Monthly Archives: May 2004

Somali Woman “As Good As Dead”

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But the woman’s family are insisting that the militiamen will continue to occupy the hospital until they are compensated for the removal of her womb.

The family is demanding 50 camels, which is the traditional Somali compensation offered for the death of a woman.

The woman’s family say she is as good as dead because she can no longer bear children.

This has been bothering me all day. I realize that this woman comes from a traditional culture, in a place where survival is everything. She would have died had a doctor at a free clinic in Mogadishu not removed her uterus. She was carrying a dead fetus, and with the lack of medical care in Somalia, she was probably in extremis when she finally got to the hospital. So the doctor removed her womb, and then waited to be thanked for saving her life.

Only, it seems that in the views of her family and many traditional elders, she’s already dead anyway, because she is now incapable of bearing children.

So now, in lawless Somalia, other people are going without medical treatment and many may die because the woman’s family and the gunmen they hired are convinced that they’re owed a blood debt by the doctor that saved their kinswoman’s life.

Yes, yes, as a “rich” selfish childfree Western woman, I see that my choice was not hers. Having children in her society confers status (no matter how I may cluck disapprovingly, I do know this) and can bring prosperity or at least survival. You have to have enough young people in your village or clan to do essential work raising crops and protecting stock from predators (and from hungry groups of militiamen).

It’s a simpler society. Life is lived closer to the edge of survival there, and choosing when or if to have children is often not an option (especially thanks to our government’s aid policies). Women get pregnant; they either give birth or die. Some choice.

All of which makes me feel really, really lucky to be able to choose to be childfree.

But even if I weren’t childfree, I’d still be a feminist… and I’m horrified that the equation in this story seems to work out to “woman=uterus” and nothing more.

However, the bigger problem is that Somalia is currently a failed state, and the rest of the world (meaning the US and the UN and a lot of NGOs and so on) seems not to be able to do anything about it, or care very much. We suffered terrible losses there, and left Somalia to its agonies. So now stories like this are going to be more and more common… if the international news people still care enough to report them. However, it’ll probably be just the most bizarre stories that will get any press, like the tale of a woman without a womb who’s now as good as dead to her family.

That doesn’t seem right to me.

Seymour Hersh

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Joi Itoquotes Lauren Weinstein:

Greetings. Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker, who exposed so many aspects of the Iraqi prisoner abuse story, now reports that U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and national security advisor Condoleezza Rice secretly approved the expansion of a clandestine program that encouraged physical coercion, sexual humiliation, and blackmail of Iraqi prisoners, setting the stage for the abuses that these same officials have recently been condemning so publicly.

According to the report, President Bush was kept informed regarding this program. The Department of Defense called the accusations in the story “outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture.”

Joi wonders:

How accepted is this view in the US now?

I don’t know. I’ve been on the road for two weeks and listened to Seymour Hersh talking to Liane Hansen about how high it might go on May 2nd (audio here). We were driving across Nebraska and Colorado that morning, and the concept seemed shocking but all too credible as we rolled through the endless heartland.

The next week, there was a timeline piece, and Liane read selected letters generated by the previous week’s show. It seemed like the piece on “intelligent design” (a euphemism for creationism taught in public schools) motivated more people to comment. There was still more flap going over Bob Edwards’ being kicked upstairs than there seems to be over whether :NPR has got the wrong end of the stick on prisoner abuse and whether Rumsfeld and/or Cambone and/or Rice condoned it and when Bush knew.

I think :NPR listeners, who tend to be well educated (though many apparently drive tractors or tend dairy cattle while listening, according to Bob Edwards), decide for themselves what’s right and what’s not in the news. I think they’re listening, hard, to what Seymour Hersh says and to what other correspondents are saying about what’s been going on and who ultimately is responsible.

As for what the country as a whole thinks, it’s hard to say… but I suspect a lot of people are thinking “bull” when anyone in the administration says anything, except for Colin Powell.

I think that Mr. Powell may well take a page from the British and Japanese, and resign over this issue eventually – and I’d respect him for it.

edited to add: I am an idjit. Bad spellers untie. As you were.

Jiggity Jog and so forth

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As you’ve probably guessed, dear robots and spiders and lurkers (oh my)… we’re home. We pulled into the driveway at about 430pm today, after putting a little over 3800 miles on the nice Silver Beast we rented. David did all the driving and deserves about a month of back rubs. And more.

Our last wild-ass guess on pictures uploaded: approximately 1.3 GIG of images. I’ll be doing a lot of re-sizing of the ones I already used in posts – I didn’t have a lot of time to fool with them, but they will be a more manageable size soon. Then there will be a lot of culling, cropping, fixing and uploading to do. We both took multiple images of things a few different ways – “hey, it’s not film, so go for it” was the mantra – so not everything will go into public galleries.

I never did get the moblog thing working the way I wanted, so Crash Test Goofy stayed in one of my bags after we left Estes Park. It’s a fun curiousity, so I may end up adding a sideblog for it to live in.

One other book that I found handy and nice to look at: the National Audubon Society Field Guide to Wildflowers, Western Region. It’s organized by color and shape with great photos in the front half, and has extended descriptions and information and drawrings in the back half. It’s the narrow version with the plastic cover, suitable for sticking in a backpack or beating a small scorpion to bits with.

Not that I had to use it for that, but it would be conveniently solid and heavy, and easy to clean afterwards.

I don’t have much to say one way or another on the big news in Blogville this week, namely the Moveable Type kerfuffle, which seems to be winding down now. Stupid Evil Bastard’s take on it eased my mind. Although we have 2 authors here, David’s blog is inactive (awww) so I’d still qualify for a free-for-personal-use upgrade to version 3.0 if and when I feel the need for it. However, most of the changes are aimed at developers and MTHaxorGods so I can wait until the next “real” update comes along, or keep going with this version while it’s stable.

There’s other blogging fish in the sea – it seems that for the non-hax0r bloggers out there, Blogger.com’s revamped (and still free) relaunch came at an opportune moment. And Moveable Type’s own TypePad is affordable for the hobbyist-blogger, too.

I’m sure if I had convinced an institution or a business to do a large group blog for free, and then found out it would require a friggin’ huge fee to upgrade it, I’d be hacked off, too. But for now it’s not an issue, and I’ll continue screwing around with MT… such as playing with macros, some of which I got working this week.

White Knight and His Lady?

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The Highland Park couple that founded the precursor to Air America Radio before selling most of it to a group of investors are in negotiations to gain control of the troubled liberal talk network, sources said Thursday.

Sources familiar with the negotiations said Sheldon and Anita Drobny want to buy–with the aid of at least one major new investor–a majority stake in the company.

I wasn’t able to listen to AAR much on the trip, and now it’s the weekend so I have to wait until Monday to hear “Majority Report.”

Can You Hear Me NOW???

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FARGO, N.D. – A man who said he was fed up with his cellular phone service went to a Fargo mall and started hurling phones across a store, striking an employee and causing more than $2,000 in damage, authorities said.

Guess he was really fed up with the annoying banner ads. I know I am, because it bugs the hell out of me when I get Mfop2to work but Verizon adds an annoying 2 line ad with extra spaces that reads:

This message was sent using Picture Messaging from Verizon Wireless! To
learn how you can snap and send pictures with your wireless phone visit
http://www.verizonwireless.com
/getitnow/pixmessaging.

One of the things on the agenda this weekend, now that we’ve returned home, is figuring out how to strip this annoying text from my moblog posts, and possibly getting it to appear in the #links section on the sidewall instead of as a main-body post. I may have to create a new sideblog to do that.

I’ve got some other macros I’d like to figure out, too.

Preaching to the Choir, which is Not Listening

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Just four months after an alliance of conservative Christians was threatening a churchgoer revolt unless President Bush championed an amendment banning same-sex marriage, members say they have been surprised and disappointed by what they call a tepid response from the pews.

Most of the groups supporting the proposed federal constitutional amendment concede that it appears all but dead in Congress for this election year.

As Massachusetts prepares to become the first state in the nation to allow same-sex marriage on Monday, several high-profile conservatives say they are now pinning their hopes mainly on reaction to events there, betting that scenes of gay weddings in Provincetown may set off a public outcry.

Much more likely: it’ll set off more expressions of joy and random acts of congratulations. I hope the P-town florists have stocked up on roses, because the random orders “for any wedded couple” will be rolling in soon.

Still, the opponents of gay marriage say they are puzzling over why such a volatile cultural issue is not spurring more rank-and-file conservative Christians to rise up in support of the amendment. They are especially frustrated, they say, because opinion polls show that a large majority of voters oppose gay marriage.

“Our side is basically asleep right now,” Matt Daniels, founder of the Alliance for Marriage, which helped draft the proposed amendment, said in an interview last week.

The Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, said: “I don’t see any traction. The calls aren’t coming in and I am not sure why.”

Some conservatives warn that the Christian leaders rallying behind the amendment may now face a loss of credibility. Their influence with evangelical believers is a subject of keen interest in Washington, in part because the Bush campaign has made ensuring their turnout at the polls a top priority.

Maybe it’s wrong of me to gloat. Or maybe not. Excuse me while I cackle with glee, because my (admittedly non-traditional family values) are not threatened one little bit by gay marriage, as previously reported here.

And Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still quite, quite dead. 😉

Saftey First, hyuk!

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Crash Test Goofy approves of car safety:

Federal regulators proposed today an overhaul of the side-impact crash tests performed on cars and trucks.

The new test procedures will reinforce the industry’s voluntary commitment to equip almost all new vehicles with inflatable curtains and other side airbags that protect people’s heads by the end of the decade.