At the Sunlight Café..

... you can talk about whatever you want.

"Is Your Washroom Breeding Bolsheviks?"

From a great collection of anti-Communist posters and ads, some of which are far better graphically. I picked this one out to display here because it's an interesting mix of rational argument and emotional appeal... by a commercial advertiser.

"I have plenty of reservations about everything Obama’s doing now – I’m not so into domestic drones, I’m not so into spying."

Said the artist Shepard Fairey, whose advertisement for "HOPE" conned the world.

I did a Google images search on "hope" and Fairey's poster did not come up first. This did. It didn't even come up second. This bullshit did. It didn't even come up third. This treacle did. This dumb thing was fourth. And this insipidity came up fifth. Some lady's hands offering us "hope" written on a piece of paper is sixth. 7-13 are also not Fairey's Obama poster. 14 is a parody of the Obama poster:



I had to go all the way to the 18th hit to get to the Obama poster:



And here's the Wikipedia article on "Hope."

Hope is the state which promotes the desire of positive outcomes related to events and circumstances in one's life or in the world at large....

What a bad idea for a political slogan. Obviously... now.

Obama's name comes up near the top of this article, right next to this diagram:



We're told of some book that examines "Dealers in Hope," including Obama (and Moses) and says that a leader can "Lead Change and Shape Culture" "by creating a hopescape and harnessing the hope system," and if you look again at the diagram, you'll see the "hope diamond" to be made from that lump of coal labeled "adversity." Just get some voice and promises vectors going into your imagination machine.

Ryan O’Neal, fighting for an Andy Warhol painting that Farrah Fawcett left to the University of Texas...

... submits to a deposition and has to admit that Farrah caught him in bed with another woman in the bedroom the couple shared, which explains her motivation to give the painting to Texas. But, he says, she did not take the painting when she left — because wouldn't grab ya painting worth millions if you were running out in a rage — as you might rip your treasured Farrah Fawcett poster of the wall — if it was yours? Answer: No. Moving an expensive painting is a big deal.

And in fact, a year later, the painting was moved to Fawcett's place. How does O'Neal explain that? He says it was sent away "for safe keeping because his new girlfriend did not like having the image of Farrah on the wall 'staring down at her' all the time."

If you're already out of sympathy with O'Neal, check out the photo at the link of him leaning toward a torso mannequin wearing what appears to be Farrah's iconic orange bathing suit, while, in the background the dead actress smiles in her eternally popular poster. The less-famous image of Farrah is this:



That's the Warhol that was hanging over the couple's bed. Imagine cheating on her under that. Imagine having sex with the man who got off having sex with you under that picture of her.

The picture, which Farrah left to her old school, had been missing but was found because O'Neal did a reality show in 2011, in which it could be seen hanging on the wall. At the time O'Neal murmured about how Farrah "permeated my mind and my being" and "still does" and "The things that are nice in my house are the things that she got me."

"[T]he old posters touted Communist values, the new ones largely replace them with pre-Communist Chinese traditions..."

"... drawing on traditional folk art like paper cutouts, woodblock prints, and clay figurines to illustrate their message."

This is a redefinition of the state’s vision from a Marxist utopia to a Confucian, family-centric nation, defined by a quiet life of respecting the elderly and saving for the future....

Almost all the art used in the posters, with its depictions of traditional dress and poses, used to be derided by the Party as belonging to China’s backward, pre-Communist past; now, these aesthetic traditions are a bulwark used to legitimize the Party as a guardian and creator of the country’s hopes and aspirations.

You can see all the "China Dream" posters here, and there are plenty of examples at the first link, with translated slogans, stuff like: "Ah China/My dream/A truly fragrant dream," "Young people are strong; China is strong," "The China Dream is ahead/What do you see?/I see my dream!," and "Honesty and consideration handed down generation by generation; poems and books (or alternately The Book of Poems and The Book of History) last forever."

Mostly, there's no mention of Communism, but one — which you can see here — says "Communists on the road to fulfilling the dream," and it has a poem that's translated as:

Feet shackled, hands cuffed
sturdy grass withstands strong winds
the Communist Party members on the road
the mountains can shake, their will is unshakeable
hot blood and spring flowers will write today's history.

"Stop telling WOMEN to smile."

"WOMEN do not owe you their time or conversation."

"Lean In, Dad/How Shared Diaper Duty Could Stimulate the Economy."

A NYT Magazine item — worth clicking through for the illustration alone, which is a graphically excellent riff on Rosie the Riveter.

What's the economic theory purveyed in the NYT?

New research suggests that, because it’s primarily women who take advantage of leave and part-time entitlements, work-life accommodations often paradoxically limit career trajectories. 

Ha. This is precisely the point made by critics of the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Clinton Era legislation that was sold as an advancement for women. Senator Nancy Kassenbaum (R — Kansas) said: "Mandating leave will have a negative impact on [employment] opportunities for women... . Employers... will seek to hire workers with lower benefit costs, increasing the pressure to discriminate against women." (139 Cong. Rec. S985 (1993).)

The NYT wheels out a Harvard economist to make the point Kassenbaum made 20 years ago.

“In a regime where anyone can go part time, where it’s hard to get rid of people if they do, employers might sort on the front end and not hire people they think are likely to want to go part time, which usually means women,” said Lawrence F. Katz, an economist at Harvard. “There may be no way a woman can credibly commit to sticking around and not going part time.” The U.S., where these policies do not exist, has the smallest gap between women’s representation in the labor force and their representation in senior management positions.

Except that we do have the Family and Medical Leave Act, and it's hard to imagine getting rid of it. Once a benefit is in place, there are real-live beneficiaries who are going to yell if you try to take it away. Even if it's hurting women, threatening it will be called a war on women.

So what's the solution?

In order to prescribe policies that really allow female workers to “lean in” at work, social scientists are trying to find ones that recast social norms and encourage male workers to “lean in” at home. 

Just change how people think! That should be easy... in the fever dreams of a social scientist.

One area where there seems to be a lot of potential is paternity leave, which still has a stigma in both the United States and Europe. To remedy this bad rap, countries like Sweden and Norway have recently introduced a quota of paid parental leave available only to fathers. 

So! The prescription is outright sex discrimination! Affirmative action for men!

This might not sound like such a big deal...

Uh, yeah, actually it does. It's blatant sex discrimination against women, to be sold as helping women.

... but social scientists are coming around to the notion that a man spending a few weeks at home with his newborn can help recast expectations and gender roles, at work and home, for a long time. 

Oh, the good old social scientists... coming around... Not even a consensus. Just long-headed brooders maundering toward an idea that just might work. Absurd!