A billion hymens removed, just like that!

Is it history's most gigantic mass defloration, exceeding anything the Mongols or Soviets accomplished?

Nah, it's just Sweden:

There is too much mythology and confusion surrounding that crucial body part known as the hymen, and a new name should help to dispel some of the myths, according to the Swedish Assn. for Sexuality Education, which goes by the acronym RFSU. That new name, which the group believes is more descriptive, is the "vaginal corona."

Etymologically, the term hymen comes from the Greek word for membrane. In Swedish, it is called the modomshina, which translates as "virginity membrane." In fact, there is no brittle membrane or curtain, but rather multiple folds of mucous membrane. A vaginal corona, in other words.

"The vaginal corona is a permanent part of a woman's body throughout her life," said Asa Regner, RFSU secretary-general. "It doesn't disappear after she first has sexual intercourse, and most women don't bleed the first time. The myths surrounding the hymen were created to control women's freedom and sexuality. The only way to counteract this is by disseminating knowledge."

Uh, "disseminating"? Really?

So now, vaginas have crowns. Show reverence accordingly.

(Via Bookslut, who apparently is now crossing her fingers for "panties" to be renamed. Maybe next year.)

... Looking up "mass rape" at Wikipedia to look for guesstimates on the Mongols' rapine, I stumbled upon an article about a novella describing alleged "joy divisions," supposedly "groups of Jewish women in the concentration camps during World War II who were kept for the sexual pleasure of Nazi soldiers." In violation of the Nuremberg Laws, presumably. Anyway, that suddenly made the choice of "Joy Division" for a band name very, very creepy, none the less so for their reforming as New Order after their singer died.

Regrets of the season

Sinfest (click da pic for readable version):

All three men were found to have rags inserted in their throats

While I'm looking over at Democracy in America, may as well relay the extremely depressing Seton Hall study on some Gitmo "suicides":

The report's key findings:

• The original military press releases did not report that the detainees had been dead for more than two hours when they were discovered, nor that rigor mortis had set in by the time of discovery.

• There is no explanation of how three bodies could have hung in cells for at least two hours while the cells were under constant supervision, both by video camera and by guards continually walking the corridors guarding only 28 detainees.

• There is no explanation of how each of the detainees, much less all three, could have done the following: braided a noose by tearing up his sheets and/or clothing, made a mannequin of himself so it would appear to the guards he was asleep in his cell, hung sheets to block vision into the cell--a violation of Standard Operating Procedures, tied his feet together, tied his hands together, hung the noose from the metal mesh of the cell wall and/or ceiling, climbed up on to the sink, put the noose around his neck and released his weight to result in death by strangulation, hanged until dead and hung for at least two hours completely unnoticed by guards.

All three men were found to have rags inserted in their throats to a point where it would have impeded breathing. The camp commander, after first ordering guards to make sworn statements, retracted his order and forbade them to make sworn statements, instead holding a group meeting that appears to have been intended to get their stories straight. And these are just some of the most glaring inconsistencies; there's much, much more in the report.

Click through for more.

Of course, Obama's administration will do nothing about this. Blood under the bridge, and all that.

The public is an ass

Via the Economist's "Democracy in America" blog, these poll figures:

Percentage of Americans who believe in angels: 55

Percentage of Americans who believe in evolution: 39

Percentage of Americans who believe in anthropogenic global warming: 36

Percentage of Americans who believe in ghosts: 34

Percentage of Americans who believe in UFOs: 34

I wish they'd asked about the sum of a triangle's angles, while they were at it.

Yoo again

Mary at Emptywheel on John Yoo:

The hugely relevant (at least, in the context of a completed but unreleased Office of Professional Responsibility investigation) John Yoo has taken to the heavily trafficked pages of the Chapman Law Review to pursue his personal war – on law. In his piece titled, Lincoln and Habeas: Of Merryman, Milligan, and McCardle Yoo utilizes the resources of Boalt Hall and Chapman to finally find and discuss the Civil War case of Ex parte Milligan; a case which managed to elude Yoo during his time spent writing memos for the Office of Legal Counsel. Yoo chooses the cases of Ex Parte Merryman and Ex Parte McCardle to bookend his claims of the “irrelevance” of Milligan, and of law in general, during times of war.

Links, and her opened-up can of whoop-ass, here.

Angelo alert

Rod Jetton, Republican consultant and former speaker of the Missouri House, is in a bit of trouble -- "felony assault" trouble -- over "an S&M session gone wrong":

What Was Rod Jetton's Safe Word?

That's the question everyone's been asking since news broke last night that the former Missouri House Speaker was charged with felony assault that allegedly happened during an S&M session gone wrong.

According to one blog that covers Jeff City politics, the Republican leader-turned political consultant actually used a pair of safe words: Green Balloons.

An unconfirmed report of the incident, from the point of view of the lady -- who was not, it seems, Mrs. Jetton -- has Jetton doping her up, hitting and choking her, and then, when she regained full consciousness and wondered why she had bruises, telling her, "You should have said 'green balloons.'" A local TV station has the probable-cause affidavit.

Jetton's views on sexual matters are documented on the internet:

“I’m all over the state traveling, and I talk to people, both Republican and Democrat,” said House Speaker Pro Tem Rod Jetton, R.-Marble Hill and a member of New Salem Baptist Church in Marble Hill. “People really do believe, as a whole, that marriage between a man and a woman is the core of our society. They feel like the homosexuals are forcing this lifestyle on them, so I think that we will have a large number, 65 percent-plus, vote for this.”

How far from the core, compared to homosexuality, is "S&M with hookers"? Could someone draw us a map here?

"That lifestyle can lead to some problems," said Jetton of homosexuality. Problems? Do tell.

(H/t Political Wire.)

Our drunken forefathers

Distilling whiskey was good business because, to the astonishment of foreigners, nearly all Americans -- men, women, children, and sometimes even babies -- drank whiskey all day long. Some workers began drinking before breakfast and then took dram breaks instead of coffee breaks. . . . During court trials a bottle of liquor might be passed among the attorneys, spectators, clients, and the judge and jury.

-- Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic 1789-1815, at 339-40.

... "Nearly all" seems like hyperbole, but annual consumption of distilled spirits alone went from 2.5 gallons/person in 1790 to nearly 5 gallons/person in 1820, and as Wood points out, once you disregard slaves with little or no access, that is an even larger amount. Given the social consequences, such as casual violence and easy destitution, alcohol then starts to seem like meth now, and temperance begins to seem less puritanical.

Colonel Korn, Esq.

Colonel Korn was the lawyer, and if Colonel Korn assured him that fraud, extortion, currency manipulation, embezzlement, income tax evasion and black-market speculations were legal, Colonel Cathcart was in no position to disagree with him.

-- Joseph Heller, Catch-22, ch. 21.

... This quote really should find its way into a brief in Padilla v. Yoo.

In defense of the My Fair Lady soundtrack album

I'd always heard that the 1956 Broadway cast version of My Fair Lady was far superior to the 1964 film soundtrack, presumably because it had Julie Andrews rather than Audrey Hepburn Marni Nixon. So the other day, I picked up a copy.

Knowing the film version pretty well, I had to distinguish mere familiarity from aesthetic preference. But after many listens, I think the 1964 version comes off better overall.

The main reason is that Rex Harrison's phrasing is much, much superior in the film version. The lack of meaningful emphasis in his 1956 songs is remarkable in contrast to the 1964 album. Possibly he'd had longer to think about them and develop how to enunciate. He may also have done better speaking the lines in context rather than in studio:

Rex Harrison declined to pre-record his musical numbers for the film, explaining that he had never talked his way through the songs the same way twice and thus couldn't convincingly lip-sync to a playback during filming (as musical stars had been doing in Hollywood since the dawn of talking pictures). In order to permit Harrison to sing his songs live during filming, the Warner Bros. Studio Sound Department, under the direction of George Groves, implanted a wireless microphone in Harrison's neckties, marking the first time in film history that one was used to record sound during filming.

Andrews is of course delightful, but I would even venture the heresy that Nixon is a more convincing Cockney than Andrews.

Some of the minor characters are difficult to judge by the albums, but Robert Coote's Pickering sounds inferior to 1964's Wilfrid Hyde-White. Thank god they got Stanley Holloway for the movie too!

Also, some of the lyrics are better in the film. It's a shame to listen to the 1956 version and not hear the magnificent rhyme,

"I know each language on the map," said he,
"And she's Hungarian as the first Hungarian Rhapsody!"

Cole Porter should've been jealous.

Pearl Harbor

The Clarion-Ledger interviews A.C. Hillman, who was a Marine stationed there on December 7, 1941, and who remembers one sailor particularly well:

Hillman, 89, who now lives in Lucedale, was aboard the battleship USS California when the Japanese attacked. Hillman said he was headed to see a friend on the ship when the order for "general quarters" came. He looked out a gun port and saw two planes over the USS Pennsylvania dropping aerial torpedoes that headed for the ship.

"They came straight at us," Hillman said. "I didn't know what to do. My life passed before me in about three seconds."

When a bomb exploded below deck, it set off an anti-aircraft ammunition magazine that killed about 50 men, and by the end of the fighting at Pearl Harbor, 98 of the ship's crewmen were lost and 61 were wounded, according to the California State Military Department.

Hillman was at a gun position high above deck during the fighting. His ammunition lasted about five minutes. The damaged California lost power, so more shells couldn't be sent up. Hillman had to sit helplessly. He could see inside the cockpits of passing planes.

Many other ships were hit. Hillman saw the USS Arizona blow up in an attack that killed 1,177 crewmen. He also saw the USS Oklahoma turn over after being hit by torpedoes - about 400 crewmen were killed. It all happened so fast, he said.

"It was on us just like ants on a piece of bread."

The California began to sink into the mud and only the superstructure remained above the waterline. Hillman said the order to abandon ship came and he had to swim to Ford Island, which is in the middle of Pearl Harbor. Fuel and oil on the surface had caught fire, leaving large areas of burning sea, which forced Hillman and the others to swim underwater for much of the distance. Hillman tried to climb aboard a boat headed to the island, but a sailor told him he couldn't ride.

"He stepped on my hand and made me get off," Hillman said. "That's when I liked to have drowned."

Hillman survived, to enjoy the privilege of taking a bullet in the ribs as part of the first wave ashore at Iwo Jima.

... Silbey considers how we've remembered Pearl Harbor and our other disasters.

... The paper also runs a list, via the state archives, of Mississippians killed at Pearl:

USS Arizona

Burnis L. Bond, Wiggins

Paxton T. Carter, Hattiesburg

Charles B. Chadwick, Coahoma County

John B. Dial, Hattiesburg

Alvie C. Fortenberry, Magnolia

Glen H. Green, Paulding

James A. Menefee, Jackson

Richard P. Molpus, Meridian

Robert E. Moody, Utica

Jessie H. Murphy, Picayune

Lonnie H. Oglesby, Jackson

Cecil R. Ruddock, Pass Christian

Walter T. Smith, Gunnison

George H. Thornton, Blue Springs

Volmer D. White, Kokomo

USS California

Cullen B. Clark, Laurel

Herbert S. Curtis Jr., Kilmichael

USS West Virginia

John R. Melton

Joe E. Mister, Grenada

Hickam Field

Eugene B. Denson, Canton

James E. Gossard, Electric Mills

Theodore K. Joyner, Canton

USS Oklahoma

James W. Davenport Jr., Hattiesburg

Charlton H. Ferguson, Kosciusko

Jim H. Johnston, Wesson

Jerry Jones, Stonewall

Cecil H. Thornton, Mississippi

Durrell Wade, Calhoun City

Wheeler Field

James Everett, Madison

John A. Price, McComb

Clevinger

He was a very serious, very earnest and very conscientious dope. It was impossible to go to a movie with him without getting involved afterward in a discussion on empathy, Aristotle, universals, messages and the obligations of the cinema as an art form in a materialistic society. Girls he took to the theater had to wait until the first intermission to find out from him whether they were seeing a good or a bad play, and then found out at once. He was a militant idealist who crusaded against racial bigotry by growing faint in its presence. He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.

-- Joseph Heller, Catch-22, ch. 8.

100 best last lines from novels

Via Yglesias, on PDF. A reasonable list, saving the absence of "He has just won the Legion of Honor," but who the fuck had the nerve to put apostrophes in the last lines of Absalom, Absalom!?

I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!

I mean, why not punctuate the last lines of Molly Bloom's soliloquy while you're at it?

(Keep meaning to get I dont hate it! etc. on a T-shirt or a bumper sticker. Surely one could sell those in Oxford or hereabouts.)

"President Obama rides to the defense of John Yoo"

So writes Dave Hoffman. He's not wrong.

... Naturally, Scott Horton is all over this. H/T to Jonathan Adler for the Hoffman link; y.t. holds forth in Adler's thread.

Remember Bhopal

This is the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal gas disaster, an epic mess that started one night when a pesticide plant owned by the American chemical giant Union Carbide leaked a cloud of poisonous gas. Before the sun rose, almost 4,000 human beings capable of love and anguish sank to their knees and did not get up. Half a million more fell ill, many with severely damaged lungs and eyes.

An additional 15,000 people have since died from the aftereffects, and 10 to 30 people are said to die every month from exposure to the hundreds of tons of toxic waste left over in the former factory. But amazingly, the site still has not been cleaned up, because Dow Chemical, which since acquired Union Carbide, refuses to accept any responsibility. The groundwater is contaminated; children of the survivors suffer from genetic abnormalities; and the victims have long since run out of their measly compensation and are begging on the streets.

I have traveled to Bhopal and seen the post-apocalyptic devastation, seen the sick, seen the factory. Methyl isocyanate is a deadly chemical used to kill insects. The night that 40 tons of it wafted out of the factory is, for the survivors, a fulcrum in time, marking the before and after in their lives. They still talk about “the gas” as if it were an organism they know well — how it killed buffalo and pigs, but spared chickens; how it traveled toward Jahangirabad and Hamidia Road, while ignoring other parts of the city; how it clung to the wet earth in some places but hovered at waist level in others; how it blackened all the leaves of a peepul tree; how they could watch it move down the other side of the road, like a rain cloud seen from a sunny spot.

All over India, when misfortune strikes — when a child is ill, for example — people burn chilies to drive away the evil eye. The gas smelled like chilies burning, and people said to one another, it must be a powerfully evil eye that’s being driven away, the stench is so strong.

Fleeing the gas, the Bhopalis clutched their children. Some babies fell, gasping, and their parents had to choose which ones to carry on their shoulders. One image still comes up over and over in their dreams: in the stampede, a thousand people are stepping on their child’s body.

In 2001, the maker of napalm married the bane of Bhopal: Dow Chemical bought Union Carbide for $11.6 billion and promptly distanced itself from the disaster. If Union Carbide was at fault, that was too bad; it had just ceased to exist. In 2002, Dow set aside $2.2 billion to cover potential liabilities arising from Union Carbide’s American asbestos production. By comparison, the total settlement for Bhopal was $470 million. The families of the dead got an average of $2,200; the wounded got $550; a Dow spokeswoman explained, that amount “is plenty good for an Indian.” As Representative Frank Pallone of New Jersey observed in 2006, “In Bhopal, some of the world’s poorest people are being mistreated by one of the world’s richest corporations.”

Union Carbide and Dow were allowed to get away with it because of the international legal structures that protect multinationals from liability. Union Carbide sold its Indian subsidiary and pulled out of India. Warren Anderson, the Union Carbide chief executive at the time of the gas leak, lives in luxurious exile in the Hamptons, even though there’s an international arrest warrant out for him for culpable homicide. The Indian government has yet to pursue an extradition request. Imagine if an Indian chief executive had jumped bail for causing an industrial disaster that killed tens of thousands of Americans. What are the chances he’d be sunning himself in Goa?

The Indian government, fearful of scaring away foreign investors, has not pushed the issue with American authorities. Dow has used a kind of blackmail with the Indians; a 2006 letter from Andrew Liveris, the chief executive, to India’s ambassador to the United States asked for guarantees that Dow would not be held liable for the cleanup, and thanked him for his “efforts to ensure that we have the appropriate investment climate.”

-- Suketu Mehta, "A Cloud Still Hangs Over Bhopal"

Cold-weather poetry

Michael Bérubé referred offhandedly (in this thread, I can't link to his comment) to Stevens's "The Snow Man" as "puzzling."

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Stevens is reflecting upon the inevitability of the "pathetic fallacy" for the imagination. Only a "snow man" could *not* imagine misery in the sound of the wind. Ultimately, the alleged fallacy rebounds upon the critic; a viewer without imagination is "nothing himself," and if he beholds nothing that isn't there, then there is nothing there. Cf. Nietzsche on the world as value-neutral without the philosopher (priest, poet) to create values.

He returns to this early statement of one of his great themes in a late poem that I like better, "The Plain Sense of Things":

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as necessity requires.

Faced by brute facts "as if" there were no imagination possible in the face of unadorned, cold reality, the poet retrenches: "Yet the absence of the imagination had itself to be imagined." One's very sadness demonstrates that one is not, after all, merely an empty recorder of neutral facts. "Inevitability" is not in the landscape, but in the beholder. And I always like the image (perhaps my own imposition) of the poet as "a rat come out to see."