Feminism isn't dead, but a new book wounds it badly -- Mona Charen

Here's another thumbs-up review for Kate O'Beirne's new book, Women Who Make the World Worse.

Related post: OpinionJournal: The Sisterhood, Defrocked.

Happy birthday, Mr. Bond

Michael Bond, the creator of Paddington Bear, is 80 today. The Common Room has a post, with links.

Do me a favor, please...

...and go around your house and make sure there aren't any electrical appliances, like radios, for instance, anywhere near a bathtub or sink. Please.

Last week a young man of our acquaintance died when a radio fell into his tub.

He was in the Air Force. He had volunteered to risk his neck for total strangers. And he died in a silly household mishap.

That hurts.

Losing him would have been hard enough on those who loved him, however he died. But like this? There's definitely an added pain, an extra dose of confusion to it.

It seems such a waste.

It has resulted in some painfully awkward moments amongst people standing around talking about him. It's sometimes horribly difficult to discuss a death that seems to have been both pointless and avoidable.

Don't do that to the people who love you.

Do me (and your family) a favor, and go around your house and make sure there aren't any electrical appliances anywhere near a bathtub, hot tub, shower or sink. Please.

Thank you.

Vatican seeks to join Schengen borderless zone, also notes zero crime rate during Pope's funeral

From reporter Teresa Kuchler, in EUobserver.com: Vatican seeks to join Schengen borderless zone :

A top official from the Vatican announced on Friday (13 January) that it wants to join the European border-free Schengen zone, in a bid to prevent international terrorism crossing its borders.

The Vatican's signing up to the Schengen agreement, which replaces internal border checkpoints between member states by reinforced external borders, is meant to boost cooperation with EU authorities.

Nicola Picardi, the Vatican's "procurer of justice", said that the Schengen agreement was about more than allowing people to travel without passports, according to media reports.

"This agreement allows for us to intensify exchange of information, joint operations, repressive and preventive measures, to ensure the security of all people," Picardi said during a ceremony marking the opening of the Vatican's judicial year.

"International terrorism obliges new forms of communication, with the aim of uniting free movement of persons with perfect measures of fomenting security," the Vatican's top official said.

At the moment, the Schengen border free area includes 15 states: 13 EU members (all old member states except for the UK and Ireland) plus Iceland and Norway.

Later in the article, talking about crime rates at the Vatican, there's this:

He [Mr. Picardi] said however that during the funeral of the late Pope John Paul II in last spring, when 6 million grieving Catholics from the whole world camped in the city for a few intense and crowded days; not a single crime had been reported.

Not a single purse or wallet robbery had occurred, he noted.

I find that hard to believe, but that's apparently what they're saying.

Full article

OpinionJournal: The Sisterhood, Defrocked

Melanie Kirkpatrick, associate editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, begins her review of Kate O'Beirne's new book:

Kate O'Beirne is ill-served by the lurid cover of her new book, which features unflattering caricatures of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Hillary Clinton, Jane Fonda and Sarah Jessica Parker (a k a Carrie Bradshaw of "Sex and the City"). The Ann Coulter-ish title--"Women Who Make the World Worse"--is almost as off-putting. Uh-oh, is this going to be another one of those right-wing rants?

Happily, it is anything but. Mrs. O'Beirne's book is a serious examination of 30-plus years of feminist folly and the conservative counter-approach. And while the National Review columnist and TV commentator is not shy about saying what she thinks, the only rants that appear in her pages here are those she quotes from some well-known feminist icons...

Full review (OpinionJournal.com, Jan. 12, 2006)

I have to agree on the cover. What in the Sam Hill was Penguin thinking? Ick.


Women Who Make the World Worse: and How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Workplaces

Shameless self-promotion...

The Suitable For Mixed Company Annex has lots of short takes and links. There are a few posts and/or links that are duplicates of, or variations on, what you'll find here, but mostly it has taken on a life of its own.

Joe McKeever: Assessing the situation in the Crescent City

Joe McKeever, the Director of Missions for the Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans, provides a brief, general overview of how things stand in New Orleans. Some of it sounds better than I thought, some of it worse than I imagined. He covers everything from car insurance rates skyrocketing, to the silly effort by the New Orleans City Council to pick a new coach for the Saints football team, to a group of people helping people move quickly toward rebuilding their homes in the hopes that obvious restoration achievement will keep the city from pulling an eminent domain end run, forcing people out of their neighborhoods.

I think it's interesting that, when he gets to talking about Baptist churches in particular, he says:

Our North American Mission Board is asking our pastors to decide which churches in which neighborhoods will be brought back first. The idea is that since the population is going to be a fraction of what it used to be for several years, we need to focus on one church in each large area, putting our resources there, trying to build it up, get all our people in that area worshiping there, having an "anchor" church there. Then, as the residential areas are rebuilt, some of the other churches can be reopened and their ministries resumed.

So, here's your prayer request for today. It goes directly against the nature of most pastors and churches to volunteer for their buildings to stay unused for several years, to go a mile down the street and join with other partial congregations in forming another church. But that is precisely what we are going to be asking some of them to do. Pray for these churches and their leaders, please.

The last thing we need these days is a vast number of tiny, struggling congregations scattered across this devastated city, each one needing the charity and assistance of Baptists across America just to keep their doors open and their bills paid. To tell the truth, we had too much of that before the storm.

Our Baptist polity--a chief element of which is the independence and autonomy of each church--is often our strength, and sometimes a great burden.

More about this later, but one of the more fascinating plans being made for next summer is to pull together volunteers from around the country and build forty or more homes in connection with Habitat for Humanity. In fact, before Katrina, we were working on this very scenario. Under the leadership of David Crosby (pastor FBC New Orleans), the "Baptist Crossroads Project" was scheduled to become the largest Habitat project to date sponsored by a single denominational group. When Katrina hit, followed by the flood, and we learned of the extent of the devastation, I had a phone call from David. "Joe, let's build FOUR HUNDRED homes next summer!" I said, half joking, "Man, you have lost your ever loving mind!" Later, I repented of my unbelief. Last week, we had a meeting to resume the planning. This incredible project has a website all its own through which you may keep up with the ideas, plans, and progress: www.baptistcrossroads.org.

Full Joe McKeever post here.

Dueling testimony in Wisconsin Election Day 2004 tire slashing case

From Jan. 11, on courttv.com: Activists: We were framed by Democrat operatives in tire-slashing case.

From Jan. 12, on courttv.com: Campaign strategist: Five activists celebrated after tires were slashed.

The "campaign strategist" would be a political consultant from the John Kerry campaign. The "activists" would be local campaign workers, including the son of a local politician, who claim that the Democratic Party sent in "professional political operatives" to slash tires on vans rented by the Republican Party and then pointed the police in their direction.

hat tip: RushLimbaugh.com

Chron.com | Measures to Prevent Hajj Stampedes

According to this AP article printed by the Houston Chronicle, there have been measures taken since 1994 by Saudi officials to try to control the flow of pilgrims intent upon the ritual stoning of the devil, and more improvements are planned, in an effort to prevent trampling deaths. But many pilgrims ignore the directions, or accidents happen, with sometimes horrifying results, as today's death toll testifies. (As of now, the death toll for the most recent stampede is at 345).

Book World: Down the rabbit hole

Have you ever been to the London Library? I haven't, but the blogger at Book World gives us fair warning about the possibilities of getting lost there....

Book notes: Twink, by John Neufeld (also published as Touching)

The junior high that I attended took in students from various grade schools scattered around town and out in the country. Junior high in that respect was quite an experience, because suddenly you had to deal with a whole lot of people you didn't already know. By sixth grade, of course, you could begin to feel that you knew what was what. Junior high is where you found out that your circle didn't constitute an accurate reflection of the whole, wide world, like you thought it did.

Junior high was where I first ran into Robin, a girl whose mother had taken that fertility drug that became infamous for causing birth defects. Robin had the trademark problem. Instead of two arms, she had an arm on one side, and two odd fingers attached to her shoulder on the other.

I probably shouldn't have freaked out. I have some birth defects of my own, notably some partially fused toes which I'd used at various times in my childhood to gross out other children and the occasional adult. (Ordinarily I was a very polite and considerate child, but I, ahem, had my lesser moments...) I went to grade school with a boy who had had polio and was a bit twisted and couldn't walk without crutches. It's not like I didn't know that people were subject to physical distortions. All I had to do was look at my own two feet, for pity's sake.

But no one had told me about the sort of drastic deformity that Robin had, and I wasn't prepared for it, and I didn't handle it very well at first. (More frank version: I felt physically sick.)

I went through various stages with Robin. I avoided her at first. (I was a kid, OK?) Then we became friends. I was embarrassed that I'd been sick when I first saw her. She told me everybody got sick when they first saw her, and I shouldn't feel bad about it. Then I felt sorry for her. And she told me to cut it out, that she didn't feel sorry for herself. And she sure didn't seem to. Robin had her act together better than just about anybody else I knew. She was still a kid, and I'm not claiming she was perfect, but as I remember it her resolve and cheerfulness and her ability to take people how they were and to forgive them their shortcomings and move on were head and shoulders above what I could do. She came across as surprisingly comfortable inside her own skin. I came to admire not only her courage but her compassion, too.

It seemed a supremely upside down way for the world to be. She was the one with the huge, obvious problems, right? So why was it that more often than not she was the one comforting me?

I haven't seen or heard from Robin in years and years. For that matter, it's probably been years since I thought about her. Shame on me, but I've left school days long behind me now, for the most part.

But yesterday I stumbled across a paperback book called Twink, by John Neufeld, c. 1970. The cover and inside copy say it was formerly released as Touching. The back cover copy starts:

A tender, haunting novel about a brave and wonderful girl who taught others the meaning of being human and the joy of being alive.

Even with that, I didn't think of Robin until I got to the second page, where a sixteen year old boy home from boarding school meets his new, severely handicapped stepsister for the first time, and his first reaction is to feel sick.

Oh, oh. Been there. Done that. I'm not proud of it, but it definitely happened like that... That's when I remembered Robin, who forgave me for it and insisted I move past all that. Robin, who was joyful about being alive, and didn't feel sorry for herself.

I sat down and read the book. It's a short book. I read it in one evening, easy.

I'm not familiar with the author, John Neufeld, but throughout this book I couldn't shake the feeling that this wasn't a novel, but an account of real people, with the names changed. Something more like Death Be Not Proud than the normal run of fiction. It felt autobiographical, whether it is or not.

This book is one I'm going to recommend, but conditionally.

The first part is written from the stepbrother Harry's viewpoint, in the first person, about his first visit to the institution where "Twink" lives along with other people with cerebral palsy. The second part is where he (and readers) get filled in on Twink's life, the ups and downs, the difficulties for her family, the differences between the institutions where she's lived, the treatments, the hopes, the naysayers versus the folks who won't give up. The filling in is done by another new stepsister, aged 22, who stays up past bedtime showing Harry pictures and pages from diaries, and chatting. Along the way, we meet people around Twink, particularly others with CP. The name Twink, by the way, is a nickname, a shortened form of Twinkle. That's the good stuff.

But it is a very 1960s/70s book, in the bad sense. Harry, age 16, smokes when gets nervous, hoping to look cool, and the adults around him either make token protests or ask him for a light. At home, after his father drifts off, Harry pours himself a drink, and the stepsister just asks for one for herself. There is talk between the stepsister and Harry about dropping acid and smoking grass -- neither one admitting to actually doing it, but the stepsister is coy and seems to want to make her stepbrother wonder if she might be doing it, along with other things. The parents just mosey off to bed and leave the 16-year-old boy and his flashy, flirty older stepsister to stay up and get to know each other, in the room stocked with drinks on the sideboard (to which, as I've already said, the kids nonchalantly help themselves). So, OK, I'm trying to say this is not exactly a parenting manual for people who want to keep their kids out of trouble ;-).

There is a lot about courage, and hope, and seeing the human beings who are inside disabled bodies; good stuff for starting nice discussions about the value of human beings regardless of what they look like and/or can't do, not to mention the virtue of not letting circumstances defeat you. But it does have that baggage from the era in which it was published, which might call for a different brand of discussion.

It's your call, of course, but I wouldn't want kids taking the wrong messages away from this book, when there are so many nice ones to glean from it, in addition to the adventure of just going along for the ride on a 16-year-old's very long, rather rattling, life-changing day. And the ending's one of the better ones I've come across in a while, at least the last few lines. That last paragraph is a haunter as well as a gotcha, I think... (Don't peek. It's a short book. You'll get there fast enough.)

The reading level code for this book, for those of you who can decipher such things (I'm not sure I can), is RL 5/IL 6+.

Bolivian leader labels China 'ideological ally' - The Washington Times

Bolivian President-elect Evo Morales is on a world tour right now. He made a point of being chummy with the Chinese this week, as Joe McDonald of the Associated Press reports (Washington Times, January 10, 2006).

Slobokan's Site O' Schtuff SloboPoll

The Slobokan poll question this week is "Do you want to see more or less government regulation of your daily life?"

Gee, I think it took me about three nanoseconds to vote Less. The other options are More and Don't Care.

The poll is in his left sidebar. Go here for comments.

His poll questions are usually tied to a recent post of his. I'm pretty sure this question was prompted by this post.

Record number of commercial aircraft orders at Boeing for 2005

Orders for aircraft were up, way up, for Boeing in 2005.

I notice, however, that how the company fared in comparison to Airbus has spawned a couple of different headlines.

The International Herald Tribune has a Bloomberg News article, dateline Seattle, headlined Boeing logs more orders than Airbus.

The Scotsman has a Reuters article, dateline Paris, headlined Airbus 2005 orders similar to those of Boeing.

At any rate, it looks to have been a gangbuster year in aviation orders. From the International Herald Tribune article:

...Boeing said Thursday that its commercial-aircraft orders more than tripled to a record 1,002 planes last year on demand from Asian and Middle Eastern carriers, as it overtook Airbus in customer requests for the first time in five years.

The orders surpassed its previous record for 606 planes set in 1998, according to Boeing's Web site. Airbus, which is the world's largest commercial aircraft maker based on deliveries, had orders for 687 planes at the end of November and expects to release its year-end total Jan. 17.

[snip]

Boeing's orders included requests for 569 of the company's 737s, 235 of its 787s and 154 of its 777s - all records for those models...

Townhall.com :: Columns :: Game Theory and Media Bias by Todd Manzi

There seems to be an ongoing debate on some blogs about whether the press by and large controls the Democrats, or the Democrats by and large control the press. Maybe we need to look at this angle too? (Via Betsy's Page)

Intent - Journal - "Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future."

Looking at Mitford series author Jan Karon today, you probably wouldn't guess what she survived to get to where she is. Follow the link provided by Sparrow at the Intent blog to a newspaper article about Karon's life. (The Charlotte Observer, August 14, 2005, by Sam Hodges.)

HistoryLink: Boeing 307 Stratoliner Pressurized Airliner -- A Snapshot History

Here's a trivia question for you.

These days, speaking of an airliner, we call it cabin pressurization. In 1940, when it was first in use on commercial airlines, what was it called? Cabin what?

The answer to that question, plus more on the first high-altitude passenger jet airliner and on 1930s aviation research, can be found here. (HistoryLink, The Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History, File #3598.)

The prototype Boeing 307 Stratoliner first flew on December 31, 1938.

According to the linked article, in addition to cabin pressurization, the Boeing 307 Stratoliner also had "power boosted control surfaces and geared two-speed engine superchargers," making it very advanced for its day.

Blogs4Life bloggers' conference is January 23

The first annual Blog4Life conference for pro-life bloggers will be Monday, January 23, 2006, in Washington, D.C., prior to the 33rd annual March for Life.

I can't be there, except in spirit, but I am happy to help spread the word. Go here for more information.

hat tip: Tim at ProLifeBlogs (via e-mail), who notes in passing that at least one blogger will be traveling from Italy to attend. So, hey, don't feel this is just a United States thing :-).

Trying to learn from Sago

Rodger Morrow has a follow-up on the West Virginia coal mine disaster and the horrible miscommunications about how many miners were alive when search and rescue crews found them. For his original post, see How the press got the "Miracle at Sago" wrong.

For a related, very short post I found through trackbacks on his site, see Sago Mine Disaster.

For Editor & Publisher articles, see Media Report Miracle Mine Rescue -- Then Carry the Tragic Truth and Local W.Va. Paper Says Skepticism Helped it Avoid Mining Story Goof.

My previous posts here and here.

I regret having put out the false information on this blog -- but I have to admit I felt pretty comfortable with the news once I had more than one source, i.e., news coming from not only more than one website, but from more than one reporter. (Quite a few sites were just relaying what the AP reporter said, but others had their own reporter on it.)

The original hubbub happened late in the day around here. I headed to bed worried about how many miners might die in hospital, but pleased that the first thing people would see on my blog the next morning was good news. My husband was listening to the BBC, however, and he heard the story coming apart. For that matter, he said the poor reporter sounded like she was fighting back sobs, and kept saying things along the lines of 'I don't know if what I'm telling you now is right, I just don't know anymore.' And so I nixed sleep and tried to follow the story for a while, before finally putting up my own version of 'I don't know what to tell you right now' in an update, and giving up for the night.

Since then I've been trying to figure out if there was anything I should have seen that I didn't see at the time.

I'm still working on it, as you can see.

I hate it when I fall for stuff that turns out not to be true.

I know it's bound to happen from time to time, but I still hate it.

Another thought comes to mind, by the way. People in general, and perhaps folks in the blogosphere in particular, are fond of talking of "The Press" as if it's an entity. There are references to Old Media and New Media and Mainstream Media (MSM), and underneath all this is a tendency to lump most reporters into one large clump. There's some validity to that, up to a certain point, in certain areas, I think. Certainly, some of the 'reporters' who are in the business to try to influence politics or policy, or punish people who don't agree with them, deserve some of the heat they get, since what they're doing isn't reporting, as much as they'd like people to think so, and since there is a horrible conformity in some quarters.

But then there are the other folks in the news business, particularly away from political beats -- the ones who might, for instance, sob into a microphone upon realizing they may have falsely raised hopes and accidentally spread news that wasn't true. The ones who were happy for the miners' families, and who had to have been delighted to have the chance to report a miracle outcome to what had been shaping up as a pessimistic story. The reporters who aren't just "blankety-blank extensions of their blankety-blank microphones" as a friend of mine who worked in television news called some of his colleagues. (And, yes, he actually said "blankety-blank". He generally cleaned things up when talking around ladies.)

Let me give you a little context here. I got scammed as a reporter, bigtime, once, by a hustler who'd also scammed folks at the national network level. It wasn't any consolation to me that the big boys got burned, too. I'm grateful to this day to the police chief who sat me down and politely, patiently, and discreetly explained to me why I shouldn't have believed the guy from the get-go.

At least, in that case, I had somebody to be mad at. I got hustled. And in my case, no one got hurt, not really. It was a feel-good, feature story kind of thing, with no victims. The police checked things out, and the last I heard the best that anybody could determine was that this guy just wanted his name in the paper and his mug on television, probably just because otherwise in his life he had nothing that he considered an achievement, and he was the sort of guy who didn't feel good about himself without folks applauding. Some folks in the news business in my day used to call folks like that 'dancing bear' men. As in people who show up at your desk with some sideshow sort of thing, hoping it's good enough to get their picture taken, usually so their momma will clip it out of the paper and say she's proud of her little boy, what with him getting his picture in the paper and all.

I can't imagine what it's like right now for the reporters (and their editors) who got caught up in the good news announcements in West Virginia and then had to retract. It's obvious that running with the false story caused a lot of hurt. And there aren't any hustlers to point fingers at, no dancing bears to blame, not much to blame, really, except man's incredible capacity for optimism, and who wants to kick that? I don't.

BBC NEWS | Americas | US mine 'rescue' turns to tragedy (updated)

***scroll down for updates****

It's looking like people who picked up parts of cell phone conversations spread the bad information about there being twelve survivors. BBC has a timeline:

Monday 0640 (1140 GMT) - Explosion causes collapse
1800 (approx) - Rescuers sent in
Tuesday 0730 - Air quality tests said to be 'discouraging'
2100 - Families say one body found
2350 - Families say 12 miners found alive
Wednesday 0250 - Reports emerge that just one miner alive
0310 - Mine officials confirm only one survivor

Update: The above post was put up somewhat before 2 a.m. It is now about 10 a.m. The link goes to an entirely different story now, one titled "Fury over US mine 'rescue' fiasco." I can understand why people, especially family members, would be furious -- but I hope that the press, and bloggers, will try hard not to emphasize that. It sounds like it was a case of honest mistakes snowballing. There's no getting around how hurtful the misinformation wound up being, but I'm willing to bet that the folks involved in the miscommunication are never going to make a similar mistake again. I'm willing to bet that others in search and rescue are going to use this fiasco as a cautionary tale. I'm willing to bet that people are very, very sorry already and don't need people screaming at them or waving proposed punishments around to make things better. Sometimes mistakes are just that, mis-takes. Somebody heard something through a veil of hope, and heard wrong, and the rest is history. I'm of the opinion that the best thing to do now is offer condolences all around and then take a good, hard look at how things went wrong, and try to learn from it. But, in my opinion, I can't see any reason to ask for heads to roll. Let's not make a bad situation even worse. If we were dealing with hard-hearted people with withered ethical sense or cracked moral compasses it would be different. But we're not, as far as I can see. We have a bunch of people who got caught by a rumor that got too much traction. Or that's what it looks like at this point.

On a slightly different note, I notice that the BBC is now being very careful. At the bottom of one graph, it has this: Information as known at 1215 GMT Wednesday 4 January. Good for them. Some stories call for that sort of caution, and this one, tragically, has become that sort of story.

Update: Rodger Morrow nails it, I suspect, with How the press got the "Miracle at Sago" wrong.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if he's right about the misinformation coming from people listening to police scanners. Even in the newsroom where I worked, which was full of people who had been around the block a few times and/or who had worked the police beat, there were massive wild goose chases prompted by snatches of communication heard on police scanners -- and I wouldn't even know where to begin to tell you about the rumors that whip through my current hometown based upon what somebody's heard, or thought they heard, on police scanners. Our local police, I might add, are going more and more to cell phone communication. Cuts down on eavesdroppers, substantially, that does. (Via Michelle Malkin.)