Thursday, January 31, 2013

Video: Hagel faces heat in Thursday?s confirmation hearing

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Source: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/newsnation/50642514/

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3D Robotics Outsources to Mexico - Business Insider

Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired and current 3D printing cheerleader, has an intriguing piece in the New York Times (Mexico: The New China, Jan 27). it deals with his experience running?3D Robotics, a maker of civilian drone aircraft. 3D Robotics competes with firms that are sourcing their production in China and hence they have had to find a way to take on competitors with low labor costs. Their answer? Tijuana, Mexico. 3D is based in San Diego so engineering is done on the north side of the border but assembly is done on the south. Labor costs may higher than in China (but, as the article notes, the gap is closing as Chinese wages rise) but Anderson sees many advantages in his firm?s ?quicksourcing? model that depends as much on speed as cheap hands.

First, a shorter supply chain means that a company can make things when it wants to, instead of solely when it has to. Strange as it may seem, many small manufacturers don?t have that option. When we started 3D, we produced everything in China and needed to order in units of thousands to get good pricing. That meant that we had to write big checks to make big batches of goods ? money we wouldn?t see again until all those products sold, sometimes a year or more later. Now that we carry out our production locally, we?re able to make only what we need that week.

This point obviously depends on owning one?s own facility in Mexico or having a very tight relationship with the Mexican supplier. If a small buyer doesn?t have much negotiating power with a supplier it will still likely face large minimum purchase quantities when buying from Mexico. Still it is an interesting observation and suggests that some start ups may be making ill-advised trade offs between cost savings and flexibility.

Second, there?s less risk. If we make an error in a design, we?ve wasted at most a few days? worth of production. If there?s something wrong in the production process itself, we can spot it fast. We control the component inventory, so we can see what?s going into our goods and know that we?re not being ripped off with used or pirated parts. And if we want to protect our intellectual property, we can do so without having to trust that other companies will uphold our interests above all others. And that?s saying nothing about political risk, environmental risk or P.R. risk, all of which companies like Apple and Walmart have learned about in China the hard way.

These are the factors that in some ways I was expecting when I started reading the article. Indeed, some of these don?t even need any kind of outsourcing story to hold. Greater flexibility in dealing with design changes, for example, is often trumpeted as one of the benefits of lean operations. That is, lots of inventory slows you down and creates problems whether it is sitting on your floor, your supplier?s floor, or the Pacific ocean.

Third, it?s simply faster. We still order some parts from China, and even though we use FedEx, it always seems to take weeks, and sometimes months, longer than we?d planned. That?s not a criticism of China; it?s merely intrinsic to any arm?s-length relationship between small buyers and big makers. If we were Apple, we?d get overnight service. But we?re not, so we wait.

This is much like the first point. Tighter integration ? whether by moving closer to headquarters or doing everything in-house ? allows for your priorities to hold through the whole process.

Finally, a short supply chain is an incentive to innovate. If you?re outsourcing the manufacturing of huge parcels of a product, you can?t change that product until you?ve sold all the ones you?ve already made (at least not if you want to stay in business). So that often means sitting on your hands, waiting for Version 1 to sell out before starting to make Version 2. But when you?re doing just-in-time manufacturing, you can change the product every day if you want ? whether to take advantage of some better or cheaper component or to improve the design.

This is the observation that I find most interesting. Here lack of speed kills. The ability to run with low inventories ? and hence little cash tied up ? means that it is easier to do the next thing. As I said above, there is then the question of how younger firms should approach this tradeoff. A large initial purchase ties up cash and enforces delay even if it can be done at a low cost. Less inventory means less time. Even if each unit costs more, the firm gets that cash back sooner so it can move on to the next project.

NOW READ: Why Pharmaceutical Companies Don't Make Any Money Off Of Flu Shots

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/3d-robotics-outsource-to-mexico-2013-1

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Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Nissan drops Leaf price by 2,500 pounds in the UK

Nissan Leaf to cost 2,500 pounds less in the UK

Just a few weeks after Nissan dropped the price of the Leaf in the US, eco-minded car buyers across the pond will be able to snag theirs for a little less as well. Indeed, the popular Japanese EV is now £23,490 ($37,115), which is £2,500 less than the initial sticker price. As with the stateside version, some of the cost reduction stems from local manufacturing -- Nissan hopes to start churning out the latest Leafs from its Sunderland UK factory in a few months. The company has also introduced a 6.9 percent financing rate, plus a lease option of around £239 ($375) a month to sweeten the pot. If that sounds like an enticing proposition, then check out the press release below for more details.

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Via: Green Autoblog

Source: Nissan UK

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/30/nissan-leaf-uk-price/

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Engineers solve a biological mystery and boost artificial intelligence

Jan. 29, 2013 ? By simulating 25,000 generations of evolution within computers, Cornell University engineering and robotics researchers have discovered why biological networks tend to be organized as modules -- a finding that will lead to a deeper understanding of the evolution of complexity.

The new insight also will help evolve artificial intelligence, so robot brains can acquire the grace and cunning of animals.

From brains to gene regulatory networks, many biological entities are organized into modules -- dense clusters of interconnected parts within a complex network. For decades biologists have wanted to know why humans, bacteria and other organisms evolved in a modular fashion. Like engineers, nature builds things modularly by building and combining distinct parts, but that does not explain how such modularity evolved in the first place. Renowned biologists Richard Dawkins, G?nter P. Wagner, and the late Stephen Jay Gould identified the question of modularity as central to the debate over "the evolution of complexity."

For years, the prevailing assumption was simply that modules evolved because entities that were modular could respond to change more quickly, and therefore had an adaptive advantage over their non-modular competitors. But that may not be enough to explain the origin of the phenomena.

The team discovered that evolution produces modules not because they produce more adaptable designs, but because modular designs have fewer and shorter network connections, which are costly to build and maintain. As it turned out, it was enough to include a "cost of wiring" to make evolution favor modular architectures.

This theory is detailed in "The Evolutionary Origins of Modularity," published January 29 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society by Hod Lipson, Cornell associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering; Jean-Baptiste Mouret, a robotics and computer science professor at Universit? Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris; and by Jeff Clune, a former visiting scientist at Cornell and currently an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Wyoming.

To test the theory, the researchers simulated the evolution of networks with and without a cost for network connections.

"Once you add a cost for network connections, modules immediately appear. Without a cost, modules never form. The effect is quite dramatic," says Clune.

The results may help explain the near-universal presence of modularity in biological networks as diverse as neural networks -- such as animal brains -- and vascular networks, gene regulatory networks, protein-protein interaction networks, metabolic networks and even human-constructed networks such as the Internet.

"Being able to evolve modularity will let us create more complex, sophisticated computational brains," says Clune.

Says Lipson: "We've had various attempts to try to crack the modularity question in lots of different ways. This one by far is the simplest and most elegant."

The National Science Foundation and the French National Research Agency funded this research.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Cornell University, via Newswise.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal Reference:

  1. J. Clune, J.-B. Mouret, H. Lipson. The evolutionary origins of modularity. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2013; 280 (1755): 20122863 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2012.2863

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/2snU8NFxquE/130130082300.htm

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Fossilized conduits suggest water flowed beneath Martian surface

Jan. 29, 2013 ? Ridges in impact craters on Mars appear to be fossils of cracks in the Martian surface, formed by minerals deposited by flowing water. Water flowing beneath the surface suggests life may once have been possible on Mars.

Networks of narrow ridges found in impact craters on Mars appear to be the fossilized remnants of underground cracks through which water once flowed, according to a new analysis by researchers from Brown University.

The study, in press in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, bolsters the idea that the subsurface environment on Mars once had an active hydrology and could be a good place to search for evidence of past life. The research was conducted by Lee Saper, a recent Brown graduate, with Jack Mustard, professor of geological sciences.

The ridges, many of them hundreds of meters in length and a few meters wide, had been noted in previous research, but how they had formed was not known. Saper and Mustard thought they might once have been faults and fractures that formed underground when impact events rattled the planet's crust. Water, if present in the subsurface, would have circulated through the cracks, slowly filling them in with mineral deposits, which would have been harder than the surrounding rocks. As those surrounding rocks eroded away over millions of years, the seams of mineral-hardened material would remain in place, forming the ridges seen today.

To test their hypothesis, Saper and Mustard mapped over 4,000 ridges in two crater-pocked regions on Mars, Nili Fossae and Nilosyrtis. Using high-resolution images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the researchers noted the orientations of the ridges and composition of the surrounding rocks.

The orientation data is consistent with the idea that the ridges started out as fractures formed by impact events. A competing hypothesis suggests that these structures may have been sheets of volcanic magma intruding into the surrounding rock, but that doesn't appear to be the case. At Nili Fossae, the orientations are similar to the alignments of large faults related to a mega-scale impact. At Nilosyrtis, where the impact events were smaller in scale, the ridge orientations are associated with each of the small craters in which they were found. "This suggests that fracture formation resulted from the energy of localized impact events and are not associated with regional-scale volcanism," Saper said.

Importantly, Saper and Mustard also found that the ridges exist exclusively in areas where the surrounding rock is rich in iron-magnesium clay, a mineral considered to be a telltale sign that water had once been present in the rocks.

"The association with these hydrated materials suggests there was a water source available," Saper said. "That water would have flowed along the path of least resistance, which in this case would have been these fracture conduits."

As that water flowed, dissolved minerals would have been slowly deposited in the conduits, in much the same way mineral deposits can build up and eventually clog drain pipes. That mineralized material would have been more resistant to erosion than the surrounding rock. And indeed, Saper and Mustard found that these ridges were only found in areas that were heavily eroded, consistent with the notion that these are ancient structures revealed as the weaker surrounding rocks were slowly peeled away by wind.

Taken together, the results suggest the ancient Martian subsurface had flowing water and may have been a habitable environment.

"This gives us a point of observation to say there was enough fracturing and fluid flow in the crust to sustain at least a regionally viable subsurface hydrology," Saper said. "The overarching theme of NASA's planetary exploration has been to follow the water. So if in fact these fractures that turned into these ridges were flowing with hydrothermal fluid, they could have been a viable biosphere."

Saper hopes that the Curiosity rover, currently making its way across its Gale Crater landing site, might be able to shed more light on these types of structures.

"In the site at Gale Crater, there are thought to be mineralized fractures that the rover will go up and touch," Saper said. "These are very small and may not be exactly the same kind of feature we studied, but we'll have the opportunity to crush them up and do chemical analysis on them. That could either bolster our hypothesis or tell us we need to explore other possibilities."

The research was supported by a grant from NASA's Rhode Island Space Grant Consortium and through a NASA subcontract with the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Brown University.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal Reference:

  1. Lee Saper, John F. Mustard. Extensive linear ridge networks in Nili Fossae and Nilosyrtis, Mars: Implications for fluid flow in the ancient crust. Geophysical Research Letters, 2013 DOI: 10.1002/grl.50106

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/S8LpqS3XZBI/130129121941.htm

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Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Chastened Congress takes on immigration, seeks Rubio's mojo

WASHINGTON (AP) ? A bipartisan group of leading senators has reached agreement on the principles for a sweeping overhaul of the nation's immigration laws, including a path to citizenship for the 11 million illegal immigrants already in this country.

The deal, to be announced at a news conference Monday, also covers border security, non-citizen or "guest" workers and employer verification of immigration status.

Although thorny details remain to be negotiated and success is far from certain ? the legislation could run into trouble in the Republican-controlled House ? the development heralds the start of what could be the most significant effort in years toward overhauling the nation's inefficient patchwork of immigration laws.

President Barack Obama also is committed to enacting comprehensive immigration legislation and will travel to Nevada on Tuesday to lay out his vision, which is expected to overlap in important ways with the Senate effort.

The eight senators expected to endorse the new principles Monday are Democrats Charles Schumer of New York, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Michael Bennet of Colorado; and Republicans John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Marco Rubio of Florida and Jeff Flake of Arizona.

Several of these lawmakers have worked for years on the issue. McCain collaborated with the late Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy on comprehensive immigration legislation pushed by then-President George W. Bush in 2007, only to see it collapse in the Senate when it couldn't get enough GOP support.

Now, with some Republicans chastened by the November elections which demonstrated the importance of Latino voters and their increasing commitment to Democrats, some in the GOP say this time will be different.

"What's changed, honestly, is that there is a new, I think, appreciation on both sides of the aisle ? including maybe more importantly on the Republican side of the aisle ? that we have to enact a comprehensive immigration reform bill," McCain said Sunday on ABC's "This Week."

"I think the time is right," McCain said.

The group claims a notable newcomer in Rubio, a potential 2016 presidential candidate whose conservative bona fides may help smooth the way for support among conservatives wary of anything that smacks of amnesty. In an opinion piece published Sunday in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Rubio wrote that the existing system amounts to "de facto amnesty," and he called for "commonsense reform."

According to documents obtained by The Associated Press, the senators will call for accomplishing four goals:

?Creating a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already here, contingent upon securing the border and better tracking of people here on visas.

?Reforming the legal immigration system, including awarding green cards to immigrants who obtain advanced degrees in science, math, technology or engineering from an American university.

?Creating an effective employment verification system to ensure that employers do not hire illegal immigrants.

?Allowing more low-skill workers into the country and allowing employers to hire immigrants if they can demonstrate they couldn't recruit a U.S. citizen; and establishing an agricultural worker program.

The principles being released Monday are outlined on just over four pages, leaving plenty of details left to fill in. What the senators do call for is similar to Obama's goals and some past efforts by Democrats and Republicans, since there's wide agreement in identifying problems with the current immigration system. The most difficult disagreement is likely to arise over how to accomplish the path to citizenship.

In order to satisfy the concerns of Rubio and other Republicans, the senators are calling for the completion of steps on border security and oversight of those here on visas before taking major steps forward on the path to citizenship.

Even then, those here illegally would have to qualify for a "probationary legal status" that would allow them to live and work here ? but not qualify for federal benefits ? before being able to apply for permanent residency. Once they are allowed to apply they would do so behind everyone else already in line for a green card within the current immigration system.

That could be a highly cumbersome process, but how to make it more workable is being left to future negotiations. The senators envision a more streamlined process toward citizenship for immigrants brought here as children by their parents, and for agricultural workers.

The American Civil Liberties Union said in a statement that the framework agreed on by the senators could provide important protections for illegal immigrants who are exploited by employers and live in "constant fear" over their immigration status.

But the ACLU took issue with the proposal to require employers to use an electronic employment-verification system, calling it "a thinly disguised national ID requirement" that would undermine employees' privacy and lead to discrimination against those "who look or sound 'foreign.'"

Such legislation could also face long odds in the House, which is dominated by conservative Republicans and which has shown little interest in immigration reform.

The debate will play out at the start of Obama's second term, as he aims to spend the political capital afforded him by his re-election victory on an issue that has eluded past presidents and stymied him during his first term despite his promises to the Latino community to act.

"As the president has made clear for some time, immigration reform is an important priority and he is pleased that progress is being made with bipartisan support," a White House spokesman, Clark Stevens, said in a statement. "At the same time, he will not be satisfied until there is meaningful reform and he will continue to urge Congress to act until that is achieved."

For Republicans, the November elections were a stark schooling on the importance of Latino voters, who voted for Obama over Republican Mitt Romney 71 percent to 27 percent, helping ensure Obama's victory. That led some Republican leaders to conclude that supporting immigration reform with a path to citizenship has become a political imperative.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/senators-reach-agreement-immigration-reform-085239296--politics.html

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Hate Crimes: A Rape Every Minute, a Thousand Corpses Every Y ...


Kit B. (308)
Sunday January 27, 2013, 9:15 am
(Image Credit: bling cheese)

Here in the United States, where there is a reported rape every 6.2 minutes, and one in five women will be raped in her lifetime, the rape and gruesome murder of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi on December 16th was treated as an exceptional incident. The story of the alleged rape of an unconscious teenager by members of the Steubenville High School football team was still unfolding, and gang rapes aren?t that unusual here either. Take your pick: some of the 20 men who gang-raped an 11-year-old in Cleveland, Texas, were sentenced in November, while the instigator of the gang rape of a 16-year-old in Richmond, California, was sentenced in October, and four men who gang-raped a 15-year-old near New Orleans were sentenced in April, though the six men who gang-raped a 14-year-old in Chicago last fall are still at large. Not that I actually went out looking for incidents: they?re everywhere in the news, though no one adds them up and indicates that there might actually be a pattern.

There is, however, a pattern of violence against women that?s broad and deep and horrific and incessantly overlooked. Occasionally, a case involving a celebrity or lurid details in a particular case get a lot of attention in the media, but such cases are treated as anomalies, while the abundance of incidental news items about violence against women in this country, in other countries, on every continent including Antarctica, constitute a kind of background wallpaper for the news.

If you?d rather talk about bus rapes than gang rapes, there?s the rape of a developmentally disabled woman on a Los Angeles bus in November and the kidnapping of an autistic 16-year-old on the regional transit train system in Oakland, California -- she was raped repeatedly by her abductor over two days this winter -- and there was a gang rape of multiple women on a bus in Mexico City recently, too. While I was writing this, I read that another female bus-rider was kidnapped in India and gang-raped all night by the bus driver and five of his friends who must have thought what happened in New Delhi was awesome.

We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it?s almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn?t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.

Here I want to say one thing: though virtually all the perpetrators of such crimes are men, that doesn?t mean all men are violent. Most are not. In addition, men obviously also suffer violence, largely at the hands of other men, and every violent death, every assault is terrible. But the subject here is the pandemic of violence by men against women, both intimate violence and stranger violence.

What We Don?t Talk About When We Don?t Talk About Gender

There?s so much of it. We could talk about the assault and rape of a 73-year-old in Manhattan?s Central Park last September, or the recent rape of a four-year-old and an 83-year-old in Louisiana, or the New York City policeman who was arrested in October for what appeared to be serious plans to kidnap, rape, cook, and eat a woman, any woman, because the hate wasn?t personal (though maybe it was for the San Diego man who actually killed and cooked his wife in November and the man from New Orleans who killed, dismembered, and cooked his girlfriend in 2005).

Those are all exceptional crimes, but we could also talk about quotidian assaults, because though a rape is reported only every 6.2 minutes in this country, the estimated total is perhaps five times as high. Which means that there may be very nearly a rape a minute in the U.S. It all adds up to tens of millions of rape victims.

We could talk about high-school- and college-athlete rapes, or campus rapes, to which university authorities have been appallingly uninterested in responding in many cases, including that high school in Steubenville, Notre Dame University, Amherst College, and many others. We could talk about the escalating pandemic of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment in the U.S. military, where Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta estimated that there were 19,000 sexual assaults on fellow soldiers in 2010 alone and that the great majority of assailants got away with it, though four-star general Jeffrey Sinclair was indicted in September for ?a slew of sex crimes against women.?

Never mind workplace violence, let?s go home. So many men murder their partners and former partners that we have well over 1,000 homicides of that kind a year -- meaning that every three years the death toll tops 9/11?s casualties, though no one declares a war on this particular terror. (Another way to put it: the more than 11,766 corpses from domestic-violence homicides since 9/11 exceed the number of deaths of victims on that day and all American soldiers killed in the ?war on terror.?) If we talked about crimes like these and why they are so common, we?d have to talk about what kinds of profound change this society, or this nation, or nearly every nation needs. If we talked about it, we?d be talking about masculinity, or male roles, or maybe patriarchy, and we don?t talk much about that.

Instead, we hear that American men commit murder-suicides -- at the rate of about 12 a week -- because the economy is bad, though they also do it when the economy is good; or that those men in India murdered the bus-rider because the poor resent the rich, while other rapes in India are explained by how the rich exploit the poor; and then there are those ever-popular explanations: mental problems and intoxicants -- and for jocks, head injuries. The latest spin is that lead exposure was responsible for a lot of our violence, except that both genders are exposed and one commits most of the violence. The pandemic of violence always gets explained as anything but gender, anything but what would seem to be the broadest explanatory pattern of all.

Someone wrote a piece about how white men seem to be the ones who commit mass murders in the U.S. and the (mostly hostile) commenters only seemed to notice the white part. It?s rare that anyone says what this medical study does, even if in the driest way possible: ?Being male has been identified as a risk factor for violent criminal behavior in several studies, as have exposure to tobacco smoke before birth, having antisocial parents, and belonging to a poor family.?

Still, the pattern is plain as day. We could talk about this as a global problem, looking at the epidemic of assault, harassment, and rape of women in Cairo?s Tahrir Square that has taken away the freedom they celebrated during the Arab Spring -- and led some men there to form defense teams to help counter it -- or the persecution of women in public and private in India from ?Eve-teasing? tobride-burning, or ?honor killings? in South Asia and the Middle East, or the way that South Africa has become a global rape capital, with an estimated600,000 rapes last year, or how rape has been used as a tactic and ?weapon? of war in Mali, Sudan, and the Congo, as it was in the former Yugoslavia, or the pervasiveness of rape and harassment in Mexico and the femicide in Juarez, or the denial of basic rights for women in Saudi Arabia and the myriad sexual assaults on immigrant domestic workers there, or the way that the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case in the United States revealed what impunity he and others had in France, and it?s only for lack of space I?m leaving out Britain and Canada and Italy (with its ex-prime minister known for his orgies with the underaged), Argentina and Australia and so many other countries.

Who Has the Right to Kill You?

But maybe you?re tired of statistics, so let?s just talk about a single incident that happened in my city a couple of weeks ago, one of many local incidents in which men assaulted women that made the local papers this month:

?A woman was stabbed after she rebuffed a man's sexual advances while she walked in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood late Monday night, a police spokesman said today. The 33-year-old victim was walking down the street when a stranger approached her and propositioned her, police spokesman Officer Albie Esparza said. When she rejected him, the man became very upset and slashed the victim in the face and stabbed her in the arm, Esparza said.?

The man, in other words, framed the situation as one in which his chosen victim had no rights and liberties, while he had the right to control and punish her. This should remind us that violence is first of all authoritarian. It begins with this premise: I have the right to control you.

Murder is the extreme version of that authoritarianism, where the murderer asserts he has the right to decide whether you live or die, the ultimate means of controlling someone. This may be true even if you are ?obedient,? because the desire to control comes out of a rage that obedience can?t assuage. Whatever fears, whatever sense of vulnerability may underlie such behavior, it also comes out of entitlement, the entitlement to inflict suffering and even death on other people. It breeds misery in the perpetrator and the victims.

As for that incident in my city, similar things happen all the time. Many versions of it happened to me when I was younger, sometimes involving death threats and often involving torrents of obscenities: a man approaches a woman with both desire and the furious expectation that the desire will likely be rebuffed. The fury and desire come in a package, all twisted together into something that always threatens to turn eros into thanatos, love into death, sometimes literally.

It?s a system of control. It?s why so many intimate-partner murders are of women who dared to break up with those partners. As a result, it imprisons a lot of women, and though you could say that the attacker on January 7th, or a brutal would-be-rapist near my own neighborhood on January 5th, or another rapist here on January 12th, or the San Franciscan who on January 6th set his girlfriend on fire for refusing to do his laundry, or the guy who was just sentenced to 370 years for some particularly violent rapes in San Francisco in late 2011, were marginal characters, rich, famous, and privileged guys do it, too.

The Japanese vice-consul in San Francisco was charged with 12 felony counts of spousal abuse and assault with a deadly weapon last September, the same month that, in the same town, the ex-girlfriend of Mason Mayer (brother of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer) testified in court: "He ripped out my earrings, tore my eyelashes off, while spitting in my face and telling me how unlovable I am? I was on the ground in the fetal position, and when I tried to move, he squeezed both knees tighter into my sides to restrain me and slapped me." According to the newspaper, she also testified that ?Mayer slammed her head onto the floor repeatedly and pulled out clumps of her hair, telling her that the only way she was leaving the apartment alive was if he drove her to theGolden Gate Bridge ?where you can jump off or I will push you off.?" Mason Mayer got probation.

This summer, an estranged husband violated his wife?s restraining order against him, shooting her -- and six other women -- at her spa job in suburban Milwaukee, but since there were only four corpses the crime was largely overlooked in the media in a year with so many more spectacular mass murders in this country (and we still haven?t really talked about the fact that, of 62 mass shootings in the U.S. in three decades, only one was by a woman, because when you say lone gunman, everyone talks about loners and guns but not about men -- and by the way, nearly two thirds of all women killed by guns are killed by their partner or ex-partner).

What?s love got to do with it, asked Tina Turner, whose ex-husband Ike once said, ?Yeah I hit her, but I didn't hit her more than the average guy beats his wife.? A woman is beaten every nine seconds in this country. Just to be clear: not nine minutes, but nine seconds. It?s the number-one cause of injury to American women; of the two million injured annually, more than half a millionof those injuries require medical attention while about 145,000 require overnight hospitalizations, according to the Center for Disease Control, and you don?t want to know about the dentistry needed afterwards. Spouses are also the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the U.S.

?Women worldwide ages 15 through 44 are more likely to die or be maimed because of male violence than because of cancer, malaria, war and traffic accidents combined,? writes Nicholas D. Kristof, one of the few prominent figures to address the issue regularly.

The Chasm Between Our Worlds

Rape and other acts of violence, up to and including murder, as well as threats of violence, constitute the barrage some men lay down as they attempt to control some women, and fear of that violence limits most women in ways they?ve gotten so used to they hardly notice -- and we hardly address. There are exceptions: last summer someone wrote to me to describe a college class in which the students were asked what they do to stay safe from rape. The young women described the intricate ways they stayed alert, limited their access to the world, took precautions, and essentially thought about rape all the time (while the young men in the class, he added, gaped in astonishment). The chasm between their worlds had briefly and suddenly become visible.

Mostly, however, we don?t talk about it -- though a graphic has been circulating on the Internet called Ten Top Tips to End Rape, the kind of thing young women get often enough, but this one had a subversive twist. It offered advice like this: ?Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might assault someone ?by accident? you can hand it to the person you are with, so they can call for help.? While funny, the piece points out something terrible: the usual guidelines in such situations put the full burden of prevention on potential victims, treating the violence as a given. You explain to me why colleges spend more time telling women how to survive predators than telling the other half of their students not to be predators.

Threats of sexual assault now seem to take place online regularly. In late 2011, British columnist Laurie Penny wrote, ?An opinion, it seems, is the short skirt of the Internet. Having one and flaunting it is somehow asking an amorphous mass of almost-entirely male keyboard-bashers to tell you how they'd like to rape, kill, and urinate on you. This week, after a particularly ugly slew of threats, I decided to make just a few of those messages public on Twitter, and the response I received was overwhelming. Many could not believe the hate I received, and many more began to share their own stories of harassment, intimidation, and abuse.?

Women in the online gaming community have been harassed, threatened, and driven out. Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist media critic who documented such incidents, received support for her work, but also, in the words of a journalist, ?another wave of really aggressive, you know, violent personal threats, her accounts attempted to be hacked. And one man in Ontario took the step of making an online video game where you could punch Anita's image on the screen. And if you punched it multiple times, bruises and cuts would appear on her image.? The difference between these online gamers and the Taliban men who, last October, tried to murder 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai for speaking out about the right of Pakistani women to education is one of degree. Both are trying to silence and punish women for claiming voice, power, and the right to participate. Welcome to Manistan.

The Party for the Protection of the Rights of Rapists

It?s not just public, or private, or online either. It?s also embedded in our political system, and our legal system, which before feminists fought for us didn?t recognize most domestic violence, or sexual harassment and stalking, or date rape, or acquaintance rape, or marital rape, and in cases of rape still often tries the victim rather than the rapist, as though only perfect maidens could be assaulted -- or believed.

As we learned in the 2012 election campaign, it?s also embedded in the minds and mouths of our politicians. Remember that spate of crazy pro-rape thingsRepublican men said last summer and fall, starting with Todd Akin's notorious claim that a woman has ways of preventing pregnancy in cases of rape, a statement he made in order to deny women control over their own bodies. After that, of course, Senate candidate Richard Mourdock claimed that rape pregnancies were ?a gift from God,? and just this month, another Republican politician piped up to defend Akin?s comment.

Happily the five publicly pro-rape Republicans in the 2012 campaign all losttheir election bids. (Stephen Colbert tried to warn them that women had gotten the vote in 1920.) But it?s not just a matter of the garbage they say (and the price they now pay). Earlier this month, congressional Republicans refused to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, because they objected to the protection it gave immigrants, transgendered women, and Native American women. (Speaking of epidemics, one of three Native American women will be raped, and on the reservations 88% of those rapes are by non-Native men who know tribal governments can?t prosecute them.)

And they?re out to gut reproductive rights -- birth control as well as abortion, as they?ve pretty effectively done in many states over the last dozen years. What?s meant by ?reproductive rights,? of course, is the right of women to control their own bodies. Didn?t I mention earlier that violence against women is a control issue?

And though rapes are often investigated lackadaisically -- there is a backlog of about 400,000 untested rape kits in this country-- rapists who impregnate their victims have parental rights in 31 states. Oh, and former vice-presidential candidate and current congressman Paul Ryan (R-Manistan) is reintroducing a bill that would give states the right to ban abortions and might even conceivably allow a rapist to sue his victim for having one.

All the Things That Aren?t to Blame

Of course, women are capable of all sorts of major unpleasantness, and there are violent crimes by women, but the so-called war of the sexes is extraordinarily lopsided when it comes to actual violence. Unlike the last (male) head of the International Monetary Fund, the current (female) head is not going to assault an employee at a luxury hotel; top-ranking female officers in the U.S. military, unlike their male counterparts, are not accused of any sexual assaults; and young female athletes, unlike those male football players in Steubenville, aren?t likely to urinate on unconscious boys, let alone violate them and boast about it in YouTube videos and Twitter feeds.

No female bus riders in India have ganged up to sexually assault a man so badly he dies of his injuries, nor are marauding packs of women terrorizing men in Cairo?s Tahrir Square, and there?s just no maternal equivalent to the11% of rapes that are by fathers or stepfathers. Of the people in prison in the U.S., 93.5% are not women, and though quite a lot of them should not be there in the first place, maybe some of them should because of violence, until we think of a better way to deal with it, and them.

No major female pop star has blown the head off a young man she took home with her, as did Phil Spector. (He is now part of that 93.5% for the shotgun slaying of Lana Clarkson, apparently for refusing his advances.) No female action-movie star has been charged with domestic violence, because Angelina Jolie just isn?t doing what Mel Gibson and Steve McQueen did, and there aren?t any celebrated female movie directors who gave a 13-year-old drugs before sexually assaulting that child, while she kept saying ?no,? as did Roman Polanski.

In Memory of Jyoti Singh Pandey

What?s the matter with manhood? There?s something about how masculinity is imagined, about what?s praised and encouraged, about the way violence is passed on to boys that needs to be addressed. There are lovely and wonderful men out there, and one of the things that?s encouraging in this round of the war against women is how many men I?ve seen who get it, who think it?s their issue too, who stand up for us and with us in everyday life, online and in the marches from New Delhi to San Francisco this winter.

Increasingly men are becoming good allies -- and there always have been some. Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy. Domestic violence statistics are down significantly from earlier decades (even though they?re still shockingly high), and a lot of men are at work crafting new ideas and ideals about masculinity and power.

Gay men have been good allies of mine for almost four decades. (Apparently same-sex marriage horrifies conservatives because it?s marriage between equals with no inevitable roles.) Women?s liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as though in some dismal zero-sum game, only one gender at a time could be free and powerful. But we are free together or slaves together.

There are other things I?d rather write about, but this affects everything else. The lives of half of humanity are still dogged by, drained by, and sometimes ended by this pervasive variety of violence. Think of how much more time and energy we would have to focus on other things that matter if we weren?t so busy surviving. Look at it this way: one of the best journalists I know is afraid to walk home at night in our neighborhood. Should she stop working late? How many women have had to stop doing their work, or been stopped from doing it, for similar reasons?

One of the most exciting new political movements on Earth is the Native Canadian indigenous rights movement, with feminist and environmental overtones, called Idle No More. On December 27th, shortly after the movement took off, a Native woman was kidnapped, raped, beaten, and left for dead in Thunder Bay, Ontario, by men whose remarks framed the crime as retaliation against Idle No More. Afterward, she walked four hours through the bitter cold and survived to tell her tale. Her assailants, who have threatened to do it again, are still at large.

The New Delhi rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey, the 23-year-old who was studying physiotherapy so that she could better herself while helping others, and the assault on her male companion (who survived) seem to have triggered the reaction that we have needed for 100, or 1,000, or 5,000 years. May she be to women -- and men -- worldwide what Emmett Till, murdered by white supremacists in 1955, was to African-Americans and the then-nascent U.S. civil rights movement.

We have far more than 87,000 rapes in this country every year, but each of them is invariably portrayed as an isolated incident. We have dots so close they?re splatters melting into a stain, but hardly anyone connects them, or names that stain. In India they did. They said that this is a civil rights issue, it?s a human rights issue, it?s everyone?s problem, it?s not isolated, and it?s never going to be acceptable again. It has to change. It?s your job to change it, and mine, and ours.
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By: Rebecca Solnit | alternet |

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