A molecular biology professor at MIT. A vice president at Pfizer. A chief architect at IBM.
Imagine these people in a room together. Do you see a room full of men?
In New York City last week, you would have been wrong.
About 200 women and girls gathered March 10 in a New York City auditorium to debunk the gender stereotypes governing who can or should participate in math and science.
"It feels like we have to work harder and prove that we're better just to get as far as men," Rica Azarcon, a senior applied math major at the University of California, Berkeley, told Tolerance.org.
"As a society, it's time to change our mentality. It's been in people's heads for a long time that men are supposed to be good at math and science, and women aren't. But gender doesn't dictate what people are good at."
[...]
Nancy Hopkins, the MIT professor who participated in last week's event, also attended the conference where Summers made his now-famous comments.
Six years ago Hopkins persuaded MIT to examine the effects of discrimination on women on campus. The result was formal recognition of a system of bias preventing female professors from gaining tenure at the same rate as men.
Hopkins was so offended by Summers' comments that she walked out.
"When you send this message that maybe it's in your genes, you're asking women every day to prove over and over, 'Yes, I really am good enough to be here,'" she said in an interview with CBS News. "It's just exhausting."
Last week's gathering was empowering for the opposite reason, said Brittany Glover, the high school panelist from Schenectady.
"It made me realize that I'm not alone, and that no matter what anyone says, you should do what you're good at," Glover said.
The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq's oil before the 9/11 attacks, sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil, BBC's Newsnight has revealed.
Two years ago today - when President George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces would begin to bomb Baghdad - protesters claimed the US had a secret plan for Iraq's oil once Saddam had been conquered.
In fact there were two conflicting plans, setting off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, on one side, versus a combination of "Big Oil" executives and US State Department "pragmatists".
"Big Oil" appears to have won. The latest plan, obtained by Newsnight from the US State Department was, we learned, drafted with the help of American oil industry consultants.
Insiders told Newsnight that planning began "within weeks" of Bush's first taking office in 2001, long before the September 11th attack on the US.
[...]
Secret sell-off plan
The industry-favoured plan was pushed aside by a secret plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, which called for the sell-off of all of Iraq's oil fields. The new plan was crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production above Opec quotas.
The sell-off was given the green light in a secret meeting in London headed by Ahmed Chalabi shortly after the US entered Baghdad, according to Robert Ebel.
Mr Aljibury, once Ronald Reagan's "back-channel" to Saddam, claims that plans to sell off Iraq's oil, pushed by the US-installed Governing Council in 2003, helped instigate the insurgency and attacks on US and British occupying forces.
"Insurgents used this, saying, 'Look, you're losing your country, you're losing your resources to a bunch of wealthy billionaires who want to take you over and make your life miserable,'" said Mr Aljibury from his home near San Francisco.
"We saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities, pipelines, built on the premise that privatisation is coming."
Privatisation blocked by industry
Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA who took control of Iraq's oil production for the US Government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme.
Mr Carroll told us he made it clear to Paul Bremer, the US occupation chief who arrived in Iraq in May 2003, that: "There was to be no privatisation of Iraqi oil resources or facilities while I was involved."
Ariel Cohen, of the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation, told Newsnight that an opportunity had been missed to privatise Iraq's oil fields.
He advocated the plan as a means to help the US defeat Opec, and said America should have gone ahead with what he called a "no-brainer" decision.
Mr Carroll hit back, telling Newsnight, "I would agree with that statement. To privatize would be a no-brainer. It would only be thought about by someone with no brain."
The former Shell oil boss agrees. In Houston, he told Newsnight: "Many neo conservatives are people who have certain ideological beliefs about markets, about democracy, about this, that and the other. International oil companies, without exception, are very pragmatic commercial organizations. They don't have a theology."
There are already a lot of countries that are not in OPEC and pay no attention to quotas. They haven't destroyed OPEC, and one more (Iraq) wouldn't, either. The cartel effect of OPEC is simply not that great, and oil prices have fluctuated dramatically every decade since it was formed. OPEC has mostly failed even to dramatically influence, much less control prices. In 2004-5, Bush administration policies in Iraq plus a rise in demand from China and India plus strikes and other problems in places like Nigeria and Venezuela put the petroleum price up to as much as $55 a barrel, whereas OPEC's target for many years was $25 a barrel. The Neocons by their Iraq war have managed to double OPEC's income, beyond even what OPEC wanted!
Now the Neocons are all becoming Greens and arguing for solar or other forms of power in order to cut down on US oil dependence. This is code for making sure the Arabs cannot use petroleum to influence the US in the Arab-Israeli dispute. I'm all for getting off the carbon-based treadmill. But petroleum has other uses than providing energy, especially petrochemicals, and Arab producers are going to be rich off such uses for decades or centuries.
The story Palast tells is one of crackpotism run wild, and it would be more than tragic if it is what dragged us into the Iraq quagmire.
Are abstinence pledges just an evangelically correct way of saying "ass-fucking"? "Yes," says a group of Ivy League crotch scholars. "Among virgins, boys who have pledged abstinence were four times more likely to have had anal sex...Overall, pledgers were six times more likely to have oral sex than teens who have remained abstinent but not as part of a pledge." Dissenting opinion: the president of the National Abstinence Clearinghouse, who says the 12,000 young sluts who were surveyed are liars. So, it's a toss-up. Abstinence pledges may still be the second-best way to stop teen sex. (D&D remains the undisputed champ.)
Despite taking courses emphasizing abstinence-only themes, teenagers in 29 high schools became increasingly sexually active, mirroring the overall state trends, according to the study conducted by researchers at Texas A&M University.
“We didn’t see any strong indications that these programs were having an impact in the direction desired,” said Dr. Buzz Pruitt, who directed the study.
The study was delivered to the Texas Department of State Health Services, which commissioned it.
'More concerned about politics than kids' The study showed about 23 percent of ninth-grade girls, typically 13 to 14 years old, had sex before receiving abstinence education. After taking the course, 29 percent of the girls in the same group said they had had sex.
Boys in the tenth grade, about 14 to 15 years old, showed a more marked increase, from 24 percent to 39 percent, after receiving abstinence education.
Abstinence-only programs, which have sprouted up in schools across the nation, cannot offer information about birth control and must promote the social and health benefits of abstaining from sex.
Pruitt said he hoped the study would bring about changes in the content of abstinence-promoting programs.
“These programs seem to be much more concerned about politics than kids, and we need to get over that,” he said.
One program technique has been to try to bolster students’ self-esteem, based on the theory that self-confident teenagers would not have sex. Those programs, which sometimes do not even mention sex, have shown no effect, Pruitt said.
Other programs that focus on the social norms and expectations appear to be more successful, he said.
It's okay if yore little kkkristian darlin' gets a STD or knocked up 'cuz she don't know what causes neither a' them thar problemos. Y'know Jeebus will reward ya if ya throw her outta the house, hunt down her beau and castrate him--less o'course he's a good football player.
Another sign of the intransigent, willful ignorance that a lot of the presinot's followers revel in.
A molecular biology professor at MIT. A vice president at Pfizer. A chief architect at IBM.
Are abstinence pledges just an evangelically correct way of saying "ass-fucking"? "Yes," says a group of Ivy League crotch scholars. "Among virgins, boys who have pledged abstinence were four times more likely to have had anal sex...Overall, pledgers were six times more likely to have oral sex than teens who have remained abstinent but not as part of a pledge." Dissenting opinion: the president of the National Abstinence Clearinghouse, who says the 12,000 young sluts who were surveyed are liars. So, it's a toss-up. Abstinence pledges may still be the second-best way to stop teen sex. (D&D remains the undisputed champ.)
