Point the First: all this talk about pornogroppression! If I could wave my magic feminist wand at the subject and boil away patriarchy, I think we'd be left with a sticky residue described by Brian Ulrich:

I don't believe healthy sexuality can exist without an interest in the whole person, which does not and cannot exist in internet porn pictures or with paid performers in a strip club.

I think that's the nut of it: you believe either that sex can stand on its own, or that it falls down without the appropriate supporting framework of emotional and/or spiritual attachments. Eliminate all the unsavory context you want, porn remains a vision of sex standing (or falling down) on its own.

And that's all the insight I've got. Lynn has been writing a series of meditations on the nature of human sexuality at Noli Irritare Leones; there's too many (and I'm too lazy) to link to them all individually, just go and scroll down if you're into that sort of thing.

Point the Second: Beans, lots of beans, lots of beans lots of beans! Beans, like misery, love company. Thanks, Wolfangel.

Ah, perchlorate - an issue near and dear to my paycheck! I can't comment on the toxicology... but once again I am reminded of just how silly it is to plumb with a single set of pipes. I don't want to drink diluted rocket fuel, but I'm pretty confident that it won't hurt me to pee into it, or wash my clothes with it. Ground water contamination is putting a pretty severe cramp on many communities' available water supply, Pasadena included. Since imported water supplies are considerably less than infinitely plentiful, it would behoove us to start thinking about how to make full use of all the water we've got.

In other nerdy news, the Sumatran earthquake caused water to slosh around in wells in Virginia... and in Southern California. Of course our wells only fluctuated by an inch and a half, which isn't nearly so spectacular as the fluctuations observed in Virginia (bedrock wells are wacky!) - and the project for which GeoMonkeyCo was monitoring the wells is so lawyer-ridden that we can't release the actual data yet. But I have a superfabulous little set of graphs accumulating on my cubicle wall!

If anyone knows how and where to find seismograms from the Western US in an Excel-friendly format, that'd be swell (UPDATE: SCEC has 'em). I fiddled with the NEIC's databot, but couldn't swing the conversion code. My Fortran skillz are not l33t, CM6 compression 0wnz0rs my megahurtz! *sob*

Courtesy Matthew Yglesias comes a discussion that makes me think: Eh? Do I have wax in my ears? Write louder, sonny boy! - 'cause all I'm gettin' is burble blah masculine/feminine blah burble doo. Somewhere in there, the statement "women are attracted to masculine men, men are attracted to feminine women" is supposed to be uncontroversial, have a clear, agreed-upon meaning, and not be a tautology.

Any two of those three rhetorical criteria I can handle, but all three at once? Even operating under a gentlepersons's understanding of the debate (we're all speaking in broad generalities, it's inaccurate and impolite to make assumptions about individuals based on such broad generalities, no normative judgments are implied) that's a lot to juggle. I haven't seen the word "obvious" this abused since I studied Bessel functions. So, I'm inclined to sacrifice "clear" - when you've thrown out all the stuff that's a bullshit cultural construct, masculinity is like porn, you know it when you see it.

Will has promised to draw up a list of masculine and feminine traits. If I'm still short on Feminist Rhetoric Credits when he does so, I suppose I'll have a whack, but blathering on about the difference between masculinity and femininity is like trying to draw a line between porn and erotica. It's fun 'cause you get to think about things that turn you on, but it's not exactly vital to free society. Indeed, in all the best free societies such discussions are irrelevant, particularly once you leave the therapist's or matchmaker's office.
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If it had a diesel engine, this would be my new car. How on earth could I resist a pink convertible grease-powered jalopy with the Powerpuff Girls painted on its side? Particularly as my car is in the shop, again, to deal with leaking brake fluid, again - this time they're reconfiguring the muffler so it doesn't scrape against the brake line and cause leaks every two months. I'm being nickled and hundred-fifty-dollared to death.

Never mind the car troubles, though, I've been thinking today about my relationship with the color pink. It's the only color with enough social meat to form an actual relationship with, the only color that pushes back at you and refuses to accept whatever implications you care to rhapsodize into it. Squealing over a pink car is definitely a betrayal of my adolescent self. And it's not that I've secretly wanted to love the color pink all this time, but was too ashamed - pink is fine, but for genuine aesthetic enjoyment I'll take a nice green car any day. Obnoxious pink things are just a big girly "fuck you" - and driving around a big "fuck you" is loads of fun! But I'm not quite certain who, exactly, I would be supposed to be fucking with that sort of a car*.
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Not really, but at Alas (and subsequently Mousewords) there's been discussion of an essay which attempts to take precisely the opposite of my preferred approach to abortion rights: namely, it considers the problem of fetal value in a hypothetical universe where it cannot be counterbalanced by a right to bodily integrity. And then gives a bunch of straw men a good drubbing for displaying the wrong emotions about such a universe (or possibly they're tin men in this instance, since they evidently have brains and need hearts).

I'm explicitly uninterested in the question of fetal value (and implicitly uninterested in the Lakoffish blah-de-blah about whether or not it's politically savvy to display such an interest) but this is so precisely opposite my thinking that I feel obliged to point it out.

1. Been meaning to link to two posts as Mousewords on feminism as a frame for the Democratic party: I: bouncing off the marginalization of women in the punditry and II: a succinct followup:
   

   
   You cannot reply to accusations that your side doesn't have a vision of family and sexual morals with morals involving economic justice and war. Yes, those are moral values. But the war seems far away and economy too far out of control. Gender issues and family issues are things that are part of every person's life.
   

   
   Liberals can't see [the Republican success from endorsing machismo (I mishmashed the quotes a bit here, one paragraph from each post --y)] because of the distancing of liberalism from feminism. Liberal men are invested in the male mystique, too, and don't want to openly align themselves with "feminized" politics of equality. We don't speak the essential language of gender and we get our asses kicked repeatedly.
   

   
   Not much to say other than "Yaaaaaa! Grr!" - it's an oversimplified framework, but I'm not giving in to the urge to marginalize feelings of righteous anger in favor of fitting this post into the conventional point-counterpoint. It's a bullshit dialectic, yo.
   
2. Dad went to high school with Mike Johanns, and I've been thinking of ways to parlay this tenuous connection into something sparklingly witty or even just a few moments of attention. But no one seems to be very excited about the USDA, so it's been tricky. Sigh.
   

I feel like I've been abnormally serious here lately, what with the politics and the politics and the what-all. I almost had a bit last week on the disgusting way I clear my sinuses, but just couldn't muster the enthusiasm for a good old-fashioned TMI yuck-fest. This isn't supposed to be a serious blog, but, you know, fuck it.

Hearing/seeing progressive men talk about how, in light of political realities, preserving abortion rights should be carefully weighed against preserving the constitutionality of the New Deal just makes me break out in a cold, Handmaid's Tale sort of sweat. True, if push came to shove, the overall harm caused by back-alley abortions and/or forced childbearing would probably pale in comparison with the harm caused by destroying OSHA, the EPA, etc etc etc, but jeebus! For one, I don't think this is a reality-based dichotomy - in what backwater of the judicial pool will you find someone who would uphold Roe v. Wade but overturn everything else? - so it's a creepy way to frame a discussion.

For two, I happen to have a pet angle on the question, which would solve everything if only it could gain some traction in the debate. Or if not everything, at least the problem of pro-life "feminism". Below the fold, I am right and everybody else is wrong! Except Patricia Beattie Jung, who is way ahead of me.
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1. Billy Graham is doing his little routine at the Rose Bowl tonight - the second-largest event they were expecting this season, after the USC-UCLA game. He did it last night, too, and I drove home in second gear the whole damn way* behind a crowd of "Los Angeles Crusade" bumper stickers.**
   
   Didn't Jesus say something about only praying within walking distance? Or at least carpools? I think Paul advised the Ephesians to carpool wearing modest bonnets.
   
2. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an e-voting petition - which may have somewhat less impact than a petition with verified signatures, but will certainly have considerably more impact than those stupid forwards where every tenth person sends it off to /dev/null, which is to say more impact than zero. Which is to say you should go sign it, you fellow FDRUSians.
   

* Actually it was fine until Glendora.

** My commute winds through the entire home district of the execrable David Dreier. Whee!

There's an article in the Weekly Standard asserting that Californians are Suckers for 'Science', spending a million zillion dollars on speculative stem cell research while spurning measures that would totally, definitely, for-real save lives:

THE PASSAGE OF PROPOSITION 71 in California (the Stem Cell Research and Cures Act) was an acute case of electoral folly. As Californians plunged headlong into a $6 billion quagmire of debt in a quixotic quest for "miracle cures" from human cloning and embryonic stem cells, they simultaneously rejected Prop. 67, an initiative that would have added a modest tax to phone bills to keep the state's endangered emergency rooms and trauma centers from shutting down.
[...]

The bitter irony here is that while Californians refuse to fund treatment centers that could make the difference between people living and dying today, they are pursuing treatments and cures that, if they come at all, are likely a decade or more away. What could explain such folly? Blame the awesome power of big money, big celebrities, and big hype.

It goes on to detail how the promise of stem cell research has been hopelessly overhyped (it has) and imply that Prop 71 passed because Californians were hopelessly dazzled by the promise of a vat of spare organs in every closet.

Erm, sorry, what? Prop 71 was about saying "fuck you" to the Bush administration's theocratic anti-science policies, and getting California a slice of that tasty biotech pie. It was about asserting our right to act alone as the world's sixth-largest economy. Yeah, it was also about overhyped science, but to look at that hype in the dry context of political soundbiting and scientific illiteracy is to miss something very, very important.

Imagine you live in a nice suburb, and you drive a very large, very safe SUV. You own some power tools, and maybe a gun, but you're always very careful with them. So what are you most afraid of? Massive hemorrhage, or Alzheimer's?

Now that we're doomed to an eternity of wailing, gnashing our teeth, and hiding our degenerate sexualities from roving mobs of angry countryfolk, we should really be thinking about building our nest eggs for an eventual flight to Canada and/or hush payments for the vice squad. But how? Gold bullion? Stock in torch and pitchfork manufacturers? Gifts to Mexican people-smugglers?

Here's what I've done so far:

• Ditched the small-cap portion of my 401K allocation in favor of increased foreign (the dollar is fucked) and socially responsible investments.
  
• Invested $35 in a little plastic card from the ACLU.
  

I know you guys are not always numerous enough to sustain a long thread, but please consider this an open discussion on silly and/or appropriate financial responses to the election...