This isn’t my issue, but I inherited an interest in it from my mother, who was, before she retired, a scientist—and who suffered horrible discrimination because she was a woman: salary caps, infrequent promotions, and frequent, corrosive disrespect from male peers and superiors. Science was a man’s world. Any woman who dared enter it knew exactly what she was getting into, and if she didn’t, she soon found out, and made her choices.

Science is still a man’s world, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Read, for example, this book and marvel at the politics of science and think about how many women you know would volunteer to play in that game. Still, the women I know who could have gone into science because they were qualified and skilled but decided on other fields did so by choice, often because their chosen professions were more people-oriented than lab-oriented, as scientists’ jobs mostly are.

That’s a purely anecdotal, conventional-wisdom kind of “prejudice” of mine, so I was interested to have it confirmed.

Tom Maguire:

The NY Times tells us that women are under-represented in science and technology because of a deplorable macho sexist workplace environment.

The Boston Globe (owned by the Times, but evidently not read) tells us that women are underrepresented in these fields because they aren’t interested.

‘Round and ’round we go …

——–

p.s. Lately, I’ve been using song lyrics as post titles. I feel guilty about not attributing them, though.

Today’s post title is from the eponymous song “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?,” by Lerner and Loewe, from the musical My Fair Lady … and I can hear Rex Harrison “singing” it now …

I won’t insult you by tell you where this comes from.

This is from “Free Fallin’,” by Tom Petty.

According to Michael Tomasky, Obama’s fans love him for the same reason that Keith Olbermann’s fans love him—not because what he says makes sense, but because he’s feisty and pushes back:

He is standing for an alternative vision of how America should operate in the world, and he is defending it tooth and nail. … This is a good manifestation of why so many Americans have rallied to Obama as the breath of fresh air the country needs right now. He’s taking some interesting chances.

Tomasky thinks this love of Obama’s feistiness is a good thing in itself, and that it’s even more important (”for now”) than agreeing with his policy vision [e.a.]:

I’m not sold on the idea that negotiations without preconditions with hostile powers are the world’s best strategy. If the US had some leverage over Iran that might be one thing, but, in our current state, we have little. Still, this is one of those cases where the symbolic message of what Obama did last Friday is more important, for now, than the substance.

I am stumped by this opinion from an opinion “leader,” the notion that a candidate’s opinions don’t matter (for now), that only his style matters (for now). This suggests that we should give him the nomination already, and the benefit of the doubt, because he’s got such a fine style.

That, of course, is straight out of the Andrew Sullivan School of Candidate Adoration. Speaking of which, in today’s textbook example of a person with a Harvard Ph.D. and no common sense, Sullivan claims, along with his BFF Barack (who also has an advanced degree from Harvard—what’s up with that?), that Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea are just not important enough for the big bad United States to worry about:

America’s economy is 68 times the size of Iran’s, which is an economic basketcase, and rendered more so by religiously oriented mismanagement. America’s military capacity is simply stratospherically greater than a ramshackle Islamist state like Iran’s. Yes: Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weaponry destabilizes the region, and yes, if such weaponry were handed to terrorists, the threat could be enormous. But it’s hard to see why such a threat would be any greater than, say, Pakistan’s government supplying Islamist terrorists with such weapons.

No one is claiming that a nuclear Iran will be a bigger threat than anuclear Pakistan. The point is to avoid turning Iran into another Pakistan.

The deeper question - to which it is hard to evince an easy answer - is whether Iran is uniquely immune to nuclear deterrence because the apocalyptic mindset of some of its leaders makes them suicidal as a nation and as a regime.

We have their statements - which should at times prompt alarm - and we have their record for the past quarter century. That record suggests a despicable regime that nonetheless acts rationally in its own interests and defense.

Really? Organizing, arming, supporting, funding, and inciding terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah are the rational acts of a country defending itself?

But what are our options if we assume that this regime - unlike Kim Jong-Il or Stalin - cannot be deterred? The only logical response is invasion of pre-emptive bombing, with no clear guarantee of success and an enormous chance of blow-back in the wider war.

Indeed. Those are the options: do something or do nothing (sit idly by while the threat grows).

Appeasement means giving a regime something in return for its aggression, in the vain hope that it will be deterred.

Iran is being plenty agressive, and what we’d be giving Iran in an Obama administration in return for its aggression is “dialogue,” in the vain hope that Iran will be deterred.

Any way you slice it, Mr. Sullivan, that is appeasement—of a regime that murders gays for the “crime” of being gay and that allows girls to be married at the age of 9. But perhaps those things don’t matter anymore, now that your BFF Barack will wave his magic wand and make all those bad things go away on a tide of

[spelling fixed]

The Overton Window is a theory that describes a range of acceptable ideas in political discourse and a (theoretical) way to make formerly unacceptable ideas gradually more acceptable . It’s a game of “Compared to What?” The idea is that by introducing ever more extreme ideas into the discourse, you reduce the feeling of menace from formerly threatening ideas. So: gradually, what was once totally unacceptable—say, openly gay couples living together in straight society—becomes utterly ordinary and unremarkable.

Jeffrey Goldberg, in today’s New York Times, opens up the Overton Window of American discourse about Israel with tough talk for the creaky, knee-jerking pro-Israel lobby groups.

The people of Aipac and the Conference of Presidents are well meaning, and their work in strengthening the overall relationship between America and Israel has ensured them a place in the world to come. But what’s needed now is a radical rethinking of what it means to be pro-Israel.

…

I am not wishing that the next president be hostile to Israel, God forbid. But what Israel needs is an American president who not only helps defend it against the existential threat posed by Iran and Islamic fundamentalism, but helps it to come to grips with the existential threat from within. A pro-Israel president today would be one who prods the Jewish state — publicly, continuously and vociferously — to create conditions on the West Bank that would allow for the birth of a moderate Palestinian state.

In crisis there is always opportunity. There’s no doubt that Israel is in crisis [e.a.]:

[Olmert] was expansive, and persuasive, on the Zionist need for a Palestinian state. Without a Palestine — a viable, territorially contiguous Palestine — Arabs under Israeli control will, in the not-distant future, outnumber the country’s Jews.

“We now have the Palestinians running an Algeria-style campaign against Israel, but what I fear is that they will try to run a South Africa-type campaign against us,” he said. If this happens, and worldwide sanctions are imposed as they were against the white-minority government, “the state of Israel is finished,” Mr. Olmert said in an earlier interview. This is why he, and his mentor, former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, turned so fiercely against the Jewish settlement movement, which has entangled Israel unnecessarily in the lives of West Bank Palestinians. Once, men like Mr. Sharon and Mr. Olmert saw the settlers as the vanguards of Zionism; today, the settlements are seen, properly, as the forerunner of a binational state. In other words, as the end of Israel as a Jewish-majority democracy.

Will those in crisis seize it as an opportunity? It means investing—money, time, effort, PR—in the West Bank, turning it into a local success story, and the faster the better.

Will anyone have the imagination to turn things around in this way?

At least Goldberg took an important first step, by making it okay to talk about it in polite society.

Or perhaps it isn’t okay to talk about this in public. Indeed, perhaps it’s “jewidice”  “jewicide”   [emphasis in original]:

Read that again. Prods (as in pressures) Israel to surrender Jewish land to Islamic jihad. That’s what this kapo is saying.

Sheesh.

Let the NYT’s top reviewers, A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis, writing from Cannes, tell you the answer in one short sentence:

If you want escapism it is sometimes necessary to flee the screening rooms altogether.

The movies are supposed to be entertaining, right?
Well, American Idol is entertaining a lot of people.

Even Campaign ‘08 is entertaining a lot of people.

Meanwhile, the movies are a fucking drag.

“A Christmas Story” is one of the more lighthearted competition selections. It begins with the death of a child and includes a vicious sibling feud, mental illness and cancer.

Wait … because it gets worse. Here’s Manohla Dargis on the big hope of Cannes [e.a.]:

I was bored out of my mind while watching [the new Indiana Jones movie], which makes me think that Steven Spielberg was terribly bored while directing it.

Get us rewrite! Stat!

Barack Obama is already making excuses—and blaming Fox News, among others—for his expected massive loss in Kentucky:

Obama conceded that he has a steep challenge to get his message and background to voters in states such as Kentucky — where he trails Sen. Hillary Clinton by 27 points, according to a poll published earlier this week — and West Virginia, where voters chose Clinton over Obama by 40 points on Tuesday. …

“Part of it is because there have been these e-mails that have been sent out very systematically, presumably by various political opponents, although I don’t know who,” he said. “And there are a lot of voters who get their news from Fox News. Fox has been pumping up rumors about my religious beliefs or my patriotism or what have you since the beginning of the campaign.”

Barack Obama refuses to face—and to speak—the truth: that he has limited appeal as a general election candidate, and that a whole lot of Democrats don’t like him.

Meanwhile, our president, who is constantly accused of lying, tells some very inconvenient truths to the backward regimes of the Middle East:

Too often in the Middle East, politics has consisted of one leader in power and the opposition in jail. America is deeply concerned about the plight of political prisoners in this region, as well as democratic activists who are intimidated or repressed, newspapers and civil society organizations that are shut down, and dissidents whose voices are stifled. The time has come for nations across the Middle East to abandon these practices, and treat their people with dignity and the respect they deserve. I call on all nations to release their prisoners of conscience, open up their political debate, and trust their people to chart their future. (Applause.)

For his trouble, Bush gets blasted, while Obama is, as usual, lavished with glowing coverage.

The people’s urgent and powerful need to believe in the myth of Barack Obama isn’t surprising, but it is frightening.