This must be a joke... please tell me this is a joke

Nature's laws of shopping: Men hunt, women gather

University of Michigan psychologist Daniel Kruger has found that how we shop has an awful lot to do with how we once found our food. Men hunt. Women gather. Conjugal chaos ensues.
[...]
As a scientist, he refused to do the sensible thing – shrug his shoulders. He wanted to know the reason. He combed over studies of aboriginal tribes and did a battery of tests on student volunteers. The results will be published in the upcoming issue of the Journal of Social, Evolutionary and Cultural Psychology.

Kruger found that our habits haven't changed. Our environment and our goals have.

In prehistory, women gathered or foraged for food. This kept them close to home, performing a daily, intensive and social activity. A good memory, a keen eye and a lot of patience when choosing help make a good gatherer.

Men hunted for meat. This was an intermittent, asocial activity that earned them prestige only through the biggest catches. Short bursts of energy were followed by long periods of sitting around waiting for women to bring in the harvest.

There are so many things wrong with this article, I don't even know where to begin.

Ending Africa's Hunger... by funding Monsanto?

More than a billion people eat fewer than 1,900 calories per day. The majority of them work in agriculture, about 60 percent are women or girls, and most are in rural Africa and Asia. Ending their hunger is one of the few unimpeachably noble tasks left to humanity, and we live in a rare time when there is the knowledge and political will to do so. The question is, how? Conventional wisdom suggests that if people are hungry, there must be a shortage of food, and all we need do is figure out how to grow more.
[...]
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with an endowment of more than $30 billion, has embarked on a multibillion-dollar effort to transform African agriculture. It helped to set up the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in 2006, and since then has spent $1.3 billion on agricultural development grants, largely in Africa. With such resources, solving African hunger could be Gates's greatest legacy.

But there's a problem: the conventional wisdom is wrong. Food output per person is as high as it has ever been, suggesting that hunger isn't a problem of production so much as one of distribution.

The Gates Foundation is focusing on technology, spending about a third of the $1.3 billion on promoting and developing seed biotechnologies, one of the largest recipients of which is everybody's favourite corporation, Monsanto.

However, all is not lost...

Despite institutional neglect, ecological farming systems have been sprouting up across the African continent for decades--systems based on farmers' knowledge, which not only raise yields but reduce costs, are diverse and use less water and fewer chemicals. Fifteen years ago, researchers and farmers in Kenya began developing a method for beating striga, a parasitic weed that causes significant crop loss for African farmers. The system they developed, the "push-pull system," also builds soil fertility, provides animal fodder and resists another major African pest, the stemborer. Under the system, predators are "pushed" away from corn because it is planted alongside insect-repellent crops, while they are "pulled" toward crops like Napier grass, which exudes a gum that traps and kills pests and is also an important fodder crop for livestock. Push-pull has spread to more than 10,000 households in East Africa by means of town meetings, national radio broadcasts and farmer field schools. It's a farming system that's much more robust, cheaper, less environmentally harmful, locally developed, locally owned and one among dozens of promising agroecological alternatives on the ground in Africa today.

Read the whole article from The Nation

Previously blogged about here

Mass Murder of Women

Bob Herbert: Women at Risk

"I actually look good. I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne — yet 30 million women rejected me," wrote George Sodini in a blog that he kept while preparing for this week's shooting in a Pennsylvania gym in which he killed three women, wounded nine others and then killed himself.

We've seen this tragic ritual so often that it has the feel of a formula. A guy is filled with a seething rage toward women and has easy access to guns. The result: mass slaughter.

Back in the fall of 2006, a fiend invaded an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania, separated the girls from the boys, and then shot 10 of the girls, killing five.

I wrote, at the time, that there would have been thunderous outrage if someone had separated potential victims by race or religion and then shot, say, only the blacks, or only the whites, or only the Jews. But if you shoot only the girls or only the women — not so much of an uproar.

Or, can you imagine if the gunman was Arab, Muslim or black. The news would be filled with analyses of black violence or Muslim misogyny or whatever. Just look at how some people try to make Mark Lepine into a secret Muslim, so that the violent impulses can be blamed on his Algerian-ness instead of his male-ness. Why is it when a white man commits a similar act, neither whiteness nor maleness are examined?

According to police accounts, Sodini walked into a dance-aerobics class of about 30 women who were being led by a pregnant instructor. He turned out the lights and opened fire. The instructor was among the wounded.

We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.

We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.

The mainstream culture is filled with the most gruesome forms of misogyny, and pornography is now a multibillion-dollar industry — much of it controlled by mainstream U.S. corporations.

One of the striking things about mass killings in the U.S. is how consistently we find that the killers were riddled with shame and sexual humiliation, which they inevitably blamed on women and girls. The answer to their feelings of inadequacy was to get their hands on a gun (or guns) and begin blowing people away.

What was unusual about Sodini was how explicit he was in his blog about his personal shame and his hatred of women. “Why do this?” he asked. “To young girls? Just read below.” In his gruesome, monthslong rant, he managed to say, among other things: “It seems many teenage girls have sex frequently. One 16 year old does it usually three times a day with her boyfriend. So, err, after a month of that, this little [expletive] has had more sex than ME in my LIFE, and I am 48. One more reason.”

I was reminded of the Virginia Tech gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people in a rampage at the university in 2007. While Cho shot males as well as females, he was reported to have previously stalked female classmates and to have leaned under tables to take inappropriate photos of women. A former roommate said Cho once claimed to have seen “promiscuity” when he looked into the eyes of a woman on campus.

Soon after the Virginia Tech slayings, I interviewed Dr. James Gilligan, who spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts and as a professor at Harvard and N.Y.U. “What I’ve concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal,” he said, “is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act.”

Life in the United States is mind-bogglingly violent. But we should take particular notice of the staggering amounts of violence brought down on the nation’s women and girls each and every day for no other reason than who they are. They are attacked because they are female.

A girl or woman somewhere in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count.

There were so many sexual attacks against women in the armed forces that the Defense Department had to revise its entire approach to the problem.

We would become much more sane, much healthier, as a society if we could bring ourselves to acknowledge that misogyny is a serious and pervasive problem, and that the twisted way so many men feel about women, combined with the absurdly easy availability of guns, is a toxic mix of the most tragic proportions.

I don't for a minute believe that all men hate women or that all men are violent or whatever the right wing wants you to think feminists believe, but that there is an undercurrent in our culture which accepts too much violence in general and too much violence against women in particular.

We need to take a good honest look at our society and take responsibility for these sick people we raise. We need to promote healthier ways to deal with anger and other strong emotions. We desperately need a healthier masculinity. We also need to abandon our antisocial and ultra-competitive society that rewards domination.

Blame CUPE

Are you tired of blaming fate, the vagaries of nature, or God for your misfortunes? Try blaming CUPE. It's fun and easy.

Here's an example, provided by the Toronto Sun.


CUPE killed summer. That's right. Summer is dead, and CUPE perpetrated the murder.

Try it yourself. Car won't start? Blame CUPE. Weather too cold? Blame CUPE. Miss the bus? Stub your toe? Spill your coffee? You know who to blame.

Solidarity with City Workers

In my inbox today:

OCAP STANDS IN SOLIDARITY WITH TORONTO CITY WORKERS

The members of CUPE 416 and 79 who work for the City of Toronto
are now on strike. The business media has begun its inevitable campaign of
misinformation to produce the greatest possible backlash against these
workers. We are encouraged to focus on uncollected garbage and suspended
services but not, of course, to give any regard to the rights of public
sector workers or to think as working people about what is at stake in
this strike.

OCAP, as a matter of basic principle, stands in solidarity with
workers' struggles. We don't hate or blame workers who have been able to
win a living wage or support calls for them to be driven into poverty.
Rather, we want to see the poor provided with wages and incomes that raise
them out of poverty.

This strike occurs in a context that makes it especially important
for all of us that it end in victory and that the concessionary demands of
the 'progressive' Miller Administration be defeated. The Mayor defended
his shameful efforts to gut the collective agreements of City workers by
pointing to rising welfare caseloads brought on by the economic downturn.
What a disgusting statement. To pit City workers against those who are
being forced to turn to the wretched sub poverty pittance that welfare
provides is an outrage. This comes from a man who boasts that there are
more cops on the streets under his regime than every before and who is
taking us towards an obscene billion dollar a year police budget, while he
has frittered away the welfare reserve fund
to a fraction of where it was when he took office.

The Mayor points to the state of the economy to justify his attack
on City workers. In doing this, he makes clear what side he is on when it
comes to who should pay for this economic crisis. As unemployment shoots
up, we face the situation with an empty shell of an unemployment insurance
system that shuts out most of the unemployed and with a post Mike Harris
welfare system that fails to provide the necessities of life. None of the
'solutions' to the crisis involve meeting the basic needs of the
unemployed and poor. For those who still have jobs and unions, the
bankrupt corporations they work for will be bailed out at vast public
expense while their rights as workers are destroyed and they are presented
with massive concessionary demands.

The process of attacking workers started in the auto industry and
other parts of the private sector. The drive for austerity is now
spreading, inevitably, to the public sector. Beginning with militant
fights by postal workers in the 1960s, public sector workers have spent
decades struggling for decent wages and conditions.

The present crisis of capitalism will mean an all out confrontation to
take back those gains. Moreover, an attack on the workers who deliver
public services can't be separated from the attack on the services
themselves and the rights of those who receive them. That is the context
of this strike and we in OCAP know what side we're on. We call for full
support for the City workers. Send messages of solidarity. Be there with
them on their picket lines. Stand with them in their fight because they
are fighting for all of us.

Finally, some common sense. I am shocked (although I guess I shouldn't be, after the reaction to the TTC strike - though even that wasn't nearly so bad) at the mean-spirited selfishness of local citizens.(Just read the comments on any news story about the strike). I can't believe how many people think that city workers shouldn't have x,y,z (benefits and perks, job security, decent wage, etc) because private sector employees don't have these things. It's like the child who breaks a toy someone else is playing with. If I can't have it, nobody can. Of course my metaphor breaks down because lots of the people complaining are not exactly in dire straights. We're talking lawyers and middle management here.

Not that the media is helping any. Zeroing in on the bankable sick days as if that is what this fight is really about. If you didn't live here, you'd think the streets were flowing with garbage.

Cognitive dissonance abounds. Garbage collectors shouldn't be given the same increases as police officers got because garbage collectors aren't as important. But me oh my, it's been TWO days without garbage collection and already they are screaming to have someone take away their refuse. Somehow forgotten is that fact that it is not just a garbage strike. Inside and outside workers include paramedics, parks and rec staff, workers at swimming pools and community centres, health inspectors, office workers, social workers, child care workers, and even the people who clean the nasty (and desperately important especially for the homeless) public washrooms. They supply incredibly important services.

What I think we should realize is just how many services we receive from the city and how invaluable they are. If we were to try to buy all these services, few could afford them. They make all of our lives better, and they happen so routinely we rarely even notice them. Using the recession as an excuse to claw back hard-won benefits from public-sector employees is just wrong. Pretty much the entire world (even the IMF) understands that a recession is the time to spend on public works, not cut them. And if you are cutting, why not start at the top (police chief? city manager?) and work your way down instead of starting at the bottom (non-unionized workers have already been screwed with wage freezes earlier this year)?

If this were France, we'd probably have a general strike just to support them. Everyone would take the day off work (parents wouldn't have to worry about child care at least) and we'd all sit in the streets drinking wine.

Perhaps we could also use this as an opportunity to meditate on the excess of waste we produce as a society. Two days without collection and all hell breaks loose? Honestly. What is wrong with us?

Entitlement

Puzzle me this: Why is it that the same people who bitch about workers sense of entitlement (you know, workers wanting decent treatment and wages) themselves feel entitled to free plastic bags? (It's true)

I think its a marvelous success so far: Toronto's new 5 cent plastic bag law has reduced the use of plastic shopping bags by something like 75%.

First the Recession didn't exist...

First the recession didn't even exist (No recession for Canada, er.. well maybe a "technical" one), and now the recession is going away.

yep, ok, uh-huh, sure, I believe you Stevie
After all, your finance minister has such a good track record

It isn't surprising...

... that 'Status Indians' face threat of extinction, since the Indian Act was implemented specifically for the purpose of eradicating indigenous peoples and culture. Indian Status was designed to reduce the Indian population, a neat solution to the "Indian Problem".

Within a few generations, it was assumed, the Indian population would nearly disappear. This was ensured through the restrictive nature of Indian Status: an indigenous woman who married a white man lost her status, as did her children, plus if you were enfranchised to vote or got a university education you were no longer considered an Indian.

In the past 40 years there have been many changes to the Indian Act, some positive and some negative, but most aboriginals in Canada are unable to access the benefits of the Act, while dealing with many of the negative consequences of their heritage. Canadians often display an incredible degree of racism, particularly towards aboriginal individuals and groups. Don't believe me? Just read the comments on the Star article, if you can stomach it.

Personally, I can't imagine if the government was able to decide for me who I am (legally speaking). Imagine they all of a sudden decreed that only those with two Christian parents could be Christian, or that those women who vote were no longer legally women, or that men who go to university are no longer legally men, or if you have a slice of pizza you are now Italian.

Also see How the Indian Act made Indians act like Indian Act Indians