As an (over-)analytical, career, married and childless woman progressing in a mostly desirable career path, I feel compelled to dissect some of the legislation coming out of the escalating Republican War on Women.

First, we frame. Is the goal here marginalizing women because God said Men First!, increasing what is believed to be a dwindling birth rate, moving America forward in innovation and jobs, ensuring that Americans become blue-collar workers while intellectual jobs stay abroad, something not mentioned or a combination of the above? What is the desired end result of passing laws that punish miscarriages, abortions, birth control, equal pay, female career choices and being a single, working mother?

So, if an unmarried woman wants to have sex, she cannot have birth control and must be married. If a married woman wants to do the same, she, too, has no access to family planning. Following that, should she get pregnant, she has to bring the fetus to term to avoid jail time and is allotted little to no maternity leave and equal pay when she returns to work. The time she spent giving birth to that beloved fetus and recuperating from the strenuous experience is not then something to be valued by society, but an opportunity to penalize a woman for having successfully used her uterus for what God intended, something men cannot do. We want you to have children, but you had a child, therefore no longer qualified to earn what your husband or other male peers do. Leave alone the primacy of the unborn fetus but not the actual born child itself.

Then comes the disconnect. This is happening at the same time that gender parity is increasingly more important in the workplace because of heightened recognition that women do the same work as men here and there are only so many of all of us. The pool of qualified professionals grows smaller.  Therefore, issues like fair maternity leave as well as equal pay and promotions are being identified and addressed in corporate America (at least in companies like mine) and it is known that the company that makes benefits more attractive to men and women alike gains the competitive advantage.

Of course, we still have a long way to go. Childbirth, for instance, will one day no longer be considered a short-term disability or long-term career kneecap and the dinosaurs of government and industry who don’t come to terms with this will be left behind to die. (Or they’ll buy themselves politicians and get government subsidies to stay afloat, but that’s not truly sustainable as we’ve repeatedly seen.)

As far as the conservatives go, let them see how far this plan to address low birth numbers or uppity women or whatever alongside the dire national need for qualified workers goes. If most of this War On Women legislation sticks, we’re going to end up with unmarried, childless, working women (tapping into a birth control black market) and equally smart and qualified women simply dropping out of promising careers to stay at home and raise children. Either way, we end up doing less with less and we lose.

Of course, none of this has anything to do with the increase in stay-at-home dads. Or, gasp, shared responsibility. Those men must not really value their paychecks.

While appraising items made in, say, Sri Lanka, the Dominican Republic or China for purchase, I wonder who made it, under what conditions, how they live everyday and, almost concurrently, how this purse will look against a pair of slacks in my closet back at home or that hard drive will satisfy my space requirements, and whether I can get the item for cheaper elsewhere. When the next disaster hits one of these countries, I will most probably send money.

To top it all off, I recognize that to entertain all of these thoughts in one sitting is horrifyingly privileged and, at the same time, all too normal. That we can live with these dichotomies, but that’s life. Then, why do I rage on hearing of the latest young American who moved to New Orleans to “do good” or “make a difference” in the world?

In the wake of Kony 2012 (consider moving out from under your rock if you haven’t heard of this documentary and its fallout yet; on second thought, stay there), writer Teju Cole tweeted up a storm of a response. It started with “From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex.” Six of these followed touching on the injustices levied against minorities and women all the way from the “microaggressions of American racism” to the stark contrast between American foreign policy on certain countries and our sentimentality towards what we consider charity cases in many of those same nations. Cole then hashed all of this out in a long-form Atlantic essay that is so civilized while not holding back. Please read it, take it all in and return.

Amen to our not-really-post-racial society, the repulsiveness of “civilized” journalism about topics inherently messy and barbaric and it being way past time we reclaim the ability to talk openly and directly about issues that pertain to us, especially when people who are not us do so fearlessly. Think Trayvon Martin, Wendell Allen, Robert Bales and even Joseph Kony and Jason Russell. But, here, I want to address the White Savior Complex specifically (leaving out “Industrial” on purpose for now, I’ll get to that later).

I disagree with Cole. I completely agree with him. Again with that pesky co-existing duality.

American sentimentality is a tremendously useful thing. It’s what drives the haves to replenish food banks and medical supplies in disaster-ravaged areas and offer money to people who need it NOW, to make it to TONIGHT, much less tomorrow. Back in 2008, when a group of us in New Orleans loaded up supplies for the United Houma Nations Old Store after Hurricane Gustav laid waste to Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes in southern Louisiana, a volunteer asked, “What’s the point in taking all of these things down there if Hurricane Ike will come along next and wipe their homes off the map?” Another volunteer replied, “They’re still alive and need these things now, to make it to that next hurricane.” Even if there are grim and farther-reaching political reasons behind floods, wars and homelessness, up to and including the way we ourselves vote, those in need are in need right now. Food, drugs and money – stat.

I also noted at the time that the hurricane-flood victims themselves acknowledged the batshit-insane but economically-real logic with which they live in coastal Louisiana. In the interest of that cherished due diligence, let’s understand that those being helped are not utterly ignorant of their circumstances, too.

They spoke of the irony of working for [the offshore oil and gas] industry that destroys their land and ecosystem but offers them a steady paycheck. If they give up working as oilmen and start a petition for the removal of oil-producing infrastructure from their area, how else will they stay economically viable?  Everyone agreed that digging their own graves is what feeds them, but their hands are tied.

But, when we went down from New Orleans to the southern parishes after days of the roads being closed off by FEMA and other authorities, when the midwest-based First Draft crew came down to New Orleans to gut houses that had been allowed to flood in the first place and then fester for months thanks to federal-state-local government turf wars, we did so only on being invited by homeowners and communities themselves, to address very specific material wants and knowing fully well that the loss these folks suffered was our loss, too. That, as First Draft’s Athenae has tattooed on her arm since: Our fate is your fate. Intent, “[connecting the dots and seeing] the patterns of power behind the isolated ‘disasters’” and having a clue before intervention. This is where I fully agree with Teju Cole.

It goes back to Nicholas Kristof’s response to Cole’s tweets in which he says, “It seems even more uncomfortable to think that we as white Americans should not intervene in a humanitarian disaster because the victims are of a different skin color.” Good grief, way to miss the point entirely. White is not just a skin color, Mr. Kristof, it’s also a state of mind and an economic paradigm. To put it in more blunt terms, even though my husband is white and understands the instant privilege that comes with the territory, I have more in common with boojie America than he does solely based on our respective families’/societies’ economic backgrounds and prevailing notions of success. To intervene with this mindset and little prior research into people’s cultures, what they consider home and their larger sociopolitical picture is nothing short of cultural proselytism.

With this in mind, too many times have I seen bright, young things armed with college degrees, blogs, social media cred and TED/Davos appearances come to New Orleans to “make a difference,” to “save them because they can’t save themselves.” They show up, make Connections, tweet a lot about Warehouse District parties and their new Friends in the Lower Ninth and Treme, raise some money for the latest charitable organization by getting a big corporation involved (which only gets the company more advertising and the community unsustainably dependent on a large outside source for financing and survival), find that they actually need money and real jobs to live in New Orleans, grow bored of keeping the charitable-organization-that-has-taken-on-a-life-of-its-own alive and weary of living amid the people they came to help and leave for New York or Los Angeles leaving a mess behind for someone else to clean up.

Because it is the only way they know how. And this is what I mean by intent: your only goal should be to want to help people restore or change themselves with self-respect based on their own cultural and economic dispositions and not remake them and their home in your image, much less feel good about yourself, pad your resume and make some money in the process.

Real help is not a sanitary or unique solution. Never ever help from a place of pity, misplaced self-confidence, an attempt to define your identity in externalities, self-justification or, worst of all, with no respect for the fact that the people you want to save are most probably doing their best to save themselves. Find out more about that and help that or get out of the way.

As for Industrial, this Charitable Behavior also reminds me a lot of emails from budding entrepreneurs asking if they can do you a favor by guest-writing on your blog about gardening equipment or child-rearing when that’s clearly not your territory or are Just Plain Clueless. And then you build up a whole infrastructure around it with flashy conferences in exotic locales and, there you have it, your insta-money-making scheme: Sound passionate about a current hot philanthropic topic, put a logo on it, cash in. You know why I like Warren Buffett? Because he made and still makes money honestly and doesn’t look blatantly inauthentic doing it.

I keep going back to First Draft because they are a great model of how to be (relatively more) privileged and effect real change. Girl loves her sexy boots and specialty soaps but, every single day, the time, money, sweat and tears Athenae and the other bloggers pour into no-bullshit, informational and passionate posts about politics, society and foreign policy and fundraisers for vetted causes – it’s amazing and stuff gets done. You would never see her or some others post the Kony documentary’s promo video as it is and then say something trite about the power of story, because (journalists, take note) they know the story changes based on who’s telling it. It’s so easy to feel good.

Please send money to Mexico. Also read up on why this most recent earthquake was destructive but not deadly, research our political relationship with Mexico, write your politicians on the way we treat Mexicans (and perceived Mexicans)  in America and think about how foreign stories are reported in our mainstream media. The more we inform ourselves, the more we participate and help in a really effective way, and the less antiseptic we are in our interaction with those different from us.

At the very least, it helps us recognize that the world is full of people different from us and they are all worthy of the same respect we expect. That right there is a ton of help.

Watching Build It Bigger’s Battle Machines episode, I was reminded of a troubling thing: American “defense contractors” and their subcontractors who have little to no experience and bid on projects that come down to life or death for our soldiers in combat … and call themselves capitalists and patriots.

Before you read on, consider this: Much like with patients and doctors in the case of the healthcare debate, neither folks who have to live in the filth nor those who actually work in the energy industry get a say in the policymaking. In other words, this conversation is held at all the wrong levels.

Shikha Dalmia at Reason:

… the part that has liberals really foaming at the mouth is [Rick Perry's] suggestion to severely check the power of the EPA and give states more leeway to set their own environmental regulations. The standard criticism of such rollbacks is that states, released from Uncle Sam’s iron fist, will engage in a race to the bottom and gut environmental standards to attract business. But states have a far greater incentive than distant bureaucrats to look for ways to protect their natural resources with minimal sacrifice of economic and other priorities.

A state government is no less reckless and capricious than its federal counterpart. Are we sure states truly have the wellbeing of all of their people as well as the required long-range thinking to hold themselves up to such high standards? Ask and the Louisiana news will answer.

The Gambit | Landry, Vitter Meet With Oil Regulators On Drilling

“The purpose of this meeting is to make sure the information given to us in Washington is the same going on here as well,” Landry said. “And how we as legislators can help to address the lack of permitting going on in the Gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon incident. We hope it’s a step in the right direction to getting the Gulf back up and running and people back to work.”

… “These are great American jobs we need to preserve and build here,” Vitter said. “As these two charts illustrate, it’s major revenue for the federal government to help with lessening deficit and debt. (It’s the) second biggest source of revenue (for) the federal government after only federal income tax.”

What about the tourism and fisheries jobs and protecting the natural environment for our descendants along with responsibly drilling for oil? But wait, let’s look at how many of those great American jobs we will preserve here. Dalmia again, from the same article as above:

[Job] projections are notoriously difficult to make accurately, and there is every reason to believe that Perry’s claims, largely lifted from oil industry studies, are way off. Michael Levi, senior fellow for energy and environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, estimates that Perry’s plan will create 620,000 jobs at best [vs. 1.2 million as predicted]. If Levi is right, Perry has needlessly opened himself up to attack by using inflated numbers. And for what? The main point of energy liberalization is not to create jobs. It’s to make cheap and reliable energy available to individuals and businesses. That’s the message that Perry should be hammering.

Cheap, reliable, fast. You pick two. Anyway, I’ll leave you with that.

Remember when TSA had this program and then cancelled it? Yeah, they’re resurrecting it. I would say Hallelujah but who knows whether it will make it out of the (second) trial?

Pilot Starts at Select Airports to Further Enhance Security

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) [on October 4th, 2011] announced that it began testing a limited, voluntary passenger pre-screening initiative with a small known traveler population at four U.S. airports.

… During this pilot, TSA will use pre-screening capabilities to make intelligence-based risk assessments on passengers who voluntarily participate in the TSA PreCheck program and are flying domestically from one of the four pilot sites: Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International, Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County, Dallas/Fort Worth International and Miami International airports. Eligible participants include certain frequent flyers from American Airlines and Delta Air Lines as well as members of the Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP’s) Trusted Traveler programs, including Global Entry, SENTRI, and NEXUS, who are U.S. citizens and are flying on participating airlines. If successful, TSA plans to expand the pilot to include additional airlines, as well as other airports that participate in CBP’s Global Entry program, once operationally ready.

As a Global Entry customer, I cannot say enough good things about how efficiently the program gets you into the country after international trips. No standing in an hour-long line for a CBP/INS agent to stamp you through – just scan your passport, have your fingerprints and picture taken and off you go. It saved me from missing a crucial, cross-country connecting flight once.

Once you get to the domestic terminal, however, the system falls apart. All that Trusted Traveler stuff is out the window and, if you opt out of the millimeter-wave scanner as I often do, you are ripe for non-standard groping and explosive checks by a domestic TSA agent. The program that lets you into your own country doesn’t work in your country. The Department of Homeland Security was formed to reduce departmental redundancy and waste, merge databases and increase cross-organizational cooperation and overall efficiency. So, why in the name of “eliminating government waste” don’t CBP and TSA processes talk to one another? And why am I treated like a pariah in my own country, and especially after I went through the pains and paid to be pre-approved as a low-risk traveler?

All of this went through my mind in Hobby airport last week when, for the very first time in all my years of flying and patdowns, my nether region was rather unprofessionally and vigorously probed and patted down by a burly, female TSA agent before I got on a routine flight to Dallas. (Which incidentally was grounded and cancelled due to inclement weather in the north – figures.)

But, what really gets me comes from this last sentence in Mominem’s latest post on this same topic: “I don’t expect any airline to be able to block anyone from using government services we all pay for.” Mominem is a preferred AirTran customer and he was kept from the PreCheck line by a Delta gate agent who gave access to that line to preferred Delta customers. Leaving aside for a minute the defeat of purpose in allowing airline gate agents to have anything to do with security pre-screening, that entire barrier between the passenger and the flight gate was made possible by the taxpayer. Security priority and better treatment given to those who have flown more miles with a private airline and/or have had to pay extra to become a trusted traveler seems cross purposes when the intent and follow-through should be standard, courteous and timely service for all, regardless of race, age, gender, number of frequent flyer miles. Anything less makes me wonder how seriously our government-security complex takes this whole business.

My question is quickly answered when O’Hare TSA pulls aside a passenger for wearing this Pardon My Hindi tshirt.

A Hindu Iyengar uncle in hipster glasses and fedora? Too suspicious, yaar!

• In Space Dust: Your Tax Dollars At Work, Boing Boing’s Maggie Koerth-Baker interviews Attila Kovacs, a University of Minnesota astrophysicist. Kovacs is spot on about the cost of doing science and the altered scientific priorities of once-great corporate research labs, and his final words sum up why I support the government funding of science.

Basic research used to be privately funded in the past, like with Bell Labs. That used to be THE place where basic research was happening. But somehow that model has disappeared and I think it’s because corporations are looking for more short term goals. There’s really no corporation doing basic research in the same way Bell Labs did.

… Corporations are interested in proprietary technologies and getting out ahead of another company. They won’t share what [they discover] and they’ll use it exclusively to their advantage. They’ll file patents and protect their turf. And that’s fine. But the reason we want public funding is that we want to generate public knowledge. We want to share this with the world. We want it to be immediately available to everyone around us. Science doesn’t have trade secrets. I think public funding is essential to keep it that way.

• Cousin Pat on historic political revolutions and the Occupy Wall Street Movement

If they don’t step up from spectacle to actual involvement (as the Tea Party ended up doing successfully), even at the most local levels where the work is the most tedious, they aren’t going to change one damn thing.

After boarding a couple dozen flights in the last few months, I am an old hand at the opt-out and full body pat down. One doesn’t have to be a statistician or a mind-reader to figure out why underpaid TSA hands “randomly” pick me for the millimeter-wave scanner. These workers are so used to passengers robotically (and tiredly) doing exactly what TSA tells them to do that it’s an opportunity to remind that there is such a thing as “a right to opt out.” There’s also a certain humor in the government running its latex-gloved finger around my jeans waistband before I board a domestic flight when I’ve paid for and used the United States Global Entry program, “a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) program that allows expedited clearance for pre-approved, low-risk travelers upon arrival in the United States.” Government waste that’s a-ok with certain parties because it’s done in the name of national defense obviously. We are all safer from my pre-approved, low-risk behind being patted down for everyone to see when fake pilot IDs and uniforms are now enough to bypass airport security.

So, why the security theater?

A new study published by the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes shows that despite the ton of taxpayer dollars spent on decision analysis and modeling the likelihood of terror events, it’s all for naught because the [voting] “public will largely neglect normative likelihood considerations when judging the actions of policy makers.” In other words, because “people have particular difficulty dealing with probabilistic information for small likelihood events, like those for terrorist attacks” and politicians are more interested in the votes of these people than preventing terror, actual threats with higher likelihood of occurrence go ignored.

Schneier himself brings this back to the TSA and their airport practises: “Are they doing their best to mitigate terrorism, or are they doing their best to ensure that if there’s a terrorist attack the public doesn’t blame the TSA for missing it?”

From Bloomberg:

President Barack Obama is proposing expanding tax credits and a “reverse boot camp” to help veterans find jobs and adjust to civilian life as part of an effort to curb veteran unemployment.

I hear “Reverse Boot Camp” and this recent Oatmeal graphic is all I see.

This image belongs to Matthew Inman a.k.a The Oatmeal who is awesome.

I’d make a great drill instructor.

Never mind that Swartz is a researcher, JSTOR makes it difficult for users to download articles to which they have rightful access and the government (your taxpayer money) pays for much of the research that ends up in journals not made available to you. Culture is anti-rivalrous as the great Nina Paley likes to point out. “Anti-rivalrous goods increase in value the more they are used.”

Boston Globe: Activist charged with hacking

Aaron Swartz, a Cambridge web entrepreneur and political activist who has lobbied for the free flow of information on the Internet, was charged in federal court with hacking into a subscription-based archive system at MIT and stealing more than 4 million articles, including scientific and academic journals [while a student]. Swartz already had regular, licensed access to the database through his work at Harvard. But prosecutors said he was so committed to the immediate acquisition of materials that he used special software to enable the quick downloading. He changed the Internet protocol address on his computer several times to circumvent security guards, according to court records.

The American Prospect on this matter

It’s easy to forget that there’s something at all controversial or oppositional about accessing information, or that some people really, really want data to be free — and others don’t. Open data has been mainstreamed. Whatever hacker-culture roots the free information movement might have are subsumed by the idea that simply everyone agrees that data is meant to be free, and the struggle is over the mechanics of freeing it. That’s never really been true, as Swartz’s case makes plain.

The Huffington Post:

JSTOR’s the one that should be in prison, man, for locking up knowledge.

Note that JSTOR has no issues with Swartz and that is the government coming down on him for what they argue is felony computer hacking. Reminds me of War Games. “I mean have you gotten any insight as to why a bright boy like this would jeopardize the lives of millions?”

Yesterday’s Houston Chronicle:

Texas’ main electric grid operator is warning customers to reduce their usage during the peak power demand hours of 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. today as high temperatures and unexpected power plant outages will stretch supplies.

Today on Capitol Hill:

An amendment from Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) defunding the Energy Department’s standards for traditional incandescent light bulbs to be 30 percent more energy efficient starting next year was approved rather anticlimactically by voice vote.

Cut off nose, meet spited face.