ILLCONCEIVED: Great review by Mary Eberstadt of Naomi Wolf's new book Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood. Eberstadt describes the book as a "wide-ranging monologue of complaint about almost every aspect of pregnancy and birth, including pregnancy handbooks, weight gain, cesarean sections, episiotomies, cold hands, 1980s medical-office architecture, maternity clothes, suburbia, childbirth classes, hospital decorating schemes, obstetrical checkups, fetal monitors, anesthesia, diaper bags, park benches, and much more."
This seems to be the consensus in the reviews. Ian Sansom described Wolf in The Guardian as unbearable. An accompanying interview with Wolf ("Just look at a playground. What do playgrounds say to women? They say - 'you know what, just fuck you! You haven't anywhere to change dirty diapers - fuck you, deal with it.") prompted one Guardian reader to write to the editor:
How long do we have to listen to middle-class women moaning about looking after their kids? I stay at home to look after my kids. Hard work, but not as hard I bet as being married to Naomi Wolf or one of her pals.
Canada's Globe and Mail gives a report on underground schools for girls in Afghanistan. These schools are dangerous, and since the Taliban took over, girls lag far behind boys in learning. But even the boys are behind. According to the article, "subjects such as science were scrapped in favour of rote study of the Koran." This is exactly the reason that one expert on the history of Islamic science gives in the Times today for the fact that only 1% of the world's scientists are muslim.
ANYONE REMEMBER WHY THE UN GOT A NOBEL A FEW WEEKS AGO? One of the reasons given was Kofi's rise to the challenge of international terrorism. In typical UN fashion, this involved a working group, which the other day failed to meet a deadline to overcome its chief stumbling block. They couldn't agree amongst themseves what is terrorism. Yep, can we please give them more power to solve the world's problems? Because it's clear they've got what it takes to do it.
Stanley Kurtz points out a great article in the The Wilson Quarterly, which dissects the vituperative things law professors have had to say about the majority ruling of Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore. The authors don't defend the decision per se, but they do a terrific job of taking down the legal scholars who have argued so sloppily against it, concluding:
Reasonable people may differ over whether Bush v. Gore was correctly decided. But the charge that the decision is indefensible is itself indefensible. That this untenable charge has been made by legal scholars repeatedly and emphatically, and with dubious support in fact and law, is an abuse of authority and a betrayal of trust. If scholars do not maintain a reputation for fairness and disinterestedness, their own legitimacy may well suffer grievously in the eyes of the public, and so could American democracy.Berkowitz and Wittes also give examples of previous cases in which the conservative justices have ruled using equal protection arguments or against state supreme court interpretations of state law.
ROMANIA ALONE: As of this spring, only one industrialized nation had signed the Kyoto Treaty-- Romania. With a standard of living ranked between Libya and Lebanon, they have the least to lose. And according to Tony Judt in The New York Review of Books, post-Communist Romania is still at the Bottom of the Heap, economically and environmentally:
Communism was an ecological disaster everywhere, but in Romania its mess has proven harder to clean up. In the industrial towns of Transylvania, in places like Hunedoara or Baia Mare, where a recent leak from the Aural gold mine into the Tisza River poisoned part of the mid-Danubian ecosystem, you can taste the poison in the air you breathe, as I found on a recent visit there. The environmental catastrophe is probably comparable in degree to parts of eastern Germany or northern Bohemia, but its extent is greater: whole tracts of the country are infested with bloated, rusting steel mills, abandoned petrochemical refineries, and decaying cement works. Privatization of uneconomic state enterprises is made much harder in Romania in part because the old Communist rulers have succeeded in selling the best businesses to themselves, but also because the cost of cleaning up polluted water and contaminated soil is prohibitive and off-putting to the few foreign companies who express an initial interest.Communism was an ecological disaster, because it was an economic disaster. It is expensive to think green. The restrictions of the Kyoto Treaty would have required the US to constrict its economy by at least $100 billion a year. And if we were to accept them, we would be, like Romania, too poor to focus on the environment.
ANYONE ELSE? Two Americans, three British killed while fighting for Taliban
BACK AGAIN: A moratorium was put on blogging this weekend, so that progress could be made on my thesis.
I've got a little something for you, Mr. Taliban, under my burqa... Afghan women fight back.
C'EST BIZARRE! France is behind us! They, of course, have some experience with Islamic fundamentalists.
UPDATE: Here is the story: Les deux-tiers des Français approuvent l'intervention militaire en Afghanistan. Overall, there is a split between the right and the left. Guess which one supports the US?