Category Archives: The XX Factor

Search the Clouds For A Star To Guide Us

Posted by Tata on

Representative Steve King (R-Magical Thinking) either doesn’t believe contraception prevents conception or will say any goddamn thing a man in a dress tells him:

“The objection that the Catholic Church and I have to the morning after pill,” King told MSNBC’s Martin Bashir, “is because it ends the life of an unborn baby.”

[…] BASHIR: As you know, sir, the contraceptive pill doesn’t abort a pregnancy. It prevents a pregnancy from happening. That’s not what I’m talking about…

KING: Well, I really don’t concede that. And that’s not either the Catholic Church’s position.

It doesn’t matter what his position is nor what position the Catholic Church takes; neither has any bearing on what the morning after pill actually does, including the secondary effect of getting these bastards out of our bedrooms.

He’s entitled to his delusions; we are entitled to discuss them and what they mean to our lives. Please pass his words on in the hope that they will follow him all his douchebag days.

Thou Shalt Not Quote Me Happy

Posted by Tata on

When I start paying attention, everyone is already talking.

Tata: I’m bored.
Tata: You’re WHAT?
Tata: Now, that is a SHAME!
Tata: I object to that objection!
Tata: Look, we’ve got stuff to do. Shut up, crazy people!
Tata: Will this give me wrinkles? Because this had better not give me wrinkles!
Tata: Are you eating a cookie?

I may be thick-skinned, but it’s skin I’m aware I should be taking better care of, so I was not exactly surprised when last night someone sat on the couch chattering about useless crap and this morning, I slathered my epidermis with moisturizing goo. There, uselessness! Take your irritating, time-wasting chatter and begone! Two more goo-coats and I should be itch-free. In the meantime, I bet Jeff Bezos wishes for a hot tub full of cortizone cream.

When you ask Iris “is abortion wrong?” the Android app will answer:

Yes, abortion is wrong. The Lord has said, “You shall not murder,” (Exodus 20:13). The life that is growing within the mother is a child, a baby. The Bible looks at the life in the womb as a child. Thanks!

The blame, however, doesn’t belong to the company that develops Iris. At least not entirely, because you could also argue that they are ultimately responsible for the answers its app gives.

After its popularity explosion om[sic] the Android platform, Dexetra decided to partner with Q&A engine ChaCha to expand its search abilities. And that’s where the problems truly are. ChaCha—incidentally, a derogatory Spanish word for cleaning lady—is a company that is partially funded by Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos and founded by Scott Jones, the inventor of Gracenote, the music database that powers parts of Apple’s iTunes.

If you go to ChaCha’s website and ask the same question, you will get exactly the same answer. If you ask Iris “is abortion right?” then it will provide a more neutral answer: “Abortion is a tricky issue—whether it’s right or wrong should be up to the mother to decide.” But if you ask again if she’s pro-choice, she will admit that yes, she’s “actually pro-life”, arguing that “every embryo is a life and a miracle.”

Scratchy! We have blasted our way to a new and record-breaking depth when electronic devices now preach about the miracle of life. Look, life is not a miracle. A few million years ago, maybe it was. We don’t know. Now it’s a habit like smoking or thinking Bill Kristol is merely stupid and not evil. No, Bill Kristol is mostly evil with a spicy dash of stupid, just to change things up, and thinking he doesn’t mean what he says is one of those bad habits that protects us from understanding that lots of terrible people mean what they say and we are surrounded by them. Anyway, life: not a miracle anymore, if it ever was. Living things reproduce and they’re so successful at it that people on TV keep arguing that massive and mass-produced bombs are better at stopping reproduction than small, regular doses of chemicals. I mean, that’s what they’re saying, isn’t it? And now our phones say it, too, albeit in suddenly diplomatic terms:

Update: hours after this article was published, ChaCha is changing the answers to those questions and, I’m sure, frantically searching for others. That’s good ChaCha, as good as the fact that we have all the captures and video with their old answers. Here are some of ChaCha’s new answers, as reported by readers:

Is abortion wrong?

Many people believe abortion is wrong because their God teaches that all human life is sacred. However, many people believe that it is wrong to bring a child into the world if the parents are unfit due to drug problems, financial instability, or if it was a result of rape or incest among many other reasons. I believe it is a personal choice. You must do what you believe is right. It may be best to talk with family, friends, counselors, or a religious leader before making any decision.

Is rape ever justified?

No, I do not think so. You might devise a justification in your mind, an unenlightened culture might condone it, but justifying sexual physical violence against another human is always wrong.

Many other people believe that a woman should bring a child into the world when she’s good and ready and nobody else’s opinion matters. Many believe sex can be fun and interesting and a delightful way to clear the complexion and who’d want to fuck people that don’t, anyway? If you need an app to tell you right from wrong you’re already lost.

And, yes, it was a Girl Scout cookie.

A Rose In A Fisted Glove

Posted by Tata on

Tamales are a bit of an undertaking, no trouble at all and completely worth the work.

I needed a weekend offline after I got into it on Facebook with an otherwise liberal dude about abortion. At this point, I’m beyond sick of otherwise liberal dudes, and wish they would drop all pretense of decency and wear their He Man Woman Haters Club stripes on the outside instead of on their Underoos. Anyway, I needed peace in my house, and banana leaves.

Now I’m out of banana leaves.

Stubborn Beauty Stubborn Beauty

Posted by Tata on

Just over a year ago, Butterscotch made a radical proposal. You knit, she said. Knit a baby blanket for the hospital over yonder, blotting out the sun to our south and west.

Tata: What? No. I’m a wretcherous knitter. I knit for lonesome cats, who do not care that I lack skill and of course it’s all about me. Wait, why are you doing this?
Butterscotch: Some people have babies and no blankets. It would be nice if we could send home every baby with a blanket.
Tata: How many babies are born there every month?
Butterscotch: I don’t know.
Tata: Do you have some sense of how many infants are born into poverty in that hospital?
Butterscotch: Nope.
Tata: So you and that group of nice people with yarn fixations in common are knitting indiscriminately for people who may not need your help, but also for people who may not have anything at all?
Butterscotch: That’s our plan.
Tata: I gotta mull over this one.

Despite what we see in Washington budget fights that leave the poor, sick, elderly and vulnerable high and dry, lots of people are motivated to help strangers. People are doing projects everywhere and it can be tricky to find a way to contribute to the common good without feeling like one is being conned. Some projects are presented with uncomfortably vague aims like Make a child smile. That is a project that probably doesn’t need doing. I don’t know about you, but I’m not leaving the house for that. The best thing for a perplexed prospective volunteer to do is find an existing organization with established aims and auditable balance sheets and join in. Maybe a good-deed-doer ladles green beans at the soup kitchen. That’s a good thing to do and can be done in March or July, probably with greater ease than in December, when all the other good-deed-doers try to horn in on the deed-doing action. Hey! Good deeds don’t even need holiday-based timetables. On any given Thursday night, a person could volunteer to ladle green beans.

But there’s more to it, because when we do good-deedery that doesn’t need doing, we create stuff and ill-feeling that we’d might be better off without. Say I decide my local women’s shelter needs new curtains because I just learned how to make curtains on my shiny new Singer Sewing Machine and I want to take that bad boy for a few blistering laps. So I make curtains and discover no one will tell me where the shelter is and I’ve no place to put my good will, let alone those pink gingham formal drapes. This is about me and not about what someone else needs. A little research at the beginning would have helped me create something someone needed, but now I have hostility-fortifying and bank account-draining clutter.

Yes, I’m being a little harsh. Yes, I’m the crazy person who’s been knitting cat blankets for nearly two years and could anyone need 100 rectangles of unevenly knotted yarn? I don’t know, but I trust Georg to tell me when enough is enough, if enough could be enough, if blankets even contribute anything to the common good. I worry about that. Back to Butterscotch: parents of newborns who don’t have blankets need a lot of help, of a kind I can’t offer. They need a pile of money for food and medical care and transportation and furniture and clothing and supplies and safe spaces and good advice and rest and quiet and all of this is what we picture when we imagine a birth. In America, more than half the population has that and can provide the essentials. Maybe Butterscotch’s blankets gather dust in a pile in a hospital closet, I thought, or maybe they go to people who have April-fresh plenty waiting at home for them. What were the odds that this project accomplished anything at all? I didn’t know and went on my way. This is of course all about me.

I know. You’re shocked.

Being judged on something I haven’t developed much skill at goes right to the core of my insecure wussiosity. I couldn’t knit something people would look at because people I don’t know would see how inadequate I was. Boy, was that stupid, because people who do know me cope with that every day. Thing is: figuring that out freed me to try it, so I knitted up a baby blanket. It took a million years and the product of all this knitting and fretting, while soft and potentially cozy, is the kind of thing you accidentally leave on the bus and forget about promptly. To my profound surprise, the object itself just wasn’t a big deal.

The thing is that when Miss Sasha was born, I had nothing. No food, no safe place to live, no furniture, no baby clothes or supplies, no money – not even cab fare home. A lot of people helped me, some of whom I never met, some I should remember but don’t, some I can never repay. So I made a second blanket and then a third and gave them, through existing organizations, to people who could use a little warmth. Probably.

A month ago, Butterscotch asked if I’d participate this year. Though I have doubts about what the project accomplishes, I said I would. Yesterday, Butterscotch sailed up the sidewalk in a windstorm, picked up the blanket and sailed off again. Inspiration, as you know, is the breath of the gods.

And She Was Holding My Right

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The last ten minutes of last night’s 48 Hours made me so angry I was still stomping my foot this morning. You can watch it here, but I’m warning you: you will come away howling. And though it’s a story about murdered women and dismembered body parts, you will know whose head has got to roll.

Pete says the cop is setting someone up. What I hear is a man blotting women out.

Added In the CBS interview, the cop says Shannan Gilbert got disoriented in the woods and drowned. Erin Moriarty gives him several opportunities to walk that back, but he doesn’t. Here we find this nonsense in another form:

Theories going around the past couple weeks were that she got disoriented trying to navigate the mud and thicket, and possibly fell, got stuck and drowned. This should come at some relief to her family who have been searching for the girl since she went missing in May, that it was a random accident and not a sinister and sexually motivated crime by some sicko. Still, getting trapped and dying in a swamp seems like something more apropos for the dessert, the mountains, or the Everglades and not a quiet little beach community on the South Shore.

Gilbert was last seen knocking on a stranger’s door and acting irrationally before she vanished, so clearly she was distressed and not thinking properly, or under the influence, which would not have been unusual in her profession – working as prostitute.

IQs plunge when people talk about prostitutes. No opinion is too stupid to articulate. Most of the victims were women and one was either a fetus or an infant. They were people. And the police are now saying there’s a serial killer on Long Island who dumped bodies in a small area and Shannan Gilbert, fleeing for her life, stumbled into that area, accidentally got separated from her clothing and belongings and drowned.

Yeah. That happened. Sure.

Second addition Ah! Transcript found. Here is where I shouted at the TV.

In most of these cases, police sat on missing persons reports – losing not only time, but valuable evidence. In Shannan Gilbert’s disappearance, security video at the Oak Beach gate that could have provided important clues was apparently recorded over. Shannan’s jacket, which Joe Brewer says sat in his driveway for days, may have been lost.

“This is a tough question Commissioner, but, if that had been a wife of a resident there who had made this panicked 911 call and then suddenly disappears, wouldn’t there have been much more of a search than there was for Shannan Gilbert?” Moriarty asked.

“No, I disagree with you – strongly,” [Suffolk County Police Commissioner Richard] Dormer replies. “Number one, when the officer responded, he didn’t know that that was a sex worker. …he conducted a search in that area. … this was a normal – if there is such a thing – normal missing case of an adult. And the officer responded.”

“This wasn’t normal,” Moriarty says. “She was hysterical. She said, ‘they’re trying to kill me’ on the phone. This wasn’t a normal missing case.”

“I don’t want to, in any way, say that we didn’t do the right thing that morning,” Dormer responded. “The officer – we looked at his actions and he searched that area that morning, which was appropriate…”

And, says Dormer, they have devoted unprecedented manpower and resources to finding Shannan.

“We kept going back there over the months…and never gave up,” he said.

So far, I was only shouting about how a frightened woman is a frightened woman, no matter what job she does, but then there was this that sent me over the edge.

Asked if he believed Shannan Gilbert was murdered, Dormer told Moriarty,” There’s no evidence whatsoever to show that anyone was out to harm her that night…”

OMIGOD, WHAT?

“She clearly was in fear for her life,” noted Moriarty.

“Now, we’re awaiting results of the medical examiner’s examination of her remains. And so we have to have an open mind on that,” Dormer said. “But I would caution right now that we don’t believe that she was a victim of foul play…”

DID HE JUST BLAME THE DEAD WOMAN? HE DID!

Even though the autopsy is not yet complete, the police commissioner says he believes a disoriented Shannan ran into the tangled brush of the marsh – possibly trying to make it to the parkway – and accidentally drowned.

“But does it make sense, Commissioner, that her belongings would be found in one spot, including her clothes and her body a quarter mile away?” Moriarty asked.

“That’s explainable because she’s hysterical,” Dormer replied. “And she’s discarding her possessions as she moves along.”

I SWEAR TO GOD I SAW HIS MOUTH SAY THOSE WORDS.

“But her clothes?”

“Well, her jeans could have come off from running in that environment,” Dormer explaine[d], “and that is a possibility that the jeans came off and she kept running…”

THIS MOTHERFUCKER WILL DO ANYTHING IN HIS POWER TO AVOID SOLVING THIS MURDER, INCLUDING DETACH WHOLLY FROM REALITY.

Vernon Geberth isn’t buying it.

“Did she take her clothes off before she went for a dip,” Geberth asked. “I think that the fact that her purse, her cell phone, and her pants were found in this location and her body someplace else is highly consistent with someone dumping the body and getting rid of evidence.”

Yes. Yes, it is consistent with dumping a body, isn’t it? It’s the Long Island connection, but when Dormer talks, all I hear is the Mayor of Amity refusing to close the beaches as the corpses pile up.

To Go Around the Long Way

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The co-worker I refer to as My Cellmate and I go for walks every day around lunchtime. She sits right on the other side of the cubicle wall, so close I can tell by her Mmm Hmm whether or not her daughter made the doctor appointment. My Cellmate is from a hamlet across the river but local enough that it’s strange she doesn’t know her way around town.

Yesterday, we walked out of the library and across the street, then on to one of the city’s main drags, where we turn and headed toward the park. She pointed across the street.

MC: Is that St. Peter’s Hospital?
Tata: It is.
MC: I was born there! It didn’t look like this then. You can hardly see the old buildings.
Tata: There were three houses in pastel colors they tore down to make room for the new wings. We lived in one of them. My mother walked next door to have my sister Daria.
MC: Do they do abortions here?

I sit next to this woman five days a week and I thought That question could go either way.

Tata: It’s a Catholic hospital. For an abortion, you would go to the other hospital up the street.

I did not say Or that office three blocks up, where I got mine. My Cellmate is not churched-up by any means anymore, but she went to Catholic schools, asks questions about the Catholic high school Dad attended and knows well the church on Somerset Street. Her question could mean a number of things and I gently closed the door on all of them. Unless someone comes at me directly, I’m not going to fight this out in my office. This, however, should be dragged right to the front door of St. Peter’s Basilica.

After months of requests from the BBC, the Spanish government finally put forward Angel Nunez from the justice ministry to talk to me about Spain’s stolen children.

Asked if babies were stolen, Mr Nunez replied: “Without a doubt”.

“How many?” I asked.

“I don’t dare to come up with figures,” he answered carefully. “But from the volume of official investigations I dare to say there were many.”

Lawyers believe that up to 300,000 babies were taken.

The practice of removing children from parents deemed “undesirable” and placing them with “approved” families, began in the 1930s under the dictator General Francisco Franco.

At that time, the motivation may have been ideological. But years later, it seemed to change – babies began to be taken from parents considered morally – or economically – deficient. It became a money-spinner, too.

The scandal is closely linked to the Catholic Church, which under Franco assumed a prominent role in Spain’s social services including hospitals, schools and children’s homes.

Nuns and priests compiled waiting lists of would-be adoptive parents, while doctors were said to have lied to mothers about the fate of their children.

Yes. You read that right. Imagine living this nightmare:

In 1971 Manoli, who was 23 at the time and not long married, gave birth to what she was told was a healthy baby boy, but he was immediately taken away for what were called routine tests.

Nine interminable hours passed. “Then, a nun, who was also a nurse, coldly informed me that my baby had died,” she says.

They would not let her have her son’s body, nor would they tell her when the funeral would be.

Did she not think to question the hospital staff?

“Doctors, nuns?” she says, almost in horror. “I couldn’t accuse them of lying. This was Franco’s Spain. A dictatorship. Even now we Spaniards tend not to question authority.”

The scale of the baby trafficking was unknown until this year, when two men – Antonio Barroso and Juan Luis Moreno, childhood friends from a seaside town near Barcelona – discovered that they had been bought from a nun. Their parents weren’t their real parents, and their life had been built on a lie.

Juan Luis Moreno discovered the truth when the man he had been brought to call “father” was on his deathbed.
Antonio Barroso and Juan Luis Moreno Antonio Barroso and Juan Luis Moreno took their story to the papers – and opened the floodgates

“He said, ‘I bought you from a priest in Zaragoza’. He said that Antonio had been bought as well.”

The pair were hurt and angry. They say they felt like two dogs that had been bought at a pet shop. An adoption lawyer they turned to for advice said he came across cases like theirs all the time.

How can justice include the church in Spain going on in peace – again?

A Lifetime Run Over And Over

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Sometimes when I’m out on the bicycle in traffic, I see things I have to file away to think about later. One of those things has been NJ Transit bus signs in English and Spanish asking women not to abandon their babies.

Last night, I looked up the New Jersey Safe Haven Infant Protection Act site because I was curious about how big a problem abandoned babies might be in the state that has certainly seen highly publicized abandoned baby disasters.

Yeah. That happened here in New Jersey. Twice. In general, though, an abandoned baby anywhere is not the kind of news that penetrates my carefully-constructed cocoon of self-absorption, so this morning, I called the number for further information and asked for just that. Seriously: how big a problem is this? Does it happen every year or just often enough to drive Seth MacFarlane tastelessly up a wall? The woman answering the phone directed me to a series of statistics pages.

Well then. This is certainly a different problem than I imagined. Every year for the last ten, at least four babies have been abandoned in the state, at least one in unsafe circumstances, though the chart does not describe those circumstances or the outcomes. As much as I would like to let the rational mind handle thinking about this matter, I can’t get past knowing what it feels like to have a baby you can’t take care of and not knowing what to do. These numbers hint at a lot of suffering and, strangely in my opinion, that news of Safe Haven protections hasn’t reached everyone. The agencies involved are asking for help.

His Hat Was His Home

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This is just sad:

Has knife; has yet to get a grip.

About the Show

Lisa Lillien is not a nutritionist. She’s just hungry. She’s a “foodologist”, whose Hungry Girl email newsletter reaches 1 million subscribers daily. She invents simple, delicious recipes that are guilt-free, satisfy cravings and taste great without adding lots of extra calories and fat grams to your daily diet. In her series, Hungry Girl stops at nothing to provide us with the answers we all need — what to eat, what to buy, what to cook, how to read labels. She’ll have lots of tips, whether at home or out in the world. Each week Hungry Girl will feature low-calorie recipes and makeovers of fatty favorites; feature survival guides for restaurants and eating situations; alert viewers to shocking (yet fun!) facts about the food we eat; and share all of her secret weapons to “chew the right thing” through her fun and inventive approach to food.

All that emphasis? Yeah, that’s mine. You probably think I’m exaggerating when I say this woman and this show pose an actual threat to idiots fascinated with shiny objects. Watch this culinary crazy train. THAT’S NOT FOOD, IT’S MALNUTRITION ON A PLATE.

There’s a lot wrong with Lisa Lillien’s fun food philosophy that relies so heavily on guilt avoidance and daily dieting; essentially, food is your enemy and you are your enemy and your enemies go dancing every night without you, though they call you up to tell you every exasperating detail. Who develops such an incredibly hostile and fraught relationship with food? Women, of course. Women who’ve been on diets since before glorious puberty tied their paths to svelte fame and fortune into Gordian knots fraying near the bathmat fringe. This isn’t eating for your health, to feed your deeper self the vitamins and nutrients key to building a strong body and a calm, active mind. No, this is colorful self-sabotage and trying to plug the hole where Mommy’s bitterness poured in like icy bilge water. You can never be good enough. Why not skip the flowers and say it with rickets? Though she never mentions vitamins, electrolytes, fiber, grains, calcium, Omega fatty acids or anything else a nutritionist should, Lillien goes on ad nauseam about calories, fat reduction and large portions. She mentions protein, probably because without protein in your diet your hair falls out and the other Real Housewives of your condo complex will TAWK. It’s a prescription for fatigue, bad skin and useless muscles, but if you’re underweight, that’s a rock-hard victory, right?

Wrong. I didn’t spend years horking up every meal and getting over it to lie to you about this shit. Lillien doesn’t seem to have a problem suggesting the most ridiculous, metabolism-wrecking horseshit to people stupid enough think a dozen chocolate cupcakes constitute diet food. Maybe they deserve each other, but maybe they don’t. Certainly, Lillien doesn’t deserve a platform on the Food Network spouting this utter crap for cash.