Driving Some Nails Home

Seriously unpleasant time travel as performed by legislative bodies:

The conservatives are at least partly right: birth control and equal pay (somewhat equal, anyway) were the great victories of first and second wave feminism. They are trying everything in their power to take those things away, in the hopes that it’ll activate a Time Turner that will erase the source of those changes as well as the changes themselves. They say we are pigs, they say we don’t need any silly pin money, they say these things and they should be embarrassed, they should be ashamed at what just came out of their mouths, but no one is shaming them. The news treats it like a simple partisan debate. Point for blue, point for red. But no matter what young folks might say, these men know we’re not in a post-sexist or post-racist culture, that they can rely on old, ugly misogyny and the reluctance to stand up for women’s rights that has tinted gender relations in this country for pretty much ever to lube their legislation up nice and slick. When women are outraged, you don’t have to listen, after all. Bitches be crazy.

(Yuki-onna is awesome!)
And Echidne questions some evolutionary psychological findings:

But there are alternative explanations. The one which seems to be the most obvious one to me is that the authors assume a causal chain from fewer-marriageable-men to all the other variables, whereas the variable they use is a ratio of unmarried men to unmarried women. It may be the denominator that is the crucial variable here.

Young people in the United States move a lot. They go to college in other states than their own, they choose to find work in other states than the one they were born in. Come to think of it, young heterosexual women (men) could move from an area with a scarcity of unmarried men (women) to one where this is not the case. Thus, the implicit assumption in the study that people stay put in a particular place does not hold.

But more importantly, the results could follow from certain states being more amenable to high-level careers for women than other states, with more of the necessary industries, a more affluent client base and more universities and colleges which women need to attend first to get into those career paths. In short, the operational sex ratio may not push the results because of a scarcity of men. It may be correlated with the results because an "abundance" of young educated women have settled in certain states: those with the best career climates for women.

Light cultural fare (from Operaramblings):

It really shows its roots in the silent Expressionist films of the German cinema of the 1920s. The visual language is similar and the director is absolutely not afraid of silence or just low level background noise. This gives it a really spooky and grim feel. The acting is quite stylised and the singing style is rather different from what we have come to think of as the Berlin cabaret style; it’s generally thinner toned and much less dramatic. This is less true of Lotte Lenya, who sings Jenny, or Ernst Busch, who sings the Street Singer, but it’s still a long way from Ute Lemper. The crowd scenes could almost be out of Metropolis. It’s pretty effective. The main plot change is to bring in the idea of Polly buying a bank rather than continuing Macheath’s burglary business (straight out of Dreigroschenroman) and ending up with Tiger Brown buying a seat on the board with Macheath’s bail money rather than the great big “reprieve chorus” of the stage version. This is where it becomes a more pointed social critique than the original. In effect we are being asked to believe in a conspiracy between finance capital, organised crime and the Metropolitan Police (hence the title of this post). This probably seemed pretty broad satire to Pabst and his screenwriters. Now it seems that all that is missing is News International.

It's probably time to revive Threepenny Opera.  Not that it's ever been dead...