Israel is building a Separation Wall. They bulldozed Rachel Corrie to build this wall; they’ve destroyed countless Palestinian homes to build this wall.

That’s okay, we’re told, because the wall will bring peace and security. The wall will keep Palestinian terrorists out of Israel; don’t Israelis have the right to be safe? As for the farms and homes destroyed (none of which belong to Israelis), ya gotta break some eggs to make an omelet.

Well, of course. And that wall sounds like a reasonable proposition. But that wall - the wall for peace, the wall that would be built along the “green line” of 1967 - that ain’t the Wall Israel is building. Instead, Israel is building a Wall that nakedly grabs more territory for Israel. Everything bad you’ve heard about the settlements? The Wall is a hundred times worse.

The blue areas are Palestine.

Look at the map on the right. If you were Palestinian, is this a deal you could agree to? If you were a Palestinian leader, could you ever face your people after agreeing to this?

If you were a Palestinian, wondering if the Israelis are prepared to negotiate in good faith, what would the map on the right tell you about Israel’s intentions?

If you were an Israeli, would you propose this for a second if you were serious about peace?

But Sharon has done more than proposed it - he’s already begun building it. It’s an impediment to peace a hundred times worse than the settlements - but no one is objecting. After all, the Wall is about peace, right?

For details - including some more detailed maps - go read Gush Shalom’s page on the wall. (Link via Aron’s Israel Peace Blog.)

Shark Blog and Silver Rights have been discussing an incident in Seattle, in which a teacher, Brian Emanuels, chastised a black student for using the word “gay” in a derogatory manner. The controversy comes in because of the way Emanuels decided to demonstrate bad behavior by example:

The NAACP is calling for Emanuels’ firing. Shark Blog disagrees, on the grounds that “Emanuels’ use of the N-word was not meant to harass anybody, but was merely a clumsy attempt to teach a lesson in tolerance.” In other words, Shark Blog is defending Emanuels based on the idea that Emanuels had good intentions.

But I think intentions are irrelevant. Accepting for argument’s sake that Emanuels had the best intentions in the world, the NAACP is still right about this case.

The problem is, how the school system responds to this incident won’t just effect Emanuels; it sets a precedent for how the school acts in the future. What happens when the next teacher disparagingly refers to a black student as a “nigger,” and claims that his intentions were good, too? It’s important - hell, it’s essential - that any teacher who acts as Emanuels did be put through hell and back.

Does it seem unfair that a well-meaning teacher faces punishment, and might even lose his job? Consider this: teachers can - and should - be fired and hired based on many things in addition to their intentions. Let’s continue assuming that Emanuels meant well: What does it say about his competence and judgment as a teacher, that he called a black student “nigger”? I’d say that’s a demonstration of stunning incompetence; and there’s nothing wrong with disciplining incompetent teachers, regardless of their alleged good intentions.

I do agree, of course, that using “gay” in a derogatory way is homophobic, and teachers should speak out against it. So I’ll give Emanuels points for that. But I think it’s possible to teach that lesson without calling black students “nigger”; if Mr. Emanuels does lose his job, perhaps he’ll be replaced by someone who can teach against homophobia more competently.

All that said, I worry that it’s a mistake to focus on cases like this. The big problem of anti-black racism isn’t white teachers calling black students “nigger”; it’s smooth, well-spoken men in expensive suits who would never use the word “nigger” in public, but who pursue policies and ideologies that keep in place a de facto segregation of black and white that puts blacks (on average) in worse schools, worse jobs, worse neighborhoods, and out of positions of wealth and power. And it’s the powerful folks who don’t say “nigger,” but who passionately oppose any policy that might actually create change in that de facto segregation.

In other words, I worry that stories like this make it seem like racism is all about individual racists. Individual racists suck, but I think institutional racism is what’s really doing the most damage. The very fact that our current system is very worried about use of the word “nigger,” but pretty much accepts the racist system that keeps blacks disproportionately poor and out of power, suggests to me that criticizing use of the word “nigger” isn’t much of a threat to the system.

Matthew Yglesias, discussing Zion’s multiculturalism in Matrix Reloaded, suggests that it would have been nice to see more interracial dating. I agree, but given how rare it is to see many non-white faces in Science Fiction at all (clue to Star Trek creators: the majority of the human race is not white), it seems silly to fuss over this.

(Keep in mind, as well, that The Matrix is not unusual in the lack of interracial romance; it’s just that in most sci-fi nearly everyone is white, so we don’t think twice about the white-on-white mono-racial relationships being portrayed.)

Really, the preponderance of monoracial dating could be justified in the universe of the Matrix. Remember, all those folks in Zion were raised in a simulation of late-20th-century Earth. Since they were therefore with all the same prejudices that bedevil our current society, it would be strange if there were less racial division in Zion than we see around us from day to day.

If I see the movie again, I’ll try to pay more attention to demographics, but if my memory serves there were a lot of African-Americans in Zion, and many fewer Asians than you’d expect given global demographics. Maybe the Matrix’s creators are implying that American Blacks, due to living in a racist system, are more mentally prepared to rebel against the system – to “swallow the red pill” – than most other folks are.

Palestinians protest Islamic Militants
The Associated Press reports on a Palestinian protest against Islamic militants. “They (the militants) claim they are heroes,” said Mohammed Zaaneen, 30, a farmer, as he carried rocks into the street. “They brought us only destruction and made us homeless. They used our farms, our houses and our children … to hide.” (Via Shark Blog).

Alterman and Fund: the “little bit nutty” defense lives on, damn it
Mac-a-ro-nies and Body and Soul have both written good posts on what’s wrong with liberal columnist Eric Alterman’s defense of accused batterer John Fund. From Body and Soul:

Another Satisfied Customer
Eszter is happy with the drawing she commissioned from me. Say, wouldn’t an original Ampersand drawing be just the perfect thing for your/your friend’s wall?

Originalism: Where does it end?
A typically fascinating post from Jack Balkin discusses a problem with theories that Courts should use formalist techniques in judging - or, rather, “neoformalist.” Many of our dearest rights (Balkin has an amazing partial list) are rooted in court decisions that used methods the neoformalists disdained. We’re talking about stuff as diverse as the right to marry, Congress’ right to pass civil rights laws, women’s equality, the existence of the Federal Reserve bank, paper money…

In my view, the problem is that the Constitution is badly written; as written, it’s simply too hard to change the Constitution to keep up with changing social needs. But society isn’t going to come to halt just because the Constitution did; if we can’t have the laws we need according to the letter of the Constitution, then we’ll have the laws we need some other way.

Mass Graves in Iraq and everywhere else
The Shadow of the Hegemon has a good post on the mass graves in Iraq. Permalinks are dead, of course (step AWAY from blogspot!), but look for May 15′th post. “Therein lies the paradox- these mass graves are being used to justify the historically unique intervention of the United States by the supposedly unique evil of the Iraqi regime, yet the existence of these graves only shows that there was nothing unique about Saddam. His evil was a sadly common one.”

Stupid, stupid racist people!
Pandagon relates an encounter he had with a racist store clerk last week (I won’t describe it, go over to his blog to read it) and asks: “Have you ever had something so racist happen to you that you just can’t say anything?”

Does anti-Semitism count? I once had someone refer to insurance fraud arson as “Jew lighting,” for instance. Another woman - in a rural area of a rural state - told me, in all seriousness, that she thought Jews had horns. In both cases, I was unable to reply - it was like the rug had suddenly been yanked out from under my aplomb.

Arundhati Roy converts to republicanism, praises Bush
Okay, not really. Scott M. (formerly known as “Sam” around these parts) links to a new Roy speech on Iraq, entitled “Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy. Buy One, Get One Free.” I haven’t read the full speech yet, but I love Roy’s writing, so I’m linking it here so I’ll remember to read it later.

I got to rewatch Into the Woods this week, thanks to a DVD borrowed from the library.

(Into The Woods, for those of you who don’t know, is a musical, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. The show retells four traditional fairy tales - Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Rapunzel and a fifth, new fairy tale, The Baker and his Wife.)

Although there are a couple of Sondheim musicals I like better than Into the Woods, I don’t think any of them have wordplay as clever and playful as Into the Woods. Here, for instance, is Jack’s mother trying to convince Jack to sell his cow before its value depreciates any further:

We’ve no time to sit and dither,
While her withers wither with her.

Of course, it’s not all silliness. One thing that’s always surprised me is how many people misunderstand the second act’s central song, “No One is Alone.” Too many people understand this song as a reassurance: “don’t worry, I’m with you pal, you are not alone.”

Actually, “No One is Alone” as an attack on the ethic of individualism that dominated the US in the 1980s. (Into the Woods was first performed in November 1987). Here’s the key verse:

You move just a finger,
Say the slightest word,
Something’s bound to linger,
Be heard.
No one acts alone.
Careful, no one is alone.

The song tells us that when people make mistakes, it’s because they’re “holding to their own, thinking they’re alone.” Indeed, the worse moral error any character in Into the Woods commits is self-centeredness. For example, Jack climbs the beanstalk, robs the kingdom in the clouds and kills the giant; understandably, he’s thinking of alleviating his and his mother’s poverty. He doesn’t think about the mourning of the giant’s wife - and his thoughtlessness brings tragedy to the entire community.

In fact, the entire first act of Into The Woods - in which fairy tales which are normally told apart are shown to be interrelated, actions in one tale leading to repercussions in another, which lead in turn to new actions and reactions - is an illustration of the “no one is alone” principle.

Having established its attack on individualism, the lyrics of “No One is Alone” go on to endorse that perpetual punching bag of conservatives - moral relativism.

Witches can be right,
Giants can be good.
You decide what’s right,
You decide what’s good.

Just remember:

Someone is on our side,
Someone else is not.
While we’re seeing our side-
Maybe we forgot.
They are not alone.
No one is alone.

The song, which seems comforting at first, is actually very disquieting: the moral is, we have to avoid the selfishness of thinking as if we were alone, and we have to remember that even our enemies are sometimes in the right.

That’s one thing I love about Sondheim - his works almost always repay a second (or a twentieth) listening.

Shonda at Diotima links to an article about a Texas Planned Parenthood which formed an arrangement with the local library system. According to Shonda, “Planned Parenthood was banning pro-lifers from the library.”

Of course, that sentence isn’t even close to the truth.

The deal was, Planned Parenthood made its private collection (about a thousand books and other materials related to reproductive health) available to public library patrons in Waco, Texas, in exchange for access to the library’s cataloging software. Planned Parenthood paid the Waco library “a few hundred dollars a year” for the arrangement.

The problem was, Planned Parenthood doesn’t let pro-life zealots into their offices, for security reasons.

I don’t use the term “zealots” generically, but as a specific description of the particular folks suing the library. Here’s a quote from Rusty Thomas, head of Elijah Ministries and the first of the pro-lifers to file suit against the Waco library:

Planned Parenthood is reasonable to keep Thomas - who, in the incident he’s sueing over, showed up at Planned Parenthood with a mob of supporters - out of their offices. If hate-filled extremists like Thomas are let in, there’s no way to protect Planned Parenthood’s staff and clients from being shot or bombed by pro-life zealots; at the very least, there’s every reason to worry that the book collection would be defaced or destroyed.

Planned Parenthood’s collection was never part of the library, and the Planned Parenthood offices were never considered a branch of the library. Nevertheless, the basis of the suit is that Planned Parenthood’s paying the Waco library turned Planned Parenthood into a branch of the library, and therefore it is claimed that pro-lifers have been banned from the public library. That it isn’t even remotely true doesn’t stop pro-lifers from making the claim.

Planned Parenthood and the Waco Library are, understandably, severing their relationship. Which is probably for the best - it’s a mistake for libraries to associate themselves with any political cause but, well, libraries.

Nonetheless, Shonda’s biased sum-up suggests how the pro-life mythmaking machine will remember this incident. Years from now, pro-lifers will probably be whispering to themselves about that time the Evil Babykillers attempted to ban all pro-lifers from public libraries. Oy.

Steve Bates, the Yellow Doggerel Democrat, is spittin’ mad at Homeland Security’s new U.S. Visitor and Immigration Status Indication Technology (aka US VISIT). (God, I love these acronyms. I feel like we’re living in a Nick Fury comic book.)

I was struck by this claim, from the AP report:

The assumption seems to be that terrorists are static; they create plans in isolation from anti-terrorist measures and carry them out. In contrast, I imagine real terrorist tactics are responsive to security measures - especially well-known, public security measures like this one.

Had US VISIT been in place in 2001, it probably would have stopped Mohammed Atta and Hani Hanjour - but only in the limited sense that whoever coordinated the operation would have known to send two different suicidal assholes instead, instead of sending those particular two assholes. I just don’t see that as a great accomplishment, somehow.

In the comments to my previous post, Alas reader Gar Lipow helpfully provided a link to the comments section of the British Medical Journal, where there are many substantial criticisms of the study I mentioned. Gar also pointed out the AMA’s very back-of-the-hand rejection of the same study (which is interesting more for how openly obnoxious it is than for providing any actual critique of the study).

Also, the study was funded by the tobacco industry, which does raise reasonable skepticism.

So, unfortunately, secondhand smoke may be harmful after all. Oh, well. On the bright side, I can go back to feeling morally superior to my smoking housemates (always a silver lining), who are killing me - KILLING ME! - with their selfish habits (choke! gasp! can’t breathe… mustn’t… pass… out…), and who also are making a mess on the floor near the coffee pot. Darn them smokers!

I’ll be interested to see what A.C. Douglas and The Light of Reason say about the critiques of this study.

The Light of Reason discusses studies showing that secondhand smoke is harmless. One study, according to the Times of London, followed married non-smokers for 40 years, and found that being married to a smoker made no difference to their odds of developing lung cancer or heart disease.

One thing that strikes me is, if true, this is awfully good news. Isn’t it? I mean, a lot of people live with smokers (yours truly included). So shouldn’t we be happy?

Well, yes. But if it’s true that secondhand smoke is harmless, that will be an annoyance to all those anti-smoking groups, who’d hate having to admit that smokers are harming only themselves. And who have, it seems, uncritically pushed studies with questionable methodology and results.

Arthur Silber, the blogger at Light of Reason, is concerned that the various anti-smoking laws are a threat to “personal freedom.” I don’t know - in light of the draconian laws against drugs like pot, LSD and cocaine (drugs that are, by most accounts, a good deal more fun than tobacco), it’s hard for me to get worked up over the anti-smoking laws. Potheads and cokeheads are being threatened with jail; in contrast, the main thrust of anti-smoking regulations seems to be to annoy smokers to death.

Huge portions of Iraq’s Library were saved!
Via Making Light, some good news for a change: Some smart Iraqis, seeing which way the wind was blowing, hid many of the Iraqi Libraries holdings before the looters and fires got to them. The Boston Globe has the story. Yay!

What if there is no more Normal to return to?
The Iron Monkey blog is pretty funny. (Via Dru Blood).

Republicans are bad for employment
Wampum charts out job gains and losses under the last five presidents. Here’s a sample, but you should go read the whole post.

War, Brought to You by Public School Funds
Sue Berger at Yo Mama tells the story of an anti-war protest her 14-year-old daugther organized at her school. It’s nice to read something like this - clearly, some members of the upcoming generation rock. (Also, it reminded me of when I was around 14 years old and organized a protest against our invasion of Grenada.)

We’re on a Road Map to Nowhere
Calpundit links to an excellent op-ed by Israeli novelist David Grossman (registration required, alas) about prospects for peace in the middle east. Things don’t look great; Sharon doesn’t seem at all sincere (as Calpundit points out, “when a party to a conflict insists that the other side concede something before negotiations even begin, it shows that they aren’t serious”), and neither is Arafat. (Abu Mazen may be sincere, but I’m not sure how much he can accomplish over Arafat’s will).

The good news is, someday the Israeli voters may choose someone other than Sharon. And someday Arafat may die.

Boys Falling Behind in Schools?
Diotima links to an unusually decent article on boys and schools from Business Week. There’s a touch too much biology-is-destiny in the article - it would have been nice, for instance, if the writer had acknowledged that not all little boys are the same, and factors other than sex determine what learning style is best for each kid. But there’s also a refreshing lack of blaming girl’s advances for boy’s problems, as if decent education for all were a zero-sum game.

I’d also point out that education isn’t the same as outcome. One reason (referred to briefly in the second-to-last paragraph of the article) boys may work less than girls at education is that boys don’t need as much education to get the same earning power. In a world in which a boy with a high-school degree can earn about as much as a girl with a college education, is it any surprise that fewer boys than girls go on to college?

Drug testing: Self-Evident and yet wrong
Mark Kleiman discusses last year’s Supreme Court decision that drug testing in school was constitutional, due to the state’s pressing interest in reducing drug use among kids. Justice Scalia wrote that it was “self-evident” that drug testing woudl reduce usage.

Now a new study shows that drug testing doesn’t reduce usage among kids (at least, it doesn’t do so as it’s been implemented). As Mark writes, “It will be interesting to see whether Breyer allows himself to be swayed by the facts, whether Thomas continues to think that something with zero measured effect is still ‘reasonably effective,’ and whether Scalia is prepared to deal with the possibility a proposition that strikes him as self-evident might nevertheless be untrue.”

The World Bank insults indigenous peoples
The World Bank is offering “up to 50,000 dollars for projects on development themes” - compared to the millions it’s been willing to lend for projects that are imposed on indigenous peoples without their participation or consent. Apparently the World Bank thinks indigenous folks are too stupid to tell the difference between a real program providing significant aid, and a cheap publicity stunt intended to help the World Bank’s image problems. Little Red Cookbook has the details.

Women’s Rights versus Population Control
Interesting (albeit somewhat academic) article from a couple of folks at the Harvard School of Public Health. To vastly oversimplify: There are two approaches to “the problem” of reproduction in the developing world: the “population control” approach, which takes reducing population as the goal. And the feminist approach, which is about empowering women - including, but not limited to, reproductive rights - and trusting that the choices empowered women make will be correct and sustainable.

Gender and AIDS
The UN Development Fund for Women has a newish website, genderandaids.org, a website devoted to studies and articles about the ways gender roles and women’s lack of power helps spread AIDS in the developing world. There’s a lot of interesting material there that I hope to get around to blogging.

Tests show: Racists become even stupider
Silver Rights, refuting the claim that racism isn’t important anymore, discusses some fascinating research showing that bigots, after talking with a black person, actually become less able to perform mental tasks.

I assume everyone’s reading Salam Pax, but I’m linking to this post of his anyhow.

Read the entire post here.

The extent to which the Americans running Iraq haven’t even been able to project an image of competence - either here or, apparently, in Iraq - is one of the surprising things about the invasion of Iraq. Why do I keep on expecting the Bush administration to be something other than slipshod? Must be an effect of the Bush publicity machine (the one aspect of this administration that seems well-run).

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, we’re continuing to let things go to hell (or, actually, to the Taliban). I was going to do a whole post on this, but it was too damn depressing; but for folks who are interested, the website of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of RAWA is an excellent resource. Just scroll waaay down (about 2/3rds of the page) to where it says “Recent Reports from Afghanistan,” and read the articles.

Hell, if you don’t want to read the articles, just read the headlines; they form a sort of lousy prose-poem of neglect and horror. Here’s the current top ten headlines from RAWA’s list:

Before the war on Iraq, some pro-war liberals were asking why it mattered if the Bush administration’s heart was in the right place; what’s important is that Iraq be “liberated,” not what’s in the hearts of the liberators. But what’s happened in Afghanistan shows that sincerity does count for something. Liberation - if it can be imposed from outside at all - is a long, tedious process, requiring a genuine commitment, not just pretty words. In Afghanistan and now in Iraq, it’s become clear that the United States lacks that commitment.

The U.S. just has no follow-through. But that’s okay, because that’s not the sort of news which American voters will be exposed to much by the media that counts. That kind of stuff is just too depressing. Can we re-run the footage of the statue being pulled down instead?

Sara at Diotima uncritically quotes from an article in Frontpage:

I don’t want to pick on Sara too much - she’s better than most anti-feminists, and even agrees with feminists on some issues while occasionally diverging from anti-feminist orthodoxy.

But this quote is dishonest. The YWCA doesn’t oppose abstinence education - it opposes abstinence-only education. Abstinence-only education is an entirely different thing than just teaching and encouraging abstinence; to pretend the two are the same thing is a lie.

Also, the quote is plain wrong. Maybe the extremists at Frontpage Magazine believe that abstinence education (as opposed to abstinence itself) guarantees “100% protection” from STDs, but no one with a working brain could agree with them (which makes it puzzling that Sara seemingly endorses the quote). Since fewer than 100% of teens who attend an abstinence education program actually will abstain (the American Academy of Pediatrics says “26% of adolescent couples trying to abstain from intercourse will become pregnant within 1 year”), it’s obvious that abstinence education doesn’t provide “100% protection.”

The Frontpage article (in another bit uncritically quoted by Sara) goes on to complain that the YWCA “seeks to eliminate racism.” The horror! The horror!

• Everything on Body and Soul today about Iraq and Afghanistan is essential reading. Just start with this post and scroll down.

• An interesting Science News article about different voting systems. Basically, the US’s voting system - plurality voting - is arguably the worse voting system of all, if the goal is to have outcomes which reflect the desire of the largest possible number of voters. Alternative systems (not just Instant Runoff) are discussed. Thanks to Jake Squid for the tip.
• The Rittenhouse Review quotes a New York Review of Books article, which points out that CNN created two entirely separate newscasts for the Iraq war - an intelligent one for CNN internatoinal, and a jingoistic one for CNN America. Amazing how blatant these things sometimes are…
• A genuinely excellent Terry Neal op-ed piece on the Jayson Blair “scandal” in today’s Washington Post.
• Via BlueHeron, an February article from the Economist arguing that the GDP per capita difference between the USA and Western European countries is exaggerated by factors irrelevant to real quality of life. For one thing, raw GDP numbers don’t account for the greater amount of leisure time Europeans enjoy; to some extent, Euroworkers choose to spend their productivity on leisure rather than on wealth. For another thing, some things counted in the US’s greater GDP - such as how much we spend keeping folks in prison - don’t really net us a greater quality of life than Europeans enjoy.
• My So-Called Lesbian Life talks about the next big body-mod trend: forked tongues. Even better, she’s got a photo.
• An interesting Haaretz article reports Frank Luntz’s take on how Americans see Israel and Palestine. Mr. Luntz is a republican pollster who has also worked for the Israeli government. (Via Aaron’s Israel Peace Blog).
  Luntz warned that, following America’s victory over Saddam Hussein, Israel’s standing in American public opinion has become very vulnerable. […] Most Americans dislike Sharon and believe that neither Israel nor the Palestinians want peace, Luntz continued. Americans, however, want peace now - and they do not care what Israel must sacrifice to achieve it, he said. Thus, for Israel to insist on its rights, he said, will cost it in terms of American public opinion.

  Americans, Luntz added, do not want to hear about democracy in Israel. They want to know when the settlements will be dismantled, when the occupation will end and when Israel will recognize a Palestinian state, as well as when the Palestinians will halt terror, when they will finally oust Yasser Arafat and when they will stop educating their children to hate Israel. In short, Americans want to pressure both sides to reach an agreement.

• D-Squared Digest has a fascinating post about how software has made it easy for folks performing multivariate analysis to “data-mine” by simply running the data through over and over, perhaps hundreds of times, until a model is found that makes the data look good. This makes finding significant-looking results easier, while actually making those results meaningless.
• Raznor’s Rants (permalink bloggered) provides this quote (which he got from Atrios and Ezra Klein) about the presidential election:
  If you are a Democrat with a compulsion to run for president, this would be a good time to find a detox program for the ambition-addicted. President Bush’s popularity is at Founding Father levels. The Republicans have a cassette full of your doleful prewar words about Desert Storm, ready for media man Roger Ailes to pin to your hide. Meanwhile, Bush’s Warthogs . . . are softening you up from the air, impugning your toughness if not your patriotism. Even if you voted for the war . . . you still have to answer for your party, which opposed it almost en masse. “They’re fair game,” says Ailes.

  The good news is, the quote is from 1991.

• Brad Delong discusses an economic theory explaining when slavery and serfdom arises. Really fascinating stuff.
• New Volokh Conspirator Russell Korobkin argues - I think correctly - that it’s perfectly legitimate for Democrats (or Republicans) in the Senate to block judicial nominations merely because they don’t like them politically.
  The bilateral monopoly situation (neither side can get a judge appointed without the other) should ensure that either (a) presidents appoint only judges that everyone can live with, or (b) presidents must make concessions on some nominations in order to get their favorite candidates confirmed. Either way, the country gets a more balanced judiciary than it would if the Senate played doormat
• Even if you’re not the sort of person who generally reads judicial rulings for the fun of it, you should go read this very entertaining court opinion (pdf file) by Greg Easterbrook. The case involves a man who claimed to own the copyright on his own name, and wanted to charge the Judge, the prosecutors, and his own lawyer thousands of dollars every time they mentioned his name in court. There’s also an interesting discussion of if judges should demand that spectators in the courtroom remove their hats. (Via The Volokh Conspiracy.)

  Easterbrook, by the way, is the same judge who years ago ruled that the MacKinnon-Dworkin anti-porn ordinance was unconstitutional. Although I generally admire MacKinnon, I think Easterbrook made the correct ruling in that case, too.

• I really should get around to adding the new group econo-blog It’s Still the Economy, Stupid to the blogroll.
• Maxspeak discusses the cost of health care and the private sector, including a useful graph. Look for the US aalllllll the way in the upper-right corner of the graph.
• An excellent Mother’s Day post in The Watch on economics, childrearing, spillovers, and motherhood. “Demanding that women shoulder whatever burden of childrearing that their companions don’t voluntarily assume is a disgrace. It’s not just rotten politics, it’s a horrid reflection on ourselves.”

  I agree, and I’d add that it’s not just childrearing - its all caretaking. Look at who’s taking care of elderly relatives, for example.

Ah, those classic comic book covers…

Via Outside the Beltway.

Okay, let’s get this out of the way right now: There is a zionist lobby in America. They work hard to influence policy, they spend a lot of money promoting politicians they like, and they have a lot of influence in the Bush administration.

So what?

Everyone has a lobby. The major media have a lobby. The Chinese government has a lobby. The farmers have a lobby. Why the heck shouldn’t the zionists have a lobby? And of course they spend money and influence policy; that’s the whole point of having a lobby.

This is so obvious, it’s boring.

And yes, they’ve been very successful. So has the insurance lobby, so has the NRA. Inevitably, some lobbies are more successful than others. So what?

Not all zionists are Jewish - but a lot of them are. This is entirely to be expected, and there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging it.

Not all Jews are zionists. But the average Jew is more likely to be a zionist than the average non-Jew; and, more generally, the average Jew is more likely to be interested in Israel than the average non-Jew.

Again, this is so obvious that it’s boring. Jews are more likely to be interested in Jewish issues just as American Indians are more likely to be interested in American Indian issues and just as farmers are more likely to be interested in farming issues.

No one should be called an anti-Semite for saying any of the above. Anti-semitism is hatred of the Jews; you don’t have to hate Jews to believe any of the things I’ve just written.

Yet people who criticize the zionist lobby are often accused of being anti-semitic - merely because they’ve acknowledged the lobby exists. People who criticize the zionist lobby and refer to the obvious fact that zionists are disproportionately Jewish are guaranteed to be labeled anti-semites.

Too many zionists forget that zionism is not Judaism. Not all Jews are zionists. Not all zionists are Jews. Someone who refers to zionism is not talking about “the Jews.” Someone who criticizes zionism is not being anti-Jewish.

Every year, the word “anti-Semite” is degraded more. Accusations of anti-Semitism are flung about far too quickly and easily; zionists are becoming the boy who cried “wolf!” The goal, presumably, is to delegitimize criticism of Israel, by labeling all but the most mild, spineless criticisms “anti-Semitic.” But I’m afraid the result will be just the opposite; calling legitimate criticism “anti-Semitic” will wind up legitimizing real anti-Semitism. And that sucks.

So how many folks out there are still having the “comments bug” - the comments not remembering who you are, that is? And what systems are you using? I know Bean’s on XP, how about the rest of you?

Anyhow, I’m working on it. Please be patient.

Also, I’ve changed the font sizes, so hopefully they’re no longer too small to be read, as some folks have complained.

“I saw President Bush on that aircraft carrier in the Pacific yesterday. Incidentally, that’s the closest he’s ever got to the war in Vietnam.”

-Senator Fritz Hollings

For any set of data indicating women have a problem, there are conservatives claiming the data doesn’t exist or should be ignored. Regarding the Save the Children report (pdf link) (see my post below this one for info), Hindrocket of the conservative blog Power Line writes:

Hindrocket says “I always like to check the actual data,” but he doesn’t actually provide any data showing that the US does any better in world rankings if we measure “on a per-baby basis.” The World Health Organization’s website includes 1995 data (in Word format) for both “Lifetime Maternal Mortality Risk” (the measure Save the Children used) and “Maternal Mortality Ratio” (risk assessed “on a per-baby basis,” as Hindrocket prefers).

So is Hindrocket right? Nope. By the WHO’s measures (which include more countries than Save the Children’s - I think Save the Children was right to exclude some of those countries, as the data-gathering accuracy is questionable), the U.S. is 23rd in the world for “maternal mortality ratio,” and 26th in the world for “lifetime maternal mortality risk.” That is, the U.S. actually does just about the same regardless of which method is used. And according to the WHO’s numbers, even measured the way Hindrocket prefers, Sweden (#10) and Switzerland (#12) both are doing better than the United States.

(Note: In my first version of this post, I made some errors with the numbers in the above paragraph, which I’ve now corrected).

So Hindrocket - and his cheerleader Instapundit, who in a classic example of conservative “deny the problem” thinking writes “Save the children — from bogus claims!” - are both wrong on the facts. Whichever way you measure maternal mortality, the US isn’t doing well compared to countries like Sweden and Switzerland.

Hindrocket is also wrong in theory. Save the Children used “lifetime maternal mortality risk” not because they’re conspiring to make the US look bad (conservative paranoia is endless, isn’t it?), but because that is a standard figure used internationally, by the World Health Organization and many other groups.

Hindrocket says “assessing the risk on a per-baby basis… would be logical,” but he doesn’t support this bald statement with any reasoning. I think Hindrocket is mistaken; Save the Children’s experts made the correct and logical choice.

The purpose of Save the Children’s report is to measure factors that contribute to mother’s and children’s well-being. One important factor is whether a country’s health care system provides reproductive control for mothers, through education, access to birth control, and (although Save the Children diplomatically avoids discussing this element) access to abortion. In countries in which the health care system doesn’t provide women the ability to control when and how many children they have, mothers have birth earlier and more often, and both mothers and infants are more likely to die in the process.

Measuring only “per birth” maternal mortality, as Hindrocket suggests, is illogical because it can grossly underestimate the risk mothers face due to childbirth, and because it fails to measure the additional risk put on mothers when they don’t have access to reproductive control. In relatively low-birthrate countries (such as Sweden and, for that matter, the U.S.), this may not make much of a difference. But in high-birthrate countries, a lifetime risk assessment provides a much more realistic idea of how much risk mothers actually face.

Update: Maybe a model will make things clearer. (Models are oversimplified compared to reality, but they make some relationships clearer).

Imagine two countries, Access and Noaccess. Access encourages family planning with education and easily-available birth control. Noaccess is run by fundamentalists who have outlawed all forms of family planning. As a result, the average mother in Access has 1.2 children, whereas the average mother in Noaccess has 12 children.

As it happens, both countries have equally good “per birth” maternal mortality rates. But since Noaccess mothers give birth 10 times as often, they are ten times more likely to die in childbirth.

Under this model, which measure of maternal mortality provides a better idea of how well off mothers are? According to Hindrocket’s preferred “per birth” statistics, mothers are equally well-off in both countries. There is no reason, if we measure as Hindrocket wants us to, to say that Noaccess is doing any worse than Access.

In contrast, measuring the incidence of maternal mortality over a lifetime, as Save the Children does, correctly shows that mothers in Noaccess are ten times more likely to die in childbirth.

Okay, now let’s consider this logically.

1. The purpose of Save the Children’s report is to measure differences between countries.

2. Hindrocket’s measure utterly ignores an essential difference between countries like “Access” and “Noaccess.” “Lifetime maternal mortality risk” measures the same difference accurately.
3. When measuring differences between countries, a statistic that measures differences is superior to one that ignores differences.
4. Therefore, Save the Children is correct to measure using “lifetime maternal mortality risk,” rather than using Hindrocket’s method.

Any questions?

The NGO Save the Children has released its annual “Mother’s Day Rankings,” categorizing the best and worse places for mothers around the world.

The U.S., unsurprisingly, is one of the best places in the world - we ranked 11 out of 117. But, considering our vast wealth, it’s disappointing that we didn’t rank first (or even rank in the top ten).

One major reason the U.S. isn’t ranked higher is our terrible health care system: too many American women die in pregnancy or childbirth, and our infant mortality rate is too high. (The other reason is that the U.S. falls far behind other industrialized countries when it comes to women in national government; 14% of congress is female, compared to 45% in Sweden, which was the country ranked #1 by Save the Children). In the U.S., the lifetime risk of maternal mortality is 1 in 3500, compared to 1 in 6000 in Sweden. The U.S. infant morality rate is 7 deaths per 1000 live births, compared to 3 in 1000 in Sweden.

Dawn Olsen has written an excellent post about the Save the Children report and U.S. health care - go check it out.

How likely you are to die in birth - or childbirth - in the U.S. depends on race. According to the CDC, the U.S. infant mortality rate for whites is 5.7 per 1000, a rate comparable to Switzerland or Australia. The U.S. infant mortality rate for blacks is 14 per 1000, a rate comparable to Uruguay and Bulgaria. The differences in maternal mortality rates are even more stark - 5.5 per 100,000 for whites, compared to 23.3 per 100,000 for blacks. This means that as far as maternal mortality is concerned, American whites have nearly the best health care in the world - better than Sweden’s - while American blacks might as well be living in Bulgaria or Saudi Arabia. (I’m using 1995 World Health Organization data, available in word format here, to make this comparison).

In effect, measured by their access to high-quality health care, blacks in the US are living in a “developing nation,” not an “industrialized nation.”

Save the Children’s main point isn’t to compare the US to other countries, but to demonstrate how bad off mothers in developing countries can be. From the WEnews report:

The report is correct to link mother’s and children’s well-being; improving women’s status is the surest route to improving infant (and mother) health. Again from WEnews:

The Save the Children report recommends increased international funding to improve women’s status in developing countries (both by providing economic opportunities and by increasing education for women and girls), and to make maternal and child health care - including “voluntary family planning services” - more available.

These should also be important guidelines in the U.S.’s “reconstruction” of Iraq and Afghanistan (remember Afghanistan?).

From the Washington Post:

In reality, the states are facing a budget crisis, and don’t have “ample money” for child care or anything else.

One thing that’s disturbing, reading the Post’s article, is the ongoing trend of considering child care subsidies something that goes to welfare parents, rather than all low-income parents (or, as I’d prefer, all parents period). 14 states now have stricter income requirements “especially for families not on welfare.” Maryland is no longer helping low-income families with child care at all, if the family is not on welfare. Indiana has decided to divert its child-care money to cash welfare payments (again, available only to families on welfare).

This reflects the nature of poverty-fighting programs since the 1996 welfare reform act. Increasingly, the goal is no longer to fight poverty, but to reduce the welfare rolls. But when success is defined as “fewer families on welfare,” perverse incentives are created. Instead of trying to reduce poverty overall, states are motivated to 1) target aid to get current welfare families off of welfare, and 2) make welfare eligibility more and more difficult, so that families off of welfare don’t re-enter, and fewer new families enter the welfare system.

Why are fewer states providing child care help for poor families not on welfare? Because the goal isn’t to reduce poverty; the goal is to reduce welfare.