The Republic of T.

We needed a study to tell us this?

In the largest study of its kind, girls measured up to boys in math in every grade, from second through 11th. The research was released Thursday in the journal Science.

Parents and teachers persist in thinking boys are simply better at math, said Janet Hyde, the University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher who led the study. And girls, who grew up believing it, wound up avoiding harder math classes.

“It keeps girls and women out of a lot of careers, particularly high-prestige, lucrative careers in science and technology,” Hyde said.

That’s changing, albeit slowly. Women are now earning 48 percent of undergraduate college degrees in math; they still lag far behind in physics and engineering.

But in primary and secondary school, girls have caught up, with researchers attributing that advance to increasing numbers of girls taking advanced math classes such as calculus.

I’ve known this all my life. Like I’ve said before, I suck at math. I did well enough to graduate from college.

Then there was college. At my university, the math department had a reputation when it came to algebra. People failed all the time. I did. Actually, I dropped before I failed. People transferred to other universities for a semester in order to take and pass algebra elsewhere, and then returned. I did. I went back to the local college in my hometown, where I took and failed algebra. I went back to my university and worked around it, taking and passing statistics and logic (also known as “math for poets” at my university). All the while, I was struggling with undiagnosed, untreated ADD, and as a result could only handle a partial class load after I hit the wall during my sophomore year.

At the time, there was a loophole when it came to statistics. If I took it and passed it, I would be exempt from taking algebra even though it was a prerequisite for statistics. So, I did. It wasn’t until a semester before I was scheduled to graduate (after taking six years to finish, by going part-time) that I found out different. My graduation advisor made a funny face when she looked over my records, and then informed that the loophole had closed, just before I took statistics. So, I wasn’t exempt. I would have to take algebra and pass it if I wanted to graduate.

I suppose I could have dropped off my books and walked awa. But then, she made another face. There was another loophole. The semester after I was scheduled to graduate, the algebra requirement was going to be dropped from my degree. I thought moment, and told her to move my graduation deadline back a semester. I would take one more elective and wait for the algebra requirement to be dropped. That’s what I did, and I graduated from college withouthaving to take algebra.

And I’ve always, always known girls who could run rings around me in math. (No major feat. By the time he gets to middle school, I’ve no doubt Parker will run rings around me in math. He’s a bright kid.) In fact, the people I knew in school who did best in math were mostly girls.

It’s not a matter of boys being better at math than girls, or vice versa. It’s a matter of some people being better at or more talented or gifted at math than other people. It doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t learn math. I can learn to paint, but no teacher can turn me into a Picasso or a Van Gough. Y’know?

I’m officially blaming it on gas prices, which probably isn’t too far off the mark. Metro ridership in D.C. is way up, and recently hit a new record.

Metro says it counted 854,638 riders on Friday, beating the old record by 4,000 passenger trips. Officials attribute the spike to a Washington Nationals baseball game, a Women of Faith Conference at the Verizon Center and tourists visiting the city.

So far, 20 of Metrorail’s top 25 highest ridership days in its 32-year history have been recorded this year. Many of the busiest days are generated by baseball games or big events like the Cherry Blossom Festival or the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

No wonder I can’t find a seat on the Metro. I used to let packed trains go by, because I could be almost certain that I would get a seat on the next train. That means I’d be able to take out the laptop and use that little bit of quiet time between work and home to catch up on some of the stuff I’ve been wanting to read.

But the trains are all crowded now, and by the time the third packed train goes by, I have to get on or get home late. So, what’s a guy to do?

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I posted earlier about the isle of Lesbos suing entire lesbian sisterhood for exclusive rights to the word “lesbian.” Well, it looks like we can all breath a little easier. The court ruled that the folks who live on Lesbos don’t own the word “lesbian.”

A Greek court Tuesday ruled that a gay rights group can use the word lesbian in its name, stating that the people from the island of Lesbos do not have sole claim to the word, Reuters reported.

A group from the Aegean island filed a lawsuit in June against the Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece, claiming its name was an affront to the residents of Lesbos, who refer to themselves as Lesbians. A Greek court ruled against the islanders.

That’s a relief. Because you know if the court had ruled the other way, somebody would be going to court to “take back” “gay,” “queer,” and anything else they could come up with, and we’d be busted back down to “Urnings,” or some such.

By the time a good idea makes it to Congress — and actually gets some serious consideration — it is no longer an idea whose time has come, but one whose time is way overdue. Such is the case as Congress takes up the issue of CEO pay, while staring in the face yet another expensive, and all but inevitable, taxpayer-financed corporate bailout.

Democrats and Republicans queasy about a federal rescue of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are coalescing around the idea of letting the government slap limits on the multimillion-dollar pay packages of their executives.

Seems reasonable, at a time when the government — with funds provided by you and me — is stepping in with a bailout that could cost upwards of $25 billion, and even $100 billion. It seems even more reasonable when considered alongside the reality that Freddie Mac’s CEO made around $19.8 million in compensation even after the company’s stock lost half its value. Fannie Mae’s CEO didn’t do so bad either, with a $12.2 million paycheck and a $2.2 million bonus.

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Has this ever happened to you? You’re watching television, or maybe it’s on in the background while you do something else (yes, I’m one of those people), and you’ve got the television volume at a comfortable level; loud enough to hear, but not loud enough to shatter eardrums. The program-already-in-progress goes into a commercial break, and the next thing you know some guy is screaming at you to buy OxyClean or some such, causing you to jump about three feet before you dive for the remote, to turn the volume down (only to have to turn it back up again when the show starts.)

Well, Congress may finally do something about it.

No matter what you think you’ve heard, TV commercials really don’t get louder than the programs they accompany.

Production tricks only make them sound like they do. It’s called “inconsistent” or “perceived” loudness. Perceived or not, the problem likely will get worse with digital television.

The annoyance is real enough that U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo is making a federal case of it. Fed up to her ears at being blasted off the couch by commercials, the California Democrat introduced a bill in Congress called CALM — the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act. It would require the Federal Communications Commission to set standards to keep commercials from running at louder volume than the shows around them. A similar rule in England takes effect next month.

“There’s been a shockingly lot of reaction,” said Eshoo aide Jason Mahler, who noted that the bill quickly picked up nine co-sponsors. “It’s all been favorable.”

This has been somewhere near the bottom of my “There Oughta Be a Law” file for a while now, but I’d love to see it passed. Anna, why not slip it quietly (get it) into some “must pass” funding legislation?

I guess I have to admit that I have been drawn in by the Washington Post’s series on the 2001 disappearance/death of Chandra Levy. I’ve been reading each installment as they are published. It’s likeI can’t help it. Before Natalie Holloway, before Elizabeth Smart, before Kristin Smart, before Laci Peterson, before Laurie Hacking, before the Runaway Bride, there was — at least here in D.C. (I don’t know how the story played elsewhere)— there was Chandra Levy.

It’s long since turned into a syndrome. It has several names, and one rather of them popular. I have my own name from it, taken from a scene in Scary Movie.

White Woman in Trouble!

A pretty high school student, knowing the killer is close to breaking through her bedroom door, calls 911 on her PC. Her eyes wide and her heart pounding, she types in her message: “White woman in trouble!” In an instant, her suburban driveway is crowded with cruisers, sirens shrieking and lights flashing, and her wouldabeen slayer is beating a hasty retreat.

And Eugene Robinson has the best working definition.

Someday historians will look back at America in the decade bracketing the turn of the 21st century and identify the era’s major themes: Religious fundamentalism. Terrorism. War in Iraq. Economic dislocation. Bioengineering. Information technology. Nuclear proliferation. Globalization. The rise of superpower China.

And, of course, Damsels in Distress.

But of course the damsels have much in common besides being female. You probably have some idea of where I’m headed here.

A damsel must be white. This requirement is nonnegotiable. It helps if her frame is of dimensions that breathless cable television reporters can credibly describe as “petite,” and it also helps if she’s the kind of woman who wouldn’t really mind being called “petite,” a woman with a good deal of princess in her personality. She must be attractive — also nonnegotiable. Her economic status should be middle class or higher, but an exception can be made in the case of wartime (see: Lynch).

Put all this together, and you get 24-7 coverage. The disappearance of a man, or of a woman of color, can generate a brief flurry, but never the full damsel treatment. Since the Holloway story broke we’ve had more news reports from Aruba this past week, I’d wager, than in the preceding 10 years.

The damsel— the “White Woman in Trouble” — thanks to the Post, is back.

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Not sure if this is going to be a series or not, but sometimes I wonder why — when someone says something with so much obviously wrong with it — no one seems to ask the obvious question. For example, Bill O’Reilly:

On Saturday, former Vice President Al Gore made a surprise appearance at the Netroots Nation convention in Austin, TX. In his speech, Gore praised the gathering of progressives, saying that they are part of an effort to “reclaim the integrity of American democracy.”

While the attendees of Netroots Nation received Gore with enthusiasm, his appearance has caused Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly to declare that Gore has “gone off the deep end.”

On his radio show today, O’Reilly claimed that Gore was now associating himself with the most “hateful group in the country.” “And I’m including the Nazis and the Klan in here,” said O’Reilly.” He then claimed that attending Netroots Nation was “the same as if he stepped into the Klan gathering.”

I haven’t seen anyone asking the obvious question: How exactly does Bill O’Reilly know what a Klan gathering looks like, let alone what it’s like to step into one?

I don’t know if these two bloggers were on the same wavelength or what, but I did a doubletake when I saw was looked like high heels for babies over at I Blame the Patriarcy.

A glance at the website reveals a link to an Entertainment Tonight article describing the crib shoes (wait, crib shoes? Why does a bedridden infant need shoes?) as “made from soft, flexible fabrics with a collapsible heel and are not intended for walking.”

The pair of women sexopreneurs who invented the infant fuckme pumps chap the Twisty hide in many ways. Forget about the obvious antifeminist implications of infant pornulation for a second; what’s with the repellent adult pastime of casting children in the role of joke-butts? Warning, says the website, these Heelarious shoes “May cause extreme smiling and hysterical laughter when in use (this is completely normal).”

Normal! Man, what is wrong with people? Why does everybody think it’s okay to openly jeer and laugh at kids? Do they think the tots just don’t notice that they are perennial objects of mockery? Last Halloween, at the neighborhood cul-de-sac trick-or-treat party (or what I like to call the Barton Creek Toddler Burlesque), my 4-year-old niece Rotel flat-out refused to wear her elaborately cute costume. It was obvious that she just didn’t want to make a spectacle of herself for the amusement of the drunk adults. Much consternation ensued. Rotel was seriously in violation of some primal code of childhood conduct when she dared to expect that she could collect candy without putting on Hilarious Kid Drag. She was robustly critiqued for having had the temerity to assert personal bodily sovereignty in the face of patriarchal tradition. I am happy to report that she prevailed in the end, but it was clear from the reaction of the neighbors that they considered her strange, and I don’t believe for a second that the kid won’t carry deep emotional scars for life. Probably she will turn to a life of crime.

Now, according to the website, the shoes are not meant for kids older than six months, and not meant for walking. (They collapse if any weight is put on them.) But come on, people!

I mean, first of all, don’t sentence your daughter to a life of corns and bunions. Take it from me, I’ve worn high heels. (Yes, I’ve done drag. Deal with it) They are not meant for the human foot. Even wearing them for a few hours did a number on my feet for a while.

Second, can we just let children be children, please? Sure, a little girl (or little boy, for that matter) might try on mommy’s (or daddy’s) pumps, and it’s cute. But putting these on a baby? There’s a point at which we need to start questioning people’s sanity. What’s next? Pimp and Ho costumes for Halloween?

As for the rest, see Habladora’s post for a larger discussion.

Let’s face it, we’ve known for a while now that the president — and most, if not all, of his administration — has a hostile relationship with reality.

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

So, while I don’t fully agree with the Dalai Lama’s assessment of Bush’s grasp on reality, I think he’s pretty much on the mark.

The Dalai Lama, in a lecture in Philadelphia today, told a group of about 2,000,

Things are not black and white. Things are relative. Things are interdependent. When we look at a situation we have to consider all the factors.

Many world disasters, including war, including the Iraq war, are due to lack of this holistic nature (looking at all the factors.) Like Saddam Hussein– ending things for him. “Reality is not that simple.

Of course, I have great respect for, in fact, I love President Bus, because he is very frank, very straightforward. His intentions are good, but some of his policy in spite of his sincere motivation and right goal, and some of his method becomes unrealistic because of lack of understanding about reality.

He went on to explain,

“You cannot look in one direction. In order to see reality, (you) have to see in three or four or seven dimensions” and that this applies in the economical field, political field and international relations.”

Bush had good intentions? OK. I guess I’m not feeling quite that generous towards him right now, but I can’t quite convince myself that the man meant well.

The rest? I can’t argue with it.

And nobody came? This was apparently the case with the D.C. gun registry, following the Supreme Court decision.

With the ban lifted after a momentous, years-long legal battle that led to the landmark high court decision last month, here’s how many applications the city received by day’s end: one.

Bracing for a crowd at the registration office, at police headquarters on Indiana Avenue NW, officials set up a reception counter in the lobby and used portable metal railings to reserve one of the building’s entrances for “gun registry applicants.” Officers stood guard at the door, and a dozen reporters and TV cameras were waiting expectantly at 7 a.m., when the registration process was to begin.

But in the eight hours that the office remained open, there was no crush of people eager to avail themselves of the newly affirmed right to own a revolver in the nation’s capital. Police gave out 58 registration packets to people stopping by for the materials. But only two people showed up to apply to register handguns, and one was turned away by police officials because he didn’t bring his weapon with him, as the registration rules require.

And the beauty part?

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This has already been covered in numerous other places, so you probably haven’t seen it here first. Nonetheless it reminded me of something a wise lesbian activist said to me when I was newly arrived in D.C.

The gist of it was that it’s incredibly important ­that when policy decisions are being made people from those groups affected at at the table and engaged in making those decisions. It was a statement, at the time, about the importance of getting gays & lesbians elected to public office. It’s not that someone who doesn’t belong to a particular group can’t advocate effectively for that group. But advocacy (and policy) based in the direct experiences of the people who are impacted by can often address more specific needs.

In other words, if you want a voice when it comes to making policy, you gotta get people elected. Because if you got something that looks like this:

You’re a lot more likely to end up with something like this:

In a spectacular act of complicity with the religious right, the Department of Health and Human Services Monday released a proposal that allows any federal grant recipient to obstruct a woman’s access to contraception. In order to do this, the Department is attempting to redefine many forms of contraception, the birth control 40 percent of Americans use, as abortion. Doing so protects extremists under the Weldon and Church amendments. Those laws prohibit federal grant recipients from requiring employees to help provide or refer for abortion services. The “Definitions” section of the HHS proposal states,

Abortion: An abortion is the termination of a pregnancy. There are two commonly held views on the question of when a pregnancy begins. Some consider a pregnancy to begin at conception (that is, the fertilization of the egg by the sperm), while others consider it to begin with implantation (when the embryo implants in the lining of the uterus). A 2001 Zogby International American Values poll revealed that 49 percent of Americans believe that human life begins at conception. Presumably many who hold this belief think that any action that destroys human life after conception is the termination of a pregnancy, and so would be included in their definition of the term “abortion.” Those who believe pregnancy begins at implantation believe the term “abortion” only includes the destruction of a human being after it has implanted in the lining of the uterus.

And you’re liable to have policy made by people who say stuff like this.

Back in 1990, the Republican candidate for Governor of Texas, Clayton Williams, likened rape to bad weather, saying, “As long as it’s inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”

When that joke came to light in June, John McCain was forced to “postpone” a fundraiser in Midland hosted by Williams. McCain spokesman Brian Rogers called the joke “incredibly offensive.”

But what Williams said in 1990 is not all that different than a joke McCain made about rape in 1986. According to the Tucson Citizen, here’s what McCain, then a two-term Congressman from Mesa, said during his run for the Senate:

Did you hear the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die? When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, ‘Where is that marvelous ape?’

And people who know who don’t even know stuff like this.

The bus had been rolling for a half-hour and McCain was holding court on everything from Iraq to college basketball. (”Who woulda thought? VCU,” he exclaimed upon boarding.) And then someone asked about public funding for contraception in Africa to prevent the spread of AIDS.
“I’m sure I’ve taken a position on it in the past,” he stammered as he looked to his communications director. “I’m sure I’m opposed to government funding.”

Sensing a vulnerable moment, reporters kept the questions coming. What about sex education in the schools? Should it mention contraceptives? Or only abstinence, like President Bush wants?

“I think I support the president’s present policy,” he said, tentatively.

More questions: Do condoms stop sexually transmitted disease?

A long pause.

A stern look.

“I’ve never gotten into these issues or thought much about them,” he said, almost crying uncle.

And who can’t answer questions like this.

So, yeah. Getting the right (or not right, in this case) people elected matters.

I’ve never spent much time in or near family court. Even when Parker’s adoption was finalized, D.C. family court was having an “adoption day,” where almost nothing was on the docket but adoption finalizations. Our attorney told us that the judges really loved “adoption day, ” because it was such a welcome change from what they saw on a daily basis. But that day, we were so happy that we didn’t give much thought to what the family court judges see all day. After all, we hadn’t seen it.

But yesterday was different. We were among four families finalizing adoptions yesterday, but it wasn’t adoption day, so much as “adoption hour.” And we were in among the other families, who are in and out of family court for reasons a lot less joyful than our reason for being there. We sat beside some of those families, talked with them, saw the judge, finalized Dylan’s adoption, and went home.

I didn’t think much about the experience, until I got home and read the fallout from John McCain’s comments on gay adoptions.

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In a post-9/11 America that no longer “does” irony — or nuance, for that matter — it’s not surprising that one of the significant ironies of the George W. Bush era went largely unnoticed. Six years after declaring the dawn of an “ownership society,” intended to create more homeowners (who would theoretically support conservative economic policies), and in the same month that president Bush declared National Home Ownership Month we learned that increases in home ownership have been erased — particularly among minorities — as a direct result of conservative economic policy.

Driven largely by the surge in foreclosures and an unsettled housing market, Americans are renting apartments and houses at the highest level since President Bush started a campaign to expand homeownership in 2002.

The percentage of households headed by homeowners, which soared to a record 69.1 percent in 2005, fell to 67.8 percent this year, the sharpest decline in 20 years, according to census data through the end of March. By extension, the percentage of households headed by renters increased to 32.2 percent, from 30.9 percent.

The figures, while seemingly modest, reflect a significant shift in national housing trends, housing analysts say, with the notable gains in homeownership achieved under Mr. Bush all but vanishing over the last two years.

…The confluence of factors has largely derailed what Mr. Bush called “the ownership society,” his campaign to give millions of people — particularly minority and lower-income families — a shot at homeownership by encouraging lenders to finance more home purchases.

“We’re not going to see homeownership rates like that for a generation,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, a research company.

(We’ll address the full impact of the subprime mortgage debacle on minorities a bit later in this series.)

Plainly put, policies that were supposed to create more stakeholders in the U.S. economy have actually pushed more people to its margins, and many out of it entirely. Whether that was the intention probably depends on who you ask. But it raises some important questions, one of which was recently posed by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

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