Happy Halloween!

We carved pumpkins at the Levine's, we made costumes at home. I did not prepare for class!



Happy Halloween!

What do Women Want?

It seems that sex is the last thing on a calculating girl's mind in Maureen Dowd's What's a Modern Girl to Do? According to Dowd's 20 and 30 something native informants, the new protagonist of "Sex in the City" can forego sex if the guy is willing to pick up the tab.

She paints a picture of young women with calculators for hearts and icemakers on their pussies. There is absolutely no account of how the pill liberated women to act on their desires. Perhaps it's because sexual fulfillment turned out to be not so fulfilling or that feminine frigidity once again appears as the perfect solution to a sexual/financial double-standards where women who get wet and forget to feign indifference are punished for their sexual enjoyment while cool customers who can throw up a Blackberry flavored smoke screen of being overbooked and undersexed will get the guy and the guy who pays as well. This to me is the most appalling hypocrisy of the dating situation described in Dowd's article.

Cosmo has not a word about the devastating joint melting danger of falling in love over some good sex, but it does offer many tips about keeping your man sexually entranced -- my favorite was yelling out the names of your friends who find your orgasming boyfriend "hot" while he climaxes. With this much planning ahead, how is a girl to let herself go when it's her turn?

I'm not asking for better advice about falling in love, just commenting on the impoverished vision of female-male relations offered to women once again.

Maureen Dowd on Retrosexism, Dating and the Working Woman

What's a Modern Girl to Do? asks Maureen Dowd about something I've been noticing from the fashionistas of New York to the hipsters of Minneapolis -- young women want to get married and take their husbands' names and a lot of them choose to stay at home, avoiding the grind of the working world. Taking your husband's name for my generation seemed retro-- in a daring sort of way. It displayed one's defiance of the feminist superego!

But Dowd's reflections on what I like to call retrosexism makes an interesting point that needs to be amplified. The working world has gotten more sexist, not less. It's harder than ever to be a mother and have a career. Our overachieving privileged boomer fore-mothers set unreal standards: they worked twelves hour days, had four nannies, made partner after having twins and married supportive millionaires. In academia, the ambitious women of the previous generation didn't usually have children.

Most middle class women I know who are not driven by ambition just tell me that they have not found work that is particulary fulfilling or lucrative. Work sucks. They choose to stay home because it is economically rational -- the cost of childcare is prohibitive. Most of them didn't marry rich guys. They are interesting women, they're not Stepford Wives, but they're not feminist fanatics either. Feminist forgot that work sucks for the most part and liberating women to work doesn't change that.

Tina Brown on Patrick Fitzgerald vs. W

This Time, the Prosecutor's a Corker. I especially like the image of the disciplined scholarship kid from Brooklyn facing down Bush and his cronies. I used to know Tina Brown's writing as the editor of Vanity Fair: and now I've discovered her at the Washington Post, which I'm reading much more assiduously, since the NY Times decided to de-select me from Times Select.

TPM: the source of "yellowcake" story

Talking Points Memo cites the La Repubblica article about the source of the Niger yellowcake letters -- turns out they were not entirely fabricated, but some dates were changed.

And Cheney is being drawn into the Plame leak. I don't look for justice any more, just some sign of a truth leak.

Avian Flu may be a hoax?

Avian Flu does seem to have the makings of an overhyped non-event. But Donald Rumsfeld stands to profit handsomely....

Karl and Scooter's Excellent Adventure

select.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/ or get it for free here

Karl and Scooter's Excellent Adventure
By FRANK RICH
The New York Times, October 23, 2005

THERE were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no collaboration between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda on 9/11. There was scant Pentagon planning for securing the peace should bad stuff happen after America invaded. Why, exactly, did we go to war in Iraq?

Do Aspens Turn in Clusters?

Do Aspens Turn in Clusters? Not really, but it seems Scooter was writing in code to Judith Miller who was in jail at the time about aspen clones, referring to neocon thinktanks and their deep connectedness, asking her to come out of jail, come back to life and the deeply rooted connectedness of all those intertwined aspens, turning together.

Whoa! My mind is spinning. If as Miller says in her retort to Bill Keller at the times, she was not socially or otherwise entangled with Scooter, this letter seems to betray a strange intimacy that is hard to laugh off. Scooter and Miller may have been aspen clones.

Worshipping the powerful

seems so self-evident. Might makes right because well, or as La Fontaine once put it, "The reason of the stronger party is always more reasonable." Sly old peasants might have winked and shaken their heads at the power of the pitiless overlord, but now that our leaders are more often than not "higher-ups," a whole new art is forged out of sucking up. A little critical thinking, however, is a dangerous thing. Demystification of this kind attitude actually takes the commitment of a lifetime. with the acceptance that certain rewards like having W. say "you're doing a heck of job," or other "prizes' may never materialize for the one who remains skeptical about mystifiers and dominators.

To teach our students to question mystification of any sort is to offer them a certain freedom -- and this kind of teaching comes with certain risks. Quickly, they become demystifiers themselves, demystifying us -- their professors and instructors. I've gotten a lot of the "you think you're so smart" retort, "but I'm going to keep on shopping" after my first lectures on the commodity image.

Students are easily tempted to believe that we are a new authority, enforcing a new critical attitude. We are -- in a sense, asking them to be critical thinkers -- for the duration of ten weeks, but our power is very limited. A grade here, a grade there, and they're gone. But there are students in my introduction to Visual Media class who have never really thought about how McDonald's is trying to make itself over as your neighborhood coffeeshop, or why Paris Hilton is advertising Carl's Jr. Burgers. They also never thought about why they were being tested up the wazoo, why the SAT's has become the measure of their "scholastic aptitude." Sometimes, I think that the straight on teaching of the classics and Latin would be better, in a way because they would never believe that Humanities has anything to do with anything with which they are familiar.

But what is behind the smoke screen is not simple common sense, or a static truth --such as, Paris Hilton doesn't eat at Carl's Jr. or McDonald's is not a cozy place where you would want to spend time with an old friend. A dialectical truth operates behind every advertising myth and authoritarian personality.

And the kid who thinks s/he sees through it ALL (including thinking itself) is the one who is the most terrified.

Maureen Dowd liberated by Peking Duck!

Maureen Dowd on Judy Miller is truly a must-read and luckily, Dowd's column has been "liberated" by Peking Duck so that those of us who are not going to pay for the NY Times (self) Select can still read Dowd's description of Miller's love affair with herself and with POWER and access to POWER that her so-called sources represented to her besotted self.

tech boondoggles

So this is why tuition costs are again going to mushroom: Institutions of higher education are being forced by the FCC to upgrade online systems to comply with a vast extension of security law. Colleges and Universities say it "will cost them at least $7 billion while doing little to apprehend lawbreakers" (NY Times)- while several lawsuits against this enforced unfunded mandate argue that compliance with the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act can be had for less. Looks like the high tech industry has only very short-sighted friends in the government. Go on, buy networking equipment stock now, but prepare to sell it next year. And sell short anything to do with human resources made in USA. Better yet, get options on a devastating lack of high-tech labor in North America.

The timeless art of flattery

The Los Angeles Times highlights Harriet Miers' skills at 'sucking up' to higher-ups. The Times' words not mine.

Once again, my thoughts turn to Adorno, whose analysis of the 1953 LA Times horoscopes focused at one point on how one had to be consistently flattering and stroking, feeding and nurturing the infantile higher up. Harriet Miers took all that to heart and added a few X-ian flourishes regarding Bush's rule as governor: "Texas is blessed!"

Astrology and Intelligent Design

Compelling Explanations are offered by proponents of intelligent design. In one analogy, they assert that iIt's like seeing the Pyramids in Egypt or the heads of Easter Island. You know somebody made them! Which leads Belle Waring at Crooked Timber to reflect on her history of bong-making. There is some stoner thing going on here that is quite unexpected.

In addition, "leading architect of the intelligent-design movement...acknowledged that under his definition of scientific theory, astrology would fit as neatly as intelligent design."

Adorno's essay "From the Stars Down to Earth" argues exactly against the kind of half-thinking proposed by the newspaper horoscope and the compromised mental faculties of the authoritarian personality.

But I could see courses on astrology filling up quickly in the college curriculum. Careers for Leos! I should have taken this one! I wouldn't be here today.

These people are lazy: mental laziness is what is at the core of this form of religiosity. Why prove anything, why argue when you can rely on vague ideas of mechanism and origin? But these X-ians are rewarded for being lazy by their secret leader. You know who I'm talking about...

stock up on star anis

The only known cure for avian flu is extracted from Chinese herb star anis according to the Independent Online Edition . Tamiflu, made by Roche from the Chinese grown herb can alleviate symptoms of the bird flu. It seems that there is not enough to go around, but the whole thing sounds like something from fantasy fiction or an April fool's joke. The star anis comes from four provinces in China, the chemical extracted goes through a highly explosive phase, what else can we add to this mad story? Faeries looking like girls in period costume martial arts movies who descended from the hills to tell us how to use it?

So run out to your local Chinese supermarkets and stock up! Fortunately, I have our stash ready -- I got mine from 99 Ranch in Irvine, but every Chinese supermarket of repute will have some in the spices section. Use to slow cook beef. It IS delicious!

everyone a porn-star, no experience necessary!

At my OC yoga studio, half the women look as if they could be porn stars or strippers -- you know impossibly trim tummies and impossibly voluptuous mammaries, tans, perfect mani-pedicures, Bo Derek cheekbones, bee stung lips, long hair (discreetly pony-tailed)...and the other half look as if they have retired very comfortably from the world's oldest profession and its variations. Was there a time in history when the rich did not aspire to porn-star ready bodies and faces? Real power for today's woman is to sport a showgirl's body without having to show it to everyone except your special mac daddy of course.

I suppose it's better than if everyone looked like coke snorting Kate Moss. I'm so grateful they don't go for the WAIF look here in the OOOOOC. That's a positive! My husband says I can complain too much, well I'm not complaining. I'm observing, and who else would be making these observations if not me, a stranger in a truly strange land.

The best moment of power yoga today was when the woman in front of me started to bob up and down in her warrior one to the hip hop music that was playing, very distracting to my ujayah (sp. ?) breathing and not very good for her posture or her pose!

Namaste...

Bush Teleconference With Soldiers Staged -

Bush Teleconference With Soldiers Staged and so is almost everything else this President does in public. I can see him cursing people out in private in that testy little voice of his when a journalist should (God forbid!) get a bit aggressive. He is not stupid. He is a power hungry greedy megalomaniac fake.

The untruth being spread as thick as peanut butter is quite unbelievable: and maybe finally, the all spin all the time Presidency is running into a few spinouts.

All I have to say is, the guy driving the Camry with the Support Our Troops ribbon on his bumper who runs his engine while parked in our lot had better watch out. Leo, at 42 inches, had to swim through Mr. Supportive's exhaust to get to our car. What is up with that, sitting in your car in the am, windows rolled up, feeling nasty and Republican and basically polluting the world for no visible reason? It's not Minneapolis, where at 40 below, you might want to warm up the old car. It's Irvine. It's 65 degrees Fahrenheit at 9 am!

I wanted to knock on his window and say "You know running your engine while parked will land you in the slammer in many civilized countries!", but I was afraid of what I was going to say next. And I didn't want to freak out Leo who is already challenged enough by his new school and kindergarten and the whole thing-- he doesn't need to see his mother go ballistic on some red white and blue patriotic polluter on top of it all.

Continued reflections on living in California

When I was little, California was for me the promised land of milk and honey. I don't know why exactly: I fashioned dioramas of the 49 gold rush out of painted papier mache and aluminum like a maniac, dreamed of driving through the arches of the great redwoods, wove macrame plant hangings and envied Californians their freedom, their confidence, their sunny dispositions. Not quite understanding that the Chinese-Americans who settled here first and been engaged in various kinds of lowly and forced labor, I seemd to have wanted to relive the history of that immigration, starting with San Francisco.

From 1993-1994, I lived in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, between the Rodney King riots and the Northridge quake. Los Angeles did in fact live up to my dreams: I had just moved from Williamsburg, where my bedroom shook every time an eighteen wheeler rumbled by. Birds sang outside my window. Silver Lake smelled like jasmine and triggered some long dormant memories of Taiwan. My car was totalled, we lived through a serious earthquake. At 4:30 am the morning of the quake, I watched like the cyborg in Blade Runner as green explosions lit up the LA basin: transformers blew out one by one until the whole city was black. And then the sun rose. Some of my friends had negative equity in their homes.

Sorry, just joking!!!

Iraqi Informant Admits New York Subway Threat Was A Hoax.

There will be no warning....there will be no warning...there will be no warning...there will be no warning....

Off Center! Offsides!

The Washington Monthly invites Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, authors of Off Center , the much commented recent book about Republican extremism and its triumph (contrasted with Dem moderation and its defeat) to guest blog. I'm sure this will spark interesting debate in the Left hemisphere of blog world.

Well, I aint no pundit or professional politico, so here's my two cents for what it's worth -- Extreme Sells! Moderation doesn't.

The American voter has gotten used to considering voting as a form of "choice" as it is understood as consumer choice, and they've been conditioned (let's not use that much feared by Cult Studs term "duped") to buy (S)EXtremism.

I fear the creeping power of the authoritarian personality/consumer! But why can't the Left produce an equivalent form of EXTREME OUTRAGE -- given the neo-oligarphical corruption of the ruling party? I'm not giving up on this possibility yet, but I don't put my hopes on the Democrats, especially the ones at the top who are smugly cocooner in their world of good intentions and party fundraisers. Look to Michael P. Rogin's book on The Intellectuals and McCarthy for a fascinating account of how the Left was scared into giving up on its own radical wing by none other than the junior senator from Wisconsin. So the Red Scare was effective, it scared the Left more than anyone else!

But let me not have the last word on this....

There is always an angle.

As Polar Ice Turns to Water, Dreams of Treasure Abound .

Dolphins learn to sing theme from Batman

Dolphins learn to sing theme from Batman. My question is, why that song? Does that song have a special meaning for marine biologists? Or is the Batman theme song an indicator of the dolphins' rather than the scientists's taste? And by the way, I don't know how to sing the Batman theme song....maybe I can get some marine biologists to teach it to me.

Get a Gift from God

was one of the teasers I saw for a Christian Students' Organization on Campus trying to tempt the passerby to stop in at their offices. There was a picture of a gift-wrapped box with a big ribbon on the poster.

The language of American Christianity is no longer religious: conversion is replaced by recruitment, grace by self-selection and sacrifice by satisfaction. I say, if you're going to be religious, at least respect its institututions and traditions. Christ is not a selling point...or maybe He is.

Authoritarian Personality gets a second life

In this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education, Alan Wolfe shows how dismissing the work that Adorno and his team did in The Authoritarian Personality had grave consequences. It allowed generations of sociologists and political scientists to neglect critical theory.

Conservatives followed Edward Shils who slammed criticized the study for focussing exclusively on fascism and neglecting left-wing totalitarianism such as Stalinism. As Wolfe pointed out, Stalinism has all but collapsed from within, and Right-wing authoritarianism has been triumphant. Witness the recent universal kow-towing to "religious conservatives" who may oppose W.'s more moderate acts of government. Witness W.'s own usurpation of power, witness the conservative response to those who could not get out of Katrina's way because they lacked the means. Read Wolfe on the importance of the kind of critical sociology that the Authoritarian Personality might have made possible.

In the study, Adorno and his team found that those who scored high on the F scale (and were therefore more likely to identify with authoritarian models of power) were very likely to have absolute contempt for the weak. This contempt is translated as bigoted, scapegoating attitudes towards Jews, homosexuals, the poor, African-American, new immigrants, etc. There is another category of the weak that is encrypted here -- the one who is without political or military power, another member of a minority who also appears to the Authoritarian Personality as the nettlesome source of social problems -- the Intellectual. Cultural Studies has told us, by way of poor readings of Gramsci and Bourdieu tells us that this figure is out of touch with the people and plays lackey of the power bloc: his/her iniquity actually has to do with presumably useless specialization and a resistance to popular culture. Therefore, yes, once again, Theodor Adorno is the consummate intellectual.

Anti-intellectualism is one aspect of the authoritarian personality embraced by the neo-populism of the Cultural Studies Left. It was as if CS wanted to compete with Right-wing populism for the favor of the people. Not all Cultural Studies scholars display this kind of anti-intellectualism, but many of the most famous and strident CS academics called for an end to dialectics, to theoretical speculation and to the study of literature -- all in the name of an inflammatory anti-intellectualism that purported to attack "elitism" while neglecting to offer sustained critiques of the concentration of economic and political power that constitutes exactly what Adorno and Horkheimer denounced as "monopoly." Elitism in fact is a smokescreen enemy of the people, thrown up to disguise the condensation of powers and rights known as the "corporation."