Winnie Cooper grew up, got hot, and more importantly, got even smarter. She has a new book out called Math Doesn’t Suck, aimed at young teenage girls who struggle with the subject and are constantly exposed to ditzy celebutantes.

       "When girls see the antics of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, they think that 
       being fun and glamorous also means being dumb and irresponsible," the 32-
       year-old McKellar told Newsweek for editions to hit newsstands Monday.  
       "But I want to show them that being smart is cool," she said. "Being good 
       at math is cool. And not only that, it can help them get what they want out
       of life."
 
I’m not the age demographic the book is aimed at, and unfortunately, incurably, I do suck at math. But I never tire of watching a great woman leave her mark on the world. I watched Kate Winslet and Jennifer Lopez make curves okay. I hope McKellar will be the first of many women to make intelligence fashionable. Hopefully someday, that’s the world my daughter will live in.  

Jennifer Leblanc

From Yahoo! News: "Texas leads U.S. in teen birth rate." When questioned about the state’s abstinence-based teachings versus comprehensive education, State Board of Education President Don McLeroy had this piece of wisdom: "The idea that just giving them a lot of information is going to solve it, I think, is kind of naive." Granted, informing hormonally-driven teenagers about condoms and such will not stop teen sex or pregnancy. But isn’t it more naive to tell these teenagers to not have sex at all, refusing to tell them even the basics about safe sex, knowing that teenagers have engaged in pre-marital sex since the beginning of mankind, and always will? 

Jennifer Leblanc

NBC’s successful (if criticized) Dateline series, To Catch a Predator, has helped officials in many states catch pedophiles. A volunteer poses as a child, pre-teen, or teenager online and then makes arrangements in chat rooms to meet with pedophiles, who are greeted at the door by NBC’s cameras. Many are prosecuted, as they should be. But a recent taping in Texas did not go as planned. An assistant prosecutor arrived with the intention of having sex with (raping, actually) a 13-year-old boy. After being exposed, he ran to his car and shot himself in the head before he could be arrested. Because of this, Texas law officials are refusing to prosecute any of the other men who showed up at the house. They’re even blaming NBC for the death of a wealthy, well-connected good ole boy.

In response to the incident, a Murphy, Texas, resident had this to say: "[NBC] can chase predators all they want, but they shouldn’t do it in a populated area with children…" Excuse me, ma’am, but isn’t that exactly where they should do it?

It gets better. The sister of the dead pedophile is suing NBC for the death of her brother. She wants $100 millon dollars, and her lawyer says, "NBC is responsible for his death."

Personally, if I found out my brother was a pedophile who cowardly shot himself rather than face the consequences (you know, the kind of consequences pedophiles face in prison), I’d have him tossed in unconsecrated ground and change my name. But then again, I’m not from Texas.

Jennifer Leblanc

If you’ve never heard of the UNFPA, or were unaware that the president had cut off the annual 34 million dollars in funding to their organization, let me give you the run-down: this branch of the UN didn’t like China’s forced abortion policy, so they went to the Chinese government and said, "We have an idea — contraception." So they began in eight provinces, then 10, and so on, and it was a complete success — no more pregnancies or forced abortions, and everyone was happy.

Then a handful of lunatics from Virginia, calling themselves PRI (Population Research Institute), got wind of this. As Christians against birth control, they believe that population control is not a problem for the planet, and that all six billion of us can be sustained on the resources from an area the size of Texas. So that means they’re smart. Anywho, they sent a paralegal to China to investigate. She went out to provinces that were not yet part of the UNFPA program and listened to illiterate peasant women talk about ongoing forced abortion. Then she visited a government health office, saw an empty desk that a worker said belonged to the UNFPA, and somehow in her little Christian-fanatic mind, came the conclusion that the UNFPA program was encouraging abortions, forced or not. She took her delusions home to her partners (the company has never had more than six employees), who turned to Rep. Christopher Smith (R-New Jersey), who was equally outraged. He turned to the president.

Our government sent dozens of investigators to China. Other countries sent hundreds of investigators, altogether, to China. Not one found any evidence that the UNFPA had anything to do with abortions, only family planning and contraception. But with this administration and the right-wing Christians, who needs evidence or facts? Those pesky things are just obstacles to certain people stamping their feet and getting what they want — which is usually more women dead for having sex. So yadda yadda, the Bush cut off funding. Other countries laughed at us, shook their heads, searched their minds for how on Earth the leader of the free world could take the unhinged word of a very few over the professional opinion of many legitimates. Also, the childish few got their way, and women and children all over the world suffered and died unneccessarily. This was back in 2002, and it was certainly a sign of times to come in all things international.

This denial of funding backfired. Other countries stepped up with more aid to the UNFPA. Two American women decided to start the 34 Million Friends Campaign to convince 34 million people to give a dollar and make the world a better place. They raised twice that amount in the first year alone.

Now it’s time for Bush to right a wrong and resume funding. Americans for UNFPA has started a petition calling for such an action. So, go, don’t just sit there — sign it! via Feministing.

For more about the USA’s unfortunate involvement with PRI, read Cristina Page’s How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America.

Jennifer Leblanc

Would you take a moment to sign a petition to save Internet radio and save my sanity in the process?

As you may or may not know, there is no jazz station where I live in Rhode Island. There is a jazz station in Worcester, Mass., to which I "listen live" online when I am trying to write, need to relax, reading, what have you. It keeps me calm, which means I’m a nicer person, I’m more polite to strangers, willing to break for animals, and my positive jazz vibes make the world a better place.

But…politicians have decided to cash in on Internet radio. They want to double the rates these stations pay and make it retroactive, costing almost 200 million dollars. This does not just affect my local jazz station, this affects every station, including any you might stream at work or home while trying to retain your own sanity. But with a 200-million-dollar bill, these stations cannot continue broadcasting, and we don’t get to listen to our music online. I don’t get to listen to jazz. Which means I don’t write, or relax, or break for animals!

So save the music and the sanity. Sign the petition, and get a nice banner for your site.

Jennifer Leblanc

Let me begin by saying, I cannot stress enough the importance of a liberal arts education. I would like to thank my professors for teaching me the importance of two crucial things: reading comprehension and backing up your statement, however small, with evidence from a legitimate source. With these elements, you will succeed in digesting the information that surrounds us 24/7, making an informed opinion, and, if you should be so lucky after college as to land a job blogging for free, being armed with cold, hard facts instead of spouting off whatever you please.

Now that I’ve expressed my gratitude, I will show you how to use these two elements. First, reading comprehension. Arguably the most important thing to learn to do after reading and arithmetic. Without this, you cannot understand anything from recipe instructions to boiling down political spin or grasping foreign policy. It’s a lovely skill — the anti-feminists simply must try it! I’m assuming they have not; otherwise, they would not have connected a pitiful rant from a man who cannot get laid to their opinion that feminism and equality have wronged women, and more importantly, men. 

Amanda at Pandagon wrote a great post about this, which is how I came upon all of this. The pitiful man, voodoojock, just seems to have had bad luck with "ladies" who, by his account, seem like selfish snobs, airheads, and drama queens. They also seem like women who just plain weren’t interested in him. "How dare they?" he asked. It must be the fault of feminism. He never mentions the F-word and cannot connect the lack of chemistry or romantic success to any particular woman’s political or social beliefs. Yet his piece has been hijacked by an anti-feminist blogger named KellyMac and labeled, "Ladies, Wonder Why You Can’t Get Men to ‘Talk To You?’" She read this and somehow came to the conclusion that there’s something wrong with women. Specifically, women who believe in, or have been brainwashed by, feminism and equality.

But KellyMac using this piece as an argument against feminism makes as much sense as using a birthday cake recipe to show that the war in Iraq has been a mistake. You don’t need a liberal arts education (or even a middle-school education) to see that one man not getting any in a bar does not equal feminism harming anyone.

Just as the fight to ban birth control and abortion is less about the health of women or children than about giving the government and the church control over the sex lives of others, anti-feminism is not about how or if either gender has been harmed by an ideology. When a person (or gender, in this case) cannot face his or her weaknesses or faults, he or she turns the blame on someone else. If a man goes home alone, it must be the woman’s fault. So, please, Ms. KellyMac — please tell me one more thing that females have done wrong in life (i.e., not wanting brief or long-term contact with voodoojock), therefore making the world a worse place for men to live. It’s been a whole day since I’ve read a finger-wagging article addressed to my gender. 

If only it stopped there.

Further down the webpage, you’ll find a post entitled, "Twenty One Indicators of Systemic Discrimination Against Men." (Wait, wait — let me get into self-flogging position.) There are too many sins to list. Besides the outlandishness of each item, I have a major bone to pick with the list creator. After some, and only some, of the items, the name of a source is listed. However, there is no link to any source. Writing "Forbes Magazine" or "Dept. of Health and Human Services" at the end does not satisfy me. For one thing, I don’t have time to go through the Forbes archive to find the single article from which you’ve extracted this information. Either the anti-feminist blogger doesn’t have time either, has chosen to be lazy, or is lying about the source. Second, while still assuming the fact came from Forbes, if a link can be provided, I would like to read it for myself. Oh darn — more reading comprehension for me. Good thing I reaped the rewards of feminism to be the first woman in my family to get a college education and can wade through big words in intimidating publications to see exactly how, and in which context, the information as used.

If I were the weaker sex I’d be tired by now, but I’m just getting started!

Next up — "Dept. of Health and Human Services?" Which state? Federal? What year?

The item about the war casualties of men vs. women is in reference to the Vietnam War, before women were allowed to fight alongside the men as they do in Iraq. If there were fewer women in that particular, or any, war zone, then there were fewer female casualties of that war. Maybe my third crucial element should be logic.

But all of this questioning is moot anyway, as I took the liberty of Googling one of the "sources" and I did find a connection to Forbes. Except, this was not used in a Forbes article or by a Forbes reporter or even approved by Forbes magazine. It was posted by a nobody on a Forbes message board in response to the absurd opinion piece, "Don’t Marry Career Women." The feminist (or just sane) reader who posted a message after this list went through it item by item, with links to legitimate sources, including the Department of Justice.

Eventually I found the origin of this list: the Christian Party and Fathers’ Manifesto. They do include links in their list — links to another page on their website. And on each page that you’re taken to, there is another link that takes you to another page on their website. For instance, one item reads, "…zero percent of American 12th grade girls were able to correctly answer basic math and physics questions…" Zero percent? As in, none? I clicked on four links, only to be led to four pages of their site repeating this fallacy. One can only assume that the Christian Party itself made this up. (If you’re going to fabricate a statistic, at least make it believable.)

So, boys and girls, today’s lesson has been: do not B.S. a feminist armed with an education.

Jennifer Leblanc

First off, I'll admit, I don't have cable. I can list a hundred things off the top my head that are worth the $70 a month more than TV. Usually I have no problem waiting for the DVD release, and I have a slight YouTube addiction — you can watch literally anything on there. But those HBO lawyers pounced like hyperkinetic bunnies on those clips. And to all of you whose videos were not removed in violation of copyright, only for me to see one minute of black screen, you're not funny. However, one video of the ending is still alive (I don't know for how much longer, though).

Now that I've seen it, I can defend it. I already knew from online postings, friends, families, and strangers in public places exactly what happened. Initially, I would've been angry, too. But after three days and finally seeing the end, I think it was perfect. It's not satisfying, we don't get closure, but that's the point.

The constant suspense is fitting — how do you think mafia families live? Between possible prosecution and knowing that business rivals will kill you and yours, the Tonys of the world may not even notice that they look over their shoulders every minute of every day. Also, they don't always end up in prison or dead. Life goes on, families eat, the guy at the counter just needs a new jacket. The only real pain involved watching Meadow destroy her tires.

Naturally, the screen went black. It had to eventually. It was abrupt but, again, fitting. Had we seen the Sopranos toast to something, had the camera pulled away from their table, it would've been just another Hollywood ending. This way, their lives go on; our ability to watch does not.

Jennifer Leblanc

I first read this around midnight last night, so I hoped I was dreaming. In the light of day, I was waiting for some sort of Onion-funded "Candid Camera" to point and laugh at bloggers everywhere for believing this. Sadly, no dream, no OnionCam. Just our tax dollars being all that they can be. Once I saw that even the BBC had reported on the "Gay Bomb," I lost all hope in humanity.

The story: "The plan for a so-called 'love bomb' envisaged an aphrodisiac chemical that would provoke widespread homosexual behaviour among troops, causing what the military called a 'distasteful but completely non-lethal' blow to morale."

How am I supposed to write about this? What am I supposed to say? I can only comment on something so unintentionally comical with real comedy. Only the Brits can supply that.

Lethal blow, people.

Jennifer Leblanc

Jessica Cutler has filed for bankruptcy. This is what happens when your awful, never-should-have-been-published book doesn't sell, you have no other purpose or skill in life other than having sex for money, and the legal fees pile up when a former john sues you for kissing and telling. This made me smile.

Then God, in her infinite wisdom, smiled on my world some more, and put Paris Hilton in jail. This is what happens, ladies, when, again, you serve no purpose on this earth and defy the law. This made me do a happy dance.

My goodness, there's more! Joe Francis is still in jail. And even if he gets out, there's another charge, in another state, waiting for him. In fact, those other charges are why he is hiding in his current cell. He's just not man enough to take it like the intoxicated, unconscious, underage girls in his videos. These may only be tax charges, but if it was enough to keep Capone in jail, it's enough for Francis. This gave me hope.

Alas, God must have gotten distracted by that pesky genocide in the Sudan or something. Dina Lohan has been given her own reality TV show in which she ruins the lives of her other two children in her own selfish search for fame. I guess living vicariously through Li-Lo isn't much fun during her second tour of rehab. So I asked God, why? Why do my fellow humans perpetually harrass anonymous, hard-working, loving mothers everywhere for simply getting a day job, while Di-Lo is rewarded for mothering skills that would make Medea say, "Have you no shame, woman?"  

For this, I thanked God for giving me a mother who saved my life instead of ruined it and for teaching me to respect, not exploit, myself and others.

Jennifer Leblanc

Meet Matthew Jezierski: "[He] started a club in honor of a group he considers to be oppressed and undervalued: the white male. The Caucasian American Men of ASU grabbed attention thanks to the club's name, but Jezierski insisted it wasn't a white pride organization. Jezierski, who is fluent in Polish (he was born in the United States), said he only wanted to promote cultural awareness. He didn't understand why being of European descent is anything to be ashamed of."

Dude?

But that's not the whole story. The whiny-white-boy club is now over, and Jerzierski is too embarrassed to talk about it. Especially because he was someone else's bitch at the time: a younger Ann Coulter named Emily Mitchell. Mitchell was also ruled by a guiding hand, that of the ultra-conservative Leadership Institute, who pays people like Mitchell to recruit virgins, racists, pro-lifers, conservatives, and generally repressed Republicans on college campuses. Thankfully, as swayed as one can be in college, eventually they grow up and get minds of their own. If not, consider this scenario:

"Hi mom, I joined a club for white men only."
"Son, we've stopped the tuition check and changed the will."

Until then, however, Mitchell and her ilk can still find plenty of easily influenced minions. There are still plenty of college boys who have never:
•been stared at or threatened for dating someone of a different race.
•been stared at for walking into an establishment with the gall of being adifferent race.
•been followed by a security guard for shopping while black.
•been pulled over by cops for driving while black.
•been afraid to walk alone at night or had his "no" ignored.
•had ancesters who were chained in ships to be sold or held in death camps to be exterminated.
•experienced or felt a single negative thing in life because of their gender, religion, or skin color (aparently Polish jokes have just rolled right off Jezierski, but maybe that's because he is one all on his own).

Yet these nice boys still buy a load like this from a pretty blond: "It's about balance. The African American men…their name is equally divisive. They're excluding Caucasian men. The Caucasian population is declining by percentages making it a growing minority," Mitchell says. "He [Jezierski] speaks fluent Polish and was offended. There's a separate Latino studies or Chicano studies but nothing for people who are white in color. They don't have anything to represent Slavic or German studies. Why aren't European cultures considered diverse?"

First of all, Heidi, there are European studies programs at colleges and universities (literatrue, history, language, and clubs like the German Devils Deutsch Club, which Jezierski settled for). Outside of that, programs like women's studies and Chicano studies exist not to exclude contemporary white men, but because white men of the past two millenia have excluded them. From everything. And now in the somewhat enlightened 20th and 21st centuries, minorities are telling their side about existing on the same planet, past and present. It's only a problem for the whites like Mitchell who don't like it.

People like Mitchell also need to remember this: America does have a white-men only club — it's called the White House. 

Jennifer Leblanc

Laura Mallory has spent the last couple of years, legal fees, and too many people's time trying to get the Harry Potter series removed from the shelves of the school libraries in Georgia. I don't really have to explain why, do I — witchcraft, children, bad, etc. The local school board shot her down, as did the state board, and now a superior court judge. Next stop — federal court.

Here's the best part — Mallory hasn't even read the books. She says she doesn't have time, what with not working and dropping kids off at school. But she does have time for an obsession with a harmless, fictional children's book that even Christian groups across the country have hailed as teaching good against evil.

"At Tuesday's hearing, Mallory argued in part that witchcraft is a religion practiced by some people and, therefore, the books should be banned because reading them in school violates the constitutional separation of church and state."

Let's start with this — witchcraft is not a religion. More specifically, Wicca and variations are practiced by people, have been recognized as a religion since 1974, and were recently allowed to display their religious symbols on soldiers' graves and remembrance walls. The "witchcraft" of Harry Potter, however, is not real at all. If there is someone out there who can wave a wand, say something in Latin, and suddenly a child sprouts a tail, I'd like to meet that person. Until then, what goes in a Harry Potter book has never and will never be considered a religion.

Next, Mallory argues the books violate the separation of church and state. For argument's sake, fine. But Mallory also says, "I have a dream that God will be welcomed back in our schools again." So, Harry Potter is not welcome due to violating church/state, but Mallory's Christian God should be? And here's what it's obviously about — a Christian stamping her feet about not having control over what other people's children believe (or don't). Georgia residents — pray for your tax dollars.

Jennifer Leblanc

Let me explain. Nothing would make me happier about the future of this country or the world than if Al Gore were to become president. I voted for him in 2000, and I would again in a second. But, as the Time article suggests, a transformation would have to take place. Gore would have to become a politician again. He couldn't be the passionate geek who has earned the respect of the world with what began as a slide show in 1989. He would have advisors, speech writers, analysts, PR people, Naomi friggin' Wolf telling him what colors to wear. He couldn't speak or move freely. He would have stop being Al Gore and start being president. And I like the man who can call our president a drug addict and dilettante without having a crowd of people running to do damage control. I like the unapologetic intellectual who has influence in every country to save our planet.
If Gore were president, he would have to deal with Iraq, and he would fail, at least to a point. It doesn't matter who is elected next, Iraq will damage him or her. At this point, I don't even think God himself could fix it and keep everyone happy. 

If Gore were president, he couldn't focus on global warming. And we need him to focus on that. It's what he does best, and he devotes his entire self to it. No one else, at least no one with the convincing energy and exposure, has or could do that. A president is pulled in every direction by every need — war, health care, poverty, the party, both Houses, the polls, economies, staff, other presidents and prime ministers, allies, and enemies. I have no doubt that Gore could do it, and well. I just think that someone else — Obama, Hilary, Edwards — could also do it well. But no one can do what Al Gore is doing now.
If you disagree, you're not alone, and there are two websites you can visit. DraftGore.com and AlGore.org have petitions to sign to get him to run and much more. If successful in convincing him, you all and Gore have my full support.

Jennifer Leblanc