Category: General

We now have a window into what President Bush and America’s senators think of the world’s women: Not much.
An international women’s treaty banning discrimination has been ratified by 169 countries so far (without emasculating men in any of them!), yet it has languished in the United States Senate ever since President Carter sent it there for ratification in 1980. This month the Senate Foreign Relations Committee got around to holding hearings on it, but the Bush administration, after shyly supporting it at first, now is finding its courage faltering.

Nicholas Kristof is just a bit off base when he assumes the success of the rights movement for women in the U.S., saying that the treaty “. . . has almost nothing to do with American women, who already enjoy the rights the treaty supports,” but he is absolutely correct when he describes the Bushie adminstration’s attitude toward the treaty.

Critics have complained that the treaty, in the words of Jesse Helms, was “negotiated by radical feminists with the intent of enshrining their radical anti-family agenda into international law” and is “a vehicle for imposing abortion on countries that still protect the rights of the unborn.”
That’s absurd. Twenty years of experience with the treaty in the great majority of countries shows that it simply helps third-world women gain their barest human rights. In Pakistan, for example, women who become pregnant after being raped are often prosecuted for adultery and sentenced to death by stoning. But this treaty has helped them escape execution.
How can we be against that? Do we really want to side with the Taliban mullahs, who, like Mr. Ashcroft, fretted that the treaty imposes sexual equality? Or do we dare side with third-world girls who die because of their gender, more than 2,000 of them today alone?

Now can we start the revolution?
Look at Bloggy if you want to know what tomorrow will bring for all of us, and take full note of the Washington Post‘s take on the emperor and his clothes.
This is really scary.

This news arrived in our home only today, from Rex Wockner‘s list, and for that I find great fault with the queer media. Unless I have missed a lot, there have been no reports here of the death of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf this past April.
Charlotte von Mahlsdorf lived, entirely openly and openly fully, as a cross-dresser under the twentieth century’s two most repressive regimes, the Nazis and the Communists. She was, in her own words, “my own woman.”
Wockner’s notice:

FAMED GERMAN TRANSVESTITE DIES
Germany’s most famous transgendered person, Charlotte
von Mahlsdorf (Lothar Berfelde), died in Berlin April
30 of a heart attack. She was 74.
Von Mahlsdorf was awarded the Federal Cross of Honor
(Bundesverdienstkreuz), the nation’s highest civilian
honor, in 1992 for founding East Berlin’s Grunderzeit
Museum which preserves furniture and household
appliances from the period 1870-1900.
“I am not at all keen on medals,” she said at the
time. “But what I find even more important is that a
homosexual, a transvestite, is honored in this way.
.. I hope this encourages other gays and lesbians and
demonstrates to heterosexuals that we too can achieve
things.”
Von Mahlsdorf emigrated to Sweden in 1997 after the
museum was attacked by anti-gay hoodlums. She was on a
visit to Berlin when she died.

She was both subject and actress in Rosa von Praunheim’s 1992 film, “Ich Bin Meine Eigene Frau [I am my own woman].”

So, the life of a lesbian, ok, a woman, even an attractive, vigorous, healthy middle class woman, and even in San Francisco, isn’t worth a dog’s life, to the dog’s owner. What’s next, the murderers suing the murdered for lack of the canine companionship of the euthanized dogs? Accounts from early this year of the horrorible assault and of the owners’ culpability left little to the imagination or to reasonable doubt.

The five-week trial gripped much of the nation as prosecutors described a horrific attack in which Whipple was bitten all over her body — her throat ripped, her clothes torn off — by at least one of the dogs.
The jury of seven men and five women saw graphic photos of the victim’s ravaged body, with wounds visible from her ankles to her face, and pictures of the blood-stained hallway where the attack occurred.
….
Don Newton, the jury foreman, said the number of prior incidents involving the dogs undermined the defense claim that the mauling was nothing more than a tragic accident.
“It was a series of actions — a series of failures to heed warnings, a series of careless taking of the dogs out and allowing them to lunge at people and attack people, that they had fallen into a pattern of actions which were inevitably leading to this result,” Newton said.

In today’s report, once again the defendent present when the dogs attacked that fatal day, “. . . insisted she had no idea her ‘loving’ pets were capable of such an attack.”

Ok, I’ll admit to a certain interest in the creative out-sized flower arangements (the cigar, the martini, the poker hand, the race horse, etc.), and where else is there a demand for those retro flower car limos (yikes, the very latest model Cadillacs!) we saw in the photographs?
But let’s try to put this into proportion. The Daily News let Thomas Hackett try today, but for whatever reason the paper fails to include the story in its online site. I will manually enter the complete text here:

It was sometimes hard to remember John Gotti had been convicted of killing six men and was believed to have had a hand in dozens more deaths in his storied career as New York’s most famous mob boss. The Catholic Church refused Gotti a funeral Mass, citing canon law that forbids holy services for a “manifest sinner.” But its verdict on Gotti’s immorality did nothing to dampen in some cases fawning media coverage of his death in a federal prison hospital from cancer at age 61. Before spending the last 10 years in prison, Gotti had reveled in his celebrity. “This is my public,” he once told his right-hand man about the gawkers who stared everywnere he went in New York. “They love me.” It didn’t matter that he was a thug from first to last, graduating from petty street crimes to hijacking to murder; or that extorting millions of dollars from unions and manufacturers drove business from New York; or that his reckless vanity invited the FBI scrutiny that left his organization in shambles.

The last clause about the FBI seems out of place in a litany of sins against society, but I can vouch for the comment about the impact of his extortions, having had some experience with the “cost of doing business,” even very conservative and legitimate business, here in New York. Gotti and “celebrities” like him hurt all of us more than we know.

We’re scared out of our wits, and the Bushies’ continual and manipulative alarms are doing everything they can to keep the heebie jeebies going.

Nine months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States finds itself in a jittery mood, as scandal and doubts envelop a growing number of major institutions.

But there is also sheer fear, and it won’t go away.

During the maximum jitters of the Cuban missile crisis, the high school where I was an impressionable freshman happened to be holding an assembly. The star speaker was a priest from San Francisco, who arranged to have his remarks interrupted by a student delivering a note. The priest studied the note, then looked up with a somber face and announced that the Soviet Union and the United States had just launched nuclear missiles at each other.
Forty years later, I can still hear the terrified whimper in that auditorium as we all considered our imminent doom. But I can’t remember a word of what the speaker said afterward. That’s the thing about fear: It gets your attention and then refuses to give it back.

We need not stand alone. We are not alone. Where can we sign up?
I’m not a celebrity and I’m not an academic, but I have asked to be a part of this very reasonable statement. But I’m already a part of it! I feel like I have been a voice crying in the wilderness since September 11, and this from a born again atheist. I’ll keep you posted about the organizers’ response and the details of the procedure.
Ok, just more words, but words which will mean that we and the entire world will know that the our rampaging government cannot shut us up or out.

Jeremy Pikser, one of the organizers of the statement, said yesterday that he had been concerned that the rest of the world was under the impression that there was no dissent in the US to the bombing of Afghanistan and the plans for a war against Iraq.
Pikser, a screenwriter who wrote Bulworth, a satire on American politics in which Warren Beatty played a politician who finally decided to speak his mind, said some people had been reluctant to add their names. “A lot of people haven’t signed it, although they agree with it, because they think it might jeopardize other things they’re involved in.”

No comment on this news item is necessary. [Actually, I find comment impossible at the moment. Maybe later. Maybe.]

The announcement received across-the-board rave reviews from industry groups representing refiners, petrochemical, manufacturers and petroleum sectors.

The Dow Jones and other indexes fell over two percent today in the midst of a growing and deepening “mistrust about Corporate America’s top management and finances,” reports the Reuters wire.

Investors’ widening distrust helped overshadow a raft of robust economic data, including a new report on Monday that showed U.S. manufacturing activity grew at its fastest pace in two years in May. Wall Street’s faith in corporate management has eroded after the implosion of energy trader Enron Corp., one of whose executives committed suicide on Jan. 25.

Faith misplaced? Where have these investors been up until now?
I worked for large corporations for many years and never had any illusions about the general competence of management, in my own companies or any others with which I became familiar. I was often simply astounded that things held together at all. Eventually I concluded that certainly within a corporation, and to a large extent even within an industry and throughout the business world, the old boy networks of small minds and smaller imaginations held each other up. The smart or imaginative people weren’t let in, or certainly weren’t let upstairs.
I fear the consequences for the country and the world of what appears to be a snowballing recognition of the emptiness at the top.