Eye tooth

I have a lot of open tabs and many things to blog about, but this is the strangest, most surprising and wonderful news I've heard this week.

Blind man sees wife for first time after having a TOOTH implanted in his eye

'The doctors took the bandages off and it was like looking through water and then I saw this figure and it was her. She's wonderful and lovely. It was unbelievable to see her for the first time.'
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'I feel fantastic getting my sight back,' he said. 'I can't really describe it - it's beyond words. I was blind for 12 years and when my sight came back everything had changed.

"Kitsch is a disease of faith" but "Beauty will save the world"

Roger Scruton on Beauty and its corruptions

Kitsch is a mould that settles over the entire works of a living culture, when people prefer the sensuous trappings of belief to the thing truly believed in. It is not only Christian civilisation that has undergone kitschification in recent times. Equally evident has been the kitschification of Hinduism and its culture. Massproduced Ganeshas have knocked the subtle temple sculpture from its aesthetic pedestal; in bunjee music the talas of Indian classical music are blown apart by tonal harmonies and rhythm machines; in literature the sutras and puranas have been detached from the sublime vision of Brahman and reissued as childish comic-strips.

Simply put, kitsch is a disease of faith. Kitsch begins in doctrine and ideology and spreads from there to infect the entire world of culture. The Disneyfication of art is simply one aspect of the Disneyfication of faith -and both involve a profanation of our highest values. Kitsch, the case of Disney reminds us, is not an excess of feeling but a deficiency. The world of kitsch is in a certain measure a heartless world, in which emotion is directed away from its proper target towards sugary stereotypes, permitting us to pay passing tribute to love and sorrow without the trouble of feeling them.
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"Beauty" (Roger Scruton)

The paradox, however, is that the relentless pursuit of artistic innovation leads to a cult of nihilism. The attempt to defend beauty from pre-modernist kitsch has exposed it to postmodernist desecration. We seem to be caught between two forms of sacrilege, the one dealing in sugary dreams, the other in savage fantasies. Both are forms of falsehood, ways of reducing and demeaning our humanity. Both involve a retreat from the higher life, and a rejection of its principal sign, which is beauty. But both point to the real difficulty, in modern conditions, of leading a life in which beauty has a central place.
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To point to this feature of our condition is not to issue an invitation to despair. It is one mark of rational beings that they do not live only -- or even at all -- in the present. They have the freedom to despise the world that surrounds them and to live in another way. The art, literature and music of our civilisation remind them of this, and also point to the path that lies always before them: the path out of desecration towards the sacred and the sacrificial. And that, in a nutshell, is what beauty teaches us.

Fyodor Dostoevsky once made an enigmatic remark, "Beauty will save the world" about which  Alexander Solzhenitsyn organized his Nobel Lecture on Literature in 1970

And so perhaps that old trinity of Truth and Good and Beauty is not just the formal outworn formula it used to seem to us during our heady, materialistic youth. If the crests of these three trees join together, as the investigators and explorers used to affirm, and if the too obvious, too straight branches of Truth and Good are crushed or amputated and cannot reach the light—yet perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable,
unexpected branches of Beauty will make their way through and soar up to that very place and in this way perform the work of all three.

And in that case it was not a slip of the tongue for Dostoyevsky to say that “Beauty will save the world,” but a prophecy. After all, he was given the gift of seeing much, he was extraordinarily illumined.

And consequently perhaps art, literature, can in actual fact help the world of today.

"Isn't saving the planet grand"

The horrific solution of  the cap and trade legislation is far worse than the problem.

The Waxman-Markey Travesty

The formulation of the so-called Waxman-Markey bill was less traditional legislative sausage-making than an unspeakable practice out of The Jungle. Its architects bought off every possible interest group no matter what the policy consequences until they had a bare majority to slam it through the House sight unseen (a physical copy of the final bill didn’t yet exist when it passed)
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Originally, the Obama administration counted on $80 billion a year from the government’s sale of emissions credits. To win over industry, Waxman-Markey gives the credits away for free. Poof! There goes the revenue.
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The upshot is that an Environmental Protection Agency analysis says that under Waxman-Markey, there will be no reduction in emissions by 2020. The progressive Breakthrough Institute estimates that emissions could continue at their current business-as-usual rate through 2030. Perversities abound. According to the Los Angeles Times, under the bill, the U.S. “would use more carbon-dioxide heavy coal in 2020 than it did in 2005.” Time writes that “the total amount of renewable energy generation under Waxman-Markey would actually be less than the renewable energy that would have been produced without the bill.”
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Even if Waxman-Markey were perfectly formulated, it would reduce global surface temperatures by only one-tenth of 1 degree Celsius in 100 years. That’s a negligible difference, purchased at a great price.


The only people who benefit are the "permanent class of government-addicted elites"

The Obama/Pelosi/Reid Democrats in charge of everything in Washington have decided to order everything on the menu, and a permanent class of government-addicted elites --lawyers, economists, think-tankers, MSMers, senior bureaucrats-- are cheering them on because the growth in the size and complexity of government means a growth in the demand curve for specialist services at specialist prices.

The jobs supposedly created are an illusion.

Looking at the experience of creating green jobs in Spain which bet heavily on that premise and the promise of wind energy, a recent study found that each green job cost more than a million dollars to create and resulted in the destruction elsewhere of 2.2. jobs.

The Beacon Hill Institute at Suffolk University in Boston released a study today finding that the studies claiming economic benefits to government imposed green jobs were seriously flawed and that such programs actually hurt the economy.

Proponents of “green collar” jobs promise that government subsidization of these jobs will create a net increase in employment, economic growth, recovery from the current crisis, and energy savings, all in addition to environmental benefits. Unfortunately, these claims are based on seriously flawed economic analysis.

Breitbart's laws

Richard Fernandez, Carnival of grotesques

My first reactions to Andrew Breitbart’s article were a) that the lines between the serious and bizarre in modern culture have drawn dangerously near each other; and b) who heck makes up rules like “Black beats white. Gay beats white. Black beats gay.” I’m sure that Breitbart is right in perceiving them - in fact we should call them Breitbart’s Laws.
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If Poets were the unacknowledged legislators of Shelley’s world, then who are unacknowledged legislators of ours? If Shelley’s commentary remains valid then the true authors of Breitbart’s Laws are the Carnival of Grotesques collectively referred to as popular culture. They make the rules to which we subconsciously conform.

Bungee Dating

When you can learn an important lesson from the experience of others, count yourself lucky.  In Bungee Dating in New York City, Gerard Vanderleun tells the story of his friend last night and it's not to be missed.

Bottom line, when you're going out on a 'non-date' with a girl you like who's under a lot a stress, a mutual massage spa salon is not the best idea for reasons you will find out.

McDo in Paris

How McDonald's Conquered France

In the battle for France, Jose Bové, the protester who vandalized a McDonald's in 1999 and was then running for president, proved to be no match for Le Big Mac....By 2007, France had become the second-most profitable market in the world for McDonald's, surpassed only by the land that gave the world fast food. Against McDonald's, Bové had lost in a landslide.
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for a limited time with pepper sauce

McDonald's France was sourcing 75 percent of its ingredients domestically, and he felt it was imperative from a PR standpoint to force French farmers, hypocritically applauding Bové, to publicly acknowledge the large volume of business that they were doing with McDo.
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They came, they ate, and they lingered. As Gravier artfully put it, "The French population uses McDonald's in a very French way; it is fast food, but not that fast."...Americans visited McDonald's more often than the French, at all hours of the day, frequently alone, and opted for takeout 70 percent of the time. The French spent more money per visit, came in groups more often than Americans, and did 70 percent of their eating during regular lunch and dinner hours. "We have a food culture in France; eating is not a feeding moment, it is a social moment," Gravier said.

The Little Red Schoolhouse

In the Wall  Street Journal today,  a review by Bill Kaufman of a new book that extols the virtues of one room schoolhouses that only became evident after they were lost, Small Wonder by Jonathan Zimmerman.

"Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory (Icons of America)" (Jonathan Zimmerman)

In One Room, Many Advantages

The attempt to abolish one-room schoolhouses, whether by the carrot of state aid or the stick of government fiat, set off one of the great unknown political wars of U.S. history, pitting farm people who "invoked classic themes of liberty and self-rule" against the "mostly urban elites" who "would wage zealous battle against the rural one-room school." Typically, two Delaware schoolconsolidators informed the hicks that "modern education . . . is less romantic and more businesslike, more formal, more exact, more specialized, done according to tested methods and a standard schedule." Such grim exactitude sounded like prison to parents used to the comparatively anarchic and localized governance of rural schools.
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The one-room school was "neither as rundown as critics claimed nor as bucolic as defenders imagined," Mr. Zimmerman writes. But its champions understood its flaws. They were defending the principles of local autonomy and human-scale democracy. Mr. Zimmerman quotes a "rural mother" who lamented: "Individuality will be lost, the pride taken in 'our' school and 'our' teacher gone. Haven't the parents who bear the children anything to say?"

Not in the consolidated schools they didn't, except in PTA debates over which kind of brownies to sell at the bake sale. "Thousands of rural parents did resist consolidation," Mr. Zimmerman says; they struggled to save the one-room symbols of "their vanishing local communities." But true to Joni Mitchell's lyric, the rest of America didn't know what it had till it was gone.
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The idealization of the little red schoolhouse, Mr. Zimmerman concludes, reflects a rueful awareness that in modernity Americans "gained the whole world of technological conveniences and lost the soul of their communities."

Growing Generation Gap

It's the largest generation gap in 40 years

Asked to identify where older and younger people differ most, 47 percent said social values and morality. People age 18 to 29 were more likely to report disagreements over lifestyle, views on family, relationships and dating, while older people cited differences in a sense of entitlement. Those in the middle-age groups also often pointed to a difference in manners.

Religion is a far bigger part of the lives of older adults. About two-thirds of people 65 and older said religion is very important to them, compared with just over half of those 30 to 49 and 44 percent of people 18 to 29.

In addition, among adults 65 and older, one-third said religion has grown more important to them over the course of their lives, while 4 percent said it has become less important and 60 percent said it has stayed the same.
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Paul Taylor, director of the Pew Social and Demographic Trends Project...cited a greater tolerance among younger people on cultural issues such as gay marriage and interracial relationships.

We're not yet at Boomsday yet, but it's hard not to wonder if an intergenerational clash is in the offing in the not-too-distant future when they begin to realize how much debt they have inherited.

In Christopher Buckley's imaginary dystopia in Boomsday, when America teeters on the brink of economic disaster as the boomers start retiring, the younger generation, incensed at their growing financial burden, calls for an economic Bastille Day.  One proposed solution to the growing social security crisis  - offering senior citizens free botox and no estate tax, if they go into government-sponsored suicide clinics for "voluntary transitioning".

Nervous in Hawaii

The great holiday weekend of the summer approaches and everyone is making plans to celebrate the 4th of July.

But in Hawaii, there's a great deal of apprehension ever since reports emerged that North Korea may fire a long-range ballistic missile toward Hawaii in early July.

Now with a crazy madman in North Korea, Pakistan in turmoil and the security of its nuclear missiles uncertain, and Iran determined to go forward, despite all objections,  to arm itself with nuclear weapons, it is clear that the nuclear threat is graver than it has ever been before.  Some  might argue that the Cold War was worse, but MAD or mutually assured destruction worked.  The Soviets were rational; something that can not be said of Iran and North Korea. 

The much-derided anti-missle defense technology, dubbed 'Star Wars', has proven in tests to be increasingly effective.
And in my mind, just in time.    Of all the programs to cut then, why was missile defense chosen?

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said last week that U.S. would deploy ground and sea-based missile defense assets to protect Hawaii just in case. 

But an editorial in the Washington Times says
new information suggests that the administration is bluffing and our defenses are inadequate to get the job done.
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The Obama administration also has cut funding for the European missile-defense shield, leaving our allies in Poland and the Czech Republic in the lurch after they took a major political risk to support the program
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The Obama administration's hostility to missile defense is inexplicable. The missile threat is growing, and defensive technology is increasingly effective, yet the Obama team has dug in stubbornly behind a losing strategy that emboldens our enemies and places us in greater danger. No wonder Hawaiians are nervous.

Just Beat It

Wow. The freedom fighters in Iran have adopted Michael Jackson's Beat It as a new theme song.

via Gateway Pundit

Economic Suicide Pact

Given how poorly the stimulus has worked  and given the 4 million newly unemployed in the past six months, it doesn't seem the right time to remake the energy sector to impose the largest tax increase in history when the economy is in recession.

Cap and Trade Fiction
The whole point of cap and trade is to hike the price of electricity and gas so that Americans will use less. These higher prices will show up not just in electricity bills or at the gas station but in every manufactured good, from food to cars. Consumers will cut back on spending, which in turn will cut back on production, which results in fewer jobs created or higher unemployment.

Costs range from the CBO estimate of $175/year which admittedly doesn't take account of the effect of the carbon tax on anything other than the consumers' own electric bill next year.  Taking into account the ripple effect of higher taxes for everything, the Heritage Foundation estimates $1870 for a family of four by 2020.

Man-Made Disaster
Not since a misguided piece of legislation imposed tariffs that turned a recession into a depression has there been a piece of legislation as bad as Waxman-Markey.

The 1,000-plus-page American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454) is being rushed to a vote by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi before anyone can seriously object to this economic suicide pact.

Its centerpiece is a "cap and trade" provision that has been rightfully derided as "cap and tax." It is in fact a tax on energy everywhere it is consumed on everything it is used to make or provide.

It is the largest tax increase in American history — a tax on all Americans — even the 95% that President Obama pledged would never see a tax increase.

Looking at the European experience Cap and Trade doesn't work

According to European Commission figures, emissions from the 27 member states rose by 1.9% in the first three years of the regime.
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Translated across the Atlantic, any climate change bill will become the subject of the worst kind of pork-barrel politics riddled with loopholes for key industries before it becomes law.

Tilting at Green Windmills  George Will looks at a puzzled Spanish professor Gabriel Calzada, an economics professor at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos who studied the effects at the "torrential spending" on wind and solar energy in Spain and concluded

each "green" job created cost $752,000 -$1.4 million in subsidies
each "green" job entailed the loss of 2.2.other jobs

Why are the leaders in Congress pushing so hard on this bill of a thousand pages which was just amended with 300 pages this morning.  I would bet few,if any, Congressman have even read it.

The number of skeptics on global warming are swelling and the tide is turning .  There is no scientific consensus whatsoever on global warming or what causes it.  The science is not settled.

Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion."

If this passes the house, there is hope it will not pass the Senate.  If it does, every Congressman who voted for it should be held accountable in 2010 for its consequences.

In the Field of Faith and Health

Reading Body, mind and Chinese medicine, I was struck by what Dr. David Eisenberg of Harvard Medical School had to say in 1993 about the Chinese medical system because it's so similar to what I believe.

The whole Chinese medical system is based on the notion that the way you relate to other people, the way you think, and your emotions govern your health and illness -- what kind of life you'll have and what kind of death you'll have...  I think the entire Chinese culture is based on the notion that there is a correct way to live, and that how you live ultimately influences your health. It's not just diet or exercise, it's also a spiritual or emotional balance that comes from the way you treat other people and the way you treat yourself. That has always been the highest goal of living in all the Taoist and Confucian traditions. And since that's the basis of their culture, it spills over into their medicine.

In a quick search to find what is going in these days in Western medicine, I came across Dr. Harold Koenig.    A pioneer in the field of faith and health, Dr Koenig is co-director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at Duke University Medical Center where he also serves on the faculty as Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Associate Professor of Medicine.

In this interview with Beliefnet, Dr Koenig talks about how prayer and attending church can have a powerful effect on our mental and physical well-being.

Putting aside the ability to be able to prove it or not, do you believe that prayer can heal—specifically help someone, for example, recover from cancer?

Absolutely. I believe that on faith and I also believe it because I've seen that happen with people, including personal friends. Of course they knew they were being prayed for, by their families and their churches, and those people have had remarkable recoveries. ...*** So there's no doubt in my mind that prayers help people—those who are prayed for and those saying the prayer.
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Beyond the effects of prayer, do you believe religious practice can lead to other health benefits? What are they?

Bear in mind that these benefits are not intended, they're kind of a consequence of going to church or praying or reading the Bible or being religiously committed. They're kind of a side effect of being religious for more valid, more intrinsic reasons.

The benefits of devout religious practice, particularly involvement in a faith community and religious commitment, are that people cope better. In general, they cope with stress better, they experience greater well-being because they have more hope, they're more optimistic, they experience less depression, less anxiety, and they commit suicide less often. They don't drink alcohol as much, they don't use drugs as much, they don't smoke cigarettes as much, and they have healthier lifestyles. They have stronger immune systems, lower blood pressure, probably better cardiovascular functioning, and probably a healthier hormonal environment physiologically—particularly with respect to cortisol and adrenaline [stress hormones]. And they live longer.

The same benefits do not accrue to those who profess a vague spirituality.
I think the word "spirituality" is much more inviting and it includes religion. But from a research perspective, it's really religion that's studied and been shown to benefit health— not the less definable, more vague, and individualized spirituality.

Glastonbury Abbey

In a 2005 interview with Bob Abernethy of PBS,  Koenig remarked on the exploding research on the relationship between religion and health since 2000.
In the past two and a half years, there have been over 1,800 articles written -- research studies, discussions on the topic of religion and health. Comparing the three-year periods 20 years apart, there has been, literally, an 18-fold increase in the amount of attention this subject is being paid.
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Having faith and being optimistic can definitely influence one's outcome. However, what this research shows is that having faith specifically in religion helps people more than having faith in other things. That's what we're studying. We're comparing people with faith in religion versus faith in family or work or hobbies, and the religious people seem to do better.

If you lived a healthy lifestyle, if you had a strong family and lots of friends, if you had a belief system that helped you cope with death and life and suffering and religion had no part of it, you'd have the same health benefits. The problem is, most people aren't in that situation. Most people don't have a worldview that makes sense of death and suffering and loss, don't have a ton of friends that are supportive or a family that encourages and supports them, and don't live a healthy lifestyle because they're simply human and are pulled to these various kinds of temptations that affect our health. So religion is a package of things that brings together all of those different areas in a person's life.

Cologne Cathedral at sunset

Now in the London Times, God will save you - believe in him or not.

Interviewing survivors around the world, I have noticed a remarkable pattern. Overwhelmingly, they share a belief that God and faith sustained them through their trials. As many as 75% or 80% cite a higher power as an important reason for their survival. Either they face their crisis with strong faith or they discover it in the crucible, believing God had a plan for them and gave them the strength to overcome.

In trying to find out what this all means, Ben Sherwood interviewed Dr. Koening:
Koenig replies that belief is the most powerful survival tool in the world. Faith and religion, he says, empower you with “the kind of strength that nothing else that I’ve ever seen can give”.

Dr. Harold Koenig is the author of several books including "The Healing Power of Faith: How Belief and Prayer Can Help You Triumph Over Disease" and  "Faith and Mental Health: Religious Resources for Healing" and "Faith In The Future: Healthcare, Aging and the Role of Religion"

Financial Advisor Kidnapped and Tortured

No doubt a lot of people fantasized about this, but in Germany a group of wealthy pensioners actually did it.

Zimmer frame gang 'tortures advisor' who lost $4 million of their savings.

The pensioners, nicknamed the "Geritol Gang" by German police after an arthritis drug, face up to 15 years in jail if found guilty of subjecting German-American James Amburn to the alleged four-day ordeal.

Two of them are said to have hit him with a Zimmer frame outside his home ..before he was bound with duct tape, bundled into the boot of an Audi A8 and driven 300 mileso a home on the shores of a popular holiday lake in Bavaria.

During his alleged confinement in an unheated cellar, Mr Amburn, 56, claims he was burned with cigarettes, beaten, had two ribs broken, was hit with a chair leg and chained up "like an animal".

In Iran, the 'Day of the Axes'

It's been heartbreaking to watch people rise from their oppression and risk their lives to stand up for freedom and face Unimaginable Horror in what will be known as the Day of the Axes.

>More than 10.000 Bassij Milittias get position in Central Tehran, including Baharestan Sq.
>Army Helycopters flying over Baharestan and Vali Asr Sq.
>The streets, squares and around BAHARESTAN (Approx. South-eastern of Tehran) is swarming with military forces, civilian forces, the security motorists
>The croud have moved to the south of baharestan, the situation is bad, the shooting has started
>In Baharestan Sq. in the Police shooting, A girl is shot and the police is not allowing to let them help
>In Baharestan we saw militia with axe choping people like meat - blood everywhere - like butcher

This is the Iranian regime, wading into its own unarmed people and axing them to death, bludgeoning women (seen as the greatest threat to the regime) and throwing them to their deaths from pedestrian bridges. The same Iranian regime whose embassy officials are invited to American embassies around the world to celebrate on July 4th, of all things, a successful revolution.

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An Iranian blogger (whose URL I will not publish) live blogging from Baharestan Square in central Tehran today captures but brief glimpses of the unimaginable horror that took place today. Bus loads of protesters were stopped and unloaded from their buses by "black-clad police" and literally herded. When the massing was sufficient, as the barely controllably distraught Tehran caller to CNN described first hand, hundreds of the regime's Basij thugs poured out of an adjoining mosque and commenced a massacre with axes, clubs, guns and gas.

Listen to this phone call from a woman and imagine yourself there.

Norm Geras reprints an email he received

But on Bloody Saturday, the situation was totally different after Khamenei's command to slaughter demonstrators. I have a report just from one hospital not so far from my living place... In this hospital alone doctors received 20 dead and many other wounded. Security forces went to all the hospitals to which people themselves had brought the bodies, to gather all the wounded and dead; when paramilitary and military forces gathered the bodies, they sent them directly to military hospitals; they transmitted these bodies to their own centres too. In an unbelievable event in the hospital, of which I have a report, security forces have shot and killed the wounded persons before transmitting them. When doctors and nurses bacame mad and went out on the streets, they have opened fire on them too.

Mike Madden tells the story of the torture of a 17-year-old in Iran with graphic photos

He is just a 17-year-old boy who was supposed to take the university entrance exam within a month before his fingers were broken and the finger webs were cut with a blade. He was arrested violently in the parking lot of a living complex without even taking part in any of the recent activities, and after more than 24 hours he returned home while his face was fully covered with blood and one could only see his eyes.

The Anchoress has another of her splendid round-ups on the Massacre in Tehran

The Mullahs are Afraid of the Women

Since returning home after four days away sans  computer, I'm just catching up on all the news in Iran. 

What strikes me most of all is the participation of women in the protests.  For a long time, I've  believed that positive changes in the Mid East would come from the; they are the most oppressed and have the least to lose.

Under the burkas, chadors, and headscarves, we are seeing young women in jeans, wearing lipstick, with blond and frosted hair, who see their chance for real political change that would change their lives.  La Femme Zahra holding hands with her husband Mousavi, tells  crowds, "This is the moment to stand."

A young woman, shot to death is now the symbol of the protestors.  Neda is now  the 'Angel of Iran' and the 'Angel of Freedom'.  The mullahs are so afraid of women rising up, they shoot them.

Women and the Iranian Unrest

Are the Ayatollahs learning that hell hath no fury like 34 million women scorned, forced out of the workplace, harassed and humiliated by religious police for three decades?  I have noticed some of the bravest protesters in Iran have been women, including a few who have been without headscarves and showing a great deal more of their figures than the regime would approve. Roger Cohen of the NY Times has noticed this, too.

.... Iran's women stand in the vanguard. For days now, I've seen them urging less courageous men on. I've seen them get beaten and return to the fray. "Why are you sitting there?" one shouted at a couple of men perched on the sidewalk on Saturday. "Get up! Get up!"

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More than 60 percent of Iran's university students are women, but women only make up perhaps 15 percent of the workforce.
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Women left alone with children after the death or desertion of a husband are particularly hard hit in a culture that openly discrimintes in employment. So are those in abusive relationships with fathers or husbands. One of Iran's dirty little secrets is how many women are forced into prostitution.  News stories from 2002 reported as many as 300,000 women were engaged in prostitution in greater Tehran. In an area with a population then estimated at 12 million that is close to 5% of the total female population.

Iran and The Woman Question

Iranian-American journalist Roya Hakakian sat down with ForbesWoman to discuss her native country's current climate and the situation facing women--and men--in Iran today
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Iran has had a robust women's movement for several decades now. But in the late 1990s, a new generation took charge; and in the early 2000s, they managed to organize and unite in ways that women had not since the revolution in 1979. It started as petition movement to collect signatures to ban stoning women to death and has spun out to become the "One Million Signatures Campaign."
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The feminist movement, which has been ongoing in Iran, has now joined the broader public movement against the regime.

So perhaps we shouldn't be surprised to learn that the Basij are targeting women, both young and old.