that survive our carpet-bombing of their cities, though. Don't want any weak ones to slip through). So: liberty, freedom, and so on. Religious freedom, perhaps? Forcing the new Iraqi government to have all ethnic groups represented?

It's funny, sometimes, the difference between things "there" and things on the homefront.

On a rainy day, odd things can happen

I went to the semi-annual used-book sale at the library today. Library sales are, in my opinion, like pure uncut crack for bibliophiles. They had what looked like a complete set of the Harvard Classics. At two bucks a piece for hardcover books, it would've been a hundred bucks, but I'd be a liar if I said I wasn't tempted. Who doesn't want five feet of their bookshelves to be dedicated to that?

But I'd gone up there with ten bucks in my wallet and was dead-set on spending that, at most. I spent eight dollars (six paper, one cloth), and must say I felt mildly proud at my restraint.

On the way home, I was stopped at a traffic light and watched the rain-spattered local highway traffic go by. A truck, bearing an 'oversized load' banner cruised on past. It was a big flatbed truck and for the most part, was empty. On the very back of the truck bed, firmly strapped down and looking entirely incongruous, was something not dissimilar from this. It was undecorated, of course, and minus the surrounding brick patio and lush gardens, but it was a stricking white, black-roofed gazebo., making its merry way through the sludgy March weather of New Jersey.