Seeing and rating

A while back on Charlie Rose’s show, someone was talking about tryouts for hiring musicians for some major orchestra.  The tryouts used to be in front of the people who were doing the hiring, but then they decided to do the tryouts with the musician invisible to the listeners.  You’ll never guess what happened.  When they couldn’t see the gender of the musician, they rated women higher.  And they started hiring more women.

The internet makes things interesting in the same way because you can’t see the person writing.

A while back I was amused when someone linked to me and called me a Jordanian.  Hey, maybe it’s true.  The Arabs have a saying, when you live with a people and eat their bread (or is it salt?) for 40 days, you become one of them.  There are worse things that could happen.

Now there are more ways to rate your website.

Blog Personality

Typeanalyser (Via Riverdaughter) will give your blog a personality test. It’s based on the Myers-Briggs personality inventory,  (you can take the test as an individual here) which is based on Jungian psychological theory, and measures personality according to 4 dichotomies: Extraversion/Introversion, Sensing/iNtuition, Thinking/Feeling,  Judging/Perceiving.  Here’s how they envision me:

INTP – The Thinkers

The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

Blog Gender

Moving onwards and upwards, the GenderAnalyzer tests your blog for gender.

We have strong indicators that http://camelsnose.wordpress.com is written by a man (91%).

Hee, hee.

Should I tell them? They have a little poll set up, and the results reported now are 54% accurate. But in at least one blog thread, the accuracy of the results is running more around 25%.

Browser Gender

So much for your writing habits.  But what about reading?  This Social Analyzer has a Java script that will analyze your gender based on your browser history.

Even better, the author of the script tells how he gets his numbers.  Gender neutral is 1.0. Higher numbers are masculine, lower numbers are feminine.  As far as political candidates’ websites, the male/female ratio for

hillaryclinton.com is 0.6

barackobama.com 0.68

johnmccain.com 1.27

For politics:

realclearpolitics.com 1.82

dailykos.com 1.56

drudgereport.com 2.08

nytimes.com 1.13

politico.com 1.7

huffingtonpost.com 1.35

Shopping is a bit more intuitive:

victoriassecret.com 0.68 (a no-brainer)

circuitcity.com 1.2 (now in bankruptcy)

target.com 0.67

bestbuy.com 1.11

Is a high male score for shopping an predictor of financial difficulty? Hint: keep an eye on Radio Shack.

Technology sites tend to rank more male, except for cellphone corporate websites, which run more towards female.

So, what am I?  On the PC I’m 61% female.  On the laptop, I’m 98% male. Go figure.

UPDATE: 11/30/08 Camel’s Nose is now testing 100% female, but is still INTP Thinker, and the laptop history is still 98% male. That was a pretty quick gender switch for the writing– a 180 degree turn in just ten days–but good to know the thinking and reading are rock solid…I guess.

Troubled about the status of women in America? Sign the petition.

Women Count is a non-profit political group committed to giving women a voice in the political process. They have a petition for you to sign. They are calling for the new president to create, within the first 100 days, a presidential commission on women similar to the one President Kennedy commissioned in 1961.

SOMETIMES THERE IS A WATERSHED MOMENT IN HISTORY WHEN IT BECOMES CLEAR THAT THINGS MUST CHANGE AND LEADERS MUST ACT. THAT MOMENT IS NOW FOR THE WOMEN OF THIS COUNTRY.

THE LESSONS OF THIS CAMPAIGN WERE ABUNDANT:

• As the economy became the single most critical issue in the election, the role that women play in our economic structure has never been clearer. Women are the backbone of the nation’s workforce and control 70 percent of its buying power.

• The candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, while inspiring women and girls around the country to imagine what can be, exposed extreme gender bias in the media and throughout our culture.

• Women, who make up 56 percent of the voting population, were targeted as never before as the critical bloc that would determine the outcome of the election.

In 1961, as the nation grappled with the issue of women in the workplace, President John Kennedy convened the first Presidential Commission on the Status of Women and appointed Eleanor Roosevelt as its chair. Kennedy recognized the moment was right.

That was 47 years ago, and it’s time to do it again. As in 1961, women are at the forefront of our political discourse – and we are committed to keeping them there.

A record number of women are seeking ways to participate more fully in all aspects of American life, politics and policymaking. A Presidential Commission on Women is the right vehicle to initiate a national conversation on the future of women. If Not Now, When?

Status of American women falls short–very short

So the United States must be number one in the world for just about everything, right?   Not when it comes to the status of women.

The 2008 Women’s Index Rank is a composite score based on educational, economic, poitical, and health status factors like maternal mortality and life expectancy.  According to the index, the United States ranks number 22 out of the 43 more developed countries (right behind Sweden, New Zealand, Iceland, Australia, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Greece, Slovania, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia).

The U.S. also has the dubious distinction of paying women 63 cents for every dollar a man makes. Compare this to 81% for Sweden or 67% for Croatia. And in the United States only 17% of seats in national government are held by women. Compare this with Portugal (28%), Iceland (33%), the Netherlands (39%), and Sweden (47%).

If we can’t hold our own against Europe, then maybe at least American women are better off than Arab women? Maybe a little. The ratio of estimated female to male earned income is Bahrain 34%, Egypt 23%, Iran 39%,  Jordan 31%, and Kuwait 35%. When it comes to participation of women in national government, it’s Bahrain 3%, Egypt 2%, Iran 4%, Iraq 26%, Jordan 6%, and Kuwait 2%.

Hey wait a minute. In Iraq 26% of the legislators are female? And here in the U.S. only 17%?

Maybe we ought to find out how those Iraqis are running their government and have them come over here and help us.

Denial of service attacks on blogs isn’t just for terrorists anymore

A few months ago someone named GeekLove08 left a message on this blog asking me to post a link to their new video. I don’t consider this to be a political blog as such, but when I saw the video, I had to write a post about it.  The video is of Hillary Clinton clad in a demure pastel pink outfit that I wouldn’t be caught dead in, giving a speech to a women’s rights convention in China, with a Dvorak string instrumental in the background. As the violins soothe and Hillary’s voice intones words of healing

“…there is far more that unites us than divides us…we share a common future and we are here to find common ground…”

a montage of gender-based hate speech images from the current presidential campaign marches across the screen in stark ugliness. If you haven’t seen it yet you might go over and favorite it.

Today I found out that Geeklove’s Come a Long Way blog on blogspot.com, along with several pro-Hillary blogs listed on Just Say no Deal, had been forced out of the blogosphere in a rather ugly episode so typical of this campaign cycle. The blog has since been moved to WordPress.

While Hillary had already suspended her campaign at the time of the attack, the blogs in question had buttons with links to help Hillary pay down her campaign debt.  Now who would want to prevent Hillary’s campaign debt from being paid?

I may have had a close call myself. A few days before the attacks on the other blogs, a pro-Obama website linked to this website and tried make some kind of claim they knew who I was and what my political views were, in spite of having an Obama button and not a link to pay down Hillary’s debt in my sidebar.  كَلْب  (No, that’s not endorsement; I have Hillary buttons too.)  Why they consider me to be so noteworthy I do not know. Perhaps the paid Obama bloggers were being offered a bounty of some sort and they were trying to squeeze me into their criteria.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Related posts:

Al-Firdaws:Cyberspace terrorists or Script Kiddies?

Why attack CafePress.com?

Saturday is No Spend Day–and a time to reevaluate relationships

Two things are supposed to happen this Saturday.  The first is No Spend Day.  (Via 18 million voices) This is supposed to be a day of no spending and no commercial media in support of women’s issues.

On Saturday August 16th, 2008, observe a day of NO SPENDING to evidence that we are serious in our demand of fair practices for women.

Don’t spend a DIME for 24 hours. NO SPENDING (cash or credit) on: internet purchases, gas for the car, cups of coffee, TV shopping, movies, dining, grocery or clothes.
NO SPENDING ON ANYTHING.

Instead, plan a day of R&R, read a book or clean your closet BUT hold onto your money AND turn off all commercial TV and Radio in response to all forms of bais against women in the media.

A day of no spending will demonstrate that women, and those who support women’s issues, can impact the economy as well as the election.

I think it’s a good idea.   It doesn’t seem to have been very widely publicized, but never mind.  Just as fasting during Ramadan makes you more aware of what you eat, smoke, and drink, planning ahead for how not to shop or use commercial media on a particular day is a good exercise in becoming more aware of how we use our money and time.  For starters I will probably listen to public radio, go for a long walk, and if I do a blog post, I will either write it ahead of time or date it ahead so as to not have it appear on Saturday. (Although WordPress blogs are free, they do sometimes put ads on our blogs to generate income.) I’m still thinking about this one, since the blog serves my purposes as well.

The other thing that’s supposed to happen on Saturday is an eclipse of the moon.  Astrologers will tell you a lunar eclipse during a full moon, as this one is, is particularly significant and the effects can last as long as six months.

The “crisis” that these eclipses tend to elicit is a crisis of lack–a time when we suddenly realize a great need or want. The impact of the crisis can act to sever a relationship–it’s possible. But it can also bring two people together with a sudden awareness of a great need for each other. Although Lunar eclipses are more relationship-oriented than Solar eclipses, they are not always about relationships between two people. They can trigger awareness of need in other areas of our lives, such as our relationship to work, to our health and bodies, and so forth. This is a time when matters come to light–things that have been brewing under the surface…

Lunar Eclipses are about relationships and polarities. With the Leo-Aquarius axis involved, this Lunar Eclipse presses us to look more closely at our needs, lacks, and wants in our lives. The Leo-Aquarius polarity deals with the balance between all that is personal (Leo) and all that is impersonal (Aquarius). The energy of Leo is creative self-expression and the boost to the individual ego that we receive through pleasure and romance, while Aquarius rules the group, more impersonal friendships, and objectivity. This Full Moon urges us to strike a balance between romance and friendship, and between expressing ourselves in personal and impersonal ways. The Leo Sun is proud and intensely individual—not content with simply being just one of the team. The Aquarius Moon, while individualistic as well, values independence and the “team”. The Full Moon illuminates this conflict. Some sort of crisis (which can be a crisis of consciousness) or sudden awareness of a lack in our lives provides us with a golden opportunity to explore our emotional needs within the context of the house polarity where the eclipse occurs in our natal charts. Relationships may be challenged, broken, or strengthened dramatically at this time. Our discovery is emotionally charged and dramatic. Epiphanies are likely at this time as we become acutely aware of our lack. This understanding can propel us into positive action.

I like horoscopes, not because I’m convinced that they are true  (or untrue) or even that they convey unique information about one person at one moment in time, but because they provide an interesting framework for organizing the way we do long term planning and analysis of our personal lives.

Maybe Saturday is also a good day to contemplate our relationships with money, media, and politics, and to take whatever revelations and outpourings the full moon inspires and start turning them into rational processes.

Text of Hillary Clinton’s email petition against Bush attack on birth control

Text of Hillary Clinton’s email message about Health and Human Services rewriting regulations to undermine reproductive rights, including links to petition:

Dear [Nijma],

Since 2001, I have served as the honorary chair of HillPAC, an organization dedicated to helping working families. It is our goal to fight for a better future for every child, and for every family. To keep fighting for those who get up every day, no matter what the odds, and never give in. For those who never back down, and those who always stand their ground. HillPAC works to elect Democratic candidates to office who share these same ideals and goals and I’m proud to serve as the honorary chair and I hope you will join me in this mission.

Right now, I’m working with HillPAC to lead the fight on one very important issue, and we need your help.

The Bush White House is working to rewrite the definition of abortion in federal regulations to include common forms of birth control. This would undermine women’s health and put family planning services in danger. Simply, it puts women at risk — it could even prevent victims of sexual assault from receiving emergency contraceptives.

I need your help to speak up for the health of millions of American women who are in danger, once again, from the latest assault from the Bush administration.

Will you join me in sending a strong message to Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt to put women’s health ahead of right-wing ideology?

Click here to send a message to the Bush administration asking them to protect women’s health.

Imagine being told common forms of contraception like birth control pills could now fall under the definition of an abortion. This is another assault by the extreme right on the rights and health of women everywhere. They will do anything in their power to impose their beliefs — no matter what the risk to women.

We’ve worked hard to guarantee women have access to a full range of health and family planning services, and we can’t let the right wing undermine those efforts. This issue is far too important not to act, so I hope you’ll join HillPAC and me today in speaking out to protect women’s health.

Tell Bush’s HHS Secretary to protect women’s health!

Thank you for all your support. I’m so happy that we are still working together on vitally important issues like this one.

Sincerely,

Hillary Rodham Clinton

Bush Department of Health and Human Services tries to re-write contraception laws

The Bush administration’s Department of Health and Human Services is attempting to redefine abortion to include common contraception methods such as the pill. The legislation is being written now. The proposed legislation could have sweeping effects on women’s health services and could prevent victims of sexual assault from getting emergency contraception.

According to the National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association (NFPRHA)

…the draft rules propose to re-define abortion to include most modern forms of contraception, a radical new definition that directly contradicts the definitions of pregnancy ascribed to by the American Medical Association, the British Medical Association, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, among other leading medical authorities. Defining “abortion” in this manner will limit access to the full range of comprehensive family planning services for women and men most in need of them – the low-income and uninsured beneficiaries of programs like Title X and Medicaid.

Moreover, by potentially invalidating a number of hard-won state laws that protect women’s access to contraceptive services, the draft regulations would be a major step backwards for women’s health. The very laws described as “the problem” in the draft regulations, like the twenty-seven state laws that require equity in prescription coverage for contraceptives, and the eleven state laws requiring the provision of emergency contraception to rape victims in the emergency room – are common-sense, compassionate provisions that are broadly supported by a majority of Americans.

These new regulations could severely limit access to counseling, education, contraception and preventive health services for those who need it most, low-income and uninsured women and men. Americans – including the nine in ten who support federal funding for access to family planning services for those who cannot afford them…

To oppose this legislation, you can send an email message through the National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association (NFPRHA) |here| and send a message to Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt through HillPac |here|.

Obama: remaking the world is not for Woman

Would Barack Obama prefer to return to the days of yesteryear before women could vote?  Looks like it.

Obama signed the guest book at Yad Vashem, writing, “At a time of great peril and promise, war and strife, we are blessed to have such a powerful reminder of man’s potential for great evil, but also our capacity to rise from tragedy and remake our world.”

Looks to me like women just got excluded from the Obama vision of human action in the world, both good and bad.

In the 18th century, when Thomas Jefferson wrote the words “all men are created equal” and “governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” women could not vote and could not give consent.  Jefferson did not mean the word “men” to mean “men and women” or “humans”.  He meant “men”.

Gender-neutral language has been around for the last 40 years.  It is the norm these days for newspapers, law journals, psychology journals, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and countless English grammar texts, including the one I studied from as an undergraduate in 1991.  Surely Obama has some basic understanding of the idea.

Use of language that is not gender neutral is associated with promoting sexism in economic issues, like equal pay for equal work. No one disputes the role that sexist language plays in manufacturing consent to gender inequality, in maintaining and strengthening sexist values.

Obama already has enough problems with women defecting from his political party. Why would he appear to ignore the role that such women as Golda Mier, Madeline Albright, Condoleeza Rice, just to name a few well-known ones, have played in the evolving picture that is the Middle East. Why is Obama so ultra cautious not to offend Jewish voters by spending days with his careful reclarificaton of his stand on Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel but so careless with trivializing more than half of American voters?

Is the Bohemian Club stag Republican bash now underway?

A while back I predicted a Repbulican vice presidential candidate to be chosen in July at the all-male Bohemian Club Republican bash in Californaia.

Perhaps they are there now.  Several key Republicans are now in the state, including the president and vice president.  Laura Bush is not.  McCain’s whereabouts are unknown.

There has been some speculation over whether Obama might have been attending the infamous Owl Ceremony last weekend during a gap in his published schedule. I think it’s pretty safe to guess Hillary Clinton did not attend–not even McCain wants to woo her supporters badly enough to challenge the boys-only rule.

A new prediction: Condoleeza Rice will not be McCain’s running mate.

Everybody look what’s goin’ down

It isn’t often I get a song stuck in my head. When I do it’s usually something dumb like the dwarves song from Snow White [Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work we go...] Today I have been humming dark fragments of something from the sixties as I go about my chores.

[There's battle lines being drawn

Nobody's right if everybody's wrong]

As I dump coffee grounds into plastic container for composting–a little trick I learned from reading liberal blogs–I think about the nice response I got from Senator Dodd’s office today–a nice thank you email with another ‘donate’ button to help him oppose FISA. Has the anti-FISA noise become just another revenue generating machine?

[Paranoia strikes deep

Into your life it will creep]

I take the container to the front door and dump the coffee grounds into the cucumber bed beside the fence. Is someone tapping my phone right now? What about all the phone calls I have gotten from friends in the middle east. Was someone listening? What might they look like? Would they be in a white panel truck?–no, that’s the movies, they would be in a gray office with optical cables running in and out. There would be some kid with pimples munching a donut and scratching as he listened to some guy in a faraway land telling me he wasn’t married yet and was I married yet?

[There's something happening here

what it is ain't exactly clear]

Am I doing something worth wiretapping or is my life on the wrong track? I am reminded of a pastor who was able to get a copy of the FBI record on him from back in the 60’s and was terribly disappointed to find they only had two pages. Is this blog worth surveilling?

[It's time we stop, hey, what's that sound

everybody look what's going down]

This week Barack Obama had time to make a comment about a singer who substituted the lyrics of the “black national anthem” for the star spangled banner at the opening of a mayor’s state of the city address. But he didn’t have time to explain his changed vote on FISA, leaving three of his staff members to give on online explanation to the blogosphere instead.

When Obama’s surrogates unleashed a vicious misogynist attack machine against Hillary Clinton, Obama didn’t take any time to explain that he really thought women were important, and he wasn’t really sexist and he wanted their votes. But this week, in the wake of controversial remarks by Wesley Clark about McCains’ military service, he had plenty of time to reassure veterans: “No one should ever devalue that service, especially for the sake of a political campaign, and that goes for supporters on both sides,” Mr. Obama said. “We must always express our profound gratitude for the service of our men and women in uniform. Period. Full-stop.” Too bad Obama didn’t think it was important to make a comment like that about demeaning comments against women after one of his surrogates played rapper Jay-Z’s “99 problems” at a campaign event. Or make a statement saying the safety of all women was important after making that “typical white woman” comment where he dismissed his grandmother’s right not to be physically threatened at a bus stop because of the color of her skin.

[It starts when you're always afraid

You step out of line, the man come and take you away]

I think of the woman in front of me at an Obama rally who screamed “Yes we can” during his speech.

Obama’s official constituent email statement about FISA says, “While I recognize that this compromise is imperfect, I will support this legislation…“

Yes we can…compromise our freedoms. Yes we can…accept laws that are imperfect–and disastrous. Yes we can…enact the Bush agenda.

Oh, the song….it’s Buffalo Springfield’s “For what it’s worth” written by Stephen Stills.

[What a field day for the heat

a thousand people in the street

Singing songs and carrying signs

Mostly say, hurray for our side]

[Stop, children, what's that sound, everybody look what's goin down]