Tying the knot

Okay, so some time ago I was walking right before Big Trash Day in my neighborhood and found a slightly garish but very cool table lamp sitting out on the curb, just begging to be picked up and given a home.

There was just one small problem. The wiring looked like it might not be safe. Not to worry, I thought. I'd just rewire it.

After all, I did quite a bit of my own house wiring back in the day when I lived in Eugene, Oregon (where such things were legal). If I can install an entire electrical service, rewiring a lamp ought to be simple, right?

Tonight I got out a screwdriver and my old wire stripper and set to work. I was making good progress until I came to the place where you tie an underwriter's knot before you put the switch in place. There was a picture of an underwriter's knot in the repair book I was using, but no instructions on how to tie it.

I thought I made a knot that matched the picture in the book, but I just wasn't sure. And it's very important to get this right. The underwriter's knot is the thing that keeps the wires from pulling away from the light socket.

Fortunately, I found this extremely helpful YouTube video with clear step-by-step instructions on how to tie the knot:



The video comes from the home repair web site See Jane Drill. You can find out more about them here.

For more complete lamp rewiring instructions, this video looks as if it would be helpful.

Cruel and unusual and made in Oklahoma

Tuesday night's horrifically botched execution of 38-year-old Clayton Locket caused the postponement of another execution scheduled for that evening and revitalized arguments that the death penalty by its very nature violates the constitutional prohibition of "cruel and unusual" punishment.

Today's web headlines tell the news. You can read all about it on

• NPR
• CNN
• The New York Times
• The New Yorker
• USA Today
• The Huffington Post

At least, Governor Mary Fallin has called for a complete review of the state's death penalty procedures before Oklahoma executes anyone else. Fallin's goal is to find an acceptable method for delivering the death penalty, but as Holly Near would point out, that's a foolish notion.

This looks like a good food blog if you need one

Sadly, I'm not much of a cook. As a little girl, I was so focused on resisting femininity that I resisted acquiring this useful skill as well. Even now, cooking is not so much a creative exercise as a way to get something to eat. I tend to cook things that can be put on the stove for a long time and forgotten,. like soup or even hard-boiled eggs.

This morning, however, I wanted soft boiled eggs, and realized that I didn't know how to make them. Fortunately, I found this recipe on the blog eat, live,run.

The Reality of Climate Change -- and the Keystone XL Pipeline

A little less than a week ago, the US National Academy of Sciences and the British Royal Society jointly issued a report on the causes and effects of climate change. Most of the information in this report has been available for quite a while, according to NBC News. Nevertheless, the 36-page-booklet is clear and easy to read and well worth your attention.

While the words are easy to understand, and it is well-illustrated with plenty of charts and graphs, much of the information in the report is quite painful. For instance, we learn that even if production of carbon dioxide suddenly stopped, the Earth's temperature would not return to pre-1880 levels for thousands of years.

Furthermore, on Page 19 of the report we learn:

Both theory and direct observations have confirmed that global warming is associated with greater warming over land than oceans, moistening of the atmosphere, shifts in regional precipitation patterns and increases in extreme weather events, ocean acidification, melting glaciers, and rising sea levels (which increases the risk of coastal inundation and storm surge). Already, record high temperatures are on average significantly outpacing record low temperatures, wet areas are becoming wetter as dry areas are becoming drier, heavy rainstorms have become heavier, and snowpacks (an important source of freshwater for many regions) are decreasing.

These impacts are expected to increase with greater warming and will threaten food production,freshwater supplies, coastal infrastructure, and especially the welfare of the huge population currently living in low-lying areas. Even though certain regions may realise some local benefit from the warming, the long-term consequences overall will be disruptive.

Yes, we've heard this before, but does that make the impact any less drastic?

Meanwhile, a study by a nonprofit group in the UK claims that the Keystone XL Pipeline would have a much greater impact on climate change than the State Department's environmental impact statement admits. Also two U.S. senators have argued that the health effects of the pipeline on people living near its path need to be studied

The State Department has yet to make a formal recommendation to President Obama on whether construction of the pipeline should be permitted. Public comment is open until this coming Friday, March 7

Joanna Russ

The other day I was just telling someone an excellent collection of essays called Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans, and Perverts by the lesbian-feminist science fiction writer Joanna Russ. Yesterday, before my Contemporary Feminist Thought class, I looked up Joanna Russ in the Bizzell Library catalog, hoping the book would be available. I thought it would be a great counterpoint to the Helene Cixous essay we were going to be discussing. (Cixous says some interesting things, but seems to have a penchant for academic jargon and sweeping generalizations, both of which Russ manages to do without.)

Anyway, when I did the catalog search on Joanna Russ, I discovered that the library has 10 books by Joanna Russ (but not the one that I was looking for). And because the catalog listing referred to "Russ, Joanna, 1937-2011," I realized for the first time that Joanna Russ is dead. Darn it. I'd always wanted to meet her.

Maybe I should pay more attention to mainstream news -- she had an obituary in the New York Times.

This essay by Brit Mandelo on tor.com is also well worth reading. It's part of Mandelo's series on Reading Joanna Russ.

How climate change works

In honor of my friends Bailey and Stefan, I'm posting this video about how climate change works:



The site How Global Warming Works also has longer (and shorter) explanation videos. Compated to a bunch of glitter, the effects of climate change are really scary.

Happy birthday, Ms. Hopper

However evil Google might be, they do a few cool things. One of them is the periodic Google Doodle, which honors some notable person or event by changing the art on the Google search page.

Today's doodle honors the 107th birthday of computer pioneer Grace Murray Hopper. Among other things, Hopper is known for finding the first computer bug. (It was a moth, which accounts for the little thing that flies out of the animated doodle at the end.) More notably, Hopper was also one of the programmers of the Mark I computer, and the creator of the first computer code compiler.

The doodle also links to a set of search results about Hopper's life and career. My favorite of the things I found on this list was Hopper's appearance on Late Night with David Letterman just before her 80th birthday. Letterman is a bit patronizing, I think, but Hopper's wry sense of humor carries the evening:



Also -- apparently in Hopper's honor -- today's search page contains a link to another video about a project called Hour of Code. The idea is that everyone should learn simple computer programming skills. Here is the video and the page for the Hour of Code project.

Enjoy!

The Harry Potter Alliance and the Hunger Games

Apparently the release of the second Hunger Games movie has become an occasion for hyper-marketing of cosmetics and fast-food sandwiches. This is, to say the least, ironic, considering the anti-capitalist and anti-militarist themes of the Hunger Games trilogy. The Harry Potter Alliance, a group of fans devoted to working for social justice, has come up with a campaign to resist the hyper-marketing.

This very cool tumblr tells more.

The wisdom of (Norman) Solomon

Norman Solomon's latest post has an interesting analysis of the current crisis of public confidence in "Obamacare." 

Lauding the president’s healthcare plan for its structure of “regulation, mandates, subsidies and competition,” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote in July 2009 that the administration’s fate hung in the balance: “Knock away any of the four main pillars of reform, and the whole thing will collapse—and probably take the Obama presidency down with it.” Such warnings were habitual until Obamacare became law eight months later.

Meanwhile, some progressives were pointing out that—contrary to the right-wing fantasy of a “government takeover of healthcare”—Obama’s Affordable Care Act actually further enthroned for-profit insurance firms atop the system. As I wrote at the time, “The continued dominance of the insurance industry is the key subtext of the healthcare battle that has been raging in Washington. But that dominance is routinely left out of the news media's laser-beam concentration on whether a monumental healthcare law will emerge to save Obama's presidency.”

Today, in terms of healthcare policy, the merits and downsides of Obamacare deserve progressive debate. But at this point there’s no doubt it’s a disaster in political terms—igniting the Mad Hatter Tea Party’s phony populism, heightening prospects for major right-wing electoral gains next year and propagating the rancid notion that the government should stay out of healthcare.

I have always been skeptical about whether the Affordable Care Act would improve U.S. health care. I would like for my skepticism to have been mistaken, but I'm afraid that it wasn't.

In honor of the women of the Puget Sound Women's Peace Camp

For Armistice Day every year, I try to post something in honor of the peacemakers in our world. This year, I'm posting a link to the final edition of the Peace Camp News of the Puget Sound Women's Peace Camp.

For background information about the Puget Sound Women's Peace Camp, you can read their Unity Statement, as reprinted in the July/August 1983 issue of Women's Press, a feminist newspaper in Eugene, Oregon.

Will "Women and Children" last?

Somebody should buy this bookstore.

Hot Wire

Hotwire: A Journal of Feminist Music and Culture is no longer publishing, but they have a website now.

Women's Space

I was going off on a slight tangent on a project for school when I found this interesting blog.

A several-month end to the budget showdown?

This might be good news.

House Republicans enjoy the government shutdown so much...

...that they've found a way to undermine the compromise deal that was developing in the Senate. Read all about it at TPM.

Things that make a person say, "hmmmm......"

Here's an interesting post by Steve Benen over on the Maddow Blog  about the fate of the Affordable Care Act.

Ending the Shutdown

As I noted in my most recent post, the Republican shutdown of the U.S. government is not the act of anarchists, but the work of elitists trying to overcome the effects of popular rule. This recent post from thenation.com makes this even clearer:

The shutdown (and the threat to allow a debt default) seeks to undo the results of the 2012 election by giving a minority within the losing party the power to decide whether government will operate or not. The founders of the American experiment established a separation of powers, but that is not the cause of today’s crisis. In 2012, Barack Obama won the presidency by 5 million votes. He won 51 percent of the overall vote, and he won the Electoral College 332 to 206. But the Democratic victory did not end there. The Democrats were expected to lose Senate seats, but they actually gained, and the overall turnout in those races gave them a 10 million–vote advantage. In House races, Democrats secured an overall margin of 1.7 million votes; the chamber is under Republican control not because of the desires of American voters, but because of a combination of gerrymandering, big money and winner-take-all voting structures.

So House Republicans are “governing” by other means. Worse yet, the House leadership is compelled to take the most extreme position because the vast majority of GOP districts have been so gerrymandered that even reasonable Republicans are more fearful of a Tea Party primary challenge than of a November challenge in which the whole electorate might hold them to account.

The editors at The Nationoffer this solution to the situation:

Groups like Common Cause and FairVote, which have campaigned on behalf of democratic reform for years, are at the ready with smart proposals—from nonpartisan redistricting commissions to proportional representation to creation of multi-member districts. Obama should use his bully pulpit not just to end the immediate crisis but to call for a national dialogue about the tattered state of our democracy. And he should call for reforms to ensure that Americans will never again be forced to live from crisis to crisis.

I would be pleasantly surprised if the president took those actions, but I am not going to hold my breath.

Democrats resort to mindless name-calling in budget battle

About a week ago, blogger Nathan Schneider posted this thoughtful commentary about the relationship of anarchists to government. Scheider was reacting to a statement by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in which Reid called House Republicans "anarchists" because they were trying to use the threat of a government shutdown to defund the Affordable Care Act.

Schneider pointed out that:

(A)narchists today disagree about how to relate to institutions like the pseudo-democratic U.S. government. Some, much like their counterparts on the libertarian right, advocate total withdrawal and non-participation, refusing to do things like vote or pay taxes. Others believe that for now government can be a means for pursuing anarchist-friendly ends; “it’s completely realistic and rational to work within structures to which you are opposed,” writes Noam Chomsky, “because by doing so you can help to move to a situation where then you can challenge those structures.”

Most people with anarchist tendencies fall somewhere in between. They’re less fixated on debating whether government is good or bad than on rebuilding political life from the ground up, starting in local communities that are connected through global networks. When the anarchist-inspired Occupy movement sprang up two years ago, commentators were quick to compare it to the Tea Party — and to judge it by whether, like the Tea Party, it elected politicians to office. But this standard seemed beside the point for Occupy participants, who tended to hold a different strategy for making change. The more useful right-wing analogue would be not the Tea Party but churches, whose massive political power stems from being effective centers of mutual support and community. Megachurch pastors generally keep aloof from elected office, but nobody can deny their influence.

In the current budget stalemate in Washington D.C., I would like to be sympathetic to the Democrats, because the Republicans are just being so hateful. Simple-minded tactics such as Reid's name-calling make it difficult for me to support the Democrats, though. Calling House Republicans "anarchists" -- when they clearly aren't -- isn't any more principled than the old right-wing habit of calling liberals and moderates "communists."

What's really disappointing is that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has such an honorable history, resorted to the same sort of simple-minded insults, as you can see in the video clip below. The name-calling mars what was otherwise an impassioned but thoughtful speech. In the short run, Democrats might gain some political advantage by using such tactics. In the long run, they'll reinforce the apathy and disgust of citizens with the U.S. political process -- a result that can only benefit the most extreme Republicans.

Illegal, Immoral, and Dangerous

Thanks to Feminist Peace Network on Facebook for sharing this careful analysis by Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies on why a US missile attack on Syria would be not only wrong, but stupid. As Bennis notes:

A US military strike on Syria will increase levels of violence and instability inside the country, in the region, and around the world. Inside Syria, aside from immediate casualties and damage to the already shattered country, reports are already coming in of thousands of Syrian refugees returning from Lebanon to "stand with their government" when the country is under attack. It could lead to greater support to the brutal regime in Damascus. In Kosovo, more Kosovars were forcibly expelled from their homes by the Serbian regime after the NATO bombing began than had happened before it started; Syrian civilians could face similar retaliation from the government.

A US strike will do nothing to strengthen the secular armed opposition, still largely based in Turkey and Jordan, let alone the heroic but weakened original non-violent democratic opposition forces who have consistently opposed militarization of their struggle and outside military intervention. Those who gain will be the most extreme Islamist forces within the opposition, particularly those such as the Jubhat al-Nusra which are closest to al-Qaeda. They have long seen the US presence in the region as a key recruitment tool and a great local target.

There is also the danger of escalation between the US and Russia, already at odds in one of the five wars currently underway in Syria. So far that has been limited to a war of words between Washington and Moscow, but with the G-20 meeting scheduled for next week in St Petersburg, President Putin may feel compelled to push back more directly, perhaps with new economic or other measures.

US not morally superior to Syria

Over on Truthdig, Juan Cole makes a cogent argument for why diplomacy, not cruise missiles, are the best tool for defusing the Syrian crisis. For instance:

I am not arguing that because the United States and its allies have indiscriminately killed large numbers of innocent noncombatants in the past, the Syrian government should be held harmless for its own gas attack at Ghouta, which killed hundreds of innocent civilians. Two wrongs never make a right. I am arguing that the United States is in no moral or legal position to play the Lone Ranger here. The first steps Washington should take are to acknowledge its own implication in such atrocities and to finish destroying its chemical stockpiles and join the ban on land mines and cluster bombs.

Now that we’re in the 21st century, moreover, it is time to cease using the supposedly macho language of violence in response to political challenges. Tossing a couple of Tomahawk cruise missiles on a few government facilities in Damascus is not going to deter the Syrian government from using chemical weapons, and it will not affect the course of the war. Sonni Efron, a former State Department official and now a senior government fellow at Human Rights First, has argued that the United States and Europe could have a much more effective impact by announcing that in response to the Baath provocation they were going to close the loopholes that allow Syrian banks to continue to interface with world financial institutions. This strategy would involve threatening third-party sanctions on Russian banks that provide Damascus with a financial backdoor. A united U.S.-EU push on this front would be far more consequential for the Syrian government than a limited military strike.