Red State Citizens Consume The Most Online Porn In The USA

According to a nationwide study of anonymous online credit card transactions, Americans living in traditionally religious, conservative states consume more online porn than their godless liberal blue state fellow citizens, with Utah leading the way.

Benjamin Edelman, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School, analyzed anonymous credit card transactions to attempt to find a link between the rise in online porn consumption and division of “red” and “blue” states from a sociological standpoint. “Do consumption patterns of online adult entertainment reveal two separate Americas,” Edelman writes, “Or is the consumption of online adult entertainment widespread, regardless of legal barriers, potential for embarrassment, and even religious conviction?”

Ewan Callaway of New Scientist analyses Edelman’s findings, noting that after Edelman factored in population density and broadband usage, Utah was actually the state with the most online porn subscriptions per 1000 broadband users. Conservative states made up the bulk of the top ten, in terms of porn subscriptions. As Callaway notes, “Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year’s presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.”

Edelman notes a difference in porn preferences between red states and blue states: “Using individual-level data from a Hitwise sample of ten million anony- mized U.S. Internet users, Tancer (2008), finds that adult escort sites are more popular in “blue” states that voted for Kerry in 2004, while visitors from the “red”
states that voted for Bush in 2004 are more likely to visit wife-swapping sites, adult webcams, and sites about voyeurism,” a fairly fascinating insight that could surely be explored further.

Church-going porn subscribers also tended to download less porn on Sundays, as church attendance provided a drop in porn usage. States that banned gay marriage had 11% more porn subscriptions than states that had not banned gay marriage. And, as Callaway notes, “States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement “I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage,” bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behaviour.”

Conservative hypocrisy is no surprise: anyone who has watched the Republican party fight off allegations of bathroom sexual encounters, child molestation, and prostitutes has witnessed the “Do As I Say, Not As I Do” philosophy that seems to sweep through the right-wing on a regular basis. Yet Edelman’s research provides evidence of said hypocrisy; those who feel it necessary to judge others on their sexual choices and “morality” seem to have no problem accessing pornography, which many religions view as immoral and wrong.

And yet although the red states tend to view porn more often than blue states, Edelman finds that porn is a fairly purple subject, accessed in each state across the nation: “When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different.”

I’ve been subscribing to a yahoo news alert on the word “feminism” which I thought might generate some articles/blogs, etc. that might interest me. I was wrong. Most of what I received were articles that had nothing actually to do with feminism but that blamed feminism for various societal ills. I hate posting the following because it’s not the kind of information I’d hoped to find with my “feminism” search but, I will say, it makes me all the more enthusiastic at spending all my  ‘book money’ at my local Scranton bookstore.

Amazon selling ‘rape simulation game’

By Jess McCabe | 13 February 2009, 11:08

Yeah, you read that right. Amazon was hawking a Japanese-language game, where the gameplay revolves around raping women. The game has now been removed from the site. The Belfast Telegraph reports:

A game that involves the player stalking victims and then raping them in a virtual world is being offered for sale by online retailer Amazon.com, the Belfast Telegraph’s website can reveal.The shocking ‘rape simulator’, Rapelay, is set in Japan and carries a sickening game description on the Amazon website. An MP said last night that he plans to raise the issue in Parliament.

Reviews by gaming websites have expressed horror at the basis for the game.

One website review describes “tears glistening in the young girl’s eyes” as she is attacked in graphic detail.

Players begin the game by stalking a mother on a subway station before violently raping her. They then move on to attack her two daughters described as virgin schoolgirls.

Players are also allowed to enter ‘freeform mode’ where they can rape any woman and get other male game characters to join the attacks.

Pregnancy and abortion are listed as ‘key features’. One review said: “If she does become pregnant you’re supposed to force her to get an abortion, otherwise she gets more and more visibly pregnant each time you have sex.

“If you allow the child to be born then the woman will throw you in front of a train!”

Most of the descriptions and screenshots of the game are too graphic for publication here.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/14/AR2009011402791.html?sub=new

10 Take Aways From the Bush Years

By Bob Woodward
Sunday, January 18, 2009; B01

There’s actually a lot that President-elect Barack Obama can learn from the troubled presidency of George W. Bush. Over the past eight years, I have interviewed President Bush for nearly 11 hours, spent hundreds of hours with his administration’s key players and reviewed thousands of pages of documents and notes. That produced four books, totaling 1,727 pages, that amount to a very long case study in presidential decision-making, and there are plenty of morals to the story. Presidents live in the unfinished business of their predecessors, and Bush casts a giant shadow on the Obama presidency with two incomplete wars and a monumental financial and economic crisis. Here are 10 lessons that Obama and his team should take away from the Bush experience.

1. Presidents set the tone. Don’t be passive or tolerate virulent divisions.

In the fall of 2002, Bush witnessed a startling face-off between National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in the White House Situation Room after Rumsfeld had briefed the National Security Council on the Iraq war plan. Rice wanted to hold on to a copy of the Pentagon briefing slides, code-named Polo Step. “You won’t be needing that,” Rumsfeld said, reaching across the table and snatching the Top Secret packet away from Rice — in front of the president. “I’ll let you two work it out,” Bush said, then turned and walked out. Rice had to send an aide to the Pentagon to get a bootlegged copy from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Bush should never have put up with Rumsfeld’s power play. Instead of a team of rivals, Bush wound up with a team of back-stabbers with long-running, poisonous disagreements about foreign policy fundamentals.

2. The president must insist that everyone speak out loud in front of the others, even — or especially — when there are vehement disagreements.

During the same critical period, Vice President Cheney was urging Secretary of State Colin Powell to consider seriously the possibility that Iraq might be connected to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Powell found the case worse than ridiculous and scornfully concluded that Cheney had what Powell termed a “fever.” (In private, Powell used to call the Pentagon policy shop run by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith, who shared Cheney’s burning interest in supposed ties between al-Qaeda and Iraq, a “Gestapo office.”)

Powell was right to conclude that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden did not work together. But Cheney and Powell did not have this crucial debate in front of the president — even though such a discussion might have undermined one key reason for war. Cheney provided private advice to the president, but he was rarely asked to argue with others and test his case. After the invasion, Cheney had a celebratory dinner with some aides and friends. “Colin always had major reservations about what we were trying to do,” Cheney told the group as they toasted Bush and laughed at Powell. This sort of derision undermined the administration’s unity of purpose — and suggests the nasty tone that can emerge when open debate is stifled by long-running feuds and personal hostility.

3. A president must do the homework to master the fundamental ideas and concepts behind his policies.

The president should not micromanage, but understanding the ramifications of his positions cannot be outsourced to anyone.

For example, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the commander of the U.S. forces in Iraq in 2004-07, concluded that President Bush lacked a basic grasp of what the Iraq war was about. Casey believed that Bush, who kept asking for enemy body counts, saw the war as a conventional battle, rather than the counterinsurgency campaign to win over the Iraqi population that it was. “We cannot kill our way to victory in Iraq,” Gen. David Petraeus said later. In May 2008, Bush insisted to me that he, of all people, knew all too well what the war was about.

4. Presidents need to draw people out and make sure that bad news makes it to the Oval Office.

On June 18, 2003, before real trouble had developed in Iraq, retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the first official to head the Iraqi reconstruction effort, warned Rumsfeld that disbanding the Iraqi army and purging too many former Baath Party loyalists had been “tragic” mistakes. But in an Oval Office meeting with Bush later that day, none of this came up, and Garner reported to a pleased president that, in 70 meetings with Iraqis, they had always said, “God bless Mr. George Bush.” Bush should have asked Garner whether he had any worries — perhaps even kicking Rumsfeld out of the Oval Office and saying something like, “Jay, you were there. I insist on the ground truth. Don’t hold anything back.”

Bush sometimes assumed that he knew his aides’ private views without asking them one-on-one. He made probably the most important decision of his presidency — whether to invade Iraq — without directly asking either Powell, Rumsfeld or Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet for their bottom-line recommendations. (Instead of consulting his own father, former president George H.W. Bush, who had gone to war in 1991 to kick the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, the younger Bush told me that he had appealed to a “higher father” for strength.)

5. Presidents need to foster a culture of skepticism and doubt.

During a December 2003 interview with Bush, I read him a quote from his closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, about the experience of receiving letters from family members of slain soldiers who had written that they hated him. “And don’t believe anyone who tells you when they receive letters like that, they don’t suffer any doubt,” Blair had said.

“Yeah,” Bush replied. “I haven’t suffered doubt.”

“Is that right?” I asked. “Not at all?”

“No,” he said.

Presidents and generals don’t have to live on doubt. But they should learn to love it. “You should not be the parrot on the secretary’s shoulder,” said Marine Gen. James Jones, Obama’s incoming national security adviser, to his old friend Gen. Peter Pace, who was then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — a group Jones thought had been “systematically emasculated by Rumsfeld.” Doubt is not the enemy of good policy; it can help leaders evaluate alternatives, handle big decisions and later make course corrections if necessary.

6. Presidents get contradictory data, and they need a rigorous way to sort it out.

In 2004-06, the CIA was reporting that Iraq was getting more violent and less stable. By mid-2006, Bush’s own NSC deputy for Iraq, Meghan O’Sullivan, had a blunt assessment of conditions in Baghdad: “It’s hell, Mr. President.” But the Pentagon remained optimistic and reported that a strategy of drawing down U.S. troops and turning security over to the Iraqis would end in “self-reliance” in 2009. As best I could discover, the president never insisted that the contradiction between “hell” and “self-reliance” be resolved.

7. Presidents must tell the public the hard truth, even if that means delivering very bad news.

For years after the Iraq invasion, Bush consistently offered upbeat public assessments. That went well beyond the infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner that he admitted last Monday had been a mistake. “Absolutely, we’re winning,” the president said during an October 2006 news conference. “We’re winning.” His confident remarks came during one of the lowest points of the war, at a time when anyone with a TV screen knew that the war was going badly. On Feb. 5, 2005, as he was moving up from his first-term role as Rice’s deputy to become national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley had offered a private, confidential assessment of the problems of Bush’s Iraq-dominated first term. “I give us a B-minus for policy development,” he said, “and a D-minus for policy execution.” The president later told me that he knew that the Iraq “strategy wasn’t working.” So how could the United States be winning a war with a failing strategy?

After 9/11, Bush spoke forthrightly about a war on terror that might last a generation and include other attacks on the U.S. homeland. That straight talk marked the period of Bush’s greatest leadership and highest popularity. A president is strong when he is the voice of realism.

8. Righteous motives are not enough for effective policy.

“I believe we have a duty to free people,” Bush told me in late 2003. I believe that he truly wanted to bring democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq. In preparing his second inaugural address in 2005, for example, Bush told his chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, “The future of America and the security of America depends on the spread of liberty.” That got the idealistic Gerson so pumped that he set out to produce the foreign policy equivalent of Albert Einstein‘s unified field theory of the universe — a 17-minute inaugural address in which the president said that his goal was nothing less than “the ending of tyranny in our world.”

But this high purpose often blinded Bush and his aides to the consequences of this mad dash to democracy. In 2005, for example, Bush and his war cabinet spent much of their time promoting free elections in Iraq — which wound up highlighting the isolation of the minority Sunnis and setting the stage for the raging sectarian violence of 2006.

9. Presidents must insist on strategic thinking.

Only the president (and perhaps the national security adviser) can prod a reactive bureaucracy to think about where the administration should be in one, two or four years. Then detailed, step-by-step tactical plans must be devised to try to get there. It’s easy for an administration to become consumed with putting out brush fires, which often requires presidential involvement. (Ask Obama how much time he’s been spending on the Gaza war.) But a president will probably be judged by the success of his long-range plans, not his daily crisis management.

For example, in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the quality of the planning for combat operations ranged from adequate to strong, but far too little attention was devoted to what might come after the fall of the Taliban and the Baath Party. Some critical strategic decisions — to disband the Iraqi army, force Baathists out of government and abolish an initial Iraqi government council — were made on the ground in Iraq, without the involvement of the NSC and the president.

Obama would do well to remember the example of a young Democratic president who was willing to make long-range plans. Bill Clinton began his presidency in 1993 after having promised to cut the federal deficit in half in four years. The initial plan looked shaky, and Clinton took a lot of heat for more than a year. But he and his team stuck to their basic strategy of cutting federal spending and raising taxes, which laid a major part of the foundation of the economic boom of the Clinton era. It was classic strategic planning, showing a willingness to pay a short-term price for the sort of long-term gains that go down in the history books.

10. The president should embrace transparency. Some version of the behind-the-scenes story of what happened in his White House will always make it out to the public — and everyone will be better off if that version is as accurate as possible.

On March 8, 2008, Hadley made an extraordinary remark about how difficult it has proven to understand the real way Bush made decisions. “He will talk with great authority and assertiveness,” Hadley said. ” ‘This is what we’re going to do.’ And he won’t mean it. Because he will not have gone through the considered process where he finally is prepared to say, ‘I’ve decided.’ And if you write all those things down and historians get them, [they] say, ‘Well, he decided on this day to do such and such.’ It’s not true. It’s not history. It’s a fact, but it’s a misleading fact.”

Presidents should beware of such “misleading facts.” They should run an internal, candid process of debate and discussion with key advisers that will make sense when it surfaces later. This sort of inside account will be told, at least in part, during the presidency. But the best obtainable version will emerge more slowly, over time, and become history.

woodwardb@washpost.com

Bob Woodward is an associate editor of The Washington Post and the author of four books on President Bush: “Bush at War,” “Plan of Attack,” “State of Denial” and “The War Within.” Evelyn Duffy contributed to this article.

http://aver.us/aver/

American Veterans for Equal Rights

I was a contracting officer in Iraq.  Basically, I purchased goods and services from Iraqi businesses (as well as ordering from the US and other countries).  Remember a few years back when you heard the stories of the $500 toilet seat or taxpayer money being used to purchase plasma tv’s for the commander’s tent?  I’m that girl.  I spent 12 hours a day hanging out with Iraqi businessmen and laborers and negotiating deals.

Don’t let anyone tell you that the Iraqis aren’t an educated and cultured people. Some of my Iraqi friends knew more about American military history than I do.  Then again, most of the world’s people who aren’t lucky enough to be Americans pay pretty close attention to what we’re up to; especially our military. 

Zek told me that his little girl and his wife were spending their days holed up in their house. He risked his life coming to the base everyday for work, he got the groceries, went to the bank and anything else that needed to be done. She used to work but it was too dangerous now.  He was killed less than a year after I left. I often think about his wife and daughter. I wonder how they survive.  Things may have changed a lot since 2004 and maybe she can now run all those errands herself.  I guess she doesn’t have a choice.

I wonder how long it will take for women to gain back the liberties they once enjoyed in Iraq.  Liberty may sound like an odd word choice considering we constantly hear about how oppressed the Iraqi people were under Saddam Hussein.  And, they certainly were in any number of ways.  But, let’s face it, when someone goes from having a job and an income to being a prisoner in their own home, they’ve lost a significant liberty. 

I found this terrific article today which inspired this post. It’s about the recent death of Nahla Hussein Al-Shaly, a women’s rights activist in Iraq.  I think everyone should read it. I think more articles like this should be written.

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/86322

Also, here’s the link  to Baghdad Burning, one of the most important pieces of documentation on the war that not nearly enough people know about it. Riverbend is a young, Iraqi woman who blogged (at great risk, I’m sure) about her experience of living under occupation. She stopped blogging in 2007  when her family fled to Syria and no one knows what happened to her. Her blog has also been published in book form in two parts by the Feminist Press.

http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

http://www.feministpress.org/Book/index.cfm?GCOI=55861100869560

US Army Recruiting at the Mall With Video Games

Friday 09 January 2009

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by: Jon Hurdle, Reuters

Last week, I was obsessing over Katy Perry and that stupid song that glamourizes drunk girls making out in public for guys while trivializing the whole thing (you don’t want to be at Southside Lanes when that song comes on, trust me). Though that all seems minor compared to Ann Coulter blaming all of the ills of American society on it’s single moms.

I did this domestic violence advocacy training a few years back. We made a list of all the barrier/reasons why women don’t leave their abusive husbands when they really should. This is off the top of my head but it was something like this.

1. Religion.
2. Money. Duh.
3. Fear of losing custody of their kids.
2. Felling like they can protect their kids more if they are in the house when daddy spends time with them rather than unsupervised visitation.
5. More women are murdered once they leave an abusive relationship than while in the abusive relationship.

Today my mind was racing with all kinds of hypothetical situations: the woman who escaped her home in the middle of the night…its her first day in the shelter…her kids are running around and asking “where’s daddy”…she turns on the tv in the shelter living room and has to hear Anne Coulter say that all of societies problems can be traced back to single motherhood. I don’t think I’m being too hypothetical considering there are a whole lot of women in shelters and this interview ran on a major network. For anyone who has ever done any type of domestic violence advocacy (and, really, who hasn’t at least on a personal level), the hardest part is getting the abused person to feel safe enough to leave (and for good reason- see #5 above).

Ann, you suck.

——

Not that any women I know would buy into her bullshit. But, people are buying those books.

I know she’s just being inflammatory to sell books. I know she’s talking about the breakdown of the nuclear family in America, the idea that people really don’t spend enough time parenting their kids. I still think she’s just shitty.

“We could wipe out chronic poverty in America tomorrow if women could just manage to get married before having children — and to stay married after having children,” Coulter writes in the book.

She told Lauer, “We know that children raised without fathers are filling up the prisons,” and accused the mainstream media and Hollywood of glorifying single mothers instead of condemning them.

Lauer said that Coulter’s critics accuse her of blunting her own points with sweeping generalizations and language dripping with venom, prompting outrage rather than thought. As an example, he took her statement that almost all of the problems in American society are due to children born to single mothers.

“That’s not outrageous, that’s a fact,” Coulter replied. “What I said is absolutely true. Any societal problem is the result of single motherhood.”

That’s all I’m gonna say about that because to say anything further might endanger said woman.  But, this is a perfect segway to talking about the event in more general terms.

First, I have to ask you about what you thought about my story so far.  When I informed you that is was a “local dive” did that inform how you processed the rest of the story? I mean, if I had said it was “the local It Bar” would you have felt any differently about what followed? I’m seriously asking you this.

I’m not gonna go any further into this story because I don’t think I can without seriously jeapordising the anonymity of the woman who is the subject of this post. I will say that it made me think of another recent news story in my local area.

I don’t think any of us can forget hearing about the woman who was murdered and had her body thrown in pieces on the side of the road. They found her body in several brown bags and a serial killer was thought to be within our midst. Women were terrified.  Several days later her identity was found.  She was a prostitute, a whore, possibly a drug addict.  She was on the down and out.  A woman without a proper home. I felt a strong wind that day. The collective sigh of relief that said “sigh….thank god she’s a whore”  That means we are not threatened; that means it couldn’t happen to me; I can go on living as I do.”  I felt that way too, for a second or two.

Then, I realize that the whore is that terrified woman inside all of us.  The collective consciousness that says “you can’t do that” or “you have to behave this way”.  The murder of a “whore” effects all of us in a very personal way. More to follow…