The Republic of T.

James Thwinda has a great post up at In These Times about “Why Conservatives Can’t Fix Poverty.” He zeroes in on Newt Gingrich as the prime example of the contemporary conservative approach to poverty, debunks the right’s “distorted characterization of poor people,” and rightly point out that the very conservative policies Gingrich and his fellow conservative champion actually make the problem worse.

I would add only one thing, and it addresses ideology. Conservatives can’t fix poverty, because conservatives don’t want to fix poverty. For the same reason that Republicans never even attempted health care reform when they controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House. From a conservative perspective, poverty isn’t the real problem. Poor people are.

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There’s a new (to us) planet on the block; a “Super-Earth” that’s far enough from it’s sun to hold water, and might be habitable. 

Considering how crazy some of our fellow occupants of this planet are, I might be willing to sign up for a scouting mission just to get away from them. OK. So it’s 36 light-years away, but we’ll stop for bathroom breaks. Right?

The winding down of the dark age of W feels like something like a long night’s journey into day. (Apologies to Eugene O’Neill.) Granted, Republicans are doing everything they can on their way out to make sure the light at the end of the tunnel is indeed a train. (More on that later.) But the world’s response to the incoming Obama administration is a nice reminder of what it’s like to live in a world where people are actually glad to see us when we show up.

As John Kerry put it when he dropped by the United Nations’ climate conference.

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It’s not something I haven’t to do, in the past few years, as much as I used to. And with two kids I have even less time for it. But, always the enthusiast, I keep up with news, and I know pretty early when the next big new thing is coming out. I start counting the days up to a year in advance, buy it as soon as its available, take it home and spend hours playing around with it, figuring it out, and just immersing myself in it.

That was the case with The Sims, and that’s been the case with Spore. Well sort of.

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“Well, I’ll get some sticks and stones, and I’ll break your bones, and the name that hurts you will be Esther!”

~ LaWanda Page as Aunt Esther on “Sanford and Son”

I knew it. Every kid who’s been picked on or bullied knows it. Anyone who’s every been called “nigger,” “faggot,” “bitch,” “kike,” “hebe,” “yid,” “Polack,” “Wetback,” “Guido,” “Spic,” “Chink,” “Gimp,” etc. knows it. I don’t care how many times we were told, “Ignore it. It’s just names and names can’t hurt you,” we all knew then and know now that — contrary to the old adage — names can and do hurt.

The old adage “sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you”, simply is not true, according to researchers.

Psychologists found memories of painful emotional experiences linger far longer than those involving physical pain.

They quizzed volunteers about painful events over the previous five years.

…The volunteers, all students, were asked to write about painful experiences, both physical and emotional, then given a difficult mental test shortly afterwards.

The principle was that the more painful the recalled experience, the less well the person would perform in the tests.

Test scores were consistently higher in those recalling physical rather than “social” pain.

Psychological scoring tests revealed that memories of emotional pain were far more vivid.

So, that brings me to this; some advice for parents about helping your child cope with bullying.

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I’m sure this has been covered by everyone and his brother, but I couldn’t help being amused by this study suggesting that conservatives are happier than liberals. But before any conservatives start gloating, there’s another thing to consider.

Being happy is a cinch, if you can rationalize not giving a shit about injustice and inequality.

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This is one of those news stories that sometimes stop me in my tracks with just a headline. This one lured me in with a headline and then hit me over the head with the first paragraph.

It all started with a headline that read,“Sludge tested as lead-poisoning fix.” But it was the recipe — and the selection of “test subjects” — that did me in.

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Let’s leave politics aside for the moment. It’s been a long time since I’ve written about things that really matter, and asked really important questions like “When did you know you were heterosexual?”, “What made you fall in love?”, and “What turns you on?” Too long, in fact.

So, allow me to make up for it now with an equally important question. Do you like to kiss? Before you answer, though, you might want to take a look at the latest research on kissing, and see if it matches your experience.

Here’s a hint, apparently as with the questions above, men and women tend to give different answers. And after reading the Washington Post article I find myself once again having to read between the lines when science doesn’t include or acknowledge another experience. Which is a shame. Because gay people kiss, and gay people have brainsÑwhich is apparently where the real action takes place anyway.

Fisher believes kissing is all about choosing the right mate.

“There’s so much information exchanged when you kiss someone that I just thought it must play a vital role in mate choice, and this paper is elegantly showing that,” Fisher said.

A disproportionate amount of the brain, she noted, is geared toward interpreting signals from the mouth.

“When you look at the brain regions associated with picking up data from the body, a huge amount of the brain is devoted to picking up information from the lips and tongue,” she said. “Very little of the brain is built to pick up what happens to, say, your back. There have been case reports of people being stabbed in the back without even knowing it. But even the lightest brush of a feather on your lips and you feel it intensely.”

This isn’t exactly breaking news. According to a press release, the research was done and the report published last year. I haven’t read the full report (available in PDF format) yet, but what’s in the WaPo article holds true for me, at least for the most part.

For example, I can relate to the three hypotheses that were pretty much confirmed by the research: that kissing is a way to assess a potential mate, promote bonding, and a way of inducing sexual arousal. Those all make sense to me, but at some points in the article it felt like I was looking at the world from the other side of a looking glass. If men and women kiss differently, and for different reasons, then I have to admit: I kiss like a girl.

Sort of.

But let me back up and answer the initial question: Do you like to kiss?

Oh. My. Good. Good-ness. If by “like” you mean that I can be perfectly happy doing that and nothing but that for hours at a time, with the right person, then my answer is yes.

It wasn’t always that way, though. See, I’ve kissed girls before. Yes, it’s true. It was just a few times when I was fooling around, just before I came out around the age of 12 or 13. I tried it, for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what the big hairy deal was that made it such a popular pass time with so many people.

Then I went off to college and kissed a guy for the first time. Not to put too fine a point on it, but all of a sudden, there it was. Big. Hairy. Deal. My brain exploded, something that never happened the times I kissed girls (during which I was thinking I must not be doing something right). In fact, an awful lot of time passed before I even thought about the fact that there was even more stuff we could do.

And I think part of what turned me on about that kiss is part of what seems to turn heterosexual women on; something I’ve written about before.

I have a confession to make. I love how men, some of them anyway, smell. Not a big surprise, I guess. After all, IÕm gay. ItÕs not unusual for me to take a deep breath, when a good looking guy happens to pass by me, stand in my general vicinity, or sit next to me on the train. In fact, itÕs almost instinctive, and Ñ depending on the guy Ñ could make me a little lightheaded and more than a little interested. The last time it happened on the train, an attractive young (20-something) got on the train Ñ hot and sweaty, fresh from an evening jog Ñ and ended up standing right next to me. If it hadnÕt been for the pole I was holding on to, I would have swooned. When I hold my husband, I close my eyes and take a deep breath.

ItÕs something that goes back at least as far as middle school, around the time puberty hit. (Which, incidentally, was around the time I came out.) It was also around the my male classmates got an extra ingredient added to their sweat. Something that drove the girls wild. And me too, of course, though I had to be a quieter about it then.

It’s similar to the way heterosexual women respond to male pheromones, and more than a little related to their motivation for kissing, too.

Women place more emphasis on the taste and smell of the person they kiss than men do, the researchers found.

“That clues us in that females may be using it more to make mate assessments than men,” she said.

Women were also more likely to refuse to have sex with a partner unless they kissed first. More than half of the men said they would have sex without kissing first, but fewer than 15 percent of the women said the same.

That’s also where I dismissed any doubts that the study was limited to heterosexuals.

As a single gay man, kissing was a part of sex for me, in part because it gave me some important information. There’s a whole category of men who have sex with men but identify as heterosexual, and kissing is one thing they don’t do in situations with other men. (Actually, there’s a whole list of things they don’t do, in order to protect their apparently precarious position as “straight” men.)

So, a guy who said “I don’t do kissing,” was likely to get “Then I don’t do you,” as a response. That’s partly because some of those guys have a nasty habit of panicking after having sex with another man who does identify as gay, and the gay guys end up dead. (See the “panic room” posts from the LGBT Hate Crimes Project here, here, and here for more.) And it’s partly because half the time those guys have girlfriends, wives, and even children—none of whom know what they’re up to. That’s something I just wouldn’t do.

But my real question is this. Why does research into why human beings kiss seem to miss entirely the reality that some human beings are same-sex oriented and kiss members of their own gender for a lot of the same reasons? I don’t know, but I’m willing to give the researchers the benefit of the doubt that they didn’t actively seek to exclude same-sex couples. Maybe they just couldn’t find any who were willing to participate. (Though I doubt that, because in most  college towns you’ll find at least a small gay community.)

But I do which researchers would think about this and take some actions to include gays & lesbians in this kind of research. Maybe they can’t go out and recruit gays specifically, because it would undermine the credibility of the research because the sample wasn’t entirely random. Still, something important is being missed when this aspect of human experience is left out.

There have been scientific studies suggesting that gay men respond similarly to heterosexual women and lesbians respond similarly to heterosexual men where pheromones are concerned. What would have been discovered if same-sex couples had been included in this research? What might have been discovered about why lesbians kiss? What might have been discovered about why gay men kiss (or why heterosexual men who have sex with men don’t kiss men)?

Nothing in the article suggests that such inclusion was the case, and that’s a damn shame, because we might have learned a lot more; like a kiss ain’t just a kiss most of the time, no matter who’s locking lips.

Everyone has heard at least one “health care nightmare” story, like the death of 17-year-old Nataline Sarkysian hours after her insurance company approved coverage a liver transplant, following repeated denials. Before that, it was the death of Diamonte Driver, for want of an $80 dental procedure. These stories naturally provoke outrage. What happened to an anonymous 68-year-old man, however, is categorized as weird news, even though it’s as much about our failed health care system as the familiar “nightmare” stories.

The abstract of the article published in Journal of Emergency Medicine, in December 2007, is about as dry as you might expect a medical journal to be.
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Lemme get this straight. This may be the lack of sleep talking, but did these folks really go to school for years and years, and all they can tell me is something that I already know? Like, I need to sleep?

After a few restless nights, most of us can’t even think straight. We are less able to make sense of problems, make competent moral judgments or retain what we learn, even though studies show our brain cells fire more frenetically to overcome the lack of sleep. Lose too much sleep and we become reckless, emotionally fragile, and more vulnerable to infections and to diabetes, heart disease and obesity, recent research suggests.

…The consequences of too little sleep can be dire. Almost half of all heavy-truck accidents can be traced to driver fatigue, while decisions leading to the Challenger space-shuttle disaster, the Chernobyl nuclear-reactor meltdown and the Exxon Valdez oil spill can be partly linked to people drained of rest by round-the-clock work schedules. Weary doctors make more serious medical errors, while sleepy airport baggage screeners make more security mistakes, researchers reported at the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.

All told, the frayed tempers, short attention spans and fuzzy thinking caused by sleep deprivation may cost $15 billion a year in reduced productivity, the National Commission on Sleep Disorders Research estimated.

I have an excuse for not getting any sleep in the next couple of months. What’s keeping everybody else awake?

I don’t remember where I heard it, but when I was growing up I remember hearing and “old wives’ tale” about reading the bible, and it was basically that if you read the bible from beginning to end, you’ll go insane. Now, I don’t remember why you’d go insane. Maybe if you read it all the way through in one sitting, you’re so sleep deprived by the time you get to Revelations that you’re already hallucinating and the imagery drives you over the edge. Or maybe it’s the effort of dealing with all the contradictions, and convincing yourself that there are no contradictions, that maintaining that cognitive dissonance is enough to drive you crazy. And in some cases, crazy enough to kill.

But how crazy is that? How many people get that crazy? And do they get crazy enough to kill? Yes, at least a few of them do. The men who killed Gary Matson and Winfield Mowder were that crazy. But they also believed that they were “obeying God’s law” and that the bible told them it was right.

But Williams insists that because the Bible holds that homosexuality is a sin that must be punished by death, the responsibility for the slayings rests with the victims.

“You obey a government of man until there is a conflict,” Williams said. “Then you obey a higher law.”

“It’s part of the faith,” he added. “So many people claim to be Christians and complain about all these things their religion says are a sin, but they’re not willing to do anything about it. They don’t have the guts.”

Matthew Williams had “the guts” when he killed Matson and Mowder. And Terry Mangum had “the guts” when he killed Kenneth Cummings Jr., because God told him to, because Kenneth Cummings was gay.
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To borrow a line from Martha Reeves, “Come and get ‘em, come and get ‘em. And take them away.

Seriously though, don’t you have some memories you could do without? C’mon. Something you wish had never happened? Something you’d like to forget? Maybe something you’d erase if you could? What would you erase if you could?

I’ve asked these questions before, back when I reviewed Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, and I’m still asking them. I guess that’s because of my own ADD-related memory problems, which can be pretty disruptive in terms of working, living my everyday life, etc. Without treatment that is. On the one hand, there are days when I’d give almost anything for something that would improve my memory to the some level of normalcy. (I don’t know what a normal level of functioning is, memory-wise. The treatment I’m using now helps some, but there’s no “curing” ADD. Thus, speaking of memory-related movies, I felt a special affinity with the main character in Memento

.

Ironically, on the other hand, there are some pre-treatment ADD-related memories I wouldn’t mind getting shed of. Humiliations. Dismal failures. Lost jobs. Lost relationships. Depression. That why Spotless Mind appealed to me. And, despite the possibility that losing those memories might mean losing part of myself, the idea of a drug that wipes out bad memories sounds pretty tempting.

Technorati Tags: adhd, current events, life, medicine, science

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I’m probably being a little paranoid here. But can you blame me? I’ve written before about being something of an introvert. People are sometimes surprised when I tell them this, because I’m an introvert who’s learned to be — or appear to be — more of an extrovert when I have to be. That’s because when you’re something of a loner, people tend to think you’re troubled or that something’s wrong, as Jonathan Rauch pointed out in his (surprisingly popular) essay “Caring for Your Introvert.”

DO YOU KNOW someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice?

If so, do you tell this person he is “too serious,” or ask if he is okay? Regard him as aloof, arrogant, rude? Redouble your efforts to draw him out?

We’re fine, really. But instead of leaving us be, I’m reading that there’s now some kind of hormone spray to “cure” shyness. (The site where the article lives seems to be down. I’m not sure if that’s because of the “Digg effect” or not.

Technorati Tags: current events, life, introverts, science

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Guys, it looks like we’re back to “Beta,” to borrow a term from the “Web 2.0″ world. Or maybe it’s that Beta’s are back in. I’m not sure which. It was over a year-and-half ago that I bemoaned the reign of the alpha males.

And be certain there are rough edges when it comes to alpha males. Sometimes its those edges that attract and repel us simultaneously. I’ll be the first to admit that as much as I feared and envied some of the more aggressive, influential boys I went to school with, I still swooned over them in the locker room. (Until they drove me out of it, that is.)

Those rough edges are still attractive qualities to some Americans, and don’t think that Karl Rove doesn’t know that. Why else does Bush take every opportunity to get down to his ranch and clear brush, except to invoke the image of the cowboy and all it implies; the strength that lies behind stoic silence, the “resoluteness” to stand one’s ground, etc. And after 9/11 America wanted an alpha male in the White House. The problem is that those rough edges that seemingly soothe us also have a downside…

The problem is that after 9/11 America wanted a John Wayne, but now — in the clear light of day, with the dust from the towers settled — we discover we ended up with a Gomer Pyle instead. One who doesn’t have the wherewithal to see us out of the mess he swaggered us into. He can clear brush, but he can’t get us out of the weeds he led us into.

This weekend I opened up Newsweek, read their article “In Hollywood, Beta Males Best Alpha Dogs,” and began to think maybe I was out in front of a cultural trend back in October 2005.

Technorati Tags: culture, current events, feminism, gender, masculinity, movies, politics, war on terror

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I was a little bleary-eyed yesterday because I stayed up last night to watch the Discovery channel documentary “The Lost Tomb of Jesus.” I opted for the 1am showing because the 9pm showing conflicted with Desperate Housewives. (Priorities, ya know?) I scheduled Tivo to record it, but ended up watching it anyway, since I was still up when it came on again. And though I thought I’d go to bed before it ended at 3am, I stayed up to watch until the end.

It’s an intriguing piece of film. Not being a historian or an archaeologist, I can’t say how much of it can or should be believed. I’m not a scientist, so I can’t vouch for the validity of the science used in the documentary either. At the same time, I don’t think its claims are any less believable than much of what people have believed for last 2000 years, based on not much more evidence than was presented in the documentary. And while I think that’s an important point that will inevitably get lost in the ensuing discussion, I think just the fact that the documentary was even produced could be a significant development in how religion is or isn’t discussed these days.

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As more objections are raised concerning the HPV vaccine, I'm intrigued about news that scientist have found the "on/off" switch for HIV. I'm sure I'll get some of the science wrong, but they've discovered goes dormant by shutting off its genes and protein synthesis. The "switch" is a bit shaky, and won't stay in the "off" position. Now that they've found this mechanism, more research could reveal a way to keep it in the "off" position. That is, if nobody objects. Given that we now have CDC doctors opposing the HPV vaccine, I can only imagine the objections to "turning off HIV." After all, preventing yet another STD might encourage pre-marital sex (because everybody's abstaining now). And, it's not too far fetched to imagine someone saying "If God turned HIV 'on', who are we to turn it 'off'?" After all, turning it off might be against "God's will" to those those believe "he" had a purpose in turning it "on."

Have you ever been in love? Are you in love? What did it? What made you fall in love?

The short answer is: your brain.

I’ve asked questions like this before, like “When did you know you were heterosexual?” and “Why did you get married?”, and usually they’re inspired by something I’m reading. The latter question came to mind while I was reading. What Is Marriage For? and Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, both of which, by the way, do an excellent job of tracing the history of marriage, how it developed and how it has changed during the course of human history. (And, lest anyone point out that “it’s always been a heterosexual institution,” I point to William Naphy’s Born to Be Gay: A History of Homosexuality as one historical resource which suggests that hasn’t always been the case in all human societies and cultures, but that many recognized some form of same-sex or same-gender union).

This time it’s inspired by a book I just finished, Why We Love: The Nature And Chemistry Of Romantic Love by Helen Fisher. Besides reminding me another favorite book, A Natural History Of Love, I was impressed that Fisher included gays & lesbians in her survey of how we experience romantic love; especially in light of some recent studies and reports on the subject.

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It feels good to know I’m not alone.

Mentioned earlier that I have a penchant for procrastination. Not that I particularly like procrastinating. It’s just that it comes with the territory as far as some aspects of my life are concerned. I know it’s a trait I share with Scarlett O’Hara (“I’ll think about it tomorrow. After all, tomorrow is another day!”). But apparently it’s a trait I share with many of my fellow Americans.

My name is Terrance. I’m a procrastinator, and I’m not alone.

Overall, more than a quarter of Americans say they procrastinate. Men are worse than women (about 54 out of 100 chronic procrastinators are men) and the young are more like to procrastinate than the old, Steel said. Three out of four college students consider themselves procrastinators.

… The causes of procrastination combine temptation, sense of immediacy, the value of doing the job, and whether you believe you can get the work done, Steel found. He even created a complicated mathematical formula, complete with Greek letters, to figure out when a person is likely to procrastinate.

Temptation is the biggest factor. And it’s why procrastination is getting worse, Steel said, citing technology.

Far be it from me to argue with science, but I think I’ll have to disagree with the guy who did the study, as far as the why of procrastination. At least in my own case.

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Speaking of virgin births, anyone looking to launch a new religion my want to check out Flora, the female Komodo dragon who's never been with a male dragon, but is about to give birth. 

Per my comment on the previous post — concerning claims of a connection between soy, homosexuality and penis size — it turns out that science bears out my personal experience.

The relation between sexual orientation and penile dimensions in a large sample of men was studied. Subjects were 5,122 men interviewed by the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction from 1938 to 1963. They were dichotomously classified as either homosexual (n = 935) or heterosexual (n = 4187). Penile dimensions were assessed using five measures of penile length and circumference from Kinsey’s original protocol. On all five measures, homosexual men reported larger penises than did heterosexual men. Explanations for these differences are discussed, including the possibility that these findings provide additional evidence that variations in prenatal hormonal levels (or other biological mechanisms affecting reproductive structures) affect sexual orientation development.

Proving once again that with guys it all comes down to “Who’s Got the Biggest.” Or at least thinks he does. Maybe that’s the root of the concern expressed by the WorldNetDaily columnist. In which case I suggest he try the tofu hot dog challenge.

It’s from Alfred Kinsey, though. So the nutters will disregard it anyway.

Via Andrew Sullivan.