In case you haven’t noticed, my blogging has been lighter than usual since October. Well the main reason for that has been because I’m pregnant. I told my co-bloggers, so they wouldn’t think I was abandoning the site..

Now that I’m in just out of month 4, I’m finally happy to report that my life doesn’t revolve around the fear of throwing up on strangers. :) For a while, from months 2-4, I was battling morning sickness, and the usual first trimester sleepiness. I’m still concerned about a few things like the fact that at almost 19 weeks I weigh the same as I did when I got pregnant. In fact, one of the most fascinating things about pregnancy is the way it has altered my eating habits and my metabolism. When I was in the throws of morning sickness, for some unknown reason the more unhealthy the food the more likely it was to stay down. I’ve never eaten so many McDonald’s Big Mac’s in my life. What’s even funnier is the fact that I ate that kind of food and lost 6 pounds. I felt like I couldn’t possibly eat enough food to maintain my weight, and I was even more shocked when I read that I was supposed to eat 2600 calories a day (300 extra calories per fetus). I’ve always been a person who loves eating and food, and by medical standards I’m in the overweight category, but suddenly, I didn’t want to eat, and these two little fetuses were performing liposuction on my thighs and butt. My husband kept joking about the fact that I had the incredible shrinking booty, which he thought was bad and my mother and brother thought was great. (Now, there’s a cultural difference if there ever was one–West African ideas about booty beauty and White American ideas about booty beauty.) Fortunately, I’ve gained my 6 pounds back, but I seem to be stuck right at the same weight. I promise I’ll write more about this since it really seems to be the one issue that is bothering me the most–I keep wondering how I’m going to gain 30 lbs in 20 weeks.¹

Of course, I’m going to write about the pregnancy because there are so many juicy issues. The gender issues are obvious, but other issues like body image (which I alluded to above), medicalization, racism, and the rampant classism/materialism that surrounds birth and children. I already have some good stories to tell already, so be prepared. Plus, when the little ones are born, I’ll even have some baby blogging to do.

1. For those who don’t know the weight gain recommendation for twins is higher, but doctors also seem to be all over the place in terms of what they suggest. My OBGYN suggested a 44lb weight gain for a woman of my height who is of average weight. Since I’m overweight, she suggested 30-35 lbs. (back)

Yesterday, South Carolina representative Jim Clyburn, who is the house majority whip, told CNN Bill Clinton has got to chill. Apparently, Bill Clinton has been getting a little too feisty with Obama and has made some criticisms that Clyburn thinks are innappropriate.

While I’m sure others were focusing on the substance of Clinton’s attacks, my first reaction was geeze Hip Hop has become really mainstream. When the House Majority Whip invokes EMPD, you know Hip Hop is an integral component of contemporary American culture.

For those who don’t know, here’s the EMPD video for the song, “You Gotz to Chill.” I’m dedicating it here to my homeboy (not) Bill Clinton.

This has got to be one of my favorite Hip Hop songs of all time. Where are Eric and Parrish these days?

I’m having a database problem at work that I don’t know enough to fix. If any “Alas” readers who know database stuff can glance at this and tell me if they see what my problem is — my problem involving the database, that is, I may have many non-database-related issues that there’s no need to bring up at this moment — I’d appreciate it.

Heck — I’ll do a cartoon of any celebrity or any “Hereville” character of your choice to anyone who fixes the problem!

Read the rest of this entry »

From last Sunday’s NY Times Magazine, an article arguing that there are five moral themes, biologically programmed, that all other moralities are built on:

The exact number of themes depends on whether you’re a lumper or a splitter, but Haidt counts five — harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity — and suggests that they are the primary colors of our moral sense. Not only do they keep reappearing in cross-cultural surveys, but each one tugs on the moral intuitions of people in our own culture. Haidt asks us to consider how much money someone would have to pay us to do hypothetical acts like the following:

Stick a pin into your palm.
Stick a pin into the palm of a child you don’t know. (Harm.)

Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it at no charge because of a computer error.
Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it from a thief who had stolen it from a wealthy family. (Fairness.)

Say something bad about your nation (which you don’t believe) on a talk-radio show in your nation.
Say something bad about your nation (which you don’t believe) on a talk-radio show in a foreign nation. (Community.)

Slap a friend in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit.
Slap your minister in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit. (Authority.)

Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like idiots for 30 minutes, including flubbing simple problems and falling down on stage.
Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like animals for 30 minutes, including crawling around naked and urinating on stage. (Purity.)

In each pair, the second action feels far more repugnant.

Umn… no, not for me.

To be sure, the thought of sticking myself with a pin sounds less repugnant than sticking a child. But keeping the TV stolen from a rich person’s house seems only marginally more repugnant to me.¹

As for the other three, I don’t find the second action at all more repugnant, in any of them. And in the last one, I’d rather see a piece in which actors acted like animals than one in which they acted “like idiots.”

This doesn’t show that the “5 morals” theory is wrong. What it shows is that even if these five moral “ingredients” are universal, the application of them still varies enormously by culture, by subculture, and by individual. Even within as narrow and selected a group as “people who read the New York Times Sunday Magazine,” the writer is mistaken to assume that readers will share a common moral understanding.

Later on, however, the article does say:

In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five.

So perhaps my reaction is just typical of a liberal.

1. I’d have other objections to keeping the TV — for instance, not wanting to encourage housebreaking, which can lead to injury or death if things go wrong — but that’s an intellectual response, not a felt response. (back)

Obama, in the most recent debate:

CLINTON: Now, I just — I just want to be clear about this. In an editorial board with the Reno newspaper, you said two different things, because I have read the transcript. You talked about Ronald Reagan being a transformative political leader. I did not mention his name.

OBAMA: Your husband did.

CLINTON: Well, I’m here. He’s not. And…

OBAMA: OK. Well, I can’t tell who I’m running against sometimes.

(APPLAUSE)

CLINTON: Well, you know, I think we both have very passionate and committed spouses who stand up for us. And I’m proud of that.

What a stupid, sexist remark. Too bad he resorts to such snake tactics after saying brilliant things like this:

We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them. The scourge of anti-Semitism has, at times, revealed itself in our community. For too long, some of us have seen immigrants as competitors for jobs instead of companions in the fight for opportunity.

This is a the latest of a series at my blog, usually consisting of an amusing visual image about disability. Visual descriptions are meant to both assist those who cannot view the image well, and encourage discussion when others see something different.

Visual description: A one-pane comic, drawn very simply. A stick figure stands next to a sign posted on a wall that reads “Third Floor Office” with some Braille just below those words. At the top of the comic: “I learned to read Braille a while back, and I’ve noticed that the messages on signs don’t always match the regular text.” The stick figure touching the Braille signage has a thought balloon translating what she reads: “S-I-G-H-T-E-D P-E-O-P-L-E S-U-C-K … Hey!”

Comic source

h/t to Andrea at Andrea’s Buzzing About

Cross-posted at The Gimp Parade

From an article about MLK Jr in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“If any of you are around when I have to meet my day,” King told the congregation of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church on February 4, 1968, two months before his assassination, “I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize — that isn’t important. Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards — that’s not important. Tell them not to mention where I went to school. I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to give his life serving others. I’d like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to love somebody. I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question. I want you to be able to say that I did try to feed the hungry. I want you to be able to say that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked.”

The article gives a brief overview of some of the scholarly books about Dr. King, and emphasizes how his radically left views — not just on racial justice, but also on economic justice (two subjects that I doubt MLK saw as separable) — have been obscured by the safe, saintly image of MLK that predominates. Obscured also is the fact that MLK was part of a mass movement that long preceded him, not a sole Great Man creating change out of whole clothe.

There are too many interesting bits to quote, but here’s another sample:

Never was King’s full agenda more visible than after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In his last years, King struggled to devise tactics suitable to challenging economic injustice, a target more amorphous than Jim Crow. In 1966 he launched an ill-fated challenge to Chicago’s slums and residential segregation. In 1967, in a speech against “racism, materialism, and militarism,” he described the United States as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” placed America “on the wrong side of a world revolution,” and blamed the “need to maintain social stability for our investments.”

In 1968, King visited a bare-bones elementary school in rural Mississippi. As he watched, the teacher provided each child with a few crackers and a quarter of an apple for lunch. “That’s all they get,” his friend Ralph Abernathy whispered. King nodded, his eyes filled with tears, which he wiped away with the back of his hand. That night, King conceived the notion of a Poor People’s Campaign. To open the eyes of the nation to poverty, he would lead a Washington encampment of poor people whose civil disobedience would compel a shift of funds from war to social priorities such as full employment and a guaranteed annual income.

Opposition instantly greeted the Poor People’s Campaign. King’s advisers privately doubted its wisdom. Former allies criticized it publicly. As King soldiered on undaunted, he was called to Memphis, where garbage workers requested his presence.

Curtsy: Crooked Timber.

I really love chapter 1 of Vulcan and Visnu, which simply shows the two characters building a bridge, and makes it oddly fascinating.

I still read various “marriage movement” blogs, out of habit and because it’s easier for me to walk on the treadmill if I can read something that pisses me off. A few have posted references to this story from Britland:

The harrowing story of twins who were separated at birth and married each other without realising they were brother and sister was revealed today. [...] The couple’s plight was revealed by the former Liberal Democrat MP Lord Alton, who is fighting for children to have greater rights to know the identity of their biological parents.

The peer, who raised the twins’ story during a House of Lords debate on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, said: “I learned of this heartbreaking story from the High Court judge who dealt with the case.

As Heresy Corner argues, it seems likely that Lord Alton either made the story up (purposely or through mishearing) or credulously fell for an urban myth.

Lord Alton told the House of Lords that he had learned of the case from the judge who decided it. Later, pressed by the Sun, he admitted that the judge he spoke to might only have been “familiar” with the case. To date, no judge has come forward, even off the record, to confirm having had such a conversation with the noble lord. The senior Family Division judge stated, on the record, that he was unaware of any such case. In any event, annulment cases normally only reach the High Court when there are complex financial issues at stake, or the legality of the marriage is in real dispute. Neither is likely to have been the case here.

(I agree with Alton, by the way, that children should “have greater rights to know the identity of their biological parents.” But there are legitimate reasons to favor that policy; no need to drag in the scary campfire stories.)

Economists Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) and Sudhir Venkatesh have published a study of the economics of street and brothel prostitution in Chicago. They used a variety of data sources, including paying prostitutes a fee to allow “embedded data trackers” (who were themselves mostly ex-prostitutes) to follow them through their working days¹ and keep records of all transactions. As far as I can tell, only female prostitutes were studied.²

Their conclusion:

This study provides a rare window into the lives of those who are most marginalized in society. Surprising to an outsider are the fluidity with which these women move in and out of prostitution and other work, their willingness to absorb enormous risk for a small pecuniary reward, and the blurred lines between good and evil, where police extort sex and pimps pay efficiency wages.

Also from the study (in context, it’s clear that when they write “prostitution” or “street prostitution” they mean to include both streetwalkers and brothel workers, but not more high-end prostitutes such as escorts):

The transaction-level data we collected suggests that street prostitution yields an average wage of $27 per hour. Given the relatively limited hours that active prostitutes work, this generates less than $20,000 annually for a women working year round in prostitution. While the wage of a prostitute is four times greater than the non-prostitution earnings these women report (approximately $7 per hour), there are tremendous risks associated with life as a prostitute. According to our estimates, a woman working as a prostitute would expect an annual average of a dozen incidents of violence and 300 instances of unprotected sex.

Other findings — some expected, some surprising.

• About 1 in 33 tricks is a “freebie” with a cop. A street prostitute gets arrested about once every 450 tricks. “A prostitute is more likely to have sex with a police officer than to get officially arrested by one.”
• Between “freebies” to cops and freebies to gang members in exchange for “protection,” about 5% of all tricks are freebies. (Freebies to pimps don’t seem to have been counted, unless I missed it.) (ETA: As is pointed out in the comments, “freebies” are essentially rapes.)
• “On average the prostitutes work roughly thirteen hours per week, performing roughly 10 sex acts total. Average revenues generated per week are about $340. Most of this comes in cash, with some payments made in drugs.”
• Street prostitutes with pimps get paid more than those without pimps — even after the pimp takes off his 25%. Working with a pimp also means having to give fewer freebies to cops and gang members, and a lower chance of violent assaulted by a customer. However, the overall risk of violence is about equal, because of the chance of being violently assaulted by the pimp.
• A study of prostitution in Mexico found that customers pay significantly more to have condomless sex. However, in Chicago there’s barely any “no condom” extra charged. The authors theorize that this is because condoms are the “default” that must be negotiated away from in Mexico, but not in Chicago.
• Most prostitutes also hold other jobs. “We estimate that these women earn an average of $7.24 per hour in their outside jobs, or about one-fourth what they earn as prostitutes.” During times of high demand for prostitution (the example studied is the 4th of July), a significant number of women enter the prostitution market on a short-term basis.
• The authors — after pointing out their study is a very rough estimate — estimate that there are “4,400 women active as prostitutes citywide in any given week.” That estimate only covers street prostitutes. They also estimate that there are, at a minimum, 175,000 johns using Chicago street prostitutes each year.

Hat tips: Lawyers Guns & Money, Hit & Run, Hit & Run again, and Foreign Policy blog. (Both Foreign Policy and Hit & Run misstate what the study found about condom use and pricing.)

1. Or nights, I suppose. (back)
2. You can read a draft of their paper here, in pdf form. (back)

From The Local (a site with Swedish news translated into English):

…special government rapporteur Eva-Maria Svensson suggested the creation of a law “banning advertising containing sexist content.”

Sexist advertising is defined in the report as any message distributed “with a commercial aim” that can be “construed as offensive to women or men.”

“Sexist advertising affects the shaping of people’s identities and is counter-productive to society’s goal of achieving gender equality,” said the report, which calls for a new law to go into effect on January 1st, 2009.

The report was submitted to the government on Tuesday for consideration.

I’m not sure what to think about this. Although I believe in strict protection of free speech for political and artistic speech, I think advertising — with the exception of political ads — should receive a lower level of protection. But I wonder about how the law of unintended consequences would operate if this proposal becomes law.

In the comments section of this post on marriages between whites and Latin@s, there is a newly revived discussion about Latin@s and race. It reminds me of a real conversation I overheard just yesterday. I was sitting in a restaurant, which was almost empty. My waitress was Latina, most likely of Mexican or Central American descent. Since I was sitting in the back, I was near the kitchen area. The young white woman, who appeared to be the manager, sat at the table behind me. The Latina waitress came up to the white woman manager and started discussing her (the Latina’s) children. I suppose this was a continuation of a previous conversation, but here’s what I heard.

The waitress: My children are white. LOL!

The manager: Yes, they are very light.

The waitress: Well, my husband is very light.

The manager: Yes, he’s very white looking.

The waitress: I want my kids to be white.

The manager: Well, they are light, and you are pretty light too. Look you’re just a shade darker than me, and I’m Irish.

The waitress: Well, I want to be white, too.

Oh how I wanted to interject myself in the conversation, and I know that they knew I heard all of this. I sat there and debated about whether or not to keep my mouth shut, and I decided that I wouldn’t say anything. But the tone of the conversation was very interesting and depressing. It was as if the Latina waitress was trying to fit in by asserting the whiteness of her children, and the white manager was trying to give affirmation that she and her children could be white. They both were placing whiteness as something that was superior and something that you strive for. I’m not the least bit surprised that these two women felt that way, but I am a little surprised that they were so open about that conversation. I guess they felt that I was white, so I must approve of it. Of course, since I didn’t say anything, I gave my tacit approval to the whole discussion.

I don’t know about the children, but the woman who was my waitress, much to her chagrin, would have had a difficult time passing for white.

I should have said something like, “Well, there’s nothing special about being white.” What’s even more ironic is that I was deeply concentrating on my African American sociology syllabus and I had several books sitting on the table that reflected this. Their discussion helped me to lose that concentration, and soon after, I left.

This is one of those times when I am reminded of a strange aspect of white privilege–this conversation would have never occurred if these two women did not presume that I was white. This is why I cringe and laugh everytime I hear whites proclaim that they don’t hear people make racist comments. Most of the whites (and those who aspire to whiteness) I know prefer to make their racist comments in front of other whites.

Hereville – remember Hereville? — I draw a comic called Hereville – is back on. It’ll be a little while before I officially post any of the new pages — but barring absolute disaster, I can promise that when new pages start appearing, they will appear once a week, without ever missing a week, until the story is finished. (And due to the long lead time this gives me, I can probably promise that for the next Hereville story, too.)

That’s a lot of the reason I haven’t been posting as much on “Alas, a Blog” lately — too busy drawing.

I’ve begun reposting the old pages (with minor art and dialog fixes) on webcomicsnation. You can always find the most recently posted page here (it’s currently on page 5), and you can read it from the start by going to the Hereville table of contents. The webcomicsnation “Hereville” page will be updated with an additional page every Wednesday. And, once again, I promise: there will be no missed weeks from now until at least the end of “How Mirka Got a Sword.”

(”How Mirka Got a Sword” will be 59 pages long when finished. 43 of those pages are now complete, and 14 of the remaining 16 pages are already penciled, which is why I’m confident I won’t miss any weeks, despite my - cough! - poor past record in this regard.)

For those of you who are interested, here’s a sneak peek at some of the new art — a double-page spread from later in the story than anything I’ve posted in public. Click on the thumbnail to see the big-sized version. (Minor spoiler warning, I guess.)

More proof that Toles is the best mainstream political cartoonist…

In contrast, see Pat Oliphant’s very sexist take on the same material.

My friend Kevin Moore, another cartoonist, criticizes Oliphant as well, and discusses my criticism of one of his own cartoons about Clinton, which I had told him was sexist. Kevin seems to have come part of the way to my view on his cartoon: “The image itself - Clinton sobbing in the arms of her husband - resonates far beyond my own intentions and serves to subvert my criticism.” I agree with that; it doesn’t matter how what the cartoonist’s intentions were, when the image used plays so powerfully into sexist stereotyping.

Obama is all talk, no substance. He puts forward right-wing arguments against universal health care (aka mandates), which will make it easier for Republicans to argue against that same legislation later on. And people underestimate how progressive Clinton has been.

Clinton is awful on foreign policy, and won’t fight for progressive causes. And the “experience” candidate doesn’t really have much experience. Although like a lot of folks, I’m considering voting for her just to say “fuck you” to the misogynistic press. (See also here, and here, and many other places.)

Edwards talks a good game, but his voting record isn’t progressive. And he has the fewest women among his senior staffers of any major candidate except Guliani — a fact that I was reminded of when Edwards reflexive response to the ridiculous “Hilary tearing up” story was a sexist remark.

The latest Grand Rounds, a weekly carnival on medical and health blogging, is a collection around the theme of “Briefing the Next U.S. President.” Check it out at Sharp Brains.

Cross-posted at The Gimp Parade

Last month, the state of Massachusetts issued a report on an August 2007 incident at one of the group homes of the Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC) where, on the basis of a phonecall, two boys were awakened in the night and repeatedly given electric shocks by the adults responsible for their care. If you’re not already familiar with the JRC in Massachusetts or the aversive therapy used there on institutionalized disabled children, Mother Jones provides details in an article published this past September.

Eight states pay up to $200,000 per student, per year, to send otherwise “unplaceable” children with autism, psychological and behavioral disorders to the residential institution that uses aversive therapy to control many of its young inmates. Very generally, aversive therapy involves the use of a wide range of unpleasant stimuli to discourage specific behaviors. At JRC, aversives include electric shocks, food deprivation and isolation. On children.

The phonecall that led to the nighttime torture of the two boys turned out to be a prank. From the Boston Globe:

The report says none of the six staff members in a Stoughton residence run by the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center on the night of Aug. 26 acted to stop the harrowing events for three hours, despite ample reasons to doubt the validity of the caller’s instructions to wake the boys in the middle of the night and administer painful shock treatments, at times while their arms and legs were bound. 

The caller said he was ordering the punishments because the teenagers had misbehaved earlier in the evening, but none of the home’s staff had witnessed the behavior that the caller cited. As the two boys’ screams could be heard throughout the house, near-mutiny erupted among the other boys, who insisted that the accused teenagers had violated no rules. One boy even suggested the call was a hoax, according to the report by the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care, which licenses group homes

The staffers, inexperienced and overworked, were described as concerned and reluctant, yet nobody verified the orders with central office, nor did anybody check treatment plans for the two teenagers to be sure they were permitted to receive that degree of shock therapy.      

The damage was done before the staff at the JRC realized their “error”:

By the time a call was finally placed to the central office and staff members realized their mistake, one teenager had received 77 shocks, well in excess of what his treatment plan allowed, and the other received 29. One boy was taken to the hospital for treatment of two first-degree burns.             

The full account described by the Boston Globe is harrowing and beyond awful. The result of the state report is the suspension of seven JRC employees. But what I find telling is that because of the state investigation the following changes are supposedly being implemented at the JRC:

• Expanded training for staff — Many of the suspended employees had been working at the JRC for less than three months at the time of the August incident. High employee turnover is also suggested by Google search of the center, which pops up numerous ads for employment.
• Institution of new telephone verification procedures — Electric shock orders via telephone will continue to be part of the official procedure of aversive therapy, as is the incredibly extensive video surveillance of every moment of inmates’ lives.
• Elimination of delayed punishment — On its own, prior to this incident, awakening inmates through administration of electric shock was not a violation of procedure? Children were routinely hooked up to shock equipment even while they tried to sleep, apparently.

Supporters of JRC and its aversive therapy say it effectively changes behavior. Of course it does. Extended torture with no end in sight tends to do that. One of the axioms of torture is that anyone can be broken, given time and cruel enough methods. There are some inmates of JRC receiving electric shock that have been there for decades.

This post is part of a Blogging Against Aversives event. (The banner at the top of this post simply announces “Blogging Against Aversives, 1-14-2008″.) You can find links to writing from other bloggers on the topic here. Or check out Amanda Baggs’ extensive and well-indexed writing on aversives, behavior modification, JRC, and other related topics at Ballastexistenz. This post of Amanda’s is especially informative. Feel free to add links of other writings on this in comments. 

Cross-posted at The Gimp Parade