Rabbits, Blinkity

So thanks to all the backlash, the Susan G. Komen Foundation decided that defunding Planned Parenthood was a bad idea. Good for them.

But as the Feministing article points out, it's quite likely they'll just remove funding at some later date, just more quietly. And in the meantime, a donation to the Komen Foundation mostly goes to buying pink billboards and other questionable "awareness" activities, instead of, y'know, actual research and prevention.* (News flash: people in the United States are pretty damn aware. What we need, ironically enough, is a cure).

If you want to fund cancer screening, cut out the middlewoman and donate to Planned Parenthood or your favorite local screening organization directly. If you want to fund research, try the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. 36.3 million out of 41.5 million - 87% - of their funding goes toward research grants.

There are many, many sensible and efficient cancer prevention organizations in the world. Komen isn't one of them.

* Read their financials here. Out of about 409 million dollars, $75 million (18%) is burned in administration, $181 million (44%) is spent on "public health education" i.e. pink billboards, while the remainder - less than half - is used for screenings/treatment and research ($77 million/19% and $75 million/18% respectively). In other words, they spend as much on administration as they do funding research.

Let me let you in on a little secret: nothing in life is free. And that includes charitable giving. This post was inspired by this commentor, who kindly informed everybody that all the blogging in the world was worth less than giving $2000 to the Against Malaria Foundation, because $2000 dollars to the AMF will keep a child in Africa from dying from malaria. Clearly, we should spend all of our spare time working for minimum wage jobs and giving the proceeds to charity,* and forget all about silly things like "reading" and "writing."
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So, this is a cool thing to write about: Things are easy/hard to learn. (Found via Clarissa's Blog which is awesome.)

The gist of the meme is to list three things in the course of your lifelong learning that came as natural as falling off a log, especially if they strike you as possessing elegance, expository power, arousal of curiosity, or best of all, a lot of formerly disparate concepts somehow “fall into place.” The other list is three things that are utterly opaque to your mind, that you have made repeated attempts to learn, but for some reason or other, you just don’t seem to be meant to learn these things.

Easy things

1. Understanding cultures and subcultures. Partly as a result of being raised in a mostly religious-right-conservative community, and now having shifted most of the way to the other extreme, I find it easy to get inside the heads of all different sorts of people.
2. Reading and writing. I don't remember learning to read, not even a little bit. I don't really remember even reading at a 'beginner' level, as it were. I just sort of... read. It's a part of me. I don't really understand, except in a superficial way, what it would be like to read with difficulty, word by word, or have trouble understanding complex grammar. I blame my parents for this.
3. Not being bored. I don't think I'm ever bored, actually. Even if I don't have anything specific to do, I'm perfectly happy daydreaming and…

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On the 1 in 1,000,000 change that someone reads this and hasn't managed to hear about SOPA, or isn't sure about it, or something, let me just urge you to look it up and consider it carefully. This is pretty bad stuff, even by post-9/11 standards. The really amazing thing, is how little our congresspeople seem to know about how the internet even works. Will this stop piracy? No. It won't even bother it a little bit. Will it seriously annoy legitimate content producers? You bet.

Could it potentially be used to censor anti-government, anti-corporate, or other forms of free speech? Absolutely. Will it? Probably not immediately to a great extent, and hopefully it would be stopped in court if it became too extreme, but in the future, well, who knows.

It's clearly wrong, clearly pointless, and possibly dangerous, which is why it needs to be stopped. Contact your congresscritters and senatecritters now.

(Update: Amanda Marcotte posits that Tom Matlock's brain has been poisoned by constant criticism from the MRA crowd. This is reasonable. Tom, and all your friends: I don't know you very well, but you need help. Detox from the kyriarchy. Become a feminist. Feminists are really awesome. And they're very smart, reasonable, and support equality for all.)

The Good Men Project just published a pile of crap, entitled "Being a Dude Is a Good Thing," by Tom Matlock. The core of it all is this little gem:

Men know women are different. They think differently, they express emotion differently, they are motivated by different things, they think about sex differently, and they use a very different vocabulary.

Yipperoo, here comes the patriarchy!

Now, I've spent a lot of time - way too much time, actually - trying to come to grips with the various men's rights crowds over the last few months. The Good Men Project is one of the better places to do this, if for no other reason than that the writing is reasonably high quality and comes across as honest and thoughtful. We're human beings, not monsters, it pleads, we just want to be ourselves. So I tried, carefully, to engage in this particular conversation. I asked for clarification about the gender essentialist bullshit that was steaming around. In return, I was told in no uncertain terms that yes, men are totally different then women, they know it because it's obvious, and that frankly, I should know it too and what's wrong with me anyway? Curiously enough, one commenter read me as feminine woman, but glossed over it with nary a stray thought when he found out otherwise. More on him later.

But I think I've got it all sorted. This stuff? It's just the new boss, same as the old. Much, much more after the break.
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Last night, a fine person going by the name of "@Dogcattlerancher" followed everybody who was following the Occupy Wall Street twitter account, including me. He had a few clever remarks listed, but was also bragging that he was going to get 300 followers in a hour. But it was clever enough I thought I'd follow him anyway. I wanted to see if he was actually paying attention, so I sent a nice remark in my favorite subspecies of internet slang congratulating him on his cleverness...
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The really interesting thing about The Good Wife is that the "wife" in question wasn't ever actually that good - at least not in the way that the obvious connotation of the phrase would indicate. "Principled," or even "Pragmatic" might be a more accurate choice of word, if less provocative. Alica Florrick is, in fact, so principled that her morals wrap from "good" right back around to "evil" on a regular basis. So it was something of a relief last season when she finally hooked up with Will and threw Peter out; at the least it should have relieved her of some of her tension. And it worked! Sort of.

Alica's Nerves

On to the episode: Alicia's been having sex, and is therefore enormously pleased with herself, complete with new bangs. She gets over herself pretty quickly, though, when she manages to get her client implicated for murder, via the usual shady-sounding leading questions. Add to that her... uncomfortable relationship with Kalinda, and not wanting to be seen with Will ever. Sure enough, it's business as usual. But with unusually passionate arguing.
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"Deals. Why, they're the very foundation of civilized existence."

This was a bit unexpected. Rumpelstiltskin... blew up the token black (seriously, TV Godesses?) fairy godmother. And then made the Rapunzel deal with Cinderella in exchange for the ball ticket.

This episode was all about favors, in fact, and who owes whom. Ashley/Cinderella owes Mr. Gold her baby. Shawn owes Ashley and their child a chance at a family, complete with tiny glass slippers. Emma owes Henry time, and a whole lot of slack for annoying but right. We already know that Regina owes Gold seemingly unlimited favors. Graham owes Regina his job and possibly a sexual harassment lawsuit. And now Emma owes Mr. Gold a favor as well. Not to mention, everybody owes magic (aka life?) a favor, starting with not leaving town. As in, it literally cuts them off at the sign by crashing their car.

But nobody scares Emma, so she plants her feet, shakes Mr. Gold's hand, and takes the sheriff's job offer.
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