Noli Irritare Leones

So, the California Supreme Court yesterday struck down the ban on same-sex marriage. To those of you who may be tempted at this point to start lamenting the actions of our “black robed masters,” there are a few things to bear in mind:

1. The California legislature has twice passed legislation legalizing same-sex marriage. Both times, the Governator vetoed the legislation, saying that the Courts needed to be heard on this issue.
2. Now that the Supreme Court has, in fact, been heard, the Governator has announced that he’s supporting their decision, and opposing efforts to amend the California Constitution to overturn it.
3. California has had provision for registered domestic partnerships since 1999. In 2003, a law was passed (that went into effect in 2005) changing the terms of those domestic partnerships to make them as marriage-like as possible.
4. California Supreme Court justices are appointed by the Governor, but thereafter face reelection by the voters. Every one of the current Supreme Court Justices has been confirmed by election. Supreme Court Justices have been voted out of office in the three decades I’ve been living in this state.
5. The California Constitution can be amended by voter initiative (a much easier process than amending the US Constitution, and one that’s happened repeatedly in the time I’ve lived here). An initiative has already been submitted for the November 2008 election that would amend the California Constitution to rule out same-sex marriage; that initiative is currently pending signature verification to determine whether it qualifies. (Flip side: by the time we vote on the measure, numerous same-sex couples will already have married in this state. If the measure passes, are they divorced?)

So, like it or not (I say because I know I’ll have readers adamantly on both sides), at this point we have all three branches of government in California on board with same-sex marriage (and all three of those brances were elected). San Francisco, open your golden gate - to would-be same-sex newlyweds from all over the country.

On a more personal note, I finished the second draft of my screenplay, which is finally at least nominally within the length limits for screenplays (the first draft was dozens of pages too long), though some web sites say screenplays these days should be even shorter to be marketable.

Movies:

It’s the Rage: The latest installment in my attempt to see all of Andre Braugher’s movies, this one had a lower Netflix rating than the others I’ve seen, both for how other Netflix users rated it and for how well Netflix thought I would like it (three stars in both cases). I shuffled it to the top anyway, because I couldn’t resist the Andre Braugher as two-timing lawyer part of the synopsis; it was a different role than I’d seen him in before. And, sure enough, it was fun to watch Andre two-time. Otherwise, though, I’d have to say the Netflix rating was right; while it wasn’t a bad movie, it wasn’t a great one either. The movie is about guns, and in many ways portrays that counter to the NRA slogan, “Guns don’t kill people, but they make it real easy.” It starts with headlines about people killed by guns flashing by during the opening credits. Soon a whole bunch of gun-toting characters are introduced, and you know that all the guns introduced in Act One will indeed go off by Act Three. Problem is, two of the gun-toting people are actually mentally ill, and another is insanely jealous, so the movie seems to be simultaneously saying guns are bad and dangerous, and people who carry guns are really not right in their heads. If you look at it as a message movie, the second message kind of undercuts the first; won’t we be OK if we just leave the guns in the hands of the sane people? Well, no; I will spoiler it enough to note that at least one of the characters who gets in trouble by carrying a gun is quite sane, and at least one death will be accidental. There’s also some interesting exploration of the characters’ various motives (power, speed, sex) for toting those guns. One other flaw: the computer nerd came off, to me, as more surreal than believable. I guess he was supposed to be a sort of young, high tech version of Howard Hughes, but for me missed the mark. I had an easier time believing the other characters.

23: Jim Carrey is pursued and haunted by the number 23. A comedy? No, this one’s a dead serious thriller, a study in paranoia as the Jim Carrey character’s wife watches her husband’s sanity slip away.

Only Human (Spanish movie): A Jewish woman brings her Palestinian fiance to meet her family. There’s the slutty sister, the brother who’s turned hyperreligious, the blind grandfather who served in the Israeli army, and who’s under the mistaken impression that the Palestinian fiance is in the IDF. Is the father having an affair? Can Rafi, the Palestinian, get in the family’s good graces after the dreadful mistake he makes? Will the gun introduced in Act One go off in Act Three? Since it’s a comedy, I don’t spoiler it too much by saying that all’s well that ends well.

And here are the ten random iTunes selections.

1. “Ombra Mai Fu” from Handel’s Largo
2. “Ave verum corpus” by Dad
3. “Ave Maria” by Dad
4. “Light of the World” from Godspell
5. “There Is One Lord” from the Taize album Wait for the Lord
6. “La Donna Est Mobile” from Rigoletto
7. “Till There Was You”
8. “The Red Corvette” by John McCutcheon
9. “Send In the Clowns” from A Little Night Music
10. “Greensleeves”

Bonus Track: Holly Near singing “We Are a Gentle, Angry People.” (There’s another slice of California gay and lesbian history; the song was written after Harvey Milk and George Moscone were assassinated. Evidently, it’s now a Unitarian hymn.)

brownfemipower is back!

Remember my post the other day about the whole Obama as crypto-Muslim meme? Well, Ali Eteraz has a thorough analysis of why, from a Muslim point of view, the “Obama as Muslim apostate” claim doesn’t hold water.

“Misogyny I Won’t Miss” - Ann Bartow links an article about the pervasiveness of misogynist commentary on Clinton’s campaign (though I concurr with Ann’s comment that the piece would have been better without the second-to-last paragraph’s suggestion that Obama isn’t facing racist commentary). One thing I keep telling myself when I see this crap, both the sexist crap and the racist crap, is that, after all, all kinds of crap was brought out about JFK being Catholic, and that argument lost. It’s not possible to come out of this election season with both the sexists and the racists losing out, but either Obama or Clinton (at this point almost certainly Obama) will win the nomination, the other will be a close second, the winner will probably be the next president, and, bottom line, the backlashers will lose, on both fronts, in the near future. The Presidency can no longer be considered either a white only or a men only job.

57th Carnival of the Feminists. 14th Carnival of Radical Feminists. Third Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy. (The last two of these carnivals will be at odds with each other on certain issues. I just feel like linking everyone today.)

Analysis of a Local Public Disturbance.

Jews and Judaism in science fiction.

Economic fundamentalism and the minimum wage. Also, Unions: good for equity, good for efficiency.

Via the Economist’s blog, the Hill asked all 97 Senators who are not running for President whether they’d be willing to be Vice President and reported all their answers.

The Anti-Splog Blog.

Foreign students go to Markere University in Uganda.

Pandiaspora.

Achieving Self-Sufficiency in Rice Production-Uganda.

AfriGadget Innovator Series: Simon Mwacharo of Craftskills.

Regional diversification.

A Fund Investing Solely in African Markets?

Tanzania says soda plant will not harm flamingos.

WEB: new online educational resource - South Africa: Overcoming Apartheid, Building Democracy.

Gambian food: Caldou.

Emergency Healthcare Transport-Bicycle Ambulances.

NextEinstein.org.

Joel and I saw this Sunday.

The Previews: We’re both thinking of seeing The Hulk, and seeing how it compares to the Ang Lee version. Hancock looked as if it could either be good, or not, so we’re going to wait and see what the reviews say. We split on The Andromeda Strain, with Joel taking the “I liked the original Andromeda Strain so much that I don’t want to spoil it by seeing The Andromeda Strain with car chases” position, and me taking the “I need to see anything with Andre Braugher in it” position. Since we don’t have cable, and it’s made for TV, my plan is to wait for it to appear on DVD.

The Bechdel Test: Well, what can you expect from a movie about a millionaire playboy arms dealer? It fails the test. There are two named women, and they do indeed have a conversation, but - the two named women are The Woman Who Does Sleep With Tony Stark and The Woman Who Doesn’t Sleep With Tony Stark, and they talk, naturally, about Tony Stark. Of the two, the more interesting as a character is The Woman Who Doesn’t Sleep With Tony Stark, Tony Stark’s secretary Pepper Potts, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, who combines thoroughgoing devotion to her boss with touches of disdain. As one reviewer put it, “no man is a hero to his valet.”

The politics: As Jim Henley points out, the Iron Man of my childhood was unconflicted, an arms manufacturer who was secure in the knowledge that he was providing the big stick needed to fight the Commies, and unconcerned about what his weapons might be doing to Vietnamese peasants. Eventually, as the Vietnam War became less popular, he got an update. So, how is he updated now, post-9/11? Ambivalently. Weapons manufacturing is shady, but the U.S. army is fundamentally good - even intelligently good (though not as brilliant as Tony Stark). The threat is bad Muslims who are out to do us harm - or is it? The military-industrial complex is a grave danger, but a grave danger that can be set right with more accountability and better weapons. The ideal, in the world of this movie, is a self-critical, but by no means a pacifist, America.

The Good: Robert Downey Jr really nails Tony Stark, bringing a certain risk-taking charm to the boy-would-you-never-want-to-sleep-with-him-in-real-life playboy character. The movie is well-paced and well-plotted, with enough twists to keep it interesting, but not so many that they can’t be made to hang together. Humor is nicely done both in dialog and in visuals (this movie is fond of the Gilligan Cut). As a test engineer, I especially liked the testing the Iron Man suit sequence.

The Bad: Spoiler, but only minor spoiler, since this happens fairly early in the movie. OK, so you have this doctor, Yinsen (Shaun Toub). And he provides the nifty dramatic roles of: A) saving Tony Stark’s life, B) helping him build the Iron Man suit (on the sly, while his Al Qaeda-like captors think he’s making them a weapon), C) being a sort of mentor to Tony, revealing to him the other side of his weapons manufacturing - he’s not the only one whose heart has been injured by Stark Manufacturing weapons, D) ensuring that not every Muslim character in the movie is villain or victim. And he’s intelligent and learned and noble. So far, so good, right? But then the movie has to go and kill him in an annoying way. They could have had Tony succeed in rescuing Yinsen along with himself (perhaps with a narrow squeaking escape from death for Yinsen). They could have had Yinsen, oops, die in the escape. They could even have had Yinsen die heroically saving Tony’s life in the escape, as he sort of does, and that would be OK, to my mind, dramatically. The problem is, the way it plays out, it’s not just that he dies to save Tony, it’s that he basically commits suttee. He dies, and it’s OK, and all good, and was part of the plan all along, and now he’ll be able to see his family in heaven, or something, and Tony, who spent three months in close quarters with the guy, can now proceed apparently unphased by the death. This, to me, lacks dramatic plausibility.

Other supporting characters are better handled, with Terence Howard doing well as Stark’s army friend, and Jeff Bridges doing a nice turn as his colleague in Stark Industries. There’s a twist at the very end that Joel and I both liked.

Stentor has an important public service announcement for some people finding him via search engines.

Link of the day: Close My Eyes! It’s All Pink!

Movies: We saw Ratatouille this week, which looks to be a good kid friendly movie, and Joel’s now taking us through the Firefly TV series. Someone, I forget who, had expressed reservations about the women in that series, but I really like the women so far, especially Zoe and Kayley.

The movie which really doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test, though, is Steam Bath - Purgatory as a steam bath with God as the Puerto Rican towel attendant. The only woman there is very much woman as sex class - pretty, sexy, interested in shopping. If you can overlook this flaw, an entertaining take on Purgatory, and the guy who’s trying to persuade God that he needs his life back, because just now it was going so right.

Random iTunes:

1. A FAIR Counterspin podcast
2. Finale from Godspell
3. “No Mas!” by John McCutcheon
4. “O Holy Night” by Dad
5. “Vissi d’Arte” from Tosca
6. “Lili Marlen” by Dad
7. “Suddently Seymour” from Little Shop of Horrors
8. “Veni Sancte Spiritus” from Gregorian Chants Greatest Hits
9. “Chanson du Toreador” from Carmen
10. “E Lucevan La Stelle” from Tosca

Tomorrow I’ll do an African ingenuity blogwatch. Feel free to suggest any links in comments.

Anyone who’s slept with more than one man already knows this department: Turn-ons, turn-offs, desire varies widely among men. (You think? The study sounds interesting, though; here’s the press release, and here’s the journal where it was published. From the Kinsey Institute.)

If they can’t get off the list, what hope is there for the rest of us department: Sky Marshals on the No-Fly List.

Drima recommends Daniel Pipes On Islam and Democracy.

Lauren’s dispatches from flyover country piece got published in the Prospect.

Jabberwocky in Latin. Via Eve.

Via the Economist’s Democracy in America blog, I see that the Washingtonian has written about Who Might Be in an Obama Cabinet?

Reading things other than “Lolita” in Tehran.

More on That Show: Last Woman Standing, Racial Politics, and America Votes!

Whoa. Damn. Well, that spells out a subtext I’ve always picked up on in a number of contexts rather refreshingly, at least.

Via religion and science fiction blogger Elliot, here’s a site on Islam and science fiction.

It discusses Islam’s portrayal in sf books and movies, sf written by Muslims, and related topics.

Now I’m curious what other religion-specific science fiction pages may be out there.

Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Buddhism, Christianity, and the Matrix.

So far, Drake has been staying off all the furniture, and consistently sleeping in his own bed.

“Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any society which I have not joined.” [...] If I had known how to name them, I should then have signed off in detail from all the societies which I never signed on to; but I did not know where to find such a complete list.
Henry David Thoreau

Obama is a Muslim. Yes, he is. OK, actually he’s a member of the United Church of Christ. But his father was a Muslim. And that automatically means he was a Muslim child, because Islam is apparently hereditary, along the paternal line. Never mind that Islam doesn’t actually have that rule, that his father left when he was two, and that his father was in any case a lapsed Muslim atheist. But wait! His stepfather was a Muslim, and so devout a Muslim was he, so concerned for the good Muslim upbringing of his stepson, that he sent his stepson to a Catholic school. But wait! He went to a madrassah as a boy. Never mind that CNN investigated the report and found that the “madrassa” was a public school that didn’t focus on religion. A “madrassa” is a school in Arabic; Obama went to a school in Indonesia, QED.

Ah, but there’s a fallback. Obama may not adhere to Islam; he may not ever have adhered in any meaningful sense to Islam. But don’t lose hope! Because, when all else fails, you can always assert that Obama is Muslim in an utterly meaningless sense: he was “raised” as “nominally” Muslim. Go ahead and prove that he wasn’t!

And remember, while you try, that your very denial that Obama is Muslim is proof that you don’t really mean in the least what you say, when you say that it can, after all, be OK to be a Muslim. That not all Muslims fly planes into buildings and kill thousands of people. That some of them don’t engage in terrorism, or honor killings of their daughters and sisters, or marry off their eight-year-old girls against their will. If you really think it’s OK to be a Muslim, why are you so angry?

Why? Well, let me count the reasons.

First, what possible reason could you have for insisting that this adherent of the United Church of Christ adherent is really of Muslim background, other than to appeal to people’s prejudices against Islam? In what other context would the claim be remotely meaningful?

Second, having made that insinuation, you bat your collective eyelashes and play innocent when people state the obvious: Obama isn’t Muslim. Ah, you weren’t suggesting anything, but isn’t it telling that we’re so ashamed to admit the simply fact that Obama was Muslim, or was raised Muslim, or was a “nominal” Muslim, or, well, something or other. You are, in other words, trying to define your terms such that one has two choices: agree that you get to use the word “Muslim” for your own convenience, abducting people into the faith who neither claim it nor are claimed by any mosque, or else, well, admit that being Muslim is shameful. Now, we’re all aware that some Muslims are our enemies. But why are you so determined to make them all our enemies, and make all of us their enemies? Why are you so eager for Muslims not to have an out?

Third, the whole crypto-Muslim Manchurian candidate reasoning wreaks of McCarthyism. Obama is, or was, somehow or other “nominally” a Muslim because he has associated with Muslims. He has Muslims in his family; he has lived with Muslims as his neighbors. And Muslim cooties, like Commie cooties, can readily be caught by association. Indeed, the latest purveyor of the Obama-Muslim connection, Lisa Shiffren at the National Review’s blog (linked and countered by Matthew Yglesias) is already on record with the other sort of McCarthyism; she had earlier written that Obama’s parents must have had Communist connections, because, after all, they had an interracial marriage (for real, I am not making this argument up). It’s good to know that Obama’s father was both Muslim and Communist; as a public enemy, he’s a twofer.

But, beyond the politics of this particular campaign, there’s a basic theological problem with this kind of reasoning. Part of it is expressed in the Thoreau quote that I’ve placed at the top of this entry. Religion is not super glue, so that you turn into a Muslim simply by having Muslim friends and family and neighbors, or even - the horror! - praying on occasion with said friends and family, or visiting their mosques. I am not simultaneously a member of the Apostolic Overcoming Holy Church of God and a Zen Buddhist. If you state that you aren’t a member of a religious society, if you state that you’ve never been a member of said religious society, if in fact you have never joined said religious society, then you’re not a member. In the case of Islam, that means that you must in some meaningful way have knowingly accepted Mohammed as a prophet. If you yourself haven’t joined a faith, other people don’t get to randomly induct you into that society, and insist that you’re really part of it. If Quakers can pronounce anathema, I pronounce anathema on religion as super glue.

And, no, “nominal” doesn’t work for getting around that. If “nominal X” has any sensible meaning, it has to mean people who name themselves as members of a faith, but not particularly observant or devout ones. As in, “I guess nominally I’m a Lutheran” - I was baptized a Lutheran, I associate myself more with that than with any other religion, but I haven’t been to church in donkey’s years. I’m not so sure I believe in all that Lutheran stuff, but I haven’t fully left the church. So I guess I’m nominally a Lutheran.

If that isn’t the meaning of words like “nominal Muslim” - if they’re not about what people name themselves and state about their own faith, then, frankly, the word “nominal” or “nominally” has become a meaningless weasel word, and should be taken out and shot. Because in that case, Reality Man (commenter at Matt’s blog) would be quite right that “nominal” and “nominally” are being used to make any loose association count, and remove yourself from the position where you’re claiming anything much verifiable at all. (But whatever you’re claiming, darn it, it sure is grounds for concern!)

But there’s still another side to the wrongness of religion as super glue - not only does it make faith something that has nothing to do with what people actually believe and affirm and accept, it’s also a kind of attack on the normal way that faiths coexist, and ought to coexist. Which is, you make friends, you grow up side by side, you sometimes combine different faiths in one family. Which is, in high school one of my sisters heads off with her friend to the local Catholic youth group, and I head off with my friend to the local Reform Jewish youth group, and neither of us turns Catholic or Jewish - even “nominally” - just because we did the normal thing of going to a friend’s place of worship, and maybe even joining in those prayers that were compatible with our own faith. Which is, people pray with people of other faiths, join in celebrating the holidays of other faiths, and learn from other faiths all the time. When Obama, as a child in Indonesia, was exposed both to Catholic and to Muslim prayers, he was learning the same lesson we all learn as children: we live in a community made up of several faiths. That’s not strange and unusual and exotic and sinister; it’s normal life.

And it’s normal life, too, that being exposed to varied faiths, you eventually grow up to make your own choice - the United Church of Christ for Obama, the Quakers for me, something else, perhaps, for you.

Using “Legal” Opinions to Engage in Bald-Faced Hypocrisy About Torture.

About 1 in 10 students in New York City’s public school system is Muslim. Here’s some research on Muslim youth in NYC.

A discussion thread of songs on or about slavery.

You’ve probably heard by now that Mildred Loving has died. Ann Bartow provides links to the Supreme Court opinion in Loving v. Virginia and the argument that preceded the opinion.

Do something.

Hmm, an email from the IRS! To my work email, which they don’t have, since no one ever had any conceivable reason to need to give it to them. Asking for my bank account information, which they do have already, since I submitted it to them with my tax form already. All I have to do is click this one link and type in that account information. It is oh so important that I do this right away, because if I don’t tell the phisher how to rob me provide those nice people at the IRS who are so eager to rush me money with my bank account information by May 10th, well, I’ll just have to wait till sometime around doomsday to get that tax rebate.

How could I resist?

First, the not-so-breaking news from Zimbabwe, where on Friday the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission finally released the presidential election results over a month after the election. The results: no winner, with a runoff anticipated between the two top candidates, Morgan Tsvangirai of MDC-T and President Mugabe of Zanu-PF.

According to ZEC results, Tsvangirai received 1 195 562 votes, representing 47,9 percent of the valid votes, while President Mugabe of Zanu-PF polled 1 079 730 votes, which is 43,2 percent of the valid votes.

The Kenyan newspaper The Nation predicts that With Or Without Re-Run, Mugabe’s Grip On Power Nearing End.

The opposition has threatened that it will not take part in the runoff because it believes that it won outright.

Legal experts say the MDC has no option but to contest the runoff, which must be held after 21 days as a decision not to take part would automatically hand victory to Mr Mugabe.

Analysts warn the run off will not be a run in the park for the opposition as evidenced by the current wave of political violence in rural areas that human rights groups and aid agencies say has killed several people and forced hundreds to flee their homes. Rights groups and the MDC say the violence is mainly aimed at opposition activists or people who voted for the opposition and is designed to intimidate them into voting for Mr Mugabe in a second round.

But some analysts say if the 84 year old manages to use violence to win the runoff he would not be able to rule the country with the iron fist that has characterised his 28 year-old rule….

Zimbabwean church leaders have condemned the state violence in Zimbabwe. Sokwanele’s blog sets forth what Baseline conditions must be met by the authorities if a second Presidential election is to be at all acceptable in law and practice. And Pambazuka News has a background piece on The complexities of Zimbabwe and the various competing interests there.

In Kenya, displaced people are finally returning to their farms, while the government cooperates with Uganda to fight the illegal arms trade on their common border, and the country awaits the launching of new low-cost cell phones.

The UN Security Council has drafted a resolution against Somali pirates. “The draft, however, sidestepped an issue fundamental to solving the problem: fishing.”

On Friday, the UN refugee agency deplored the killing of a senior aid worker in eastern Chad.

Pascal Marlinge, the Country Director for the non-governmental organization (NGO) Save The Children, was shot yesterday by bandits while travelling in a three-vehicle convoy on the road between the towns of Farchana and Adre.

UN peacekeepers evacuated villages in North Darfur. Meanwhile, the Security Council voted to extend for a year a mission to support the 2005 peace accord that ended the civil war between North and South Sudan.

Blog posts:

Drima on Fouad Released, Andrew Mwenda Jailed.

You Missed This is skeptical about the government’s formation of a minimum wage committee, and, in other news, recounts that

Luke’s Top 4 most popular Kenyan stories on the web right now

1. Lies, Lies

2. Mombasa-not always a clean haven

3. Perils of love reduced to size

4. Why do Kikuyu women have a weakness for Luhya men?

which actually, when I think about it, sound not all that different from the sorts of stories that are most popular on the web here in the US.

Kenya Christian wonders: is the IDP resettlement too hasty.

who’s a good boy. Well, Saturday we joined their ranks, getting a five-year-old Boston terrier, Drake, from Boston Buddies, a Boston terrier rescue organization. One of the cats hid in the loft for a day, while the other cat bravely ventured down to determine whether Drake was safe. Fortunately, he seems to be a very non-alpha dog, who says ma’am to the cats (we picked him from the lot available because he was one of the two advertised as cat friendly).

Blogging may be a bit scarce as we socialize Drake to his new home.

I just wrote an email to my mother about how to check headers to find the origin of spam email (or, in this case, spam email that someone else sent out forged in your name so that you would get all the bounces). I’m not going to copy/paste the whole email, but I may as well blog a few of the relevant links:

About.com on checking spam headers.

SpamCop (free service that you can sign up for to report spam - they resolve the headers and find the reporting address for you).

GeoBytes Spam Locator.

So, here is what sucked up my time this week: an iframes attack, not on this site, but on another site that I manage (manage in the cPanel sense, not in the having shell access sense). Here is the story, so you can know the signs, and how to recover:

1) Google lists the site as dangerous and possibly distributing badware. One of the bloggers there learns this on a search and reports this to me.

2) Google will, if you submit the site again for verification (a process that involves first establishing ownership of the site by creating a file of a specified name), give a list of sample URLs that fail their test. They do not, however, indicate why the URLs fail. Submitting a further verification request with the question “What are you finding; these are blog entries with standard blog software?” results in getting the same URLs back with no further information.

3) Google does point to a Badware FAQ that lists a number of different reasons the site might fail, with iframes among the possibilities. However, there’s not a lot of diagnostic information in the FAQ that would help tell which problem you have, and iframes is somewhere well down the list. As a result, I wasted a bunch of time, as it turned out, looking for files someone might have inserted, making sure nothing was world writeable, etc.

4) Fortunately, the blogger who had originally reported the problem was, in the meantime, checking why she had been dropped from a particular aggregator. The administrator of that aggregator told her that it was for iframes.

5) The shortcut: the iframes may be invisible to you if you’re browsing the site. Sometimes they do things like redirect surfers to other sites, or suck up your bandwidth, but in this case neither thing was happening; the only harm visible at our end was being listed as a badware site. However, you can find out quickly whether there are iframes on a web page by doing View Source. So, for future reference, I would suggest that if you ever get listed by Google as a badware site, this is the first thing to try, on one of the URLs they cite to you as failing. It’s fast, and saves a lot of time checking other things.

Now, there are a bunch of references in Google to iframes attacks. This one, though, turned out not to describe the actual insertion point in our case - the directory they mention didn’t exist on our site (but definitely check for it if you get hit). Moreover, the most obvious php files (e.g. index.php at various levels) didn’t actually have any direct reference to iframes. I found a few pages with iframes in themes, but removing those references didn’t fix the problem; View Source still showed the iframes.

6) Since I don’t have shell access at that site, the next step was to submit a request to support, asking them to grep all files at the site for iframes, and send me a list of which ones failed the test. This they did, advising me to also check my home PC for viruses that might have stolen my ftp login and inserted the code. All home PCs were virus scanned, and none turned up any viruses (the fact that this site, which I access much more often, wasn’t affected, also leads me to believe that the home PCs weren’t the injection point). The list of malware-infected files included html and php files, and several jpg files.

7) The jpg files, it turns out, are key in this case. They are not really pictures, but rather php files that have been disguised with the jpg extension. They display iframes, and run some other code, which appears to be designed to keep them propagated. Some php files have iframes code directly, some are untouched, and others do not include any iframes code on their own, but include the jpg files.

At this point, the ideal thing, and what I would do if this sort of thing happened at work, where I’d have full access, would be to write a tool that removes the code from all php and html files. I could feed it exactly what code it needed to remove (in this case, nicely inserted at the end of the file), test it on some sample files first to be sure I got it right, and then run it and let it do its job. After all, software inserted the problem; software should be able to remove it. But I’m not exactly going to port infected Wordpress software over to work to do this kind of coding and testing in my off hours, and, in the absence of shell access, I didn’t really see a good programmed way of fixing the site that wouldn’t involve the likelihood of waiting on probably overworked tech support, or being in the back of the queue of some Wordpress volunteer or other. The fastest way of fixing the site appeared to be the boring brute force method of editing every file by hand.

9) Editing the files from cPanel turns out to be way too slow if you have many files to edit, so, the somewhat faster, but still boring and slow, brute force method, is:

a) Look at the files and directories listed as infected. Decide which directories are unlikely to have needed customization. For those directories, but those directories only, download files from a known to be clean Wordpress installation, and upload the same files to the directory.

b) Edit the jpg files to make them zero length (and make sure other people can’t write to them). That way they stop doing damage even while you’re editing out references to them.

c) Download whole directories worth of php and html files with FTP, and, from the FTP client, view and edit each file to make sure the bad code is gone.

This does the trick, but it also sucks a bunch of the joy out of life, because there are days when you come home from work and can’t blog, or work on the screenplay, or swim, or play piano, or do anything much fun, because you have to sit and edit stupid files - not even fun work with the computer. Someone really does need to write an application, or, if it’s already written, well advertise it, that removes specified strings from PHP files and HTML files on a site wide basis.

Possibly much of this time could have been saved if I’d been less paranoid about which files Wordpress might have customized and did more downloading and uploading of files from an uncontaminated installation. But I figured I wanted to be absolutely sure I didn’t break the blogs in the process of repairing them.

During the time that I couldn’t blog, lots of stuff came up that maybe I’ll blog about tomorrow, along with the African news that I’ve been promising all week and unable to deliver, but for now, just a couple of links:

Daisy’s Dead Air writes about the death of Albert Hoffman, discoverer of LSD.

LSD is tasteless, odorless, colorless and can be absorbed right through the skin. What, did you panic and decide you didn’t want any after all? Ha! Too late, babe.

Actually, though, it’s not absorbed through the skin quite that fast in my experience. Once a guy handed me some windowpane without first asking me if I actually wanted it - no, I’ve never personally chosen to take LSD, but I’ve been around plenty of people who did, back in the day when I was in college. He walked off, I pursued him, and, after a brief argument, succeeded in handing him back the LSD, and declining the unwanted trip (since he was a boundary pusher anyway, he was so not someone I’d actually want to trip with, if I had ever chosen to take LSD). Still, that small dispute aside, an interesting set of memories of psychedelic culture.

Because Our Voices Matter Too: Don’t dismiss “fly over country,” and don’t assume it’s uniformly conservative.

Which reminds me, I dreamed last night about the author of that last blog post, Lauren, and her son Ethan; they were in a coffee shop somewhere. Other part of last night’s dream: I had a photograph that showed lesbians from the Stanford gay and lesbian organization from when I was there; in the dream, they were all tough-looking blondes, and Joel wanted to crop them out of the photograph. In real life, they looked nothing like that, and Joel would never ask me to crop them out of the photograph, if I had a photo of them (but I think the only woman from that group that I still have a photo of is the one who later became persona non grata with the California lesbian world as a result of legal arguments made during a custody battle).

1. “Les Tringles Des Sistres Tintaient” from Carmen
2. Some song about Idi Amin
3. “Lascia Ch’io Pianga” from Rinaldo
4. “Tower of Babble” from Godspell
5. Kentucky Fried Chicken Training
6. “If Ever I Would Leave You” from Camelot
7. “O Hear the Bells of Christmas Morn” by Dad
8. “The Meek Shall Inherit” from Little Shop of Horrors
9. “O Sole Mio” by Dad
10. An aria not named in iTunes - I think it’s one of Madame Butterfly’s

Still fixing crap on the other web site. Feeling as if all of my at home time is being spent fixing computers. Off to work to do other stuff with computers.

I spent all morning trying to fix something on another computer, and now I need to go to work. African news will have to wait till tonight, or maybe even tomorrow. In the meantime, here’s a link for you:

Extended Family: a support system for families of prisoners.

Heh. dnA writes:

Michelle Malkin’s reaction to the Sean Bell verdict was as predictable as the sunrise. I’ve discussed this before, but violations of an individual’s civil rights, even when they result in death, are not nearly as offensive to the fanatical Right as the existence of Al Sharpton: …

OK, that does sound like the Michelle Malkin we all know and, well, don’t actually love. But this also reminds me, if I’m not up for blogging intelligently about the Sean Bell verdict myself, I should at least link other people who do (hat tip to Global Comment for one of these links).

Other links:

On Facing Your Bias, Owning Your Prejudice, and Allies - Part 1.

Zimbabwe: Black America must not be silent

“Yes, and.”

synecdochic on the difference between being sex-positive and being getting-laid-positive.

Andre Braugher news: I mentioned his upcoming projects earlier. Well, they now have the web site up for The Andromeda Strain, and here’s an article on the cast of this summer’s Central Park production of Hamlet (where Andre Braugher gets to be the evil brother murdering Claudius, who marries Hamlet’s mother and becomes the object of Hamlet’s revenge).

Struggling With God. And a pretty good explanation, by a non-Quaker, of Quaker queries.

Diaries

Tomorrow I’ll do another Africa news round up.

“You went to a mosque without your head covered?” B was incredulous. “What about cultural sensitivity?”

“It’s not a requirement,” said D, who had also been inside a mosque with uncovered head.

In fact, the lack of head covering had been an oversight. I made sure to dress in modest Western style when heading to work Friday morning, since I knew I’d be taking my lunch break at the mosque: long-sleeved shirt that was still cool enough for the hot weather, loose long pants, but I forgot all my scarves at home, and so, on my lunch break, realized that I had two choices. Either I would go wearing the shawl with the great big honking picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe, or I would go unveiled. I decided that nothing was to be gained by the great big honking picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe. I was the only woman unveiled.

The mosque visit had been intended to be a meeting activity. In the absense of any uniformity as to when people were available to go, but with some feedback that people wanted to be there for the Friday sermon, I picked a Friday and let the meeting mailing list know. I thought I had two other yeses besides myself, two maybes, and several people who would have to get a tour at another time. I arrived at the mosque to find myself the only one (illness having, I later found out, intervened).

The woman who was our contact at the mosque gave me a tour before the service. The mosque, in Garden Grove, is the oldest mosque in Orange County, California, thirty years old. It attracts hundreds of people to its regular Friday service, and a smaller number on other days. There is a school on the grounds, and a bookstore which also sells candy to the schoolchildren.

During the service, the women go upstairs, and the men downstairs. Or, rather, this is the placement for the big Friday service; on other days, when there aren’t enough men to take up the entire downstairs area, the men are in one room downstairs and the women in another room. I had wondered, actually, whether all the women would really wear hijab, since I’ve known several Muslim women who in ordinary life don’t. At the mosque, they all do, but with some variation otherwise in attire. If you’re a breast man or a leg man, you’re not getting much of a view: the shape of all breasts was concealed by folds of cloth from the hijab, and everyone’s legs were covered, whether by long dresses, or salweez kamisas, or simply long Western pants. The schoolgirls wear jumpers that remind me of Catholic schoolgirl uniforms, over long pants, and accompanied by a hijab. Some very young girls go uncovered. If you’re more of a hip or butt man, you could be in better luck; while most women’s figures were largely concealed, you could see the occasional pair of tight Western jeans. But then, if you’re a man, you’re downstairs.

The mosque is decorated by calligraphy, in deference to Muslim refusal to use images in a place of worship. Arabic writing shows the names of the prophets and the ninety-nine names of God. The floor is covered by rugs which mark out the spaces where people can worship, close enough that people are nearly shoulder to shoulder. During the service, people sometimes stand, sometimes kneel, or sit, or prostrate themselves. As an obvious visitor, I was encouraged to go to the back, where there were chairs, since I wouldn’t be used to sitting on the floor. A few Muslim women, perhaps ones whose joints would no longer take the floor postures, were also in back.

While the head covering really isn’t required for visitors (but may be a good idea if you want to out of politeness, or to be less conspicuous), removing your shoes is required. This is probably not the day to wear your socks with the gaping hole in the toe. Short-shorts and a tank top would also be a bad idea.

The service goes like this. It begins with announcements, in English. There will be a blood drive. A brother needs bone marrow, please see if you are his type. A sister mosque is doing a fund raising drive for a school. There will be a Malaysian astronaut speaking at the next Muslim council. Then comes a prayer in Arabic. The prayer is chanted, and something in the intonation of the chanting reminded me of some Greek bouzouki music. The sermon begins with a reading of a Hadith, alternating in Arabic and English, and then proceeds to an explanation, in English, of the meaning of the Hadith. We are utterly dependent on God, whose glory has no need of us.

After the service, I browsed further in the bookstore. The bookstore has children’s books, Qurans, books to learn Arabic, and books on all manner of questions from a Muslim perspective. Children can learn about the great iron wall built by some old Muslim ruler, or about the boy who was color-blind, or about how Allah made my eyes, and ears, and nose, and lips, are here are all the wonderful things I can see, hear, smell, and taste.

Of the adult books, I looked at the ones on the role of women. These showed a diversity of opinion. One book warned Muslims in Western countries to avoid learning decadent Western ways. It is important to marry as soon as possible after puberty. Women should not defer marriage for an education, because early marriage is far more important. Next to that book, a book with a title about Islam empowering women spoke in tones not too different from what one might see in a Christian feminist book, saying how Islam should not be understood as restraint of women, and telling the stories of Muslim women who had showed leadership, expanded knowledge, and done other great things. A book on cleanliness contained rather more restrictions related to women’s menstruation than I was comfortable with. A book by a male Western convert balanced multiculturalist warnings against being too hasty to see Muslim women’s roles in other countries as wrong - they could be perfectly acceptable to the women in those cultures - with cautious arguments for interpreting Islam more freely in the West. A book on marriage lamenting the high rate of divorce stood near a book on how to manage a good divorce. There were advice books on marriages, surprisingly mostly directed at telling men how to please their wives (or maybe that was just my selection). And there was a repeated emphasis, in the advice on family life, on respect and care for the aged.

I left with a couple of books and some pamphlets on Islam, all presents from the mosque for our meeting. The mosque has a couple of specific books that they give out to educate people about their faith, along with Qurans; our meeting has already received a Quran as a present from CAIR, but I was told we should feel free to call the mosque if we wanted more Qurans.

Some stuff that’s been nagging me that I’ve been meaning to write, and which now seems to have already been overtaken by events, but I’ll write it anyway.

Last month, Vogue had a cover with LeBron James and Gisele Bundchen which stirred up some controversy. The photo’s framed for masculine/feminine contrast: James in sports gear, with his mouth open, eyebrows drawn together, and teeth bared, and Bundchen in evening dress, awkwardly hanging off his left arm, long hair windblown and a smile on her face. Lots of controversy in the blogosphere and even the mainstream media - is James being posed in a way that makes him appear a scary, savage black man, threatening the beautiful white woman? Some people produced pictures for comparison - an old King Kong poster where King Kong has a similar pose, an even older WWI propaganda poster that has a similarly posed black man. Some people questioned what the big deal was. Some doubted the comparison with King Kong - isn’t Bundchen smiling here, as if this is all fun? And still others accused critics of being racist themselves, because how could you possibly think the media would portray a black man as a savage animal, if not because you yourself are racist and see black men as savage animals?

Look back even further: blogger Amanda Marcotte at one point had a book in production, now just released, and blogged a preview of the book cover. The cover, at that time, showed a big gorilla carrying off a white woman; the book was a feminist humor book. There were horrified reactions and complaints about the way the King Kong movie reflects racist tropes, defensive reactions from Amanda about how people didn’t understand her sense of fun in retro pictures, and, finally, an announcement that the cover was being pulled. The book, titled It’s a Jungle Out There, was released with a different cover, of a woman wrestling a crocodile.

Digression on King Kong - I saw an older version of this movie when I was young, at which age all racial references, good or bad, tended to go over my head (I remember seeing South Pacific at a similar age, and having no clue why Nellie Forbush broke up with Emile - I think I figured she was upset about his kids because she just didn’t like kids). In the remake I saw: big black gorilla, check, scary black natives, check, noble and intelligent black seaman whom I didn’t remember from the original, ah, they’ve taken critiques about race into account and are trying to accomodate them, noble and intelligent black man dies trying to save the white woman, um, no, this doesn’t really do it. It works as a movie if you block out that whole side of it, but I really can’t defend the racial angle here. (Similar recent stuff with the Pirates of the Caribbean series.)

Back to Amanda’s book: a thread at Feministe announcing a promotional event turned heated, referencing yet another dispute in which Amanda was recently involved, which dispute I’ve been studiously trying to avoid blogging, and so I’m not going to backtrack and summarize it now, except to say that Amanda has received criticism related to her handling of a particular racial issue, and that Amanda, in turn, has dismissed the complaints as trumped up, and that this whole debate has been going on in voluminous threads on several blogs, with much posting of comments by Amanda and her critics (but with no comment at all on Amanda’s own blog).

Somewhere in that thread, reference was made to the original book cover, and also to pictures inside the book, which at that point most of us had not seen. And someone remarked that Amanda’s pictures were ever so different from the Vogue cover, not in any way to be compared, because Amanda was trying to subvert the stereotypes she portrayed, while the Vogue cover was just reinforcing said stereotypes.

I looked at that remark, and thought, huh? Wait a second. No. The difference between Amanda’s work and the Vogue cover is that we all know Amanda, and we don’t all know Annie Leibovitz, the photographer who shot the Vogue cover. And so, knowing Amanda, we know - that she loves retro art, and thinks that using it to introduce pieces that mock whatever sexual stereotype the retro art represents is great use of kitsch. That she has invited Pam Spaulding to be a co-blogger, who is black, and that her blog has categories on race, immigration, etc., and just look and see, she’s always been progressive on these issues. Or we know - that she’s been involved in a whole series of disputes with different women of color, and every darn time she has this same defensive reaction, just can’t acknowledge her white privilege, and here she goes again. Or we know - that Hugo’s her friend, that belledame has never liked her, and that anything the one says to support her or the other to criticize her can be discounted. And so on. We know all kinds of things about Amanda’s life - what part of rural Texas she comes from, what songs she now likes to sing in Austin karaoke bars, the normal self-revelatory stuff that you learn about fellow bloggers, that make you think you know who they are.

And, if we knew Annie Leibovitz, don’t you think we’d use that knowledge in responding to criticisms of her? Don’t you think we’d say, oh, of course Annie meant the cover of Vogue ironically, ironic references to old movie posters are just what she’d do, and see how she subverts the savage black man trope by having Gisele Bundchen happy and smiling? Or we’d say, Annie would never have dreamed of thinking of King Kong when making this kind of picture. Or we’d say, no she’s not racist, she has all kinds of black friends, or has dated black men, or whatever. Or, yes, she’s always had a blind spot about race, and this is just another example. But we don’t know Leibovitz, so the photo has to stand for itself. It is what it is, and we judge it racist or not based on the photo, and not what we might infer about her intentions, from some personal knowledge of what sort of person she is. And looking at the Vogue and book covers, by themselves, no, it’s not particularly obvious that the Vogue cover is way more racist than the book cover, or that the book cover is somehow delightfully subversive. But then, Amanda had seen sense, taken criticism, and pulled the original book cover.

This is what I had been thinking. And then, as I was delaying getting around to pulling my thoughts together for a post, someone scanned the pictures that are being used inside Amanda’s book, and all hell is breaking loose. Because it turns out that she didn’t gain much by pulling the cover with the white woman and the black gorilla, given that the pictures inside the book still show a white woman in the jungle facing actual threatening black natives. Holly of Feministe reacts here.

Unrelated stuff: I’m postponing Friday Random Ten till Saturday, but here’s a totally unrelated link that may be of interest to Jean and any other readers who are based in New York City.

Why Women Need to Support Women Artists: Crooked at the Women’s Project.

I’m embarrassed to admit that before last week I had never been to a show at the Women’s Project, a 30-year-old feminist theatre company based in NY dedicated to presenting theatre by and/or about women. But I remedied my significant oversight and I hope all New Yorkers –both men and women — who are interested in challenging theatre will also take the time out to visit the Women’s Project which is presenting Crooked by Catherine Trieschmann and directed by Liz Diamond….