Komen link round-up; local protest later today

Richer, smarter, and funnier minds than mine have explained why it's stupid for Susan G. Komen for the Cure to politicize women's healthcare by ending grants to Planned Parenthood that provide breast screenings to underserved American women. In short, cancer prevention activities make up some 16% of the patient care Planned Parenthood delivers, compared to 3% for abortion services. Math from figures in a Bloomberg Businessweek article indicates to me that Planned Parenthood used Komen grant money to provide about 172,000 breast exams in the past 5 years ("Komen grants paid for about 4.3 percent of the 4 million breast exams and 9 percent of the 70,000 mammogram referrals provided at Planned Parenthood clinics in the past five years, Planned Parenthood said"). That's not a whole lot of exams -- 34,000 per year -- and it was probably not even 172,000 individual women. But it's 172,000 exams that wouldn't have taken place without the grants, and it's 172,000 encounters with women who got some education on breast cancer prevention and detection.

Komen says they're "dedicated to the fight against breast cancer in the world." They need to add the qualifier, unless the service reaches you through Planned Parenthood.

EDIT: Word on the street is that there is a fundraiser for the Philadelphia Komen affiliate today at the Cescaphé Ballroom, 932 North 2nd Street, and that activists will gather at 5:30 p.m. to urge the affiliate to join those in Denver and Connecticut in telling the national organization that it sucks to politicize women's public health.

Contract with America evolves: contract on whistleblowers

Newt Gingrich says his best-case scenario is that next January he'll walk from the inauguration ceremony to the Oval Office and sign the repeal of Sarbanes-Oxley (MSNBC video, skip to 9:05).

Dude's candidacy gets hilariouser and hilariouser.

Stats on looking for work

My job application-to-interview ratio seems to be about 6:1. I'm on track to apply for 72 jobs this year and interview for 6.

By "apply" I mean carefully select positions that interest me, that I appear qualified for, that I reasonably believe I have a good chance of getting, and that I make a good-faith effort to tweak my resume and compose a solid cover letter for. I don't mean shotgunning: shotgunning my resume out to all the lawyering positions I see on craigslist takes away time from my law practice. Which has at least been paying my office rent for a few months now.

Stats from this week's job interview: There were 3 interviewees (including myself), and it'll be about 4 weeks before they make their hiring decision.

Who is Jessica Buchanan?

Who is Jessica Buchanan, and what about her caused the President to give the go-ahead for a Super Special Black Ops Navy Seals operation to kill nearly a dozen militant pirates to get her out of Somalia yesterday, just before the State of the Union address?

Maybe she's this Jessica Buchanan.

EDIT: Or maybe not. Later news reports say that she's local, a student at Valley Forge Christian College (CNN). I'd guessed the Buchanan in the LinkedIn profile based on age and work in the Middle East.

Excitotoxins!

"Excitotoxins"? This is my word of the day. My made-up word of the day:

Don't you have to cook grains in order to get their nutritional benefit?

This question presupposes that grains such as rice, wheat, barley, and oats are helpful to the body's nutrition. Actually, they are not. The fact that they must be cooked to be edible is the first clue that something is wrong with them. They are bland to the taste and are virtually inedible without salt, spices, and condiments, the deadly "excitotoxins". Grains are acid forming in a body that needs to be slightly alkaline. Many people have substituted cooked grains in place of meat in their diet, and as a consequence, have shown a marked reduction in cardiovascular disease. However, because cooked grains create a condition known as acid toxemia, these same people will instead, suffer from a higher risk of arthritis and cancer. Cooked grains also contain opioids (which are addictive), cause daily mood swings, and contribute significantly to obesity.

As the joke goes, [citation needed]. Christ, why can't I look up some information about growing bean sprouts at home without being associated with looney-tunes raw foodists? (I recently started up again, after having quit since renouncing my former life as a hippie. All the internet research I can find indicates that the beans I'm sprouting are so old that they shouldn't be sprouting. But three dinner guests and my ravenous daughter found differently this weekend.)

Further on in the FAQ:

Too much fat will thicken the blood

Oh, man, that line brings just one thing to mind:

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry "Hold, hold!"

Crazy-making

I think it bears repeating that being un- or under-employed is incredibly stressful. I have a great undocumented, unofficial safety net of friends, family, and a partner who buys my groceries; but that's all it is, a safety net. I'm not building reserves. And I've had to accumulate debt on my credit card again because last month I had an only somewhat expected, but totally uninsured loss at my home.

A news item the other day mentioned that women are more likely than men to experience mental illness (MSNBC). How is this report surprising? When you jump through the right hoops, you do all you're supposed to do -- I put myself through law school so that I could double or triple my administrative professional's salary and show my daughter a better life -- and you get jack for it. What kind of jack? I serve on a volunteer committee with a guy who graduated below me in my law school class, who can't figure out how to calendar meetings on the iPad his Biglaw job gave him and who can't meet a deadline to save his life, and yet I'm the one who knows that, right now, I have $68.17 in the bank. This guy takes home six figures a year from his office; in my office, I get asked for free advice on how to legally force a grant-making foundation to give money to an organization that hasn't even applied for its determination letter yet.

I applied for dozens of jobs in 2011, landed a half-dozen interviews, and made less money in the past two years than a relative of mine spent in six weeks to finish their basement.

My friend Bee Lavender on American poverty and the lack of will on the part of political leadership to address it:

[E]normous numbers of people are forced into bankruptcy because of the egregious and parasitic [health] insurance industry. Others are trapped in jobs and relationships that restrict their aspirations, usefulness, and profitability, because they need the insurance. Health care reform hasn't happened in a fashion useful to me, and I very much doubt that it will in my lifetime. Not for lack of need, or care, but because the political will does not exist.

But instead of talking about the reality of poverty, and what it means to be poor, we get to hear presidential candidates shit talk our brothers and sisters, wives, husbands, children.

They say we're poor because we're lazy. I say I've never met a lazy poor person, though I have met quite a few rich people who lie and cheat and steal.

The esteemed Republican presidential candidate does not seem to grasp some basic concepts about life, work, or economics. Repealing child labor laws would certainly not have helped me as a child (my absenteeism being the result of cancer, not a bad attitude). My parents were already forced by necessity to take any job on offer, no matter how demeaning or low paid.

My dad is a janitor; Gingrich says we should fire janitors and make kids do the job. I would like to ask him what my father is meant to do? He is sixty-two years old, and has the best job he can find. If he loses it, there is no alternative career path.

This is crazy-making. In the face of ad-hominem attacks from politicians who blame the poor for their condition, and yell "look, Elvis!" to successfully draw the media's attention away from government policies that allow incomprehensibly high corporate profits to go untaxed while social services, public education, and the nation's infrastructure crumble, it's enough to make an un- or under-employed person crazy.

Of course Gingrich's daughters are defending him

The CNN blog headline reads, "Gingrich's daughters defend him ahead of ABC interview with ex-wife." I was going to make a comment along the lines of, well, of course they're defending him. It's perfectly reasonable for a man's children to stick up for him. Parents generally treat their offspring very different from the way they treat a spouse, and no child shares the perspective, knowledge, and experience of a spouse when a marital relationship goes kablooey. So I was going to say, you know, I imagine my daughter would defend her dad ahead of a television interview with me, just as Gingrich's daughters are defending him as against one of his ex-wives; but that statement would seem to equate my ex-husband with Newt Gingrich. And no matter how smelly the dirty laundry is between me and my ex-husband, I would never dream of equating or even comparing him to Newt Gingrich. After all, my ex-husband never asked me to open up our marriage, or cheated on me with someone 23 years younger than he is (as far as I know), or discussed divorce proceedings with me while I was in the hospital, or brought legislation destroying the welfare state to the sitting Democratic President for his signature.

When abortions are illegal, women still get abortions

. . . and they get more of them. A study, published in The Lancet, covered the years 1995 to 2008 found:

Abortion rates were lowest in Western Europe -- 12 per 1,000 -- and highest in Eastern Europe -- 43 per 1,000. The rate in North America was 19 per 1,000. Sedgh said she and colleagues found a link between higher abortion rates and regions with more restrictive legislation, such as in Latin America and Africa. They also found that 95 to 97 percent of abortions in those regions were unsafe[, defined as] any procedure done by people lacking needed skills or in places that don't meet minimal medical standards.

The researchers' conclusion: "It is precisely where abortion is illegal that it must become safer," and providing education and birth control universally will go a long, long way.

The full text of the study is available free with registration at The Lancet's website.

Gruesome, public Center City suicide mostly unreported

I'm not sure why I don't see this news item more prominently on local news sources:

Philadelphia Police are investigating the death of a man who plummeted from a balcony at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Center City onto the Benjamin Franklin Parkway around lunchtime Tuesday.

[...] Witnesses told police of a loud boom or possibly a gunshot around 1 p.m., before the man fell from a top floor of the hotel and landed in front of the T.G.I. Friday's restaurant on the 1700 block of the Parkway.

A friend of mine passed the scene after the man fell and before the police covered up the body. The top of the man's head was blown away and a gaggle of teenagers -- I'd guess Hallahan girls -- witnessed it all. It was pretty gruesome; made for an unprintable photo, outside of rotten.com; and my friend took the rest of the day off.

Could be that the news outlets are reluctant to report it because it was an apparent suicide (PDF), though some organizations are re-thinking that type of policy.

Bonus: a mesmerizing 2003 article from The New Yorker about the Golden Gate Bridge:

Survivors often regret their decision in midair, if not before. Ken Baldwin and Kevin Hines both say they hurdled over the railing, afraid that if they stood on the chord they might lose their courage. Baldwin was twenty-eight and severely depressed on the August day in 1985 when he told his wife not to expect him home till late. "I wanted to disappear," he said. "So the Golden Gate was the spot. I’d heard that the water just sweeps you under." On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. "I still see my hands coming off the railing," he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, "I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped."

Perhaps yesterday's suicide was trying to make sure he didn't change his mind on his way down from the hotel balcony.

Who signed it?

Looking at the credentials I've hung on my wall -- B.A. diploma, J.D. diploma, certificate admitting me to the bar of Pennsylvania -- I see that every last signature on them is that of an older white man. My other credentials, too; everything going back to my high-school diploma and all the academic awards between is signed by only older white men. It makes me feel that I've earned my credentials not because of those signatures but in spite of them.

Doesn't help that, last night, after I dispensed about $300 worth of legal advice and business counseling to a non-profit organization, an older white man took me aside and gave me spontaneous, unsolicited advice on how to drum up business.

Anyway, as to the anti-SOPA website blackouts -- you know President Obama said two days ago that he won't sign the SOPA bill, right?

Neighbors to 26th District: help! 26th District to neighbors: help yourselves!

Captain Mike Cram, Philly P.D. 26th District, showed up late to speak to a town meeting in Port Richmond last week. When residents expressed their concerns that 26th District officers are slacking at addressing both violent crime and nuisance problems in Greater Port Fishington, Cram and A.J. Thompson of the District Attorney's office told them to forget the police and simply engage in self-help. They

suggested neighbors round up 50 or 150 friends to sit out at Conrail or outside known drug houses "to get it into people's heads that somebody's watching." Cram said a shortage of manpower means neighbors must take things into their own hands.

Wild. I'm not sure how the 26th District and the District Attorney's office expects residents to fix blight, end illegal house parties, and eliminate murderous armed robbery by "watching," but evidently that's the solution they're offering.

But for what it's worth, for the past several weeks Leo M. Mulvihill, Jr., the lawyer who lives and works in Fishtown quoted in City Paper's story there, has been doing just that. He's tweeted with @PhillyPolice name-checks when he sees cops driving while talking on cell phones, and regularly posts photos of cops napping in their patrol cars or just generally disrespecting the neighborhood. Here's hoping the cops in the 26th District don't start giving him a hard time for documenting them.

Rita's Water Ice sold to private equity firm again: what it means

Quietly reported yesterday, though not announced on either company's website, a private equity company called Falconhead Capital, LLC, has bought Rita's Water Ice. Rita's had been owned by a private equity group since 2005. So though this was merely paperwork (and the exchange of an undisclosed but likely eight-figure amount of money) it's still a good opportunity to talk about what it means when a business changes from operating as an independent company to being owned by a private equity firm.

It means the business is no longer a company of its own, but is merely an asset in the equity firm's diverse portfolio of brands. And as soon as it starts underperforming, the firm's portfolio managers will treat it as any asset that produces income for members of of the firm, not as a company employing and serving people: the asset will be sold off or terminated. The business will enter into bankruptcy or will wind down; workers will be laid off, shops will be closed, and money that would have moved around the local community from customers to workers and managers, and from employees to the places where they spend their paychecks, will no longer move around.

Companies are managed for their stakeholders. In our capitalist system and under our state and federal laws, it's the legal and ethical duty of the company's directors to do what they have to for the stakeholders. When any company's income is down, the company has to respond for the benefit of its stakeholders. The stakeholders of a private equity company are the investors in the company's portfolio. The stakeholders of an independent company are employees, customers, management, and stockholders. So compare. When a company is just a company, when it underperforms the directors choose from options like shaking up management, cutting some jobs, closing a few storefronts, or choosing some strategic planning option, like enduring a few quarters of decreased income while anticipating increased future income through investment in their plant, on the assumption that in the long run it's best to keep the company itself a going concern. But when a company is a line item in a portfolio of assets, when it underperforms it gets taken out of the portfolio. That's the only legal and ethical option, once a company has been sold, as Rita's has, and is nothing but an asset of a private equity firm.

It's what happened to Harry & David, the mail-order fruit gift box people. And there's a good possibility that sooner or later it'll happen to Rita's, too.

The end result of selling a business to a private equity firm so that it's just one brand out of many is uncertainty -- among the business's employees and local suppliers who lose their income. In the local communities that see an eventual loss of the money that the business had kept moving around. And among the customers who are disadvantaged economically with a lack of competition and with quality of life issues that enter in when the only choices at the strip mall are remotely-owned mega-chain restaurants and stores.

Daycare is awful

Daycares are horrible things.

I imagine I am projecting my own abandonment issues.

And I recognize my luck and privilege that my household was financially able to opt out of the American welfare-to-work system that President Clinton signed into law.

Occupy attrition

Occupy Philly appears to be going out not with a bang but a whimper. What was accomplished in other cities by tear gas, pepper spray, and mass arrests will be accomplished in Philadelphia by rain, cold weather, and political out-maneuvering.

Friday jukebox: Nina Simone

Let me tell you what I got
That nobody's gonna take away
From this woman

Friday jukebox: Pink Martini

you looked into my bloodshot eyes and said

is it too soon if I call you

Sunday

MSNBC sees conspiracies in a mayors' teleconference

MSNBC reports breathlessly that a dozen-odd American mayors participated in a conference call last week, but that the mayors "deny colluding on 'Occupy' crackdowns." The call was part of near-weekly verbal communications that members of the United States Conference of Mayors regularly hold, and the conversation apparently naturally turned to the various Occupy actions happening in everyone's cities. And coincidentally, there were clear-outs and crackdowns in multiple cities between the teleconference and MSNBC's investigation for this report.

But investigation into what? Collusion about what? MSNBC begs a huge question here: that's it's improper or illegal for the mayors to talk about a challenge common to all of them and discuss solutions. And so what if they coordinated clearing out the encampments? So what if they "colluded"? What does colluded even mean here? Is there an accusation that mayors from different cities shared funds or police forces or matériel?

Perhaps the conversation went in the direction of, "I'll clear out my city's Occupy if you clear out yours," or "We'll use our pepper spray and riot police if you do, so nobody looks worse than anybody else." But even if it did, how is this "collusion"? And even if it is "collusion," how is this a problem? What laws would have been broken (outside of opening themselves up to §1983 liability for various police excess issues -- does MSNBC mean conspiracy to deprive Occupiers of their civil rights under §1983? Something tells me the article's premise is not that deep)?

And here I thought it was only radically politicized people and the insane who saw conspiracies everywhere.

Occupy Philly: control yourselves

Channel 6 answered my not-so-rhetorical question from yesterday, "[I]f the Occupy movement is truly so anarchist and leader-less, why doesn't a contingent separate itself out, splinter away, and offer to negotiate separately, away from the bad-faith consensus-blockers?"

One group of Occupy Philly protesters spent the day preparing for confrontation, another faction was meeting with city officials trying to defuse the situation and work on relocating the encampment.

A group calling itself Reasonable Solutions has distanced itself from the bizarro hardliners who are gearing up for a pepperspray 'n' bulldozer showdown with police by retrenching, defacing the transit concourse with graffiti, and "[leaving] a trail of human waste" on the lower levels of Dilworth Plaza.

You know what separates humans from animals? Choosing not to defecate where we sleep. You know what separates adults from children? Choosing not to protest perceived injustice by inappropriately dealing with our bowel functions.

If Occupy Philly can't get this nonsense under control, then public sentiment, which is at best ambivalent about Occupy groups -- for god's sake, don't read the comments on that news article -- will seriously go south. And by "public sentiment," I mean the sentiment of even hard-core radical feminist commies like myself.

I walked through Dilworth Plaza this morning about 8:00. Maybe one tent out of ten is correctly pitched, tied down tightly, and kept neat. I dig that it's a challenge to properly maintain a campsite over weeks or months, and not everybody spent time with the Girl and Boy Scouts or Guides when they were kids -- but damn, read the instructions that came with the tent, take away your trash, and keep your site neat and clean.

Late last night, I got e-mail asking if I would kindly volunteer to serve as a Legal Observer if (when) the police start clearing out the camp. Someone justify to me why I should help out the bad-faith operators who've decided to piss and shit all over my city. I'm not going to be a tool to help those Occupiers avoid jail time or even a police beat-down.

Now, the Reasonable Solutions people, that contingent I'll be happy to help out.

Dilworth Plaza renovation supporters: tools, fascists, or the 1%?

If I'm a person who lives and works in Center City Philadelphia, and I support the proposed renovations to Dilworth Plaza, does that make me a tool, a fascist, or a member of the 1%?

The proposed renovations seek to address some real problems with the current space. Right now, it's a paved wasteland with pedestrian barriers, blocked views, and multiple elevations that break up the space into many unattractive, unmaintained areas. The plan is to transform it into an open greenspace with a lawn area, water features, and improved access to the underground hub where the Broad Street Line, the Market-Frankford El, and the subway-surface trolleys intersect (67-page PDF). The suggested glass-enclosed stairways will bring to mind transit entrances in such cities as London, Tokyo, and Paris, and the concourse below will see sunlight for the first time since it was created and capped, making it more inviting and probably increasing its perceived safety. The proposed changes will make the space a workers' lunch oasis in the very noisy traffic junction around City Hall, and a more likely weekend destination for residents and tourists. For crying out loud, they want to put in rain gardens!

But Occupy Philly characterizes the plan thus:

The renovation, in its most general significance, is a privatization of public space, an enclosure of the commons in favor of a falsely sterilized, for-profit, private park of amusements for the privileged.

Really? Because what I see in the proposal is a re-imagining of the Plaza that benefits transit users, serves city residents and workers, and brings in tourists who spend money and support jobs in places around Philly that aren't only the historic district around Independence Hall. Also, "in its most general significance" (whatever that means), the plan keeps the Plaza open to the public; it doesn't make it private at all.

Why does Occupy Philly characterize the plan so inaccurately? And why take the stupid ad hominem pot-shot at the people who will use the Plaza when it's turned into more of a welcoming, green public park?

Occupy Philly could have found the proposal and read it easily -- the document I found is dated 2009 but I figure it's close to the final proposal, and it turned up when I simply googled "dilworth plaza proposal." And if they were really supporting the non-1% of Philadelphians who walk in and around the Plaza every day as they go to work or school, or do business in City Hall, or use the concourse to access SEPTA, Occupy Philly would cooperate and move across the street to the space at the Municipal Services Building.

But they aren't, and that's a big reason why I think that they are infiltrated, and that they've been infiltrated for weeks. And I'll quit thinking that as soon as they quit calling me the 1% for being a person who's really looking forward to having Dilworth Plaza brought into the 21st century.

Or back to the 17th, as the space where City Hall sits right now was one of the city's 5 original public squares:

Let every house be placed, if the person pleases, in the middle of its plat, as to the breadthway of it, so that there may be ground on each side for gardens or orchards, or fields, that it may be a greene country towne, which will never be burnt & always wholesome.

William Penn's Instructions to his Commissioners, William Crispin, John Bezar, & Nathaniel Allen, 1681

This is what a textbook case of infiltration looks like

So Occupy Wall Street's Zuccotti Park encampment is being bulldozed away, and any reasonable voices that would have conceded leaving Dilworth Plaza here in Philly have been blocked by individuals who are either stubborn-headed or acting in bad faith or both, and I imagine it will compel a Zuccotti-like showdown at City Hall any day now.

And of course Mayor Nutter is taking the opportunity the bad-faith operators have handed him to have a legal basis for bulldozing Occupy Philly as well: people are relieving themselves on the plaza instead of in the porta-potties; there's been an alleged sexual assault; there's respiratory illness going around because people aren't washing their hands and they're sleeping in the cold and damp; and, well, Dilworth Plaza is smelling pretty damn ripe lately. And when the group comes to "consensus" that it won't leave City Hall and move across the street, the mayor can say with very good plausible deniability that the group is being unreasonable, that it has changed and is different from the original rabble-rousers, and that something will have to be done soon.

I say there are "bad faith" actors in the Occupy consensus process because that's what the nonsense in Seattle the other day looked like: a few individuals deliberately blocking reality-based consensus for unclear reasons, but for reasons that will result in the disintegration of the protestors' united front. COINTELPRO is long gone, of course, but this is what happens when there's been some textbook undercover operatives work and coordinated infiltration.

But if the Occupy movement is truly so anarchist and leader-less, why doesn't a contingent separate itself out, splinter away, and offer to negotiate separately, away from the bad-faith consensus-blockers?

Another thought, I saw on the Twitter (and repeated without clear verification) that the NYPD had declared a no-fly zone over Zuccotti park for the duration of the clearing out, pepper spraying, and bulldozing. Attention, news media attorneys and Occupy Wall Street's lawyers: subpoena the security cam videos!