ubernoir wrote:

Look at Michelle Obama: She has segued seamlessly from an active professional life as a highly paid hospital executive to her current incarnation as fashion plate, doting mom and demure sex object, posing for Vogue in a hot fuchsia frock that shows plenty of skin. What's most surprising about this metamorphosis? How few people are objecting to it.
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And guess what? In the long battle between the two styles of feminism, Brown, for now, has won. Just look at the culture around us. Ms. Magazine, the earnest publication that defined feminism in the 1970s and '80s, has been replaced on college women's dorm room shelves by sexier, sassier updates such as Bitch and Bust. The four talented, smart -- and feminist -- women of "Sex and the City," who are intent on defining their own lives but are also willing to talk about Manolos and men, look more like Brown's type of heroine than "Sisterhood Is Powerful" readers. The stereotype of feminists as asexual, hirsute Amazons in Birkenstocks that has reigned on campus for the past two decades has been replaced by a breezy vision of hip, smart young women who will take a date to the right-on, woman-friendly sex shop Babeland.
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Then third wave feminism came along, critiquing its staid mothers and reinvigorating -- while simultaneously giving some political heft to -- the kind of gestures Brown had set out in her 1962 manifesto. Third wave feminism is pluralistic, strives to be multiethnic, is pro-sex and tolerant of other women's choices. It has led to an embrace of what was once so politically suspect -- the notion that you can be a "lipstick lesbian" or a "riot grrrl" if you want to be, that you can choose your persona and your freedom for yourself.

But that very individualism, which has been great for feminism's rebranding, is also its weakness: It can be fun and frisky, but too often, it's ahistorical and apolitical. As many older feminists justly point out, the world isn't going to change because a lot of young women feel confident and personally empowered, if they don't have grass-roots groups or lobbies to advance woman-friendly policies, help women break through the glass ceiling, develop decent work-family support structures or solidify real political clout.

Feminism had to reinvent itself -- there was no way to sustain the uber-seriousness and sometimes judgmental tone of the second wave. But feminists are in danger if we don't know our history, and a saucy tattoo and a condom do not a revolution make.

The fact is, we know the answers to Western women's problems: The way is mapped out, the time for theory is pretty much over. We know the laws and the policies we need to achieve full equality. What we lack is a grass-roots movement that will drive the political will. "Lipstick" or lifestyle feminism won't produce that movement alone.

review by Naomi Wolf

This is common amongst any "movement" or "revolution". It's been co-opted by capitalism. "Hey there hipster, wanna join the trend in [insert counter-culture meme here]? Well, come by the shop and get outfitted." This is my complaint about the 60's Baby Boomers. If you ever strike up a conversation, apparently everyone back then was a hippie and went to Woodstock. Of course, the numbers tell differently. But ahh... romantic reminiscence. We were all cool in high school. We were all heavy and deep. It makes me sick.

RE: Book Review: 'Bad Girls Go Everywhere : The Life of Helen Gurley Brown' by Jennifer Scanlon - washingtonpost.com

Decius wrote:

flynn23 wrote:

Decius wrote:

If this is true, the leadership of the Bush administration could go to prison. This could be very, very bad for the country.

How so? I mean, I can see it being very divisive, and certainly distracting, but given the long list of potential infractions, what do you think should happen?

Simply put, I don't believe this was spin.

During this long period of delay and potential litigation, ugly passions would again be aroused. And our people would again be polarized in their opinions. And the credibility of our free institutions of government would again be challenged at home and abroad.

In the end... the verdict of history would even be more inconclusive with respect to those charges arising out of the period of his Presidency...

My conscience tells me clearly and certainly that I cannot prolong the bad dreams that continue to reopen a chapter that is closed. My conscience tells me that only I, as President, have the constitutional power to firmly shut and seal this book. My conscience tells me it is my duty, not merely to proclaim domestic tranquility but to use every means that I have to insure it.

That's where I thought you were going. It's clear, particularly when you look at the wiretapping situation, that the White House is not going to give up the expansion of power it received during the Bush Administration so easily, regardless of its morality.

RE: The torture row is not going to go away.

Of course the whole notion of repairing bank balance sheet is a lie and misdirection. The balance sheets we should want to see repaired are household balance sheets. Banks have failed us profoundly. We want them reorganized, not repaired. A world in which the banks are all fixed but households are still broken is worse than what we have right now. Too-big-to-fail banks restored to health are too-big-to-fail banks restored to power. The idea that fixing legacy banks is prerequisite to fixing the broad economy is a lie perpetrated by legacy bankers.

Dark musings, 2009-03-24 | The Big Picture

This is interesting because of motive. People probably don't realize this but Shell and BP are the biggest producers of solar and wind products in the world. With them exiting the market, I bet it's because they can't get the margins that they thought they'd get because of all the newcomers into the market. Biofuels are a smarter investment IMO, but carbon sequestration is a technical hack.

Slashdot | Shell Ditches Wind, Solar, and Hydro

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Decius wrote:

There have been a number of articles lately about people cutting costs by cancelling/cutting cable TV service.

This is an interesting discussion.

I think this revelation was "old" when my good friend Luke Kanies uttered out loud to the Tennessee Legislature that all content would be packetized within 5 years. This was in 2002 and he was right. At the time, the MPAA was trying to strong arm legislation so that they could control the pipes in anticipation of this happening. It didn't work and I think you will see a paradigm shift in the next 2 years as people wake up to this reality. With the exception of live sports or other "noteworthy" events (Pres speaking, breaking news, etc), there's very little reason to have cable in its packaged form. You can download almost anything and in a lot of cases, the quality is good. Sometimes better than cable due to poor compression.

But this got me thinking about something else that has been brewing. I've been saying for a few weeks that all of this 'chaos' in the economy is really the result of a transition to an information based economy. All of the disintermediation that we were yapping about in the early-mid 90's when the internet came of age has happened, and now we're seeing the effects. As institutions from the 20th century come crumbling down because they can no longer control the distribution of information.

This has happened in retail, automotive, finance, real estate, the content industries (movies, music, news, etc), and is about to happen in health care and government. This has some MAJOR implications, which we are feeling very much at the moment.

For one, with as interconnected as everything is globally, this type of instability in institutions has massively cascading effect on the world.

The other is that the entire nature of "work" and "career" is also changing. No longer are we safer or even more productive in large organizations. In fact, competition is so fierce and the need for adaptability so great, that large organizations have a hard time even picking priorities, much less executing on them. I think that a new era of small teams or individuals will take over, as the building blocks of commerce.

RE: Cancel Cable TV

But I submit there is a solution -- a variant of an argument that I've suggested for stopping cheating on Digg, or building Wikia search into a meritocratic search engine, or helping the best writers rise to the top on Google Knol. The solution is sorting based on ratings from a random sample of users. The remainder of this speculation will be very theoretical, and will at times seem like a Rube-Goldberg approach to what should be a simple problem. But at each juncture, the complications to the algorithm are motivated by an argument that anything simpler would not work. At many points along the way, it will be tempting to throw up one's hands and say, "Why go to all this trouble, the existing system works well enough." But this statement is hard to quantify with any actual evidence -- unless you're just using the circular definition above, that whatever rises to the top is automatically the "best".

Decius, will you please give this guy a swift kick in the ass?

Slashdot | Censorship By Glut

The administration decided that using billions of dollars to buy troubled assets of financial institutions at the current time was "not the most effective way" to use the $700 billion bailout package, he said.

The announcement marked a major shift for the administration which had talked only about purchasing troubled assets as it lobbied Congress to pass the massive bailout bill.

Bait n switch?

Paulson: Government won't buy troubled bank assets - Yahoo! News

Our agenda puts the interests of America’s farmers, families and communities ahead of the fast-food industry’s. For that industry and its apologists to imply that it is somehow more “populist” or egalitarian to hand our food dollars to Burger King or General Mills than to support a struggling local farmer is absurd. Yes, sun food costs more, but the reasons why it does only undercut the charge of elitism: cheap food is only cheap because of government handouts and regulatory indulgence (both of which we will end), not to mention the exploitation of workers, animals and the environment on which its putative “economies” depend. Cheap food is food dishonestly priced — it is in fact unconscionably expensive.

This is an amazing article that I highly urge you to read through. There are many facets covered, and it is sweeping in the issues that it raises and guilds, but I can't help but think that food is the absolute most important thing to get "right". It impacts our health, the environment, our culture and society, our security, our economy, and the land that we live on. Lots of things might seem 'closer' at hand to needing to be fixed, but food cuts through them all. Please read.

The Food Issue - An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief - Michael Pollan - NYTimes.com

I am talking about striving in our own professions and civic lives for what we ask — what we demand and expect — our elected leaders to deliver: more integrity, less phoniness and more consideration of the community.

I'll volunteer my vocation as an example. Perhaps 95 percent of the American public thinks the news media are "part of the problem." The other 5 percent work in news or don't own televisions. Our craft is seen as tabloid, divisive, serially obsessive, gluttonous for the trivial, argumentative, biased in sneaky ways and distorted. And the market seems to be saying to us, "Go away, we won't pay!"

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