Sexy Superheroines and Incompetent Cheesecake

post from ThinkProgress on 28 February 2012 12:00:03 PM. © ThinkProgress

I quite like this meditation by Noah Berlatsky on cheesecake and precisely why drawing superheroines as pinups as offensive, and just plain incompetent:

If you make it simply about visual stimulation, it?s simply about visual stimulation, and doesn?t have to have anything to do (or at least, not much to do) with real women. Once you start pretending that you?re talking about a smart, motivated, principled adventurer, on the other hand, you end up implying that said smart, motivated, principled, adventurer has an uncontrollable compulsion to dress like a space-tart on crack. Which is, it seems to me, insulting.
The second thing is that, if you must make your adventurer into a fetish object, it seems like the least you could do is make her tough…if you?re going to do action-hero cheesecake, then bring on the masochism: get off both on how hot the action hero is, and on how thoroughly she can beat you black and blue. It?s feministsploitation; not feminism exactly, but a fetishization of feminism, and it makes some sense at least to the degree that the fetish clothing and the putative power of the character are coherently working together, both in that the power makes the character more sexy and in that that the clothing adds (not necessarily logically, but still) to the sense of the character?s potency.

I basically agree with Noah: there’s nothing essentially wrong with producing sexy depictions of everyone. The problem comes when you mash up two projects in a way that undermines both: so-called sexy superheroines are drawn in a way that undermines our sense of their competence and power, and the things illustrators do that are meant to make them sexy often show more ignorance of the female form than appreciation for it. Sexist justifications for the depictions of female superheroines often get more contortionist than the heroines’ poses, and there’s something oddly refreshing about Noah pointing out that the guys who want hot depictions of powerful women are undermining even their own interests.

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2012/02/28/433188/sexy-superheroines-and-incompet
ent-cheesecake/

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Scientists: Global Warming Played ‘Critical
Role’ In Snowpocalypse Winters

post from ThinkProgress on 28 February 2012 12:00:03 PM. © ThinkProgress

Scientists have tied the rapid decline of Arctic sea ice, caused by global warming pollution, to the recent extreme winters that hit the United States last year and Europe this year. In “Impact of declining Arctic sea ice on winter snowfall,” a new report published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers find that the loss of polar ice has changed atmospheric circulation and increased atmospheric water vapor, driving the popularly-dubbed “snowpocalypse” conditions:

We conclude that the recent decline of Arctic sea ice has played a critical role in recent cold and snowy winters.

Sea ice decline is contributing to catastrophic, deadly winters in two ways, the researchers find. The loss of ice changes wind patterns over the northern oceans, which in turn disrupts the jet stream, allowing cold polar air to plunge across the northern hemisphere. “If there is a dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice, the westerly winds that blow across the North Pacific and North Atlantic oceans are weakened,” lead author Jiping Liu, a senior research scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told Climatewire. “This means we will have a wavier jet stream.”

The loss of ice and warmer temperatures mean that there is much more evaporation from the Arctic Ocean, leading to a higher moisture content in the polar air that is pulled south. That means that intense snowfall is more likely, especially as the polar air collides with warm, moist air from the south.

In 1999, Kevin Trenberth explained how global warming would lead to more intense precipitation events, including snow storms.

The decline in Arctic sea ice is one of the primary indicators of man-made global warming. Arctic sea ice cover began shrinking decades ago, with a rapid acceleration in the last decade. Sea ice decline has been much more rapid than projected by climate models. Some scientists now expect the Arctic to be effectively ice-free during the summer in less than 30 years. The United States and other nations have responded to this troubling collapse of the planetary thermostat by making plans to drill for fossil fuels in the Arctic oceans. That decision hastens our march into a “no-analogue world,” in the words of NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco.

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/green/2012/02/28/433766/scientists-global-warming-played
-critical-role-in-snowpocalypse-winters/

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Santorum Backs Away From JFK ‘Throw
Up’ Remark: ‘I Wish I Had That Particular Line Back’

post from ThinkProgress on 28 February 2012 12:00:03 PM. © ThinkProgress

Rick Santorum backed away from his claim that President John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech about the separation of church and state makes him want to “throw up” during an appearance on the Laura Ingraham radio show this morning. “I wish I had that particular line back,” Santorum told Ingraham, while insisting that the nation’s religious freedoms are being threatened by the Obama administration:

SANTORUM: [A]nd if you read President Kennedy’s text, while there were certainly some very important things and good things he said in that, there were some things that triggered in my opinion the privatization of faith and I think that’s a bad thing. I think we need to have a free exercise of religion in this country and it’s important for those First Amendment freedoms to be alive and well in America and I think they are threatened here in America as we’ve seen by President Obama, not by Rick Santorum.

Listen:

Santorum has taken a lot of heat for mischaracterizing Kennedy’s statements and claiming, “I don?t believe in an America where the separation between church and state is absolute.”

Asked about Santorum’s remarks during his press conference this morning, Mitt Romney said, “I respect President Kennedy and his expression of his own views. And I felt that his speech was an indication of those views. My speech was an indication of views that were somewhat different. Religion certainly has a place in the public square.”

Indeed, rather trying to stomp religion out of public life, Kennedy sought to encourage Americans to abandon divisive religious rhetoric. ?I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end ? where all men and all churches are treated equally ? where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice ? where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind ? where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the law and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their work in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood,” he said. ?I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me,? Kennedy added.

A recent poll found that 67 percent of Americans believe that there is a clear separation of church and state, while only 28 percent disagree with the sentiment.

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2012/02/28/433696/santorum-backs-away-from-jfk-thro
w-up-remark-i-wish-i-had-that-particular-line-back/

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How Bank Of America Could Take A Chunk Of Some
Americans’ Tax Returns

post from ThinkProgress on 28 February 2012 12:00:03 PM. © ThinkProgress

Back in November, we noted how Bank of America was raking in millions of dollars in fees by contracting with states to put unemployment benefits on BofA debit cards. By using those cards, people can get hit with all manner of charges — including ATM fees — when they attempt to access their benefits. One woman estimated that she had paid $350 just to withdraw her own unemployment benefits.

And it’s not only unemployment benefits that are now being loaded onto pre-paid debit cards, giving BofA the chance to reap a profit on a public service. As Logan Smith at the Palmetto Public Record noted, BofA could also be cashing in on tax returns that have been loaded onto debit cards in South Carolina:

The state Department of Revenue announced the program back in December, but conveniently left off the long list of fees which customers without BofA accounts will be subject to.
For every withdrawal from a non-Bank of America ATM, BofA will take $2.50 off the top ? in addition to any fees the ATM owner might charge. Want to get your money directly from the bank? The first time?s free, but every withdrawal after that comes with a $10 fee. Leaving the country? Bank of America takes 2% of every single transaction you make outside the United States. [...]
Bank of America didn?t have to bid for the program, according to a Department of Revenue spokesperson who told Palmetto Public Record the state chose BofA over South Carolina-based banks because ?they were the best fit.?

As Smith also pointed out, BofA doesn’t even bother charging South Carolina to provide this particular service, figuring it can make its entire profit off of fees and interest. Additionally, the program is opt-out, meaning unwitting South Carolinians are automatically signed up to fork over some of their tax return to the nation’s second largest bank.

BofA already had to quickly backtrack when it proposed a monthly debit card fee, and fees are currently the number one reason that millions of Americans are moving their money out of the nation’s biggest banks.

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/02/28/433763/bofa-fees-tax-returns/

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Company Backed By GM And DOE Says Its Lithium Ion
Batteries Could Cut Costs In Half, Nearly Triple Energy Density

post from ThinkProgress on 28 February 2012 12:00:03 PM. © ThinkProgress

by Zachary Rybarczyk

Joint investment between the U.S. Department of Energy and General Motors has enabled a breakthrough in lithium-ion cell technologies that could cut the price of electric vehicle batteries in half.

Armed with $7 million from from General Motors? venture investment arm, G.M. Ventures, and $4 million from the Energy Department?s advanced energy research program, ARPA-E, California-based Envia Systems announced that it had created a battery pack with cells with energy density far greater than other technologies on the market.

Envia says its new manganese-based cathode design allows lithium cells to store almost three times the amount of energy per charge than today’s commercial lithium-ion battery packs. Envia’s chairman and CEO Atul Kapadia spoke to the New York Times:

?We will be able to make smaller automotive packs that are also less heavy and much cheaper,? Atul Kapadia, chairman and chief executive of Envia, said in a telephone interview. ?The cost of cells will be less than half ? perhaps 45 percent ? of cells today, and the energy density will be almost three times greater than conventional automotive cells.?
Mr. Kapadia continued: ?What we have are not demonstrations, not experiments, but actual products. We could be in automotive production in a year and a half.?

If these claims are true, they could provide a much-needed boost to the electric vehicle sector. Because batteries are one of the most costly parts of electric vehicles, dramatic improvements like this could substantially reduce the overall cost of vehicles. Dozens of companies are working on bringing battery costs down, but none have been able to get into a cost range that would break the market open.

Looks like a strategic government investment in good ol’ fashioned energy R&D could just get us there.

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/02/28/433434/envia-gm-doe-lithium-ion-batterie
s-cut-costs-in-half-triple-energy-density/

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Songs to Fight the Plutocracy By: "Know Your
Enemy"

post from They gave us a republic... - Front Page on 28 February 2012 12:00:00 PM. © They gave us a republic... - Front Page

By @KKYellowDog

Uploaded by masterofacdcsuckaS on Dec 5, 2007:

Lyrics:
Huh!
Yeah, we're comin' back then with another bombtrack
Think ya know what it's all about
Huh!
Hey yo, so check this out
Yeah!
Know your enemy!
Come on!
Born with insight and a raised fist
A witness to the slit wrist, that's with
As we move into '92
Still in a room without a view
Ya got to know
Ya got to know
That when I say go, go, go
Amp up and amplify
Defy
I'm a brother with a furious mind
Action must be taken
We don't need the key
We'll break in
Something must be done
About vengeance, a badge and a gun
'Cause I'll rip the mike, rip the stage, rip the system
I was born to rage against 'em
Fist in ya face, in the place
And I'll drop the style clearly
Know your enemy...Know your enemy!
Yeah!
Hey yo, and dick with this...uggh!
Word is born
Fight the war, fuck the norm
Now I got no patience
So sick of complacence
With the D the E the F the I the A the N the C the E
Mind of a revolutionary
So clear the lane
The finger to the land of the chains
What? The land of the free?
Whoever told you that is your enemy?
Now something must be done
About vengeance, a badge and a gun
'Cause I'll rip the mike, rip the stage, rip the system
I was born to rage against 'em
Now action must be taken
We don't need the key
We'll break in
I've got no patience now
So sick of complacence now
I've got no patience now
So sick of complacence now
Sick of sick of sick of sick of you
Time has come to pay...
Know your enemy!
Come on!
Yes I know my enemies
They're the teachers who taught me to fight me
Compromise, conformity, assimilation, submission
Ignorance, hypocrisy, brutality, the elite
All of which are American dreams (8 times)
All of which are American dreams
All of which are American dreams
All of which are American dreams
All of which are American dreams
All of which are American dreams
All of which are American dreams
All of which are American dreams

video details and more

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheyGaveUsARepublic-FrontPage/~3/44x4xHbTOvc/songs
-to-fight-the-plutocracy-by-know-your-enemy

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Education on the Cheap

post from The American Prospect on 28 February 2012 11:54:39 AM. © The American Prospect

Publicly funded online schools run by private companies have been controversial with teachers groups and some education advocates since they started to take off a few years. But the concept of educating kids by computer has a strong appeal?not just among lawmakers, but also among portfolio managers and investors. The two biggest companies offering online education?K12, Inc. and Connections Academy?are both for-profit, and until recently K12 had been a stock-market favorite. But an article this week on Seeking Alpha, a major investment website, casts doubt on the long-term profitability of K12 in light of poor student results.

In the past few years, school districts and charter schools have increasingly subcontracted out certain operations to either Connections Academy or K12, Inc. In many states, lawmakers embraced the idea, which promised to bring private-sector efficiency to education. Online education also offered an idyllic image: kids can take classes anywhere, at times that work for them. Students with special needs can have tailor-made classes.

But poor student performance has plagued these programs. The K12 virtual academies in several states show high "churn" rates?students enrolling and then leaving the schools. According to some reports, teachers sometimes teach up to 70 students, which delivers bigger profits but poor test scores. The increased scrutiny has left some lawmakers concerned about the policies around online education and less eager to expand existing programs. That's a big problem for companies that rely on public dollars for a big portion of their profits.

"The growth of the student bodies themselves are a clear testament to the popularity of the school choice and charter school movement, as well as K12?s comprehensive online marketing and enrollment advisory efforts," writes Roddy Boyd in the Seeking Alpha story. "Just as evident, however, is another reality: the fact that these cyber schools might as well have a turnstile as their logo for the volume of withdrawals they experience."

Boyd is hardly the first person to notice the disturbing "churn" rates at K12 schools. A New York Times story last year excoriated the effectiveness of K12 schools, noting particularly the retention problems. ?The kids enroll. You get the money, the kids disappear,? said one professor in the story who had studied for-profit "education management organizations," the technical term for companies like K12. The Times story focused on the problems in Pennsylvania. Boyd further notes that the K12's virtual academies have the same problem across the country. K12-run Ohio Virtual Academy, for instance, has a churn rate of over 51 percent.

Connections and K12 put a lot of resources into public relations. K12, Inc. spends millions on lobbying efforts while Connections Education's Mickey Revenaugh, the executive vice president for sales and marketing, also serves as the private chair for the Education Task Force at the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC is the powerful, Koch-funded organization that helps connect conservative lawmakers and corporations, and has had a major role shaping policy, particularly at the state level.

What's heartening in this case is that it appears that K12's poor results may have investors taking note. Either the company will improve its program at their behest, or policymakers will start shutting the door on the company. Either way, these companies probably won't have much luck if they continue to offer shoddy educations while raking in profits.

It may be easy, then, to say use this as an example of free market, capitalism improving the education system. But you also have to wonder if the emphasis on turning a profit, rather than delivering an optimal education, wasn't the problem in the first place.

Read The Full Article:
http://prospect.org/article/education-cheap

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Final Polls Say Michigan Primary as Close as
Possible

With people currently going to the polls and voting today, the Michigan GOP primary race couldn't be closer. Two final polls of the state show the race essentially tied, with only a single point separating Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. The final PPP has[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/firedoglake/fdl/~3/Jg_-tC-cEek/

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Time to Protest, Sleeping Beauty

In an important article at Salon last week, Linda Hirshman suggests that the past month's ferment on contraception in particular, and reproductive health generally, might reawaken the women's movement. While I'm not sure I agree precisely on her analysis of how feminism went to sleep to begin with?Hirshman doesn't definitively assign blame either?she's absolutely right in this:

For 40 years, women, the majority of the population and the majority of the electorate, have been the Sleeping Beauties of American politics, slumbering obliviously while vigilant and relentless adversaries surround their rights with a thicket of thorn trees.

She suggests that "women" didn't see the danger in the Hyde Amendment, which may be true. Feminists at the time were outraged by it, but by then were effectively being boxed in by other powers. And she's absolutely right to identify some of the smart young feminists who have been working in the past decade to wake us all up, using new tools, tactics, and talking points that resonate better for our time. I deeply hope that Hirshman is correct that a new women's movement may now be waking up.

After reading Hirshman's piece, a colleague asked me why I thought that the LGBT movement had been so successful over precisely the same period that not just the women's movement but most progressive issues had failed. I wrote about the issue for the Prospect in some depth a decade ago, when Bob Kuttner first asked me the same question. But I've had some more thoughts since. Last week I noted how strange it's been to feel that my gay side is winning while my lady side has been backsliding, pretty much at the same crazy pace. So let me explain a bit about the differences I've seen.

The women's movement of the 70s/80s got very, very far, as far as it could, before those women ran out of power. For instance, it's just amazing to think that I started working only about ten years after women had to bring lawsuits to get jobs as reporters or doctors. That breakthrough took a generation's energy. But once they broke in, they couldn't push any farther to create truly family-friendly environments. (Longtime national columnist Ellen Goodman tells the story of coming back to work after having her first child and being asked so often what she was doing about her infant that, finally, she just started saying she'd left the refrigerator open and was sure that would be fine.) The women's movement had a long list of other demands, but no more traction to push for them. Subsidized childcare, flex time, equality in the home, federally funded reproductive health, and much more ended up either disappearing from public discussion or being fought for one by one, which is a recipe for failure. Every now and then a "teachable moment' put another issue on the public agenda?as when Anita Hill's allegations of Clarence Thomas's sexual harassment put every employer in the country on notice that it was illegal. But progress slowed.

Meanwhile, the mainstream news media acted as if the battles had been won and what had been won was putting women in careers.

Feminists fumed at that mischaracterization, but had no power to revise it. At the same time, heterosexual women had to negotiate intimate power struggles within marriages/partnerships, which are extremely difficult to navigate, since the power dynamics between any two people are already complicated. (The power struggle at home is tangled enough when you're the same sex; I send my deepest sympathies to all my nongay sisters.) At home, women had to contend with men's invisible social power, with gendered expectations about each partner's behavior, with the fact that one sex had been trained never to notice dirt while the other sex had been trained that her worth depended on having a clean house. Navigating social change at home is exhausting. Sometimes I think that those personal battles zapped the energy of a generation's worth of women.

LGBT folks were starting from much farther behind. We might have had it a little easier at home, but in public we faced far more direct hatred. We were fighting for our lives?for gay men, quite literally. Both the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the 1990s backlash referenda were unspeakable. But those who were fighting against us were fighting an idea. As I wrote in my 2002 piece on the LGBT culture wars, as more of us started to come out, people realized that they already knew lesbians and gay men?and it became harder to hate us. MTV's "Real World" did us an enormous favor by always putting one of us in that trailblazer reality show, which had a big impact on several generations of young people. Lesbians and gay men already live in every zip code and every family in the country. Accepting us means accepting cousin Akisha, whom you already love and have over to Sunday dinner, and giving up pretending that her "friend" isn't sharing her life.

Here's the difference between the LGBT movement and every other progressive effort: When women?or pretty much any other group?ask for more power, someone else loses power. That's not really true for LGBT folks. The only thing we've been asking for has been recognition and acceptance. That costs nothing. A minority of religious people truly believe we are evil, but they look increasingly foolish. Accepting us into existing social institutions chips away at a particularly anti-feminist intellectual philosophy about gender?Maggie Gallagher, perhaps the chief foe of marriage equality, gets that, which is why she's fighting us tooth and nail--but that's too abstract to sway most people. Making women fully equal?enabling women's bodily, emotional, and intellectual autonomy?is much more personal for most people, and changes far more things. It changes marriages, dating, children's lives, workplaces, social institutions, and whether or not someone has to pick up.

My world has changed since I first came out in the Mesozoic era. Back then, I thought women were easily on the road to full equality, and could rest. Making it possible to introduce "my friend" without fear was far more exciting. That's flipped. Now it feels as if I've won as a lesbian, but that as a woman, things have been utterly static and sometimes worse. Toy aisles are far more gendered than when I was young. There is less access to abortion than when I was young. The gendered wage gap has been effectively stagnant for about fifteen years. I could go on. I deeply hope that the ferment of the past months means, as Linda Hirshman suggests, that the women's movement, that sleeping beauty, is reawakening.

Read The Full Article:
http://prospect.org/article/time-protest-sleeping-beauty

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Actually, Mitt Romney would light his mother on
fire if he thought it would excite the base

Mitt Romney still can't excite the base (Scott Audette/Reuters)Does Mitt Romney ever listen to the crap that comes out of his own mouth?

It's very easy to excite the base with incendiary comments. We've seen throughout the campaign if you're willing to say really outrageous things that are accusative, attacking of President Obama, that you're going to jump up in the polls. I'm not willing to light my hair on fire to try and get support. I am who I am.

This from the guy who's peddled incendiary remarks on a daily basis and flip-flopped on every alleged principle he's ever held in a pathetic attempt to excite the base ... an effort in which he has failed miserably, which explains why he's in the fight of his life in his own home state against Rick freaking Santorum.

Bottom line? Whatever the results are out of Michigan tonight, Mitt Romney loses.