This one's for the ladies...

ThePeoplesCube features some feminist protection. I assume these will be free to all womyn under Obamacare.

By free I mean "women with jobs and/or husbands with jobs are going to be taxed to the point they have to ask for 'em because they can't even afford store-brand", but you knew that.

Well this is interesting...

The Obama administration is again delaying implementation of a rule that would require government contractors to verify the immigration status of their employees. Contractors won’t have to use the Homeland Security Department’s E-Verify system until June 30, according to a Federal Register notice published Friday.

The really interesting part is there were only six results when I searched Google News for "Obama e-verify", and they were publications dealing solely in government or HR news (I learned about it from an e-mail from NumbersUSA). Either the MSM hasn't picked it up--note it was released on a Friday, for maximum disinterest--or no one thinks it's worth reporting. I'll check back tomorrow.

Plaintiffs in the court case, which includes the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, argue the rule violates the law by requiring government contractors to use a system that is voluntary for other employers.

Haven't we already seen this with TARP? If you want that sweet gubbament money, you gotta dance for it. Granted, these businesses are provided actual products or services for their money, but I'm sure they make custom arrangements to please customers every day.

Plaintiffs also claim the rule is too vague and will force contractors to verify all employees to avoid potential suspension and debarment, which would be a financial hardship.

I'm not sure where they pulled that from, as the law says very plainly that only new hires after the date--now June 30--should be verified. Sneak 'em in now, boys. Businesses shouldn't have to enforce the laws, the laws should be enforced at the border and by police at all levels--but I don't believe this is a real motivation.

Quasi-related, here's a sob story from a mainstream newspaper about a citizen "forced" to seek welfare after her illegally-resident Haitian husband was deported, 16 years after entry. I'm having a hard time mustering up sympathy--she had a choice whether or not she married and had babies with this specific man, she chose to not work while knowing her husband could be deported, etc.

OTOH, I want to know when he "applied for asylum" because if it's taking 16 years to decide asylum cases, that's too long. Since the guy left Haiti, Clinton deposed Aristide, then he came back, then he was permanently exiled, then his friend was elected...the outcome could have been different at any point. I suspect he only applied after an earlier investigation into his status.

"Deportation is no different than any law enforcement action,'' said Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies. "If people are not self-sufficient as a consequence of a spouse breaking the law, that's not a good reason not to enforce the law.''

(I was going to imagine what our cities would be like if it was, but they're mostly not married...nevermind.)

And finally--Ace writes up this sort of phenomenon as "government program works as designed, media outraged":

Recently, the mother of two [a different mother] went to Family Central to get state assistance for child care. She was denied, she said, because the agency determined she earns too much as a medical assistant.

Yeah, damn shame you can't take advantage of a program designed for people less able to help themselves than you are. She then goes on to bitch about student loans and credit card debt. I can be sympathetic about the loans to a point--Did she take out extra to buy a cool laptop? Did she go to the local community college or a swank private school? Did she really need the degree for her job? If the loans are through the feds, did she ask for a hardship deferment?--but credit cards? That's all on you, honey. You used the items or enjoyed the meals or whatever with the understanding that you'd be expected to pay for them at some point...and now you want other people to pay for your childcare so you can make those payments? Grow up.

Further, note the article doesn't mention any men who can't function after their wives are deported. It would be interesting to know why this is--could they find none? Does the public not feel the same sympathy for men who make dumb choices?

(Full disclosure: I racked up five figures of CC debt traveling and buying stuff when I was in grad school, then spent the next five years being broke and trapped and bored to tears while every spare penny went to paying it off. So I understand how CC debt is crippling, but I also understand it's a choice people make. And my student loans were about the size of a house downpayment--but again, that was my stupid choice. You'll notice I don't complain about repayment, only about the ways government wants to manipulate the housing market and the economy, and tax my wages, ensuring I'll never be able in the future to save up a down payment or find a monthly repayment I can afford on my one--when I have a job, I'm seriously exploring fields that can't be offshored--income. Sigh.)

Heh.

I got a call today from a staffing organization named after the protagonist of an Ayn Rand novel gaining new relevance in 2009. OK, he was a genius electromechanical engineer. But I really don't see him accepting an hourly rate to make money for some corporation for 6-12 months, with or without an option to go full-time upon completion of his contract. I admit to skimming through the 60-page monologue after the first five or six pages, but I think he'd already made his point...

They're a "certified woman-owned business." I'm trying to figure out why the practice of governments differentiating "women-owned" businesses irritates me. Perhaps because I resent being seen as a va-jay-jay to meet an affirmative-action quota rather than as a competent candidate, so I don't appreciate the world being encouraged to view me in that fashion with an official government seal of approval.

(Contra other women, I've never liked Brad Pitt, either.)

OK, back to the phones. Just got a good laugh out of it: professionals are talking about "going Galt" to avoid Pelosi-Obama's tax hikes on wages and businesses, and this "Galt" wants earn business income hooking me up with work (in one of those high-tax high-government coastal states I'm told is superior to any state in the Midwest...not that desperate yet). Bizzaro World.

"Math class is sure hard!"

...and this is why I believe that having a lot of formal education doesn't mean you're smart. How can you have a math class with no right or wrong answers?

From the linked essay by Jay Schalin:

And if somebody is better at language skills than quantitative reasoning, and therefore less interested in scientific matters, it is often best for all concerned if he or she does not study to be an electrical engineer.

Heh. My favorite anecdote from my least favorite EE lab was when my assigned partner for the week was the other chick, and we both arrived at the wrong answer in the pre-lab assignment and thus wired our transformer backwards--instead of stepping down from 120V to 6V, we stepped up to 2400V--and overloaded some capacitors, which caught on fire and shot across the room, narrowly missing some guys who got the right answer. (We were never assigned to work together again, which I'm sure was coincidence. ;)

But it really hammered home the fact that there are right and wrong answers, and you can't accomplish anything by assuming all answers are equally valid as long as they're written up properly (also made me realize I wasn't as smart as the "educators" in Podunk Community High School told me I was...alas).

Key graf:

Perhaps the key to producing more scientists in our society is not some sort of feminist Manhattan Project to produce more women scientists, but rather to promote science universally to all young students, and let those who have talent and inclinations in a given field pursue them.

Yup.

Phyllis Chesler on Honor Killings

In the Spring 2009 issue of The Middle East Quarterly, available online. Her main point is that honor killings are significantly different from Western-style domestic violence--in intent, ferocity, celebration, and victim selection--and should not be treated as such.

In both North America and Europe, family members conducted honor killings with excessive violence—repeatedly stabbing, raping, setting aflame, and bludgeoning—in more than half the cases. Only in serial-killing-type scenarios are Western women targeted with similar violence; in these cases, the perpetrators are seldom family members, and their victims are often strangers. Despite the obfuscation of Muslim advocacy groups, these case studies show that honor killings are quite distinct from domestic violence.

She is quite detailed and presents the data she used with her conclusions, which I will keep in mind the next time I rant at "feminists."

But I would still appreciate the organizations that purport to care about women noticing the existance of honor killings.

Yoo-hoo! Feminists!

When you get done celebrating your own va-jay-jays, try making yourselves useful:

The American media is wholly uninterested in beheaded wives.

And on V-Day.

Go forth! Fight violence against all women for a damn change, and not just the ones abused by white men.

Good grief.

...and after six months of hearing "women's media" (when I'm unfortunate enough to be subjected to it--please don't think I consume it on purpose!) swoon over how Michelle Obama has such style and such fashion flair, it was really funny to see her wearing a 40-year-old bathrobe made out of upholstery.

I kinda dug the polyester matelasse--I didn't know anyone still made it. I'm assuming they chose it because it was a popular fabric when Jacqueline Bouvier was still setting fashion trends. And then it died out. For a reason. Just like Harvest Gold died out...

Married to the government II

Unmarried women voted 70-30 for Obama. John Miller at NRO wonders if they'll be given a media label, "bitter unmarried women."

As a card-carrying bitter unmarried woman (I gots Moral Authority, yo), I approve. Label 'em. Make them own it.

I've ranted about this at length before, and now my perspective has changed--I really do believe women want the government to be some combination of husband and daddy (how icky is that *shudder*). Government will put a roof over their head, pay their doctor bill, fund their retirement--but better than a real husband, government won't leave the toilet seat up or get angry when you start sleeping around.

I'm digusted. Please don't judge me by the actions and attitudes of my insecure lazy sisters.

Huh.

I read this whole article about middle-aged "feminists" (the original title, they took the f-word out) pining for their daddy's money, and not once do they note that the federal government will take 55% of it, unless Daddy dies in 2010. Huh.

This need for an inheritance to fund retirement could have been avoided, at least until last week. Huh.

Clothes.

I opined freely at Badger Blogger today about Sarah Palin's new clothes. Lisa Schiffren explains it more clearly than I can. That first weekend after her selection was announced the "women's media" and MSM plastic-faced women were making fun of her shoes and her earrings; it wasn't going to get any better if she didn't start dressing like the rich women who've spent their whole careers in Washington.

The RNC probably could have skipped the retail and went straight to designers and asked for freebies a la Clinton. But this is uncharted territory--no one has ever put a non-rich, non-career-Washington woman without an influential husband or father on the ticket before. They'll know better for 2012...

Meanwhile, no one will look in Michelle's closet to check the origin of any unreported gifts within. While we hiss at "crazy old cat lady" stereotypes here at Radishhof, we also enjoy the PUMA blogs' sense of humor:

...angry, America-hating sleeper sofa from your shutin[sic] Aunt Tilly’s house, the one with all the cats. The cat pee sofa.

That’s our Michelle!

Heh.

Bleg

If you ever see me acting like these women, please call the DNR and have them put me down in a humane manner, but quickly. Very quickly.

Dr. Sills also came across many single midlife women who expressed financial insecurity. "It's the 'I'm afraid I'll be a bag lady and I need to find some man to help pay my bills' anxiety," she explains.

I'm hoping to avoid destitution by not buying unnecessary shoes and "beauty" treatments. Kind of a Catch-22 there, eh?

(The comments gave me a craving for Tim Hortons.)

Huh.

I hope Mr. Johnston is working on a GED on the side, but other than that, I don't see what the big deal is here. All the women from my high school who had babies at 18 have much better lives than I do. You can always have a career when the kids are grown, if that's what you want; the other way 'round just doesn't happen.

Don't read the comments; the world is full of shit-heads.

(I always have to put a hyphen in "shit-heads" because otherwise I read it "shi-theeds". Bah.)

Let's just get this election over with

I'm so tired of seeing this catshit (this is the least offensive example, trust me) everytime I read quilt blogs and friends' personal journals and every other email with "FWD:" in the subject line. Can we just move on to the gloating (and/or race riots) and stop the snide crass self-congratulation-on-how-smarter-we-are-than-people-who-go-to-church? It's like water torture, and I'm only two "Sarah Palin is an evil bitch!" conversations away from going Towanda the Avenger.

Full disclosure: I do laugh any time Gary Varvel draws Obama's ears, but that sort of thing is a) a tradition of political cartooning and b) doesn't co-opt, politicize, and vulgarize any treasured American icon. And half the time I still think McCain looks like Statler and Waldorf's long lost brother. Heh.

(I might start asking them how they think Sarah Palin is going to go about impregnating every American woman after she takes the oath of office. Some of these women I'm convinced there's some Oprah-esque wish-fulfillment fantasy going on here. The liberal ideal of government-as-husband, 35-year-old educated white woman version.)

Semi-related, I attended a birthday dinner last night and at my end of the table conversation centered how how much the Midwest sucks. Too much "sprawl", unlike Portland and Seattle which are awesome because no one's allowed to build so it's pretty and you don't have stupid poor people from the small towns trying to move in (I think I outed myself as an evil baby-polar-bear-starving Neanderthal conversative asshole when I accidentally mentioned out loud that building restrictions are a classic example of how government over-regulation hurts poor people). People from small towns are so..."limited." (guilty) Milwaukee has no progressive culture, just backwards mass-commercial crap (really? There's a one-man play about an East German transvestite going on right now at the Rep....). Lake Michigan is small and boring (!!!). And four distinct seasons? That's for unenlightened boors. You have to be seriously unevolved and classless to like winter.

I LOVE winter. And like the Midwest. And enjoy life in Milwaukee (except for the driving down to the inner city and having to swerve to avoid the people who stand in the middle of the street and stare me down, but I'm thinking you get some of that in the poor parts of any major city, no matter how progressive and cultured it is). Stupid, limit, uncultured, unenlightened, boring, worthless small town hick that I am...I can't help wonder why these people are here instead of someplace more to their liking. I suspect its because it costs a lot of money to live in those places...

I don't think I'll be invited to any more dinners after my friend Andy, who organized it, moves to The Cities next month.

(Two of my favorite writers are Walter E. Williams and Thomas Sowell, can you tell?)

Misogynist rant

OK, twice in the past two days I've gotten the same chain e-mail about how Sarah Palin is going to force all pre-menopausal women to get pregnant and give birth if she's the Vice-President. I wish I'd kept the chain e-mails I got in 2000 and 2004 about how George Bush was going to force us all to get pregnant and give birth, just so I could send them as a reply. They were wrong then, and they're wrong now, and their totalitarian fantasies are showing...

For the purposes of "can't we all just get along" I'm assuming the e-mailers are just ignorant of how federal legislation is created and passed, and not knowingly lying to whip up FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) among women who don't actually know how the federal government works. The more I think about it, the more I believe it's the latter. C'mon; the vice-president's duties are to bang the gavel on the first day of the Senate and to go to funerals the president doesn't feel like going to. No one in Congress is going to introduce any bills to outlaw abortion or contraceptives ever; if they do, they won't pass a massively Dem-majority Congress. The "worst" outcome is the Supreme Court agreeing to hear a challenge to Roe v. Wade and deciding that states should be allowed to make their own laws.

You have to be seriously delusional to believe that equates to "forced child-bearing." No one's going to tie you down and shoot you full of sperm unless you ask nicely (and maybe not even then).

I'm annoyed that women who are educated and "smart" and held up as an ideal are either a) really fucking stupid, and/or b) believe other women are really fucking stupid. They act like women aren't capable of making decisions or controlling their own behaviors. It's a sick irony--to "empower" women, you have to believe women are weak and stupid. I'm getting sick of "sharing a chromosome" with these bitches.

OTOH...vicious slander, gossip, and backstabbing to enforce acceptable groupthink is totally a chick thing. If you don't believe me, try disagreeing with a group of women sometime. ;)

Attention "pro-choice feminists"

Got a project for you.

Stop bleating about "hegemony" and "cultural imperialism" and go do something useful on behalf of women other than yourselves.

While I'm pricing plastic surgeons...

Middle and upper-class women around SE WI feel they have a right to be jerks in public because they never get to have fun and no one ever listens to them. Or something. Ladies at the wine bar screaming about their "issues they might be having with the men in their lives"--I'd rather be in a Hieronymous Bosch painting. *shudder* Even if the wine bar is showing SportsCenter.

And Heather Mac Donald explains--again--that there is more variability in math ability among men than among women, and the difference between genders actually exists at the high end of the curve, and--sorry, feminists--most women choose to do better things with their lives.

This I find interesting:

(Asians, however, showed a very slight skew toward females above the 99th percentile, while there were too few Hispanics and blacks scoring above even the 95th percentile to compute their gender ratios.)

Math isn't just sexist, it's racist, too (and since the Asians don't fit the desired outcome, we ignore them, just like college admissions). Has anyone studied the sexual orientation of the 99th percentile? Math could hit the trifecta...

In which I consider gender-reassignment just to avoid derision by association 2

I've often wondered if one of my X chromosomes has some damage...

Women come to feel so close to celebrities, they almost consider them part of their circle of friends.

Yeah. When Angelina Jolie or Katie Holmes helps you move or even invites you to their birthday party, let me know.

And there there's these women. Not Rachel Lucas, the laydeez who annoy her. Sweet Olivia Manning! Katherine Berry called it: It’s not because you’re a female. It’s because you bore them.

And trust me, it goes both ways--they're as bored with me as I am with them. I got kicked out of a ladies' online group just after 9/11 after being told that "real women" don't and shouldn't care about history, art, or travel--they have husbands and babies to tend to! Changing a diaper was far more thrilling, relevant, and POWERFUL than anything I will ever do in my entire worthless unwomanly life!

Instead of whining about being taken seriously, I started reading more history and art stuff. Meh.

(What's wrong with cat-blogging? *scritch*)

It's like they're writing about me...

(They are, sorta. I was a research subject at SMPY at Iowa State, although they don't seem to have used data from those years in the referenced study.)

The harpies who continue to push Title IX into places it wasn't meant to go now want the federal government to start insisting on hiring quotas for women at research universities.

I've spent 20 years observing all this "chicks in science" stuff from the inside--from special summer programs to jobs at companies that make a big show of hiring women and minorities first--and probably the only thing I can say with some certainty is you can't make women who'd rather play with babies be interested in calculus or debugging circuit boards. Especially if they don't have the abilities to do calculus in the first place (remember the variation amongst women is greater than the difference between the male and female average, thanks).

Ms. Pinker, a clinical psychologist and columnist for The Globe and Mail in Canada (and sister of Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist), argues that the campaign for gender parity infantilizes women by assuming they don’t know what they want. She interviewed women who abandoned successful careers in science and engineering to work in fields like architecture, law and education — and not because they had faced discrimination in science.

Instead, they complained of being pushed so hard to be scientists and engineers that they ended up in jobs they didn’t enjoy. “The irony was that talent in a male-typical pursuit limited their choices,” Ms. Pinker says. “Once they showed aptitude for math or physical science, there was an assumption that they’d pursue it as a career even if they had other interests or aspirations. And because these women went along with the program and were perceived by parents and teachers as torch bearers, it was so much more difficult for them to come to terms with the fact that the work made them unhappy.”

Wow. That sounds exactly like me. Lots of encouraging talks from men and women in science/engineering careers about how exceptional women should go on and succeed; lots of scorn and derision from women not in science/engineering about how women shouldn't bother (men outside frightened away by my job title, sigh). And I've tried to leave the field twice post-college, and ended up unemployed and broke both times. I love science, I liked math enough, but the business is soul-destroying.

I'll have to pick up a copy of this book.



I'm sure I could rant much more, but it's time to watch Ben Sheets and Ryan Braun and Corey Hart. :) Keeping focused on what's important here...

Guess I'm an elitist after all.

I like a good lawnmower race as much as anyone, but this...this is horrifying.

Disclaimer: I won a whole bunch of ribbons at the Central Iowa Fair 20-25 years ago for various housewifely arts. Feel free to laugh.

In which I consider gender-reassignment just to avoid derision by association

DEAR ABBY: I dress my Siamese cat, "Belle," in clothes and pajamas. (Yes, they make apparel for cats.) I also push her around in a stroller. My friends think I'm crazy, but I consider Belle to be my daughter.

One time, a teenager came up to me as I was pushing Belle in her stroller and asked, "Where's the baby?" I told her that Belle was like my baby.

Is it nuts to treat a cat like a child? -- MOM OF A FUR KID IN N.Y.

DEAR "MOM": Nuts? No. A bid for attention ... perhaps.

Dear Abby and Not A Mom:

You're both pathetic, deluded, insensitive assholes. Please stop making the rest of us barren spinsters with cats look even sadder, crazier, and despisable (despicable?) than we really are.

Peace/Love/Arugula!

Radish

P.S. Nobody is fooled by the phrase "Fur kid." See below for handy educational diagram:



The one on the left can be left home alone all day with a bowl of water and some crunchies. If you do that to the ones on the right, better hope you get arrested before their actual Mom (or Grandpa or Aunt Radish) find out about it and come looking for you. See? Not the same.