Noli Irritare Leones

Will he or won’t he? This week, Special Adviser to the President on National Assembly Matters, Senator Mohammed Abba-Aji, reported that Yar’Adua would hand over power to Vice President Goodluck Jonathan by transmitting a letter of medical vacation to the National Assembly, in compliance with a recent Senate resolution.

He said the President has been inaccessible to top Nigerian officials because he was being kept in the ward meant for the King of Saudi Arabia, with the best of security.

Given that Yar’Adua has been absent from Nigeria for medical treatment for, oh, a couple of months now, such a letter would seem to be overdue. Militias in the Niger Delta have threatened fresh violence over the president’s continued absence. A couple of weeks ago, the army restricted movements of soldiers as the chief of army staff warned against a military coup.

Danbazau dismissed the “unnecessary, unwarranted and inflammatory comments” circulating which suggest that a coup might be needed to pull the country out of a constitutional crisis in Yar’Adua’s absence.
He warned that a military coup would be akin to “dragging us back to the dark days of our nation’s history”.

“We are aware of the fact that there is tension in the country. We know it’s not a secret,” Danbazau said.

“Everybody knows that. And we also got intelligence information that some people are trying to infiltrate our ranks.”
The Chief of Defence Staff, Air Marshal Paul Dike, also told reporters that military officials would not seek to overthrow the government.

“Meddling in political issues does not complement our constitutional role in any way, shape or form,” Dike said. “I therefore warn all members of the armed forces to steer clear of politics. Ours is a military that is mindful of its past, conscious of its present and hopeful of the future.”

As the military exercises restraint, though, civilian pressure on Yar’Adua has been mounting.

The Northern Governors Forum held an emergency meeting in which it

affirmed that bed-ridden President Umaru Yar’Adua does not need to transmit a written document to the National Assembly for Vice President Goodluck Jonathan to assume the position of “Acting President.”

The NGF chairman who is also the Governor of Niger State, Dr. Mu’azu Babangida Aliyu, who read the communiqué asked Nigerians to give Jonathan, “full and total support pending the return of the President in the interest of the country.”

Another article reports that Abba-Aji’s remarks suggest that

There are strong indications that the camp of ailing President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua may have finally crumbled.

The People’s Democratic Party national chairman reports that the party plans to send a delegation to Saudi Arabia asking Yar’Adua to transmit a letter to the National Assembly.

That would enable Vice President Goodluck Jonathan to act as President in his stead, in compliance with Section 145 of the Constitution.

This has been the demand in public protests in the past three weeks, as well as in agitation by personalities, including former Heads of State, former Presidents, and three former Chief Justices in the Eminent Elders Group (EEG).

Information and Communications Minister, Dora Akunyili, raised the stakes on Wednesday by breaking ranks with cabinet colleagues to demand that Yar’Adua hands over to Jonathan.

Ogbulafor announced the planned trip in Abuja, accompanied by a full complement of the PDP National Working Committee (NWC).

Joel took me to Carmen for my birthday; it was part of the Metropolitan Opera simulcast to movie theaters (I think in this case not actually simulcast – some of the simulcasts they save for one replay a few weeks later). Unlike Tales from Hoffman, I’d already seen this one (with different performers, of course) as a Netflix rental, so rather than finding out the plot for the first time while watching it, I was more focused on other things.

Escamillo, in this case, was an understudy who’d been informed three hours before the performance that the original performer was ill; he played the part as if he’d been the first choice all along. I guess the Met rehearses its understudies well.

Since I’d seen the opera before, this time I was drawn to how certain parallels played out.

Micaela vs. Carmen, both introduced in their first scenes as the object of attentions from a group of soldiers, but Micaela frightened and warding the soldiers off, and Carmen absolutely in control as she slides her flower down an officer’s crotch. The difference in their approaches to sexuality, with Micaela, good girl style, keeping her arms between her and Don Jose, not fully letting go (before marriage, anyway) even with the man she loves. In that beginning part, brazen Carmen seems the one I’d want to be; after all, not only does she get more sex, she’s also more successful at getting men to stop when she doesn’t, for the moment, want them. On the other hand, in the mountains, when Micaela’s singing the aria about overcoming her fear and Carmen the one where she fatalistically accepts the prediction of doom in the cards, Micaela’s the stronger one.

The similar parallel between Carmen’s introduction as the object of all the men’s desire and rock star toreador Escamillo’s introduction as the object of all the women’s desire.

Anyway, well done version all around, and great birthday present from Joel.

Scott Lemieux on John Edwards:

Even better, however, is this throwaway, which tells you most of what you need to know about how these narratives work and how much useful information they actually convey:

“It should be collectively blush-making for the press to remember the newsmagazine covers, the fawning TV sitdowns, the op-ed boostings Edwards garnered in the course of his years as a crowd-pleasing, “Kennedyesque” candidate who supposedly cared for the underdog and coined the “Two Americas” catchphrase.”

The media spent years calling John Edwards “Kennedyesque.”* But then it turned out that he was rich and unfaithful to his wife. Wait, what was my point again?

What frustrates me about infidelity narratives involving famous people, though, is that, inevitably, somewhere along the line, you’ll start hearing what was wrong with the wife. She’s a bitch (with anecdotes of her nastiness usually coming from the time when her husband was already cheating on her, so who knows how unpleasant she actually was before that), or she’s a doormat (with simply staying with him sometimes grounds enough for criticism), etc.

Now, I think I remember saying, at the time John Edwards’ infidelity came out, that Elizabeth Edwards was practically the patron saint of political wives. I said that because she had this particular balance: just smart and outspoken enough that you couldn’t say she was sitting back and giving her husband adoring gazes, but just visibly adoring enough that it was hard to do the number on her that people did on Hillary Clinton. But that was just an observation about how she managed the political wife role. It doesn’t mean I necessarily liked her better than every other political wife around (though I did, and still do, like her better than I like her husband), and it certainly doesn’t mean I care, now that there’s no chance that John Edwards will get elected to anything anytime soon, how actually saintly she was or wasn’t.

Anyway, the truth is, people cheat on lousy marriages and people cheat on good marriages. The fact that you were cheated on doesn’t say you were a wonderful spouse, nor yet that you were a terrible one. Picking apart the marriages of famously cuckolded people feels to me like looking for some magic key to not being cheated on that just isn’t there.

Not actually a comment on Twilight (at least not directly), since I’ve neither read nor seen it, but rather inspired by a conversation on a friend’s Facebook wall. Story below the fold.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m trying to write a short story about which I have some doubts; I’m not sure, at the moment, that I like the main character. Maybe I’ll rescue it, and maybe I won’t, but I should probably at least finish it. Steven King wrote that at one point he almost gave up on Carrie because he wasn’t particularly liking Carrie. Not that I expect this to turn into anything as good as Carrie.

I’m thinking about the Friends testimony on integrity, and may have some blogging about that later, but not today, since I don’t want to spend too much time blogging on a day on which I have a class. So, instead, I’ll tell you about my name. One of my Facebook friends suggested looking up your name in the Urban Dictionary, so I looked up mine, and feel compelled to inform my sweet husband that “Lynn” means “A woman to be loved, and treasured! Someone that brings total bliss to your life! A very honest, loyal, and trustworthy person!” Also someone with “complete and utter intelligence, modesty, beauty, and self worth.” As I always say, modesty is one of my best qualities.

Other links:

The all important NYC kindergarten admission tests.

UC Irvine on the pros and cons of social media.

Kristin Luker on the politics of teen pregnancy. I haven’t read this book, but I know I really liked her earlier book on the politics of abortion.

Good things in Obama’s education budget.

Schneier on Online Credit/Debit Card Security Failure (specifically, problems with the 3D Secure system).

EKathimerini reports that Greek Prime Minister Papandreou is promising austerity measures (expected to be demanded by Brussels) to rescue the ailing Greek economy.

The government is due to receive by Wednesday an official response from Brussels to the measures it has proposed in its Stability and Growth Program. It is widely expected that Brussels will approve the crisis plan. But if authorities fail to follow the goals set out in the program to the letter, sources reveal, they will be obliged to submit a “Plan B” – containing additional reforms – by March 16. Otherwise, they risk handing over the responsibility for financial decision-making to Brussels.

According to sources, the additional measures envisaged by Brussels include an increase in taxes on fuel and luxury goods. The government is also expected to come under additional pressure to cut salaries and freeze recruitment in the public sector – measures that are likely to incite more public protests. Public sector employees on short-term contracts staged demonstrations in Athens last week, tax officials are planning a walkout this week and civil servants have called a strike for next Wednesday.

Would fellow Euro zone members come to Greece’s aid if Greece is unable to service its debt? The idea of a common Euro bond has been floated, but Greece’s Finance Minister says the idea lacks wide support.

The European Commission is expected to release its response to Greece’s proposed plan on February 3rd.

A Fistful of Euros has posted repeatedly this month about the Greek debt problem; Global Voices has a round up.

Newsweek has an article on men who try to force their girl friends to become pregnant.

Men of a Certain Age got renewed for a second season (yay!). I’m watching it a week behind online, since we don’t have cable. Reactions now that I’m a few more shows in …

They’re continuing the contrast between fit Terry and Owen’s middle aged physical shlubbiness. This continues to be a little weird for me, since Andre Braugher’s the one of the three actors that I’ve always found sexy, but I suppose I’ll get used to it. “Powerless” had Owen waking with some odd contraption on his nose (before shifting to Terry waking with a hottie); it’s a nose that, without the contraption, I personally find one of the best looking noses on TV.

On the other hand, Owen’s been given a beautiful, loving wife who still thinks he’s sexy. The Owen/Terry contrast seems more about relaxed married life vs. a single man on the prowl than anything else. There’s a scene in “Go With the Flow,” where Owen and his wife help Joe get ready for his date, that had a nice shift between a very married sort of teasing (”What do you know about high maintenance women?”, “I, uh, dated a few before I met you”), to Owen’s wife boosting his friend’s confidence by pointing to several features that Owen doesn’t have (flat abs, hair, owning his own business), to a close that suggests that, flat abs or no, he’ll be getting sex shortly from a wife who still finds him hot (which in fact he still is, even with the extra weight).

Besides, to me the worst thing you could do with Andre Braugher is not give him enough to act, and that mistake Men of a Certain Age emphatically doesn’t make. (One of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ commenters praises the part because “Andre Braugher isn’t the other two main characters’ Black Friend. He’s just their friend.“) Owen’s my favorite character, believably rounded, with an interesting set of relationships with friends, wife, father, and rival at the car dealership, and some of the best lines. And I loved his small moment of triumph at the end of “Powerless.”

Slutty Terry is the character I at first though might prove weakest and most two dimensional, but I think they’re avoiding that trap, and he’s coming across as a bit feckless and perhaps less mature than the others, but a slut with a conscience (don’t sleep with the engaged woman, do allow yourself to be admonished that leaving yourself free of commitment to any one woman doesn’t mean you get to slack off on being on time for the one you’re with now), who at times proves right (such as when making sure returning to dating Joe supplies himself with condoms, and not taking any excuses from Joe).

Actually, the one of the three friends I find least sympathetic is Joe (the nominal lead, since Ray Romano’s the one who put the show together); he can be a bit passive in his worried neurosis. What saves him, from a sympathy point of view, is his relationship with his kids; when it comes to their problems, this divorced father doesn’t stay passive. Whether it’s a perhaps misguided attempt to shelter a middle school aged son with a pack of phobias, or a moment of telling off an ex-wife who suggests she’s going to shut him out of what’s happening with the kids, or the mix of sympathy and firmness with which he confronts the ex who’s been giving his teenaged daughter trouble, you can see that the one thing in his life he’s not going to let slide is his relationship with his kids. It’s a good thing, as far as I’m concerned, that they did the teenage daughter being stalked show right before the very Joe-focused return to dating show, since it gave me a lot more sympathy for Joe.

The obvious Sex and the City comparison is made at the Modesto Bee.

And one of the three guys is played by Andre Braugher, an amazing actor you might remember best from the superb TV drama “Homicide: Life on the Street.” Braugher’s character is overweight, in shaky health and under the thumb of his tyrannical father, who owns the car dealership where he works.

He’s also the cynical one, the one who talks logic. (He’s Miranda, for you “Sex in the City” aficionados.)

The other two are played by Scott Bakula, as an aging actor with the overblown libido (read Samantha), and Ray Romano as a party store owner with a gambling habit and a marriage that’s crumbled. (He’s kind of the Carrie in the bunch, in that he’s the funniest and the one with the relationship that’s most out of whack … but that may be a stretch).

I suppose Miranda was my favorite Sex and the City character, too. I like this show better, though.

Other stuff:

My husband made the top ten bipolar blogs. Yay! Go, Joel! Of the others, I’ve read and liked Crazy Tracy for years (and it’s good to see her now on the mend again).

Your Brain Can’t Handle Your Facebook Friends.

Paul Krugman on Bernanke:

The pro case is obvious: Ben Bernanke is a great economist, whose work on monetary economics has been a crucial guide to action in this crisis, and he applied his academic insights forcefully in 2008 and early 2009, helping pull the world back from the brink.

Against that are two factors. One is that he completely failed to see the trouble building as the housing bubble inflated — and no, it wasn’t one of those things nobody could have predicted, since a lot of reputable economists were warning almost frantically about the bubble….

One of the things that’s weird to me, post-bubble, is discovering that some people with much more understanding of economics under their belt than me seem to have been much more surprised about the bubble. It’s not that I was sharp enough to have been among those anticipating the collapse of the bubble – I wasn’t – but I do remember the possibility as having been in the back of my mind, when I passed on offers of home equity loans. I thought, well, housing prices generally trend up, but they still have business cycles, and so what’s soaring now may yet fall, and better then not to have used all the equity and find myself under water. And then, post crash, I read people talking as if people who ought to have been much smarter about such things just assumed there couldn’t be any fall in sight. I guess even very accomplished economists sometimes see what they want to see.

Eve Tushnet argues for a Catholic Church acceptance of “some, though as I said above not all, forms of transgendered identity.” Interesting to me because it’s a pro-transgender (or at least pro some transgender) argument coming from someone who has accepted a conservative Catholic position that she herself needs to refrain from acting on her attractions to women (even though they are, by her account, stronger than her attractions to men).

Harry at Crooked Timber helps me understand Thomson’s violinist: what is the point of thought experiments in moral philosophy?

First of all, it should be obvious that the violinist case does not establish the permissibility of abortion even in the case of rape. In fact, I would say that the focus on the permissibility of abortion (which Thomson encourages, not least by her title) is a bit misleading. Every semester a very small number of my students say that they do not think it is permissible to unplug oneself from the violinist. Not a single sentence in the article speaks to them: they can get off before even getting on (interestingly, every now and then a student (usually they turn out to be some sort of lefty) who thinks there is a right to abortion thinks it is impermissible to unplug oneself, because one has extensive and stringent duties to aid stranger in need)….

Ah, this is exactly the problem I’ve always had with Thomson’s violinist. I’ve always seen the example pulled out to justify a right to abortion, and my reaction has always been a mystified “huh?” because I’m in exactly that set of people who finds it crystal clear obvious that of course I wouldn’t have a right to unplug myself from the violinist, but finds a right to abortion much more plausible. I’m surprised that position’s so rare, actually, and surprised that students who don’t think they have the right to unplug themselves from the violinist are such a minority.

Caveats: There are some duties that you expect to just do, with no fanfare, and others that, even if they’re really not optional, are strenuous enough that you expect a certain amount of extra praise and support for the people doing them. If I find several thousand dollars, or a diamond ring, lost by a stranger, of course I should turn it in, but newspapers carry stories praising people who do this, and the person who gets the property back is likely to give a reward. If I were plugged to that violinist, I’d expect people to rally around me, offer me whatever support and help they could, and praise me for my act of sacrifice as I left him plugged in. But I’d still be obliged to leave him plugged in, even if I got all the costs of the action, none of the praise I deserved for it, and it just wasn’t fair that I’d been plugged to him in the first place.

But the thing is, abortion’s way more understandable than unplugging the violinist precisely because the fetus doesn’t appear to be sentient until well into the pregnancy (no brain waves), and because it’s hard for me to imagine personhood without at least the possibility of sentience. So dragging the violinist into the argument feels to me like an argument against a right to abortion rather than an argument for a right to abortion. Apparently, though, the opposite is true for some people reacting to Thomson’s violinist:

… So what does the example establish?

It seems to me that it establishes two things. First consider a combination of views that is widespread among American conservatives (and that Thomson must have encountered a thousand times): that there is no right to abortion, and that we do not have extensive and demanding enforceable obligations to strangers. People who hold that combination of views ought to be deeply discomforted by the violinist example (and by the people seeds example that follows). Neither example PROVES that this combination is inconsistent, but both examples press the person who adheres to it to give us more explanation of the differences between the cases. The second thing that the example establishes is that for many opponents of abortion (all those who say it is ok to unplug oneself from the violinist) the right to life of the fetus plays only a small background role in their justification of abortion’s impermissibility; of course, if the fetus did not have a right to life then abortion would be permissible, but these people believe that it is permissible to kill innocent beings which have a right to life in circumstances very like the circumstances of the fetus growing inside the pregnant mother. They need to offer an explanation of the difference.

Odd to me. It never occurred to me that anyone would actually hold the combination of views, “no abortion, but I’d feel justified in cutting the violinist loose.”

Stentor on The environmental implications of border-drawing.

Bond, who is butch and doesn’t find her own gender fluid at all, writes about how Gender Is Not Fluid. It occurs to me that, for those of us whose gender is more fluid than Bond’s (if not altogether fluid), it may be partly because there’s something else that we’re consistent about, that sometimes shows as being more feminine and sometimes as being more masculine. For instance, I, personally, consistently don’t want to spend much time fussing with my appearance. If I can avoid shopping by wearing my mother-in-law’s hand-me-downs, I will, and whether the particular hand-me-downs I’m wearing are more or less girly doesn’t make too much difference, as long as they’re comfortable and don’t restrict my movement. When I’ve run short on socks, I’ve gone around in skirts (preferably long ones, so I don’t have to worry about unshaven legs), and when instead I decide that my hiking boots are more comfortable than the shoes (even sensible ones) that I get to wear with skirts, I shift to pants. So my gender presentation is a little fluid, but with an underlying consistency of not wanting to spend much time on my looks (an “unfeminine” trait in itself, but one that lets me cheerfully prefer looking either “feminine” or not to spending any more time than I have to looking for the right outfit).

Leading health care experts ask House to pass the Senate bill.

E.J. Dionne on How the Democrats may solve their health-care problem.

In her dreams, she never stutters. Waking life is another story. On Sundays, Fran Price feels the contrast sharply. Her high, breathy, childish but sweet soprano voice could easily have graced the Praise Choir. If only.

Today, though, Fran has little time for regret. She swings her car off El Caballo Road at the large stone wall that announces the entrance to Lemon Grove Church. She drives down a palm lined street into the parking lot, and maneuvers the beat up Honda with the “You Matter to God” license plate into one of the last available parking spaces, over near the Children’s Complex. Too late. Damn traffic.

Fran smooths the perfectly ironed pleats in her skirt, the one that falls just past her knees. She adjusts her blouse, with its ruffled collar, and checks her makeup, just a simple foundation and lipstick, nothing fancy. She will be practically the only one at church this dressed up. Pastor Jake Warner himself, popular author of The Faith-Based Life and leader of Lemon Grove’s famous megachurch, favors jeans and Hawaiian shirts.

Fran makes a dash for the door. Pastor Jake, in the front of the church, raises his hands. Fran sees him small, on the stage, and large, on the overhead screen. Near him, the Praise Choir stands ready for the first hymn. Crowds pack every seat in the church. She’s missed her window. She’ll have to go to the overflow area. She turns, her head bowed, but a man rises. He is tall, with a six pack abdomen and a powerful chest. Fran lowers her eyes, careful not to look too long at that chest.

“Here, have my seat,” the man says, and vanishes to the overflow area outside before Fran can thank him, or get his name.

But Elizabeth Bennett observes wryly to the woman in the neighboring seat, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a pastor beginning his sermon must be in want of a reference to Charlie Brown comics.”

And Darcy, chest heaving and eyes smouldering with passion, rushes to Eliza’s side, and pours forth his love, “In vain have I struggled to pay any attention at all to the sermon. It will not do.”

*************

At home, that evening, Fran draws from the drawer of her desk that secret screenplay. She sits in an armchair, neatly marking the manuscript with corrections, and then stows it away again, never to be seen by another.
But Jo March bursts into the office of the Hollywood producer, and begins her elevator speech.

“I have a high concept screenplay for you: Spiders on a Train. It’s sort of a Diary of Bridget Jones meets Spiderman 2, with a dash of Stephen King. The protagonist is a mild mannered librarian by day and crime fighter by night. I picture Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslett in the lead roles.”

The producer stares at Jo. Where have you been all my life, his look says. He snaps his fingers to an assistant, and offers Jo a contract on the spot.

***********

Monday, Monday. Halfway through her Monday morning, Fran already looks forward to the weekend. Or at least lunch time. In her mind’s eye, she can see her sandwich, something with whole wheat and an abundance of spouts, and her small, organic apple. Perhaps she can even indulge in a serving size package of trail mix; nuts and dried fruit are high in omega-3.

It’s been a busy morning. Fran shelved books, opened the community room for someone, advised another person who wanted to teach for the local literacy program, and dealt with an irate library patron whose interlibrary loan book had been sent back when its hold expired. Now, though, she has a moment of peace, seated at the reference desk.
By a moment of peace, I mean, oh, about five seconds. For no sooner has Fran sat down, than her boss, red-faced Greg Hamilton, known to library staff as Hambone, storms up to her.

“I thought I’d told you to shelve those books. They’re scattered all over the floor. Get to it.”

It happens all the time. No sooner has Fran shelved a set of books, than someone pulls them all down, and Greg scolds her for not doing her work.

“Y-y-yes, Greg,” she says, and scurries off to shelve the books again.

But Jane Eyre pulls herself up to her full height, and looks Greg square in the eye.

“Though all the world hates me, and believes me wicked,” she says, “if my own conscience approves me, I am not without friends. I know in my own conscience that I shelved those books, and I don’t deserve to be scolded because someone else pulled them down. I am a free human being with an independent will, and I deserve some respect.”

****************

At her mother’s house that evening, for her own birthday party, Fran flees for the refuge of the kitchen. Her uncle Larry and her father once again raise their voices in a political argument. Socialist Uncle Larry expounds the virtues of good government.

“You want to cut Big Government? Give up your schools, then, and your libraries, and your roads.”

“I believe in starving the Beast,” Fran’s father replies.

Fran hides in the kitchen, and looks for an excuse to stay. She dons dish gloves, and fills the sink with soapy water. But her mother follows Fran into the kitchen, with worries of her own.

Fran’s A-cup breasts are encased in a bra, for her mother has warned her about jiggling. Her cotton underpants are cut classic brief style, and spotless, for her mother has warned many times of what the EMTs may think if she is caught in an accident with underwear that isn’t up to snuff. But no matter how she tries to please, she can’t keep her mother from worrying. Today, her mother fusses over Fran’s lack of a suitable boy friend.

“Kate suggested,” Fran says, “that I try Internet dating.”

Far from reassuring her mother, this declaration only inspires a new bout of worry. Does Fran know what kind of men are to be found on the Internet? She must be sure her photo shows no cleavage (what cleavage, thinks Fran), that she meets first for coffee and with her own car to drive home, that she puts no hint of suggestive language in her profile, to make it clear she’s to be treated as a lady. Will she use a good Christian dating service? Perhaps it would be best to give the whole thing a pass.

Fran nods her consent to her mother’s advice.

But Arrietty Clock knows that staying under the floorboards of the house is safe, but safe is not what Borrowers are made for. Arrietty listens as her mother laments to her father about Arrietty’s cousin Eggletina, who brought disaster on her family when she was Seen. She listens, but she knows she must venture out anyway.

This Friday, Arrietty will be found at the local sushi and karaoke bar, in a slinky little black dress cut well above the knee. She will not care whether her breasts jiggle, or what the EMTs may think of her underwear, and if Arrietty should be Seen, well, she will know just how to handle it.

**************

Back at the library, Tuesday morning, Fran listens to her coworker, Jim Greene, rant. Fran often wonders why Jim became a librarian at all, for he has no patience for the job. Right now, he cannot abide the workshop he needs to attend on the new ISBN 13 cataloging system.

“Just when we’ve all learned one system, those Goddamn bureaucrats want to make us learn another,” says Jim.

Fran contemplates asking Jim not to take the name of the Lord in vain, but settles for a safer mm-hmm.

“No man can be expected to keep up with the crap they keep throwing at us,” says Jim.

Fran nods again, glancing forlornly at the computer screen she hopes to return to, if only she can placate Jim out of his rant.

But Éowyn, bold noblewoman of Rohan and niece to King Théoden, does not quail. Boldly she approaches the six-headed beast threatening the children’s section of the library, and whips out her sword. Whish, whish, whish, and the beast’s six heads fall, severed, to the floor. Eowyn raises her sword, and cries out, triumphant.

“I am no man.”

As if Nigeria didn’t already have enough problems, what with the case of the missing president and the strains in relations with the US introduced by the underwear bomber incident, this week 460 people have been killed in Jos in incidents of communal violence between Muslim and Christian gangs. In his first exercise of executive powers since the President of Nigeria left the country two months ago for medical treatment in Saudi Arabia, Nigerian Vice President Goodluck Jonathan ordered troops into Jos. Mass burials were held as the troops took over. But starving residents of Jos defied a 24 hour curfew imposed on Tuesday. The Nigerian Senate rejected emergency rule for Jos and relaxed the curfew.

360 members of the Nigerian House of Representatives donated N20,000 each to US relief efforts in Haiti, as the house passed a resolution commending the US government for providing prompt relief to Haiti. But one of the interesting Africa stories in the wake of the Haiti earthquake has been the involvement of Ushahidi. Initially established by Kenyans to track post-election violence in Kenya, Ushahidi has expanded to be used to track crisis reports in other parts of the world.

But as many were e-mailing, Twittering and checking Facebook, thousands of volunteers joined forces to build a tool to help those in need – a combination of web and mobile phone technologies, traditional media and the voices of people on the ground.

Project Ushahidi maps reports sent by people in Haiti.

They can use mobile phones and the web to inform about structural risks, lack of water and food, and missing persons.

“We translate it, map it, and structure the data,” said Ushahidi co-founder Erik Hersman.

“Then we pass it on to organisations on the ground which can then work with the specific needs reported by the people.”

Aid workers in eastern Chad are awaiting the outcome of talks on the possible exit of UN peacekeepers.

The Chadian government has asked the UN not to renew MINURCAT’s mandate, Gen Oki Mahamat Yaya Dagache, President Idriss Deby’s representative working with the UN mission, told IRIN on 20 January.

“At the end of the mandate we will not extend,” he said. He would not comment on why. A presenter on state radio said on 19 January MINURCAT – with some 3,000 of the planned 5,200 troops in place to date – “has not shown its effectiveness”.

As the UN peacekeeping mission in Chad possibly approaches its end, they have completed their initial round of training judges in the eastern region.

Meanwhile, the governments of Chad and Sudan signed an agreement on January 15 to normalize relations.

The two countries have agreed to prevent armed groups from using the territory of either state against the interests of the other and to establish mechanisms to monitor their common border.

Other links:

The AfricaKnows Project.

Africa’s ever-distant green revolution.

Pambazuka offers a Human rights impact assessment of Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill.

Many months ago, I meant to write a post responding to something or other that Maggie Gallagher had said about abortion. Or, more particularly, about abortion and sexual decisions. I bailed on the post in large part because I wasn’t sure how to organize my thoughts on some of the same stuff that’s come up in Hector’s and attie’s discussion in the Friends with Benefits comment thread (on my own blog, not on Alexandria). Abortion is both very much linked to casual sex, in some ways, and, in other ways, very much not.

What I mean by the two things being very much linked: I don’t think it’s tenable to be pro-life and to feel free to hop into bed with anyone whatsoever, without any particular commitment. To a lot of people, that may seem obvious. Most of the commenters on my own blog, for instance, who term themselves pro-life are consistent enough to also think they ought to limit who they sleep with. And most of my commenters who think pretty much any sex between consenting adults is OK also think, whatever their own personal decisions about abortion would be, that the right to get one is something they’d actively defend.

But in fact, I’ve also run into people who will both say that they’re pro-life, that abortion is wrong for pretty much everyone, and also that sex doesn’t imply any particular commitment beyond a bit of fun, unless you choose it to. Pretty much, these have been pro-life men. I think that’s no accident, not because I think “men are dogs,” or in any general sense worse in their ethical judgments than women, but because I think people, men and women alike, are at risk of being self-centered, and it’s easier to forget just how common unplanned pregnancies and pregnancy scares really are if you’re not the one who’s going to get pregnant. And in that case, it becomes easy, perhaps, to not think too closely about whether your behavior is actually compatible with your “pro-life” stand, to just assume that birth control will simply work.

I also think it’s just not a tenable position. Sure, children can be raised by single parents, and grow up to be happy, gainfully employed, solidly married, anything you like (including President). But if you’re the kid’s father, and choose to simply walk away from your kid, no contact, not even any money if you can get away with it, you’re still depriving your child of something. And if you’re the child’s mother, and choose to shut out a father who hasn’t done anything to prove unfit, and who’s willing to be there, you can’t be said to be in the right, either. So, pretty much, an obligation to give birth to a child implies, even if not an obligation for the parents to marry, an obligation for them to be stuck dealing with each other for potentially a long time. Not too surprisingly, one of the big reasons women get abortions is not being in a relationship they’d want to have a child in: perhaps no man who will hang around, perhaps a relationship that was turning shaky but hadn’t quite broken up yet when the pregnancy happened, perhaps a relationship that she’s quite happy with but with someone she wouldn’t trust as a father.

On the other hand, if being too lenient toward your own casual sex doesn’t seem to me, to borrow a phrase from the Catholic Church, to be avoiding the near occasion of abortion, being too severe toward everyone else’s casual sex goes hand in hand with punitive attitudes toward single mothers that provide their own kind of near occasion of abortion, and aren’t exactly the way to go if reducing abortion is really your chief goal. (And that’s not getting into the matter of birth control knowledge and availability.)

Finally, there are also lots of other reasons that women get abortions, a huge variety of reasons: out and out life threatening circumstances, such as a tubal pregnancy, prior severe health problems during pregnancy, such as preeclampsia or hyperemesis gravidum, financial issues (for married women as well as single), ranging from the desperation of the women Emma Goldman encountered as a midwife in the days before birth control, who begged her to help them get even risky abortions so they could provide for their children at all, to the decision of a double income professional couple to put off a baby until they’ve bought a house, health conditions in the fetus ranging from ones that are incompatible with life (the baby wouldn’t live at all if born) to ones that might involve quite manageable degrees of disability, etc. Some may be reasons that you, reader, would consider sufficiently grave, and others may be ones that you consider too light, but they all have this in common: they have nothing to do with casual sex.

So, on the one hand, reasoning from objection to abortion to an obligation to sleep only with people you could cooperate with in raising a child in the event of an accidental pregnancy makes perfect sense, while on the other hand, even if everyone did that, it wouldn’t eliminate abortion.

It’s actually my mother, not me, who is the oxytocin expert, so, Mom, if you happen to read this on Facebook and see that I get anything wrong, feel free to let me know in Facebook comments. But destinyinprogress, at Alexandria, asked me a question about oxytocin in reply to one of my posts, so, here is what I know, and my thoughts about what I’ve read.

My mother did research on oxytoxin, when I was a teenager, and wrote articles with titles like Oxytocin analogs with oxygen-containing side chains in position 3.

From dinner table conversation when I was young, I learned a few basic facts:

Oxytocin is closely chemically related to vasopressin, a chemical that controls reabsorption in the kidneys. There is an illness called diabetes insipidus, much rarer than the usual diabetes mellitus that’s related to blood sugar and insulin. In diabetes insipidus, you lack sufficient vasopressin, and the result is, as with diabetes mellitus, excess urination, fluid intake, and thirst (but lacking a bunch of the other diabetes mellitus symptoms that get caused by blood sugar being out of whack).

Oxytocin is important to contractions of the uterus during childbirth (Pitocin, which is used to induce labor if it’s not happening naturally, is basically an oxytocin injection) and to milk letdown. I can remember visiting my mother’s lab and helping monitor a bunch of female rats who had been given oxytocin, and whose uterine contractions were being measured.

More recently, though, oxytocin has been in the popular press for reasons that have nothing to do with its ability to induce labor, and you can readily find articles describing “the cuddle hormone,” that promotes human attachment and bonding. This “cuddle hormone” is reportedly released during orgasm (which makes a certain intuitive sense, given that orgasm both involves muscle contractions and, for a lot of us, some pretty strong bonding). Some articles further relate that men and women respond differently to oxytocin, in pretty much the way gender stereotypes would lead you to expect, so that women, in particular, tend to produce and respond to oxytocin with orgasm, and so we, naturally, fall in love when we have sex, while all you men are even so much more able to detach sex from love.

The problem is that this description, the full one, I mean, in which oxytocin is both clearly the reason people tend to fall in love when they have sex and clearly works differently in men and women, seems to be a stretch, an overly confident interpretation of research which is relatively new, sometimes contradictory, and which may not always say what the articles indicate. (In fairness, my own knowledge is pretty sketchy, too, on just this point, so I also could get things wrong here.) Here is what Wikipedia has to say about oxytocin:

The relationship between oxytocin and human sexual response is unclear. At least two non-controlled studies have found increases in plasma oxytocin at orgasm – in both men and women.[5][6] Plasma oxytocin levels are notably increased around the time of self stimulated orgasm and are still higher than baseline when measured 5 minutes after self arousal.[5] The authors of one of these studies speculated that oxytocin’s effects on muscle contractibility may facilitate sperm and egg transport.[5] In a study that measured oxytocin serum levels in women before and after sexual stimulation the author suggests that oxytocin serves an important role in sexual arousal. This study found that that genital tract stimulation resulted in increased oxytocin immediately after orgasm.[7] Another study that reports increases of oxytocin during sexual arousal states that it could be in response to nipple/areola, genital, and/or genital tract stimulation as confirmed in other mammals.[8] Murphy et al. (1987), studying men, found that oxytocin levels were raised throughout sexual arousal and there was no acute increase at orgasm.[9] A more recent study of men found an increase in plasma oxytocin immediately after orgasm, but only in a portion of their sample that did not reach statistical significance. The authors noted that these changes “may simply reflect contractile properties on reproductive tissue.”[10]

I reference Wikipedia not because I consider it an absolutely reliable source here; being open to editing by absolutely anyone, regardless of level of expertise, leaves it vulnerable to error (and sometimes worse – just today, some charming soul edited the Martin Luther King entry to use the word “nigger,” though the edit was soon fixed). One of the women in my Quaker meeting, who teaches at a local college, likes to use Wikipedia in her classes as an example of the limits of crowd sourcing in providing accurate information, and she bent my ear, during social time after one meeting for worship, with an account of the errors she’d found on topics where she had some knowledge. I wouldn’t recommend you use Wikipedia as a source if you’re writing an academic paper, even an undergraduate one, about oxytocin. Still, if crowd sourcing isn’t as good as peer review, it does make for an entry a little more neutral than some other popular accounts, a lot of which seem to have a culture wars axe to grind in what they say about oxytocin and sex. And what I get from the Wikipedia entry is that there’s a lot that still isn’t clear, too much to draw any particular conclusions about whether oxytocin does or doesn’t account for differences in men’s and women’s sexual attitudes and behavior.

I should be clear that I’m not saying that oxytocin isn’t released at orgasm, or that it doesn’t lead to bonding and increased trust, or even that women might not, to some degree or other, on average, either release more and respond more readily to said oxytocin, at the point of orgasm. What I’m saying is that the research just doesn’t seem to be all that clear yet.

Our own intuitive individual experiences can’t necessarily tell us that much, about the oxytocin/orgasm/bonding connection. Just because you, personally, find it easy to have sex relatively casually and not fall in love, or even because you, personally, are a woman and still find it easy to have casual sex, doesn’t mean that the “cuddle hormone” story is, in the general case, wrong. People have different levels of all kinds of hormones and neurotransmitters, and different biological receptivity to said chemicals. One of the most publicized of the “cuddle hormone” studies concerns differences between prairie voles, in which sexual behavior are said to be tied to differences in brain receptors for oxytocin and vasopressin. It’s always possible that, to one degree or another, people who have casual sex easily aren’t in denial, but really are physically wired to respond differently (at least in degree) to the same chemicals that make others bond. On the other hand, just because you (as is the case for both me and destinyinprogress) don’t do that well with more casual sexual relationships, doesn’t mean that oxytocin is the reason. It may be, or there may be some entirely different reason.

From my limited understanding of what the scientific evidence actually is, my greatest skepticism isn’t with the “people release oxytocin at orgasm and that leads to bonding” part; though I’m not sure whether even that is actually proven, it sounds as if there are at least some studies pointing in that direction. (And, regardless of exactly how oxytocin in particular turns out to be tied to sexual response, I do believe that, in ordinary experience, bonding during sex is something a lot of people can’t readily turn off – whether or not other people can.) My skepticism is more with the way a lot of popular articles present this purely as something that happens to women. It doesn’t look to me as if what scientific evidence there is supports that conclusion at this point; I think it’s a case of people jumping to conclusions based on their own presuppositions about differences between the sexes (a lot of which can be explained, even without any differences in men’s and women’s oxytocin serum levels at orgasm, by the fact that we all have brains and can perceive that sex has different costs for men and women).

In the interest of finding something more peer reviewed than Wikipedia, I did some Googling to find out what research was being done on oxytocin, at top universities. I haven’t yet turned up a lot about oxytocin and sex, which may say more for my failure to select the right search terms than anything else, but I did turn up some interesting research, at Stanford, on oxytocin and autism.

The researchers will test whether impaired social behaviors in autism are linked to levels of the hormone oxytocin. In healthy individuals, oxytocin primes maternal behavior, enhances social interactions, increases the ability to read facial expressions and recognize individuals, and boosts trust and empathy. Preliminary research has hinted that autism may be associated with oxytocin deficits, but those studies involved limited samples.

So, there does seem to be ongoing research on just what effect oxytocin has on social relationships, but a lot of it seems to be preliminary at this point.

My husband, as well as my non-worksafe blog friend figleaf, both recommend that you look use Charity Navigator to check out the relief organizations to which you intend to donate. Charity Navigator rates organizations fiscally to determine which ones give you the most actually charity for your buck. Here is their list of three and four star organizations with relief operations in Haiti.

Friends may notice that the American Friends Service Committee is not on this list (my husband did, and flagged it for me, since, as a Quaker, I generally have the AFSC as one of the organizations I think of first). I checked this out further, by putting the AFSC in Charity Navigator’s general search, and got the response:

We don’t evaluate American Friends Service Committee.
Why not? Many religious organizations are exempt under Internal Revenue Code from filing the Form 990. As a result, we lack sufficient data to evaluate their financial health. This is the same reason we are unable to evaluate the Salvation Army.

Though we don’t evaluate American Friends Service Committee, below you can find a list of rated charities that perform similar types of work.

So, it’s not that they’ve rated the AFSC as handling your money badly, but simply that they don’t have the information to rate it one way or the other. However, I do have further information about the AFSC and Haiti, from a member of my meeting who has in the past been our AFSC representative. She reports that the AFSC does not currently have an operation in Haiti, although they have had one in the past, and that they are not set up to provide immediate relief in Haiti. For this reason, they are focusing on what they can do in terms of longer term follow up (and that is how you can expect any money you donate to the AFSC for Haiti to be used, and a perfectly reasonable thing to support in addition to immediate relief). For organizations currently in Haiti providing relief, see the Charity Navigator list I linked above.

I’ve joined two fan pages on Facebook that you may find useful as well: Global Disaster Relief on Facebook and Haiti Earthquake Recovery / The New York Times. I expect that they’re publically viewable even if you’re not on Facebook. Also from Facebook, former Presidents Clinton and Bush have set up a Haiti fund.

The Lede blog at the New York Times has a post on Haiti Disaster Relief: How to Contribute.

Here’s the latest Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontiers report from Haiti.

Eve Tushnet points to a long list of places to donate that focuses on Haitian run organizations.

UPDATE: You can also donate your frequent flyer miles.

No, this isn’t another post about what the latest software tweaks are in Facebook, whether they got it right about how public or private their defaults are, or how you can fix your settings if the defaults aren’t what you want. This time, I wanted to talk, in the wake of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks about where privacy is going, about what my own privacy standards actually are, regarding my Facebook friends’ wall posts.

Back in the dark ages, decades ago when I was starting to use the Internet (or actually its precursor the Arpanet), a saying was current, that you shouldn’t say anything online that you didn’t want published in the New York Times. Online privacy couldn’t be trusted that far. Nevertheless, then and now, people did say things in email that they wouldn’t remotely want in the New York Times, because if you hang around socializing anywhere long enough, including virtually online, you find yourself wanting to share confidences, and carve out some spaces that are more private than others.

Still, if few of us are willing to forgo saying anything at all in private by email, to our closest friends and family, Facebook walls are a little more public than that. Even if you’ve checked your settings and avoided any too public new defaults, chances are good that you’re sharing your wall posts with all your Facebook friends, maybe hundreds of them, so that they’re not exactly the height of private. So, if I see your wall post, I generally don’t treat it as a closely guarded secret. Still, there’s a space between “closely guarded secret” and “so public that I’ll freely blog it with full attribution.” And, though you may have seen me post, from time to time, “Susie Bright said such-and-such on Facebook,” actually, by default, I treat most of my Facebook friends’ posts as not bloggable. After all, some people may be sharing things with their two hundred Facebook friends that they don’t want their employers to see, and, as long as such things are about, say, their views on same-sex marriage, and not about, say, the money they’re embezzling, I figure it’s not my place to tell. And my blog, unlike many of my Facebook friends’ walls, is searchable via Google. So here are the rules I’ve been following in deciding what to blog, from Facebook wall posts.

1. I don’t blog about what the nephews and nieces are doing on Facebook. If you’re a minor, and you’ve friended me, I assume whatever you’re posting isn’t to be redistributed.
2. I do feel free to blog anything that I saw via a fan page. I figure fan pages are meant for publicity, and Amnesty International, for instance, wants me to spread the word.
3. I do feel free to blog anything whatsoever that a political figure says on Facebook. If Barney Frank cracks wise on Facebook, presumably he means that wisecrack to be public. (Actually, I’m following Barney Frank via a fan page, but if instead I were his Facebook “friend,” I’d still assume he meant his wall to be public.)
4. I do feel free to blog anything whatsoever about the public career of anyone famous. So, if Chris has photos of his sister Vanessa at the Emmy Awards, or a story about her TV show, or, as happened the other day, an ad the two of them are both in, I consider that bloggable. If Chris changes his relationship status from “single” to “in a relationship” or vice versa, I don’t blog that, because it’s not about anyone’s public career and I’m not Perez Hilton (not that relationship status is usually super private, but I’d just as soon err in the direction of not blogging, rather than the other way around).
5. If you make your living in large part by writing about your opinions, and you also have a Facebook feed where you share links and opinions on those same topics, I consider all of that bloggable. So, Susie Bright’s Facebook feed, for instance, is pretty much open blog fodder as far as I’m concerned, unless she says otherwise. (After all, I did get to be her Facebook friend largely because, before she had a Facebook fan page, she announced that she was accepting friend requests from absolutely anyone.
6. If, on the other hand, you’re not a particularly public figure, and you like to share links and thoughts, and I like one of your links, I generally pass it on without attribution, or just as from a Facebook friend, because I don’t know how public you meant your wall to be. Although, if you’re my husband Joel, I try to always remember to give you credit when I steal your links.

First thing, my thoughts on Harry Reid. I realize that half the rest of the blogosphere has said this already, but the comparison between his gaffe and what Trent Lott said is so bogus it stinks.

Now, partisan grandstanding about the foibles of politicians in the other party is a grand old tradition, on the part of people in both parties. I can remember, for example, years ago, when Pat Robertson and Jesse Jackson were both running for president, and we were treated to twin revelations that both men had married their wives when said wives were already pregnant. First came the revelation about Pat Robertson, breathlessly reported by people on the left; oh, the hypocrisy! And I thought, give me a break; none of you think there’s anything wrong with having sex with the person you’re going to marry before you’ve married her. (In view of current events, I want to make it very clear that this defense of Robertson applies only to the business about his first kid being born less than nine months after his wedding date, and not in the slightest to the views he’s just been spouting.) Admittedly, Robertson’s position was of the “True Love Waits” variety, so you could get a little mileage on the hypocrisy front, but, as religious sexual hypocrisy goes, having sex with someone you actually wound up marrying, before the point in your life where you claim to have been born again, is pretty small fry. It’s not as if religious conservatives really shame men for life for marrying women after, rather than before, their first child was conceived. And, for those who jumped with the tit for tat revelation about Jackson, I had the same reaction. Come on, the guy stood by his child, married the mother of his kids, and, at that point, had actually done a fair amount of urging other people to take responsibility and be fathers to their kids. Of all the things that conservatives disliked about Jesse Jackson (and there were plenty), I doubted that particular detail of his life was really high on the list.

Similarly, there are the breathless revelations, in every election, that the candidates from the other party are rich (always ignoring the fact that the candidates in your own party are also rich).

This isn’t one of those cases. As Ta-Nehisi Coates points out

I think you can grant that, in this era, the term “Negro dialect” is racially insensitive and embarrassing. That said, the fair-mind listener understands the argument–Barack Obama’s complexion and his ability to code-switch is an asset. You can quibble about the “light skin” part, but forget running for president, code-switching is the standard M.O. for any African American with middle class aspirations.

But there’s no such defense for Trent Lott. Lott celebrated apartheid Mississippi’s support of Strom Thurmond, and then said that had Thurmond won, “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.” Strom Thurmond run for president, specifically because he opposed Harry Truman’s efforts at integration. This is not mere conjecture–nearly half of Thurmond’s platform was dedicated to preserving segregation. The Dixiecrat slogan was “Segregation Forever!” (Exclamation point, theirs.) Trent Lott’s wasn’t forced to resign because he said something “racially insensitive.” He was forced to resign because he offered tacit endorsement of white supremacy–frequently.

Claiming that Harry Reid’s comments are the same, is like claiming that referring to Jews as “Hebrews” is the same as endorsing Nazism….

People who are itching for an opportunity to prove that the indignation over Trent Lott’s remarks was just one more case of partisan gotcha need to think again; sometimes people are indignant because what you said really is beyond the pale. If we had to clear our country’s political leadership of everyone who ever used, even in private, language to describe Obama’s candidacy that was less than racially sensitive, we’d be dropping a heck of a lot of people (heck, pretty much every politician to whom that might have applied, in either party, has been promptly forgiven by Obama). But, thankfully, we no longer live in the days when actually lamenting that a segregationist campaign lost needs to be taken for granted as normal and OK in a Senate majority leader.

Other people making more or less the same point:

Sojourners blog.

Lawyers, Guns, and Money.

A The Nation blogger.

“If the Lord spanked San Francisco” department: Back around the time of the 1905 earthquake, a rhyme circulated in San Francisco:

If the Lord spanked San Francisco,
For being so frisky,
Why did He burn all the churches,
and save Hotellers Whiskey.

But the Lord’s mysterious ways in favoring the sale of whiskey over houses of prayer haven’t deterred people from attempting to discern His will in subsequent natural disasters. So I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me, though it saddens me, to find Pat Robertson already casting blame for the Haiti earthquake. Still, when he does so by, as Ta-Nehisi Coates put it, ‘equating an attempt by slaves to claim their freedom with “a pact with the devil:”,’ well, what can I say? Only that I’m appalled.

For much more thoughtful commentary on Haiti, TNC has a post with some words from Evan Narcisse.

My sister points me to two pieces in the New York Times. The first, by Nicholas Kristof, reports that, by abolishing their army and investing instead in education, Costa Ricans have become the happiest people on earth. The second, by Ross Douthat, concerns how to talk about faith and what kinds of theological debate are OK.

French film maker Eric Rohmer died, several of whose films I’ve seen. The most famous, My Night at Maud’s, struck me for the way it interwove romance with an ongoing discussion, among various characters, of Pascal’s Wager. And also the fact that a lot of it is about things not done, an opportunity to stray with another woman passed up, some words not said.

Rohmer’s death, though, is overshadowed by the death of someone famous for one particular act of courage and kindness: Miep Gies, the woman who hid Anne Frank and her family, and, when that hiding place was unfortunately breeched, the woman who preserved Anne Frank’s diary. Since the world doesn’t always particularly reward the good, it’s good to know that Miep Gies, at least, lived to a hundred, was in good health till near the end, and left behind children and grandchildren.

David Crystal on the myth that the average teenager uses just 800 words in daily communication. (At my teenaged dinner table, if I wanted to follow my mother’s conversation, those words included oxytocin, vasopressin, and superoxide dismutase. But adult conversation aside, this number seems way low to me; I’m sure it doesn’t fit Catgirl and Gameboy, for instance.)

Mashable reports the first Twitter murder. However, given that the two men in question seem to have known each other already outside of Twitter, it doesn’t sound as if Twitter so much sparked the murder as provided evidence to the court of arguments that might not have been so easy to document if they’d stayed in meatspace.

Four quick sites that let you check if your links are safe.

The Congressional Quarterly reports that Obama set a new presidential record in getting Congress to vote his way. Ezra Klein has, I think, a sensible take on this.

On the one hand, you could take this as evidence that Obama is an awesome president. But I’d say it’s a bit more complex than that.

You’re seeing the triumph of three things here. First, an uncommonly large Democratic majority. Second, a long-standing historical trend toward party discipline. And third, the White House’s relentless strategy of focusing on what it can pass rather than what it thinks is needed….

Meanwhile, Nigeria continues to deal with the limbo of an absent president. Yar’Adua’s interview with the BBC may have quelled rumors of his death, but it hasn’t stemmed calls for him to step down.

“The constitution does not provide for a president ruling us from a hospital bed, in an undisclosed hospital; enough of the insult,” said President of West African Bar Association, Mr. Femi Falana.

A judge today ruled that Vice President Good-Luck Johnson should take over as acting president of Nigeria.

Chris Williams shared with his Facebook feed this video (I’m guessing publically viewable, but if not you can try finding it on Youtube from my description) of him and his sister Vanessa in a commercial for the eye bank of New York. It’s short and I think sweet, since they talk about their late father (who donated his corneas for transplant). I don’t particularly remember their parents personally, but my mother remembers them as good people, and tells me that their mother helped one of my sisters practice for a musical. But while I’m on the subject of eyes, on a lighter note, one of my feeds turned up a celebrity plastic surgery site, that mentioned speculation about whether Vanessa’s eyes really are that blue. Hey, for once a celebrity question I can answer! I say yes, Vanessa’s and Chris’s eyes have always been blue; blue eyes run in their family, and I know Chris had those same blue eyes as a little boy starting grade school, who would hardly have already been wearing colored contact lenses to prepare for his future career. There, aren’t you glad to have that vital question answered .

On a more current note, Vanessa’s Facebook fan page reports that she’s been nominated for Canadian Smooth Jazz International Vocalist of the Year.

Back to world news: Chinese cyberactivists are supporting Iranians.

Someone from my Quaker meeting passes on this cartoon about Admin Mourning.

Pulling together Haiti relief links from my Facebook feed and elsewhere:

The White House blog has a post up citing another State Department post and offering the following suggestions:

As Secretary Clinton said earlier, the U.S. government will offer assistance to Haiti and others in the region in the form of civilian and military disaster relief and humanitarian assistance.

For those interesting in helping immediately, simply text “HAITI” to “90999″ and a donation of $10 will be given automatically to the Red Cross to help with relief efforts, charged to your cell phone bill.

Or you can go online to organizations like the Red Cross and Mercy Corps to make a contribution to the disaster relief efforts.

We’ll provide more details and opportunities to help as we learn more. To stay up-to-date, follow us on state.gov.

Oxfam’s Haiti Emergency Response Fund.

Updates from aid workers and journalists in Haiti.

Partners in Health.

MÉDECINS SANS FRONTIÈRES

Episcopal Relief and Development. (I’m picking this over the American Friends Service Committee simply because the Episcopal Relief and Development web page already has a Haiti fund up and the AFSC’s doesn’t, so I’m not certain whether the AFSC yet has infrastructure in place for responding to this particular crisis. They may; they have offices in Latin America and have worked in Haiti before, so if anyone knows of AFSC efforts, let me know and I’ll update this post.)

An appeal from the Secretary-General of the UN.

I’ll have some non-Haiti links for you this evening (some of them days old, since I’ve been preoccupied with offline stuff). In the meantime, if you’re a praying person, say a prayer for Haiti, and regardless of whether you’re a praying person, take a look at where you might donate.

UPDATE: OK, the American Friends Service Committee now has a link up to donate to their Haiti relief efforts, so I’m adding them.

Last month, yet another study of college students’ sex habits, this one from University of Minnesota, hit the headlines, with the news that casual sex doesn’t cause emotional damage.

Thoughts. First, I think Amanda’s right that it’s worth noting that

… researchers also found that there isn’t as much screwing around as breathless stories about the “hook-up culture” would have you believe. Between these two studies, it was found that only 4 precent of teenagers have sent a sexually provocative photo through text message and 80 percent of college students’ most recent sexual encounter occurred in the context of a committed relationship.

Second, I’m inclined to be cautious of any single study about the emotional impact of casual sex. Not because there’s anything particularly obviously wrong with this study, of “a diverse sample of 1,311 sexually active young adults,” published in a peer reviewed publication, but more because I think it’s easy for different studies to point in different directions depending on what questions you ask. Maggie Gallagher and Linda Waite, in their book on marriage, cite research to the effect that people with a steady sex partner in the form of a spouse tend to be happier with their sex lives than people who have to go out and troll for hookups. This University of Minnesota study that’s currently in the news reports that the 20 percent of college students whose most recent sexual encounter was either with a casual acquaintance or with a close but nonexclusive partner didn’t score as noticeably more at risk for “harmful psychological outcomes,” which I take, in absence of anything beyond the press release, to mean that they aren’t, for example, clinically depressed. Both results could easily be true.

We tend to have two competing public narratives about “casual sex,” one in which you’re permanently damaged by it, tape that has lost its stickiness and will no longer be able to fall in love, chewed gum which no one wants, and another in which it’s no big deal, something to be open to trying, don’t pooh pooh one-night stands if you’re frustrated about not yet having found that relationship you want. But in fact, there’s a vast middle ground between being just fine with even the most emotionally disconnected kinds of sex, and suffering lasting damage from your more casual experiences, a middle ground where you make some bad choices, regret them, recover from them, and learn not to repeat them, without turning into that tape that has lost its ability to stick to anything once the right person comes around. It’s in that vast middle ground that my own experience lies.

If I take the three basic positions generally current about sex and commitment – wait till you’re married, anything goes as long as it’s consensual, or sex when you’re not married is just fine as long as it’s not too “casual” – it’s the last one that comes most naturally, that resonates most easily with my gut feelings and experience, while the other two take a certain mental effort to adopt. At the same time, I see some limitations in the position my gut wants to adopt.

Since I’ve been writing recently on war and peace issues drawing from the Bible and Christian tradition, I want to be clear that here I’m not talking about what the Bible or Christian tradition has to say about sex, but, for the moment, only about where my own experience leads me; the two aren’t bound to line up (though they may, in the end, prove to do so).

Nor am I talking about reason, exactly. For the moment I’m talking more about stuff like this. On Twitter, Scarleteen suggested a #ThanksAbOnly tag for people to Tweet about what they got out of abstinence only education, and one of the tweets was:

JaymeFH #ThanksAbOnly for telling me sex before marriage makes me like a beat-up used car no one will want to buy.

When I hear the kind of abstinence till marriage argument that JaymeFH scorns, there just isn’t any part of me that’s nodding along, feeling somehow ruined because I slept, before I married, with people I felt I cared about at the time. When I read an article from someone who seems to be shaking his or her head and wondering “what do women get out of it,” and “it” is having sex at all before you’re married, I have to laugh. Women get sex out of it, and sex is no small thing. It’s not that waiting till marriage strikes me as some perverse, oppressive, irrational, prudish, indefensible position, even absent an appeal to God – set your worry about birth control failure and your negative evaluation of the results of a pregnancy before you’re committed to each other high enough, and it actually makes perfect sense – but it is that, when it’s argued, as it so often is, in terms of lost purity or perfect virginal wedding nights, it winds up going against the grain of my experience.

On the other hand, here’s an article lamenting the rise of casual sex in a particular segment of working class British culture. Amanda Marcotte links it impatiently on Facebook, with the comment

Yeah, I love how it’s a given that wanting to fuck a woman and having searing contempt for her are basically the same emotion.

I’ve seen this kind of sex panic article often; the working class British subjects in this one could just as easily be replaced by students at elite colleges in the US in another, and the quotes would sound almost interchangeable. I’m skeptical of such articles, because I suspect that the world of the Aughts hasn’t really changed as much from the world of the Seventies as the writers say, that romantic love isn’t really this scorned, marginalized thing. But my skepticism isn’t backed, like my gut reaction to the “beat-up used car” remark, by any difficulty feeling why someone would be dismayed, to find a dating world that actually looked just like the one described. I would find any dating environment troubling, in which it were really true that

She is angry that she is growing up in this milieu. “It’s all casual sex now; nobody talks about love,” she said. “I wish I could have a real connection with a man. But there’s no courtship any more. That’s all dead. It’s just immediate. There’s no getting to know someone; you’re expected just to look someone up and down and make the decision just like that: are you going to have sex or not?

“There’s no time to build up a connection. The idea is that you have sex first, but how are you meant to create the kind of excitement, the emotional connection, after that? I want to have an emotional connection with a man. I want it to be there with the feeling that I am equal to him. I do think I’m as good as a man. But I don’t want just this no-strings sex stuff.”

Like the woman described, my own experience of sex, when young, didn’t leave me wanting, or even, frankly, understanding the desire for, “just this no-strings sex stuff.”

But before I get to sex, I need to talk about not-sex, because that has a lot to do with my visceral reactions to what people call, variously, “casual sex,” “one-night stands,” “hookups,” “flings,” “no strings attached,” etc. In particular, I’m thinking of a particular kind of not-sex: the stream of not particularly welcome overtures, from people not particularly willing to care about my response, that started with the obscene phone call from an apparently adult man when I was just a kid, including the guy who tried to grab me on the street when I was still not quite legal, the shouts in the street from groups of men, the drunk at the swimming pool whose wife kept apologizing for him, etc. Because the thing about these unwelcome, uninvited, boundary pushing approaches is that, though the men making them were very much a minority among the men I met in general, they were a much larger set of the men who were approaching me for no strings sex. I know that people can be coercive even to people they’re close to; that’s why we have laws against rape within marriage as well as among strangers. And I know that it’s possible to cruise strangers in a way that, whatever its other problems, at least shows some respect for the desires and wishes of the person you’re cruising. Once in a very blue moon, I’ve been cruised that way, and I’m told it’s routine among gay men. But my own experience involved a lot of disregard for my boundaries by strangers and near strangers; it took a while to realize how much this colored my attitudes about “no strings attached,” and how different must be the experience of people who find “no strings attached” appealing (for I’m sure no one finds it appealing to be called a bitch for turning down a random married drunk stranger).

And now, having dispensed with not-sex, I’ll talk about sex, about choices that, even if I came to regret some of them, were my own, free, uncoerced choices, for which I don’t blame anyone but myself, ones that involved people who may have broken my heart, but who never once disregarded my “no.”

I don’t know how to do this without getting into numbers, because the numbers kind of matter to my reaction. There are seven people who matter to this story. Not that my “number,” in the most technical sense, is seven; it’s actually some number smaller than that; I won’t say what. All of these seven, as it happens, are men, because, though I’m bisexual in my attractions, I didn’t in practice make out with as many women as men, or go as far with the women as with the men.

First, there are the two non-relationships, two men with whom I came to the sharp realization that I’d made a mistake, and had to set a limit. The right feeling just wasn’t there. One time, I spoke with what felt like a necessary cruelty; I just needed out, and in the process was, I think, very unkind to the guy involved. The other time, both of us were as nice to each other as we could be under the circumstances. In each case, my limit was respected (so the “number” actually can be counted on one hand). But the experiences marked me; I realize that, for me, if the feeling isn’t there, I freeze in ways that are really unpleasant, for me and anyone who’s with me.

Then there were the five others. And what happened was that, with four of them (including the one I married), I found myself having fantasies about babies, and the really long term. I’m not sure how ordinary I am in this. I actually suspect that I’m an outlier, that the guys didn’t necessarily have the same kinds of fantasies, that my friends, male or female, didn’t necessarily go quite as often, or as quickly, to baby thoughts. Not necessarily an outlier in caring about the people I had sex with, I don’t mean to suggest that the whole rest of the world is crazy about anonymous sex. But an outlier when it comes to the baby fantasy thing. But maybe we’re all some kind of outlier. At any rate, for all four, I had that fantasy and that impulse, however careful I was in practice. So, there are these two extremes, I’ve-got-to-get-out-of-here and I-want-to-have-your-baby, and not a heck of a lot of middle ground.

And then there’s the middle ground. One person. The closest to a friend with benefits I’ve ever had. The guy who was a friend rather than a lover, with whom I briefly shared what he called “adventures.” And somehow wound up feeling fine about it, neither madly in love (no baby thoughts there) nor trapped and needing to get out, but just having fun with a friend. But at the same time, given my other experience, my being OK, just the once, with a more friends with benefits arrangement has always felt to me like a kind of rare freak accident, harder to come across than true love, not something I’d find a likely enough prospect to take a chance on again.

Eve Tushnet once included, among the many links she posts and excerpts to Marriage Debate, one with rules for how to handle a friends with benefits arrangements. The gist was a series of don’ts: don’t confide in each other, don’t do this and that and the other thing that might suggest you’re actually close to each other, or like each other too much, certainly don’t meet his family. I broke every one of these rules with my friend, including the one about meeting family (though I’m not sure I met any of them till the “adventures” were over, maybe a brother, maybe not even him till later). We went places together, confided in each other, all the usual sorts of things friends do; the only thing we didn’t do was fall in love. And, in fact, for years afterwards I counted him as one of my best friends, till, as often happens even with good friends, we let the friendship lapse.

And this gets to the place where I’m ambivalent about “friends with benefits.” As I hear it described, it often winds up sounding as if there are more “benefits” than “friendship” to it, or are supposed to be; that “keep your distance to make your friends with benefits relationship work” article that Eve once linked is the kind of thing I see often. And it frankly sounds to me like an awful deal. Why would I want to be trying really hard not to like the person I’m sleeping with too much? It makes as much sense to me as trying never to have an orgasm with the person I’m sleeping with. To me, the only reason “friends with benefits” felt OK in this case was precisely that, even if I didn’t feel in love with the guy, I still felt close to him. Which makes it hard for me to see how not falling for the person I’m sleeping with makes any sense as, well, a plan, or an expectation, rather than a kind of mutual accident. Going by my own experience, it sure isn’t something I’d want to bet on.

But why I say ambivalent, instead of purely negative, is this: the “friend with benefits” was still around, years later, and willing to take phone calls when I was in crisis, and generally be a shoulder to cry on when I needed it. The guy who, before the man I actually married, was most forthcoming with words of love and assurances of his unending friendship, wasn’t. He was off without so much as the courtesy of a face to face break up, or the least explanation for his sudden silent treatment.

When we talk about how bad “casual sex” is, the temptation is to define “casual sex” as, first, always something more “casual” than what I’m doing, and, second, in terms of feelings; if you feel all mushy about someone, it’s not “casual,” but if you feel less starry-eyed, maybe it is. And feelings matter, of course; whatever else may guide your decisions about sex, you shouldn’t be sleeping with someone if you don’t feel right about it, or don’t feel right about what you think the other person feels for you. (There might be any number of other reasons you shouldn’t be sleeping together, but, regardless, not feeling it is reason enough.) But how starry-eyed you feel isn’t the only thing that matters. If there’s one thing that the “no sex until marriage” ethic and the “consenting adults” ethic both have to offer, that the “sex with love” ethic sometimes forgets, it’s a focus on taking responsibility for your deeds, whether it be by hanging around to help raise that child you’ve fathered, or by using condoms to avoid spreading STDs.

Articles giving dating advice on what kinds of “casual sex” you should be avoiding, frankly, often suck. They wind up sounding as if you mainly have to concern yourself with your reputation, with not having a “number” that’s too high, or having sex on too early a date, and they don’t talk so much about how to handle the feelings that are actually involved, or what responsibilities people actually have toward their lovers. But I have seen bloggers who, though their perspectives vary, use words that resonate with me more than those dating articles. Steve Barnes often says that you shouldn’t have sex with someone unless you’re willing to take a call from that person in the middle of the night a year later. Hugo Schwyzer has sometimes talked about being willing to support the other person through all the consequences that might come of your sleeping together. *Christopher suggests asking, where is this heading. What I like in all of these suggestions is that, in their different ways, they point to deeds and taking responsibility, not just really, really feeling as if you’re in love. Because really, really feeling as if you’re in love may or may not last very long at all, but some concern for the welfare of the person you’ve slept with (and certainly for any child you might conceive together) ought to remain. Ethics, whether sexual or other ethics, have at least partly to do with what we still may owe each other, even when we’re not feeling it.

On Wednesday, we went to see an opera at the movie theater. The way this works is either that the Metropolitan streams one of its operas to the movie theater live, or, sometimes, as in this case, one of those operas gets replayed later. Mom’s been attending these for some months now, and telling me how she loves it (how else do you get to see an opera live in a small town in Maine?).

The opera, Tales of Hoffman, concerns an artist, his loves, and the Muse who wants him for herself. There are four loves, the singer who’s in his present (appearing in the prologue and at the end), who may be the only “real” woman of the lot, and three past loves, a mechanical doll, a singer, and a courtesan, in acts which are each in its way surreal. The Muse doubles as Hoffman’s friend Nicklausse, in a role that’s both male and female, and which, at least in this production, involved a lot of collusion with the villain of the piece (a figure who takes different roles in each act, but who always wishes to destroy Hoffman), since both Muse and villain want to break up all the love affairs. I have to say that in the second act I was on the villain’s side, since both Hoffman and the singer’s father wanted her to give up singing. The interesting thing about her conflict between art and domesticity was that loyalty to her mother involved rejecting domesticity (weirdly, it also involved dying like her mother, as if using her mother’s talent and succumbing to her mother’s illness were inescapably linked). On the other hand, in the third act, the villain’s pure evil.

I’m thinking of learning one of the arias from this opera; I just have to decide which one.

The 41st year of the NAACP Image Awards look, in terms of nominations anyway, to be a good year for Greeley (my high school). Not only is Vanessa Williams nominated again, this time in two categories, but Joe Berlinger’s Crude is nominated as a documentary.

And, in other Vanessa Williams news, here’s a first look at her with her brother in drag as a Wilhelmina doppelganger.

Some Friday links:

Airship stories from my brother.

What are peoples feelings on the subject of Hell/Final Punishments.

A review of Flatland, the movie.

Google Gets Its First Taste Of Facebook’s Realtime Stream.

14 Power Women To Follow On Twitter.

Why are women posting bra colors on Facebook?

Teachers know decimals are a girl’s best friend. Research debunks myth of gender gap in math.

What Does It Mean to Be a Deficit Hawk?

Hey, Big Spender. A Pew Research poll shows that the public isn’t particularly willing to cut spending to balance the budget, when pressed for specifics.

Dropping Academic Veneer, Cal State Prof Starts His Own Hate Group.

WebMD wants you to Find the Best Workout for You. They also have 24 ways to lose weight without dieting.

National Insurance Company in Uganda has its IPO.

Smartphones help collect data on malaria cases in remote Uganda.

139 die in southern Sudan tribal clashes.

The state of stateless Somalia 2010: inside the black box.

Is Al Qaeda in Yemen connected to Al Qaeda in Somalia?

Waq al-Waq, a blog about Islam and insurgency in Yemen.

Oxfam’s blog says, Do not assume anything about population.

Matt Yglesias takes issue with a blog post by Charles Murray in which he notes an increase, in Paris, in people he doesn’t consider to look “like native French,” but rather like “African blacks, Middle-Eastern types, and East Asians.” Charles Murray (not Matt Yglesias) writes

Mark Steyn and Christopher Caldwell have already explained this to the rest of the world—Europe as we have known it is about to disappear—but it was still a shock to see how rapid the change has been in just the last half-dozen years.

Given that, a) Charles Murray is the author of The Bell Curve, and b) he’s favorably citing Mark Steyn, I’m with Matt Yglesias in taking Murray to be suggesting that this change is a negative development.

Anyway, just for the record, Europe as I have known it includes two countries in which Muslims are the largest religious group (both of them pretty secular), and a rather long history of cultural exchange with the Middle East (some of it, to be sure, not particularly friendly), which somehow hasn’t resulted in the utter disappearance of European culture. So, I find it hard to believe that the presence of a bunch of dark-skinned people in a neighborhood in Paris heralds the end of European civilization as I know it. I think, if I go back in twenty years to visit my cousins in Greece, Greece will, like the rest of the world, have changed over the years, but it will still be recognizably Greece.

WP: You had gone with him?

Carly: Hasn’t everybody?

WP: No.

Carly: That only means you haven’t met him, though at the time I met him he was still relatively undiscovered as a Don Juan. I felt I was one among thousands at that point – it hadn’t reached, you know, the populations of small countries….

Carly Simon, to the Washington Post, on Warren Beatty

I hear there’s a new biography out, about Warren Beatty, which makes the shocking revelation that he’s slept around. What? Say it isn’t so! You’re breaking my heart. All these years I thought he’d saved himself for Annette Benning.

For years, Americans have known the country largely as the source of a particular kind of email scam, the one in which you’re assured that, because we’ve been told you’re so very trustworthy, you can get a huge sum of money if you’ll just send us your bank account number and let us put money in your account.

In fact, it’s the home of many other stories that generally take up little space in American awareness, the second largest economy in Africa, home of Nollywood, the third largest film industry in the world, and, on the downside, the home of an ongoing armed militant conflict in the Niger Delta and false rumors about the polio vaccine in northern Nigeria that have foiled UN attempts to eradicate the disease.

Now Nigeria is in the news as the country of the accused “underwear bomber,” an incident that has strained US-Nigerian diplomatic ties, as the Nigerian Senate gives the US a seven day ultimatum to remove Nigeria from the “countries of interest” list to which it was added, after the underwear bombing incident, a list that ensures that Nigerians receive “enhanced” scannings. The Nigerian Foreign Affairs Minister complained of the decision.

… Notwithstanding Nigeria’s position, Maduekwe added that the government has ordered 30 full body scanners for the nation’s airport, a demonstration of the government’s non-compromising stance on terrorism..

According to him: “Listing Nigeria on second tire of countries that are indicated on the ladder of terrorism and security measures from the USA is an unacceptable New Year gift to a friendly country like Nigeria on the year of its golden jubilee celebration.

“We are not on the world terrorist list, nor have ever supported or connived with countries known for terrorist act. We have been on the list with which US has maintained excellent relationship. For the fact that these countries surround us does not place us in the terrorist list. It is unacceptable to Nigerians….

But Nigeria has been in its own constitutional crisis for months, preceding the strain in its relations with the US, for Nigeria’s president, Yar Adua, has been absent from the country and out of communication, reportedly in Saudi Arabia for medical treatment. In the beginning of December, a Nigerian blogger wrote

Nigeria by my own estimation is the most ridiculous country on planet earth. For the second week running this country is without a president whether legal or illegal.

…

Right now in Nigeria there is no governance, there has hardly been one since May 2007 due to the ill health and near total incapacitation of Yar Adua. The man is sick and right now no one knows if he is dead or alive in far away Saudi Arabia where everything around him is total secret and unknown.

Yar’Adua, President of Nigeria, had a controversial start to his presidency, for he gained power in a controversial election held on 21 April 2007, and took office amid widespread complaints of fraud. It was an election that placed then Nigerian President Obasanjo sharply at odds with then Vice President Atiku Abubakar. Obasanjo, legally barred from seeking reelection himself, supported Yar’Adua, then a governor, while Atiku Abubakar, in third place in the official results, so bitterly rejected those results that he refused to attend Yar’Adua’s inauguration.

Unlike the contested election some months later in Kenya, the contested election in Nigeria did not lead to violence, but rather to court cases, court cases that got resolved by objections to the election results being dismissed. Yar’Adua further quelled opposition by inviting opposition parties into a national unity government, and invitation that two parties accepted.

Now, though, with the president in a Saudi hospital for six weeks, the country is in constitutional crisis. The Nigerian Bar Association is demanding that he hand over power to Vice President Goodluck Johnson. The Nigerian Senate argues that the 1999 constitution constrains it from taking any action on the continued absence of the president from the country. Leading politicians are holding consultations on how to resolve the constitutional crisis. The Federal government has refused to produce a document, in court, certifying that the president is fit to remain in office.

The Federal Government, yesterday, ruled out the possibility of producing before a Federal High Court, Abuja, a certified medical report from King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Saudi Arabia, attesting that President Umaru Yar’Adua is fit to continue in office.

The Attorney-General of the Federation, Chief Michael Aondoakaa (SAN), who made the disclosure in Abuja moments after a heated court proceedings in three separate suits asking President Yar’Adua to step down for his Vice, Dr Goodluck Jonathan, owing to his ill-health, said the President was entitled to his private life.

“How can we produce such a document? It is not fair. Everybody is entitled to his privacy. If you bring such a document here, every Dick and Harry will photocopy it. He is entitled to his private life. It is not fair,” he complained to the President of the Nigerian Bar Association, NBA, Chief Oluwarotimi Akeredolu (SAN), while stepping out of the court room, yesterday….

Meanwhile, supporters of the president are assuring Al Jazeera that the president’s health is improving, and he’ll be back Real Soon Now, his leadership unweakened by his long absence.