Sunday, March 28, 2010
IS THE SKY REALLY FALLING?
Friday, March 26, 2010
ET TU STUPAK
That's lovely. Here I thought that he cared about Americans whose health is at risk because they cannot pay exorbitant insurance premiums. But no, his vote was all about limiting women's choices. I assume that the congressman has adopted umpteen HIV positive and drug addicted children, as well as children whose mothers were raped. He no doubt will divert funds from the military to pay for the care and feeding of unwanted children. That sort of thing. He cannot possibly be one of these anti-choice people whose compassion only applies to the unborn-- those folks who are anti-choice, but who foam at the mouth when others protest against ca[ital punishment.
The congressman's column is attempt to get back into the good graces of his anti-choice constituents. apparently it only they who matter to him and the hell with the rest of the country. I find that his reason to vote for health care reform is less than admirable. Essentially he is no different from so many other politicians who wish to inflict their religious views on the American public. Shame on him.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Thursday, March 11, 2010
OODLES OF YARN IN CHARMING BERKELEY SPRINGS,WV
THE RIGHTS AND WRONGS OF SPRING
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Tuesday, March 9, 2010
STRANGER THAN FICTION
My geek connections suspect that they visit once their bots come across words of interest; I prefer a scenario where Islamic Malaysian extremists crouch over their computers searching for data on cooking, gardening and book writing in America and Israel. That is a more honorable occupation than plotting to blow people up.
Whatever the reality of these fanatics, there is nothing in my blogs to justify their visits except for a bizarre coincidence. Most recently, one of them did a search for Luna Mellul and landed on my blog. It turns out that there is, in real life, someone who used to be called Luna Mellul. She is the wife of a rogue Jew turned Islamic extremist. The guy was not exactly Nobel Prize material. He drove a cab in New York and whether this is the root of his disaffection with America and Judaism I do not know. I do know that he eventually turned coat, renounced his country and his co-religionists to join people disaffected with reality. He converted to a violent brand of Islam and allegedly coerced the real Luna Mellul to do the same. He went on to write and post on the web rather stupid rants against Americans and Jews. No surprise there. As so many religious fanatics, his frothing-at-the mouth rhetoric was meant to disturb, frighten and discombobulate those who did not share his views. Too bad for him. If he got any attention at all, it probably came from folks very low on the the Shin Bet (Israel's internal security folks) totem pole. Americans did not give a hoot about his crackpot pronouncements. Vastly ignored, he decamped to Morocco.
But who are these Malaysians what is their connection with the rogue Jew? I don't really care. I do know that one of them blogs about weapons for snipers. That is something I trust Homeland Security to sort out.
Meanwhile I am changing my fictional character's name. It is not that Malaysian bots influence my decisions one way or another. It's just that I would rather not have the main character in my novel share anything with the unfortunate Luna Mellul.
Friday, March 5, 2010
Thursday, March 4, 2010
THE LONG KVETCH—HOW DEMON FEMINISM WRECKED HER LOVE LIFE
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It is hard to cry for Lori Gottlieb. She is a gifted writer with impressive credits. She is the author of four books, dozens of articles in national publications and ten anthologies. She is also a commentator for National Public Radio. Her level of experience in journalism ought to keep her from confusing facts with opinion. But that is precisely what she does in much of her confessional book, MARRY HIM: THE SEARCH FOR MR.GOOD ENOUGH .
Her essential message seems to be, "be realistic, play nice, go for the middle ground.” That is probably sensible advice for humans of either gender “and those who have yet to make up their minds." Too bad that the message gets lost in a welter of generalisations, extrapolation, obfuscation, inaccuracies and ambivalence.
Gottlieb's lengthy account of her attempts to find a husband first appeared as an article for Atlantic.Reportedly,generated more mail than any other article to appear in that magazine in a decade. Not surprisingly, it evolved into a very marketable book. Basically, Gottlieb attributed being single to her overblown romantic expectations. Well and good. She blamed feminism for her mistakes. Not cricket. She claimed that she was not the only one whose love life was wrecked by feminism--millions of women shared her experience. Debatable. She put in a plug for arranged marriages. Highly debatable. She implied that marriage is forever. Vastly unrealistic, judging from current divorce stats.
Her take on feminism is the most unpalatable dish in this dating smargorsbord. . Feminism, by many other accounts, is about equal opportunity and equal pay for women. Bra burning and man hating are incidental to it, however often they get mentioned in the media. Pity that Gottlieb chose to dredge up these old cliches. The irony of it is the probability that feminism made it possible forher to compete successfully with male writers. It is disappointing that she ignores that. It is also disappointing that she seems to approves of equality when it suits her. For example, she cries foul when a matchmaker accepts a smaller fee from a man-- the same fee she would not accept from Gottlieb because it was not "worth her time."In the pre-feminist world Gottlieb would like to resuscitate, incidents of this nature were the rule.
Still, she is entitled to her opinion. The trouble is that the women she interviewed in order to buttress her arguments are hardly representative of the general population. They are, by and large, part of an elite group of highly educated successful urban professionals. The divorced mother who clerks at a Wal-Mart somewhere in the Appalachians is conspicuously absent. So are other low-income high school dropouts in rural areas of the United States. Possibly their views differ significantly from those of a well paid urban dentists, fashion designers and architects. Yet Gottlieb would have her readers believe what is meaningful for a few women is meaningful for women in general. She apparently imagines that all that keeps American women from fessing up to their desire to chuck their jobs and go tend hubby is that they were brainwashed by feminists. The bad thing, according to her, is wanting “to have it all” as some unreferenced tenet of feminism supposedly dictates; the good thing is to lower one’s expectations.
‘The dream, like that of our mothers and their mothers from time immemorial, was to fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after.”
As far as I know, women in time immemorial did not leave a record of their dreams--they were too busy catering to hubby. Her claim that women passed on the idea of romantic love, dor-le-dor,for thousands of years does not hold water.
“Before the twelfth century, in Europe, love between men and women was not regarded as heroic; it was instead considered a sign of weakness, the preoccupation of a person without character, ” says William Reddy. He ought to know. He teaches history and cultural anthropology at Duke University.
The notion that marriage guarantees a happily solvent life is one of the objectionable fallacies in MARRY ME. It negates the present divorce rate and its negative economic impact on women and children. Just how risky it is for a woman for a woman to trade a good salary for the joys caring for hubby and kids is something Gottlieb glosses over. She argues that feminism is to blame for the status quo while implying that it all comes down to viable eggs. If, as her research indicates, men prefer to marry potentially fertile women under age thirty-five, how does feminism fit into the picture? This is just one example of fuzzy logic in MARRY ME.
Should you shell out 25 five dollars for this book?That depends. If you are a successful urban professional looking for for a way to validate your angst, go for it.