Right, then - 22 March 2011

Greetings, people of importance, people of interest, and people who just like seeing the spectacle. Today we start with a call for submissions to Bodies of Work, which hopes to showcase material from the "transsexual, transgender and gender-variant international community".

We continue with a plea to not use the language of insanity or neuroatypicalness when dsecribing people who do acts of harm, especially those who seem fully competent when they do them.

The triple of this idea a statement as to why someone is a feminist - because they believe that men are better than their reputation and the society that lets them be ill-behaved.

All of these things are complemented by a list of 101 discussions in important issues surrounding life, literature, and the culture surrounding you.

Elsewhere, coalition attacks continued against Libyan targets as rebel forces moved to a more aggressive position, using the coalition forces as support.

Out in the world today, the deployed paywall for the New York Times in Canada...isn't exactly that hard to circumvent. What the article is really great for, though, is analyzing how deliberate a decision like this might be and whether the NYT has calibrated their holes properly so that they get the right amount of revenue from the subscribers and the right amount of revenue from the ad sales and everybody's happy with easy access.

The president of Afghanistan said that his forces would take control of seven areas and provide security for them. This continues even as serious doubts remain about the ability and effectiveness of this transistion on both sides of the equation.

The publication of photographs showing United States soldiers posing with the corpse of an Afghan man has the United States army apologizing, having already court-martialed the soldiers in the photos.

Finally, the address by the United States President to the Iranian people on the occasion of the Persian New Year had significantly more bite to it than the more pleasany address of two years ago.

Domestically, Mr. Matloff suggests that the continued presence of immigrant workers and students in the pure sciences, engineering, and technologies is discouraging and displacing many United States students and workers from even trying to get into that field.

In tech, the manner in which you can disable the geolocation features built into your web browsers, so that agents and other entities cannot pinpoint as easily where you are connecting from.

Additionally, How Facebook's Like This button is tracking user data all over the freaking web, even if someone doesn't actually have a Facebook account.

In opinions, why movies that are all about the one teacher who makes a difference are hurting the education profession a lot, by making teachers out to be saints and martyrs, whose altruism shines so brightly that they'll willingly work with piss-poor wages, dicks for administrators, parents, co-workers, and students just for the chance to INSPIRE! one student to do better than the system would normally do for them.

Mr. Carafano says that United States involvement in Libya should be strictly limited, as there's no reason to invade there more fully, unlike Iraq and Afghanistan. He also mentions in his last paragraph what the WSJ gives fuller voice to - that because the President is willing to let other nations lead this affair, not only will the United States lose prestige and look absent in the affair, the objectives won't be limited in scope or achieved.

Mr. Crimi joins the camp that says Iran will be the biggest beneficiary of the current unrest in the Middle East, as they move material and ships into position with which to attack Israel. Claims Iran denies, but we're supposed to dismiss them out of hand because Iran Are Terrorists and always have been since 1979. The second part of Mr. Walsh's explanation details all that firepower, directly and through their proxies, that Iran can bear on their neighbors to bend them to their will. Assuming the allies and proxies are actually willing to go along with Iran on things.

Finally, the possibility that the ancient Hebrew religion was G-d and His Wife, rather than the single male deity doing all the creation himself. It does make sense for there to be a Divine Male and Divine Female together. And then, a letter written by Excelsior himself after a reader tried to take advantage of a very old offer that he would review a comic work for a pittance of a fee.

The news material - 23 March 2011

Up top today, take note of the following - how it makes more sense to self-publish in the long term rather than accept an advance and a significantly lower percentage of returns to publish with a big house. Standard caveats about name recognition and the like apply - it's a lot easier to go this route if you already have your devoted fanbase and have built up an audience through the publishing industry. Also, you need the infrastructure in place to handle what a publisher normally does for an author. That said, publishing contracts and recording contracts do really resemble indentured servitude, don't they...?

Elsewhere, it needs to be said, forever and always, that the requirement that persons working as models starve themsleves to unhealthy proportions is not sane, and that actual people prefer people that look like them modeling their clothes - not only do they think they models look more attractive, it also tells them whether or not they're going to be able to pull off the same look in their own bodies. Doing fashion with real models might actually mean more sales, not less, as people can be confident they will fit and look good in them.

Finally, twin stories of life and death. In life, meet Hideaki Akaiwa, who not only rescued his wife and mother from the tsunami that struck Japan, but continues to do rescue work in the affected area...by swimming out into the flooded area, sometimes using SCUBA gear, to find people trapped and barely surviving.

The death part is The Dead Pool Acting Company signs Elizabeth Taylor, noted actress, to a contract at 79 years of age.

Out in the world today, even though their flash is finished, and the revolution won, there is still the business of actual government and ownership of the means of production in Tunisia, and that should probably be getting a lot more media coverage than it is.

A soldier indicted for the murder of an Afghan man will plead guilty to three counts of murder and one of conspiracy to commit assault and battery in hopes of a reduced sentence. The soldier's misdeeds were flung wide to the world when the German magazine Der Spiegel published photographs of the soldier and others posing with the corpses of their alleged victims.

Staying in Afghanistan, think tanks are saying it's time to stop the United States' war in the country, even as the President urges the opposition to seek peace and not attack targets like schools.

In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency maintains that any radiation detected that might be from the Fukushima nuclear power plants is in sufficiently small quantities as to be harmless. In Japan itself, there's a bit more worry about radiation in food and beverages. When talking about exposure, though, it sometimes helps to have some pictures. For example, one suggestion of scale of things that you would normally get in a day versus the actual limits of exposure. Although, if you want it in little unit boxes with various amounts of scale, xkcd puts together such a graph - follow the flow, and it will make sense.

Speaking of nuclear objects, the Obama Administration is looking to see if there are placees where the budget can be cut on the nuclear arsenal past the point of the new START treaty. The Republican opposition claims that any cuts to the nuclear program are too much and that the security of the United States will be compromised by such a thing.

In technology, the increasing presence of BACON e-mail and how to fight off that tide - a little harder to do than spam because bacon e-mial is stuff that you've opted-in on, rather than opting-out.

A judge rejected a proposed settlemtn from Google that would have allowed its digitization program to continue, claiming the company would have been granted something akin to a monopoly and been allowed to profit from books without first obtaining permission from their copyright holders.

In opinions, the possibility that economists are no longer social scientists but members of the Cult of The Market (A.P.T.I.N.), based on how Mr. Krugman points out that most economists have not been paying attention to what researchers are doing, modeling, and concluding in the last few decades, preferring to see the science as settled rather than fluctuating. We suspect he would be more than willing to point at Mr. Forbes' column today claiming that The Great Saint Reagan was right on tax policy, and that lower taxes, combined with dramatically lowered spending, is exactly what the economy needs to take off and be succesful again. Instead of, say, the "massive expansion of government" that everyone claims only the Obama Administration and the Democrats are responsible for, turning a blind side to the manner in which Republican administrations have and continue to want to expand government in several sectors, while also implementing tax cuts for the people that least need them. Mr. Forbes also believes in the Laffer curve as doctrine for how governments should set their tax rates.

Ms. Glick lays into the Obama Administration for not following what she perceives are the core interests of the United States in the Middle East - cheap oil, propping up anyone who will sell cheap oil, and stopping anybody who would like to see the region united under a single banner, being it Arabia or Islam. If those have been the traditional goals of the United States in the region, no wonder we have an awful reputation and a rap for being imperialists of the worst order. The goals that are apparently now in vogue are "placating anti-US regimes", "trying to be friends with Europe" and "good PR from US media", a coalition led by Secretary Clinton against Barack Obama's desire to not intervene at all and the neoconservative insistence that all tyrants be squashed with military intervention. Since things are going this way, we can assume that Ms. Glick and others are assured that things are not going as they should have been, even as they pen columns saying "better late than never" when it comes to the intervention in Libya.

Contending not for a Worst, but a Strangest, is Mr. Gaffney, who sees the coalition attacks on Libya as the precursor to the United States letting Israel's neighbors attack them and standing by or actively helping them, as well as an apparent unresolved issue with having women in powerful positions.

Last for tonight, what networking does do for your career and what network really is useful for - getting stuff done. Networking probably doesnt help you get in to a field as much as you think, but it certainly helps you accomplish things once you're there. It also helps you learn who the real power-brokers are in any organization so that you can make friends with them. (Even though good ideas should be able to survive office politics.)

Playing Games: A long-overdue icon thing.

I believe I owe lexicalcrow a long-overdue icons explanation. So, here we go.


SA-Name: The apparent jumble of strokes making a lily on a pond contains all the letters in my username. They're all there, believe it or not. It's a very tranquil sort of usericon.


Gamera: A giant turtle plans on taking on all comers. I believe I was introduced to it by sharkcowsheep, if not having stolen it from them.


1UP Mushroom: The promise of new life eternal in Super Mario Brothers games. Often in the news rotation, as I see the cyclical nature of my posts as much the same thing - another life posted on the blog today.


Heartless: The insignia of the villains of the first Kingdom Hearts game - the shadows of beings left when their hearts are removed from them. When I'm in a particularly hostile mood, the Heartless icon (and it's companion, the Organization XIII logo) show up more in the rotation.


Blue Rain: It's not actually rain. I forget what 2dlife said it really was, but it always reminds me of rain, and it's blue. It's for more contemplative exercises that don't have a tinge of depression associated with them (That's Charlie Brown.)


Pigeon Head: Mo Willems' endearing character, Pigeon. I have them, but I haven't always used the Pigeon icons - perhaps because I haven't figured out what their mood or their subject matter is. Maybe if I devoted full posts to things about my professional career or something - then again, I also have the READ! Chicks Dig It icon. It's nice to have some options.

Sforzando: Standing up to adult bullies to protect Costume Day rules

Remember an earlier story about a young boy who wanted to be Daphne for Halloween? The one who turned clucking heads of other mothers at his school because they thought he was a gay child and his mother was raising him wrong by not forbidding his costume choice? There's more to this story than just the initial bullying. In fact, the head of the church attached to the school got involved. He demanded that the mother of the Daphne child apologize for slandering the bullying mothers and to take down the post, claiming that she had acted inappropriately and scandalously by standing up for her child and posting about it, under the rubric of "taking offense where none was intended." Recall from the original that none of the children were scandalized, only the mothers. We wonder whether the vision of appropriate gender roles they have is akin to this Vanity Fair cover, where the women are all slinky, scantily clad, and hanging off the manly menfolk (with the exception of the "Exotic" feeding something equally exotic).

Now, it would be relatively easy to stomp simply on the "they were a religious school, rar, aren't the religious people stoopid" angle, but since there are kids involved, it's a lot easier to jam on "THINK OF THE CHILDRENS" and how they're being taught by their mothers about how society expects men to not want to dress as women, even on a costume day. Even then, though, that's really only deflecting off of the main point - The kids were okay with it. It might be that magical age of innocence where gender roles haven't been firmly planted in them yet, but with the way that kids have been bombarded with material from their parents, other parents, advertisements, toy selections, and the like, by this point they've got to have an idea about the blue/pink divide. Which they will be expected to exploit in the G.R.O.S.S. manner, usually, leading to the gender see-saw that is elementary schooling, at least until the hormones kick in, or so we're told. The kids should have been at the forefront of the shock, horror, and teasing, assuming they'd been properly immersed in the culture.

Except that it was costume day. You know, one of the few days a year when the rules don't apply? The time when everyone becomes bound only by the rules of theater, which say that when a fairy declares himself invisible and throws his hoodie up as the signifier, he's invisible, regardless of the cigarette he's smoking. Where young men have traditionally held female roles, because they have the range and the look for it, and because it was only until recently that the G.R.O.S.S. principle finally stopped applying. The hens that clucked missed the rules change. They sought to impose their rules, which for that day, were in the minority. If children can dress as dinosaurs, superheroes, aliens, devils, angels, saints, politicians, and any number of otherworldly, extradimensionally, and otherwise bizarre creatures, then it doesn't follow that the rules except dressing as a girl for costume day. The kids know this instrinsically. The kids-at-heart remember this, which is why they pine for costume day and wish there were more sanctioned days where they could show their desires to the world and not be societally censured for it. Anybody who's been at a convention, concert, or other event and seen or participated in cosplay understands how shared spaces suspend the rules pretty easily, and usually enjoy the time when the world outside are the strange ones with the odd customs. Point being, our societal norms routinely have holed ripped in them just through the gathering of enough like-minded individuals. Who are these women to assert that their rules are the correct ones and all others, including the children for whom costume day is ostensibly put on, must obey them?

Like many, when challenged on their assumption that their rules were the right ones, they sought refuge, hiding behind someone they perceived to be bigger and stronger, someone who held the actual power to make their way stick. You can riff here on how "the religious people are stoopid", if you like, but you're still missing the point if you do - you can strip the religion out of this story, and it still reads as a case of adults trying to crush a child. The bullies went to their "parents" to justify themselves and have him come out and say "My kid is perfect. Your kid must have done something to bring this on themselves."

So what happens next? Well, according to what actually seems to stop bullies, the mother of Daphne standing up to them and refusing to back down is the first part of it. If things continue in such a manner, then mom might have to react to such bullying with disproportionate force so as to discourage another attempt. Being known as someone to not screw with makes the bullies decide to go after someone easier as a target. We'll see whether there's another Daphne in the future, or something else that makes the hens cluck their tongues, and how the response from this parent goes. It's been pretty awesome so far.