HollaBack

Jessica Valenti

For an explanation of HollaBack see this post at i blame the patriarchy

The “Success” of Abstinence Programmes

“We’ve taken a very negative approach to teen sexuality, and it’s not working,” says Martha Kempner of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States.

[..]

Given the intensity of the administration’s abstinence-until-marriage campaign, few were surprised when in February 2007, the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, a professional research journal, published a study reporting that adolescents who had sex were 58 percent more likely than were virgins to commit a delinquent act (up to one year after sex).

But Paige Harden, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of Virginia, didn’t buy it. She and her colleagues narrowed the original study’s data to compare only identical twins who were raised together but started having sex at different ages. That step automatically controlled for variables such as family and school environment.

Their findings, which will appear in the same Journal of Youth and Adolescence this spring, were startling: Twins who had sex earlier than their twin siblings were less likely to become delinquent.

Harden’s wasn’t the only recent study to loosen the administration’s chastity belt. In the January American Journal of Public Health, a team from Columbia University linked delays in sexual activity until after the teen years to problems in sexual functioning later in life. The researchers noted that the finding “lends credence to research showing that abstinence-only education may actually increase health risks.”

The government’s own statistics on the trends in teen sexual health support that conclusion.

On March 11, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released figures showing that one in four young women ages 14 to 19 has a sexually transmitted disease (STD). A CDC spokesperson pronounced the situation an “epidemic.”

In December 2007, the CDC announced a 3 percent rise in the teen pregnancy rate – the first increase in 14 years. And in November, it reported data showing that adolescent rates of two of the three STDs tracked nationally – syphilis and Chlamydia – increased from 2000 to 2006 (the latest reporting year). The third STD, gonorrhea, has climbed 6 percent since 2004.

In These Times Steve Yoder

Iraqi Refugees

Adam Doster writes about the Iraqi refugee/humanitarian crisis and the US’ ineffective response:

Rising violence and growing attention to the emergency forced President Bush’s hand in early 2007. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice created a high-level State Department task force on the refugee issue and promised to resettle 25,000 Iraqis. But over the course of the year, that target dropped to 7,000, and later to 2,000. By year’s end, only 1,608 Iraqis had been admitted.

The number of refugees processed each month would have to triple for the administration to meet its new 2008 goal of resettling 12,000 refugees. And on March 11, the State Department’s Senior Coordinator of Iraqi Refugee Issues James B. Foley told the House subcommittee on Middle East and South Asia that reaching that number is “not guaranteed.”

By contrast, Sweden, a nation of 9 million people, has resettled more than 90,000 Iraqis, in spite of its opposition to the invasion. The Center for American Progress’ Katulis and his colleagues have advocated that the United States should take in at least 100,000 refugees annually, based on UNHCR estimates of Iraqi citizens facing extreme vulnerability.

Why does America keep missing its targets? The State Department points to bureaucratic snafus, ranging from the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) stringent security review of each applicant, to jurisdictional confusion between the State Department and DHS, to a lack of interviewers in the field. Kurtzer says the fault lies with the White House, where officials refuse to take the problem seriously.

“There’s been a lack of political will from the senior levels of the administration to respond to this crisis in a way that we know the government is capable of responding,” he says. “When the White House is interested in putting resources and finding solutions to a problem, they are clearly capable of doing it.”   alternet.org 

Barbie, Islam and FOX

• Iran is once again considering banning the importation of Barbie dolls, after the Iranian Prosecutor General warned that “the irregular importation of such toys, which unfortunately arrive through unofficial sources and smuggling, is destructive culturally and a social danger,”

An earlier short-lived anti-Barbie campaign in 2002 led to the Iranian government’s promotion of a pair of twin dolls, based on a series of stories in children’s school books, who are modestly dressed and uphold traditional Islamic values.

The hosts of Fox and Friends found this story amusing. “So they’re actually doing, like, their own anti-Barbie doll,” commented Alisyn Camerota, who herself bears an amazing resemblance to the Barbie dolls she was displaying.

“‘It can destroy the Islamic republic!’” exclaimed Brian Kilmeade, quoting from the Prosecutor General’s warning. “Here we are,” he continued, “trying to find their nuclear power plants. We could drop dolls on their nation and bring them to their knees.”  more here

Barbie #1

Running the Numbers
An American Self-Portrait  
 
This series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 410,000 paper cups used every fifteen minutes. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.   Chris Jordan

[see next two posts]

Barbie #2

[see previous post and next post]

Barbies

Chris Jordan

[see previous two posts]

Ideas and Idealism

This endless personal context of thought is what I want to insist on – even for the heaviest thoughts of the weightiest thinkers on the thorniest topics. Each idea arises in a context, a moment in the chain of associations and digressions that comprise a conscious life. You can strip it from its context and lend it a certain autonomy, disconnected from life, but that won’t change its provenance, which affects its content and authority. Most intellectual history takes account of the autobiographical setting of thought, but as lip service, the way biographies often deal with childhood: a quick chapter left behind, rarely treated as the decisive period in every life ever lived, its effects reverberating till the end. (Rosebud, Rosebud – always Rosebud.) We remain the kids we were, and our ideas stay rooted in our autobiographies, far more than is usually assumed. Those bios are not mere backdrop for the thoughts. The thoughts don’t exist apart from the lives in which they are embedded. They are warp and woof.  [more]

The Autobiography of an Idea: Rethinking the Holocaust in light of 9/11,my mentor and my dad”  Rick Salutin, The Walrus Magazine

Jeremiad

jer·e·mi·ad

Pronunciation:

\ˌjer-ə-ˈmī-əd, -ˌad\

Function:

noun

Etymology:

French jérémiade, from Jérémie Jeremiah, from Late Latin Jeremias

Date:

1780

: a prolonged lamentation or complaint; also : a cautionary or angry harangue

A few interesting viewpoints on Jeremiah’s jeremiad:

Barack Obama finally had his Sister Souljah moment to reject Jeremiah Wright and say that the rants that Wright gave yesterday do not represent the Wright he knew. Coincidentally, he just happened to come to that conclusion after Wright had taken a PR offensive that had put him back in the spotlight and started to do even more damage to the Obama campaign. I don’t know how many people will buy all of Obama’s outrage at this point. If he had had any doubts, he could have sat down and watched the DVD of Wright sermons sold in his own church. You know, just in case he’d never seen that side of Wright.

[...]

I just find it hard to believe that Jeremiah Wright, in his late sixties, suddenly had a total personality change and start spewing forth these beliefs that he’d never before mentioned in Obama’s hearing. If people don’t believe Obama’s claim that everything he heard yesterday was newly minted Wright (when we can all compare to the tapes of his past sermons) what does that do to Obama’s self-portrayal of being a different kind of politician. If he seems dishonest on this question, it dents his whole shining armor.  Bettys Page

And from Bob Herbert at the New York Times

The question that cries out for an answer from Mr. Wright is why – if he is so passionately committed to liberating and empowering blacks – does he seem so insistent on wrecking the campaign of the only African-American ever to have had a legitimate shot at the presidency?

A possible answer for Bob Herbert:  an Obama presidency

could give us the worst of all possible of worlds: one in which race is completely repackaged as a discourse of celebration and, to the extent that that had already become the only metaphor through which American politics could accommodate critical discussion of inequality, the language of ‘disparity,’ it will no longer be possible for critiques of inequality to be heard as an appropriate topic for political discussion. Obama already when he talks “black” (e.g., with his “Cousin Pookie” riffs, which are the exact equivalent of Shelby Steele’s rantings about underclass, shiftless “Sam”) opts for the Bookerite/Cosbyite metaphor of victim-blaming in the phony first-person plural, and he has always played the Immigrant Success Story Up From Slavery Ain’t America Great and Don’t I Show It angle. And, moreover, what many of his white supporters like about him is that he doesn’t have the ‘chip on the shoulder’ that so many indigenous blacks do. Add all this to his commitment to appealing to the right and to the investor class, and the upshot is that inequality could lose whatever vestigial connotations it has as a species of injustice and be fully consolidated as the marker, on the bottom end that is, of those losers who failed to do what the market requires of them or a sign of their essential inferiority.   LBO 

Gary Snyder

On Tuesday, Christine Wimmin of Poetry magazine announced that the winner of this year’s Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize is Gary Snyder:

The judges issued the following statement in making the selection: “Gary Snyder is a true nature poet: there’s no sentimentalism to his work, and he never uses the natural world simply to celebrate his own sensibility. A deeply learned and meditative artist, an impassioned ecologist, and a poet of great scope as well as intense focus, Snyder has written poems that we will be reading for as long as we’ve been reading Robert Frost.”“The selection of Gary Snyder as this year’s winner of the Lilly Prize does honor to the tradition of excellence and importance that the prize has stood for since it was established over 20 years ago,” said John Barr, president of the Poetry Foundation.   poetryfoundation.org 

 

A poem from Gary Snyder:

For All

Ah to be alive
on a mid-September morn
fording a stream
barefoot, pants rolled up,
holding boots, pack on,
sunshine, ice in the shallows,
northern rockies.Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters
stones turn underfoot, small and hard as toes
cold nose dripping
singing inside
creek music, heart music,
smell of sun on gravel.

I pledge allegiance

I pledge allegiance to the soil
of Turtle Island,
and to the beings who thereon dwell
one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun
With joyful interpenetration for all. 

more of Snyder’s poetry   here