Child rearing and fundamentalism

There's an interesting article in yesterday's Guardian about the relationship between the way we care for infants and programming children in a rigid belief system. Two basic approaches are contrasted - that of attending to an infant's needs in response to the infant's signals and that of putting the infant on a fixed schedule, i.e. letting it cry to learn that "there's no point". Here's an excerpt:

There may be links here with the role of religion. A key element for a baby's development is security. Attending a tiny baby in the middle of the night and catching a glimpse of the anxiety or even fear in their face is a reminder of how vulnerable these small people must feel. Programming may provide a certain type of security, but of a rigid and brittle kind, which may also contain seeds of anger or despair at feeling deserted when they most needed comfort.

This brings echoes of those forms of religion that offer a fixed and firm belief system. Believers know their dogmas: there is no space for discussion or debate. If one aspect of the "faith" is undermined, or creates doubt, the whole system can collapse. Such dogmatism (rather than "fundamentalism") can be found in most faiths, and can be a driver for destruction. If your security is bound up in a belief system that by definition is right and true, you can bomb non-believers into dust, or blow yourself up with them, in certain hope of your ultimate vindication.

This is a more urgent issue than I realised when I began my exploration. Infants who are trusted to let us know when they need to eat, sleep, be comforted or held can perhaps also be trusted to let us know when they are ready to read, go out alone, surf the internet and formulate a faith. If they are programmed to accept what to do and when, we should be unsurprised if later they simply follow orders, or react aggressively.

Someone has said that the opposite of faith is not doubt; the opposite of faith is certainty. According to that point of view, the fundamentalists are not people of faith at all.

Earth Day

Here's a web page entitled "Things YOU can do to save the Earth". I'm going to give you just a small excerpt here:

SAVE ENERGY- If each U.S. household increased the energy efficiency of our major appliances by 10 to 30%, we'd reduce the demand for electricity by the equivalent of 25 large power plants. Energy use in the home is responsible for 30 per cent of energy related carbon dioxide (C02) emissions which is a primary contributor to global warming.

*Americans buy 2.2 million light bulbs every day. We flick a light switch dozens of times a day without thinking, but it's time to give it some thought. According to the World Resources Institute, lighting accounts for about 20 percent of all the electricity used in the United States (5 percent residential, 15 percent commercial), and 10 percent of all the emissions of CO2, the main greenhouse gas.
*Turn off lights when you are not in the room
*Replace incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents. The standard incandescent bulbs currently lighting your home have changed very little from Thomas Edison's first light bulb in 1879. Only 10% of the energy used by these standard bulbs contributes to light; the other 90% is wasted as heat. In fact, incandescent lights burn hot enough to fry an egg! And what about halogen lights? A typical halogen bulb burns at 1,000 degrees F. These old-fashioned light bulbs waste energy and can potentially cause burns or fires. Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs use 75% less energy than a standard incandescent bulb and last up to 10 times longer. This means that over the life of one CFL, you can avoid replacing up to 13 incandescent bulbs!
*Use rechargeable batteries or make sure the regular batteries will be recycled
*Use energy-efficient appliances (check the Energy Guide Labels for refrigerators, freezers, water heaters, clothes washers, dishwashers and air conditioners to buy the appliance that uses the least amount of energy.)

By the way, I found a great source for full-sprectrum, non-flickering florescent light bulbs. It's the Improvements catalog and the page for the light bulbs is here.

"An Inconvenient Truth"

It's the documentary Al Gore has made on global warming. And I'm linking you to a review by Richard Cohen. Read this:

[Y]ou will be captivated, then riveted and then scared out of your wits. Our Earth is going to hell in a handbasket.

You will see the Arctic and Antarctic icecaps melting. You will see Greenland oozing into the sea. You will see the atmosphere polluted with greenhouse gases that block heat from escaping. You will see photos from space of what the icecaps looked like once and what they look like now, and, in animation, you will see how high the oceans might rise. Shanghai and Calcutta swamped. Much of Florida, too. The water takes a hunk of New York. The fuss about what to do with Ground Zero will turn to naught. It will be under water.

"An Inconvenient Truth" is a cinematic version of the lecture that Gore has given for years warning of the dangers of global warming. The case Gore makes is worthy of sleepless nights: Our Earth is in extremis. It's not just that polar bears are drowning because they cannot reach receding ice floes or that "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" will exist someday only as a Hemingway short story. It's rather that Hurricane Katrina is not past, but prologue. Katrina produced several hundred thousand evacuees. The flooding of Calcutta would produce many millions.

You cannot see this film and not think of George W. Bush, the man who beat Gore in 2000. Bush has been studiously anti-science, a man of applied ignorance who has undernourished his mind with the empty calories of comfy dogma. For instance, his insistence on abstinence as the preferred method of birth control would be laughable were it not so reckless. It is similar to Bush's initial approach to global warming. It may be that Gore will do more good for his country and the world with this movie than Bush ever did by winning in 2000.

I hope it does do some good. But I'm not optimistic.

Energy Advisory Board Abolished

This is almost unbelievable. But knowing how anti-science Bush is then, of course, I do believe it. He's abolished the Energy Advisory Board. I'm afraid I can't link to the article I'm quoting here because it requires authorization to view but it's published by the American Chemical Society and is reproduced in a comment found on AMERICAblog. Here's the excerpt I want to share with you:

The Department of Energy's decision to disband its principal scientific advisory committee next month is the latest example of the Bush Administration's refusal to listen to outside, independent scientific advice, critics told C&EN on April 10.

Established during the Carter Administration, the 28-member independent Secretary of Energy Advisory Board (SEAB) is no longer needed, says DOE spokesman Craig Stevens, and will shut down on May 20 after it completes a final report on science and math education. Stevens says two recently announced residential initiatives will guide the department's work on energy and basic research over the next several years.
...
Edwin Lyman, senior staff scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, says the decision to disband the advisory panel is "a symptom of an Administration that doesn't like to hear any kind of contrary view, that simply likes to talk to itself. The notion that the Energy Department has all the information it needs on scientific and technical issues is ludicrous." Lyman says DOE prefers to "listen to national lab advocates who have their own agendas instead of soliciting external scientific advice to try to put things into perspective."

Kent J. Bransford, national president of the Physicians for Social Responsibility, says the decision is "not a surprise" and is consistent with "the Administration's tendency to ignore outside scientific input." One example, Bransford says, is the White House's opposition to mandatory controls on greenhouse gas emissions, which "essentially ignores the cautions and input of some 2,000 international scientists" on the threat of global warming.

SEAB was established in 1990 to provide advice, information, and recommendations to the secretary on the department's basic and applied research activities, economic and national security policy, educational issues, and laboratory management. SEAB, a mix of scientists, business executives, and former government officials, replaced the Energy Research Advisory Board, which had been in operation since 1978.

Someone once said that we're all entitled to our own opinions but not to our own facts. I wish someone would get that across to Bush.

Why we need to legalize marijuana

Okay, folks. Given my generation I know a lot of you won't believe this but the truth is that I have never smoked (or ingested in any other way) marijuana in my life and I have absolutely no desire to do so. But I want it as an option if I get cancer. And I think people should be able to use it recreationally as long as we legalize alcohol and tobacco - both of which are way more harmful than weed.

Well, it seems that Bush's FDA has just up and lied about the medical benefits of marijuana - completely contradicting the current science:

The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday that "no sound scientific studies" supported the medical use of marijuana, contradicting a 1999 review by a panel of highly regarded scientists....

The Food and Drug Administration statement directly contradicts a 1999 review by the Institute of Medicine, a part of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation's most prestigious scientific advisory agency. That review found marijuana to be "moderately well suited for particular conditions, such as chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting and AIDS wasting."

I also want to show you a very moving comment off of AMERICAblog on the subject:

My late lover of 13 years died in 1992 at age 33 of AIDS. He was from a fundamentalist family from Eastern Tennessee. They hated me for "breaking up" his two year marriage to his high school sweetheart which had produced a child (it was really his walking in and finding his wife in bed with his "best friend"!).

For years, I would get icy remarks over the phone from his family. They would include Christian tracts in greeting cards to us warning about our sinful ways.

However, when his family saw how I didn't run off when he was diagnosed with HIV in 1985, and essentially became his nurse for the next 8 years, they began to accept our relationship, maybe because it was no longer sexual.

Anyway, I had to watch him wretch daily due to being on chemotherapy for his Karposi's sarcoma. He wasted away due to not being able to hold down food. On his 33rd birthday, I bought some pot from the boyfriend of our home healthcare nurse and we served it on top of a giant, decorated chocolate-chip cookie.

My love only lived 31 more days, but he quit throwing up his food, began putting on weight, and best of all got his sense of humor back, a joy for living, spending many hours phoning old friends and family and laughing with them.

He and his family had decided to have a closed casket as he was so skeletal. When I shipped his body back to Chattanooga, they were amazed how good he looked again and had an open casket for the wake. They said their church had a prayer chain that had been praying for him and they gave credit to Jesus. I never have told them about his smoking marijuana daily that caused the real "miracle".

BTW, I still hear from his family, and twice visited his grave on Missionary Ridge and they always insist I stay in their home, not rent a motel room! Best of all, they never preach at me about my lost soul.

The fundies are so sick. They believe everything pleasurable is sinful. That's fine if they want to abstain themselves but whatever happened to freedom? They're determined that nobody else gets to use marijuana even if it makes someone's final few days bearable instead of unbearable. Personally, I think they're monsters.

Friday cat blogging!

Getting Leroy to hold still to have his picture taken is quite an enterprise and sometimes just impossible! Here he is grooming himself. (Photo by Ellie Finlay)

Nuclear madness

I want you to go over to Smirking Chimp and read Chris Floyd's latest because I can't do it justice here with an excerpt. It deserves to be read in its entirety. The piece is entitled, "Time's arrow: The coming nuclear epiphany in Persia" and here's how it gets started:

Twelve hours. One circuit of the sun from horizon to horizon, one course of the moon from dusk to dawn. What was once a natural measurement for the daily round of human life is now a doom-laden interval between the voicing of an autocrat's brutal whim and the infliction of mass annihilation halfway around the world.

Twelve hours is the maximum time necessary for American bombers to gear up and launch an unprovoked sneak attack – a Pearl Harbor in reverse – against Iran, the Washington Post reports. The plan for this "global strike," which includes a very viable "nuclear option," was approved months ago, and is now in operation. The planes are already on continuous alert, making "nuclear delivery" practice runs along the Iranian border, as Sy Hersh reports in the New Yorker, and waiting only for the signal from President George W. Bush to drop their payloads of conventional and nuclear weapons on some 400 targets spread throughout the condemned land.

And when this attack comes – either as a stand-alone "knock-out blow" or else as the precusor to a full-scale, regime-changing invasion, like the earlier aggression in Iraq – there will be no warning, no declaration of war, no hearings, no public debate. The already issued orders governing the operation put the decision solely in the hands of the president: he picks up the phone, he says, "Go" – and in twelve hours' time, up to a million Iranians will be dead.

Now there's another article on the same subject that I also want to recommend. It's entitled "America's last days" by Margaret Kimberley and I'll give you an excerpt here:

Does George W. Bush have the numbers 6, 6, and 6 tattooed on his head? In recent years it has become popular for every calamity, natural or man made, to be ascribed to the end times, the last days, Armageddon. If the end is near, the nation most responsible is the United States of America.

Throughout history human beings have competed with Mother Nature in the killing business, and humans win hands down. The Middle Passage, the American Indian holocaust, Stalin's purges and Hitler's concentration camps took out many more millions than bad weather, or shifting tectonic plates. If no one speaks up to stop Bush and does so very soon, that awful trend will continue.

The Bush administration has been openly threatening a military attack against Iran. Seymour Hersh recently wrote in the New Yorker that not only is the Bush administration preparing to attack Iran, but is planning to use nuclear weapons to do it. In this latest report, Hersh quotes sources who repeat the Bush messianic vision to "save" the people of Iran. If the Iranians will be liberated like the Iraqis were liberated, they are on their way to a living hell.

Hersh is not the first to report that the president is a megalomaniac hell bent on killing people in order to save them. Bush reportedly told Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that he is getting his orders straight from God.

"God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East."

It isn't clear if God also recommended permanent bases, theft of resources, no bid contracts and Abu Ghraib.

There are obvious reasons to fear Hersh's assertions about Bush. Equally frightening is the prospect that he will get whatever he wants from a spineless, bought-off Congress. One Congressional source tells Hersh, "There's no pressure from Congress. The only political pressure is from the guys who want to do it."

I think Kimberly is right. These may be the last days. Not because of some wrathful God but because of a wrathful (and demented) human being who thinks he's God.

33%

All right, folks. Normally I would NEVER link to Fox News. But even they are reporting that Bush's numbers are down to 33%. Wow.

President Bush’s job approval rating slipped this week and stands at a new low of 33 percent approve, down from 36 percent two weeks ago and 39 percent in mid-March. A year ago this time, 47 percent approved and two years ago 50 percent approved (April 2004).

Approval among Republicans is below 70 percent for the first time of Bush’s presidency. Two-thirds (66 percent) approve of Bush’s job performance today, down almost 20 percentage points from this time last year when 84 percent of Republicans approved. Among Democrats, 11 percent approve today, while 14 percent approved last April.

"It seems clear that many Republicans, while they may still like and support George Bush, are growing uneasy with what may happen to their candidates — and the policies they support — in the November elections," comments Opinion Dynamics Chairman John Gorman.

What can I say? Worst president ever.

Global warming and meat eating

Wow. Here's an article that brings two of my passions together: saving the planet and vegetarianism. The article is called, "Meat-Eaters Aiding Global Warming?" and here's an excerpt:

Your personal impact on global warming may be influenced as much by what you eat as by what you drive.

That surprising conclusion comes from a couple of scientists who have taken an unusual look at the production of greenhouse gases from an angle that not many folks have even thought about. Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin, assistant professors of geophysics at the University of Chicago, have found that our consumption of red meat may be as bad for the planet as it is for our bodies.

If you want to help lower greenhouse gas emissions, they conclude in a report to be published in the journal Earth Interactions, become a vegetarian.

In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that both researchers are vegetarians, although they admit to cheating a little with an occasional sardine. They say their conclusions are backed up by hard data.

Eshel and Martin collected that data from a wide range of sources, and they examined the amount of fossil-fuel energy - and thus the level of production of greenhouse gases - required for five different diets. The vegetarian diet turned out to be the most energy efficient, followed by poultry, and what they call the "mean American diet," which consists of a little bit of everything.

There was a surprising tie for last place. In terms of energy required for harvesting and processing, fish and red meat ended up in a "virtual tie," but that's just in terms of energy consumed. When you toss in all those other factors, such as bovine flatulence and gas released by manure, red meat comes in dead last. Fish remains in fourth place, some distance behind poultry and the mean American diet, chiefly because the type of fish preferred by Americans requires a lot of energy to catch.

I read a comment today on AMERICAblog that urged us against cynicism. Yes, global warming is upon us and we can't stop it at this point, the writer explained. But we can lessen its impact by what we do. So be aware that every time you choose not to eat meat, you are not only reducing animal suffering, you are also helping the planet with regard to climate change.

"I'm the Decider"

Oh people, people. You have just GOT to click through and listen to the musical version of Bush's petulant "I'm the decider" statement. It is rich. Go right here. The lyrics are printed there too so you can read along while the music is playing.

Let's just drop Earth Day

That's the point made by the Alan Bisbort in his article, "RIP Earth Day". Here's what he says:

This Saturday is Earth Day, the one day of the year adults set aside to fool their children that they're serious about leaving them a livable planet. What dupes these children be!

Global warming spirals beyond even the most cautious scientific projections, and what do we do about it? Nothing. Less than nothing. We buy gas-guzzling, ozone-depleting vehicles, throw chemicals on the lawn, deplete and despoil the oceans, cover the countryside with asphalt. We are simply not serious about leaving the earth in better shape than we ourselves inherited it. And yet we pretend, with Earth Day, that we are.

Let's be real adults and put Earth Day to rest, along with the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, voting, the tooth fairy, Easter bunny and Santa Claus. After five years of Bush, Earth Day is not something any sentient adult can take seriously. Why lie to the kids? What good will it do them?

One glance at the table of contents of Worldwatch's latest "Vital Signs" tells us the Earth is in deep trouble: Fossil fuel use surging (even as oil prices and profits hit record highs); climate change indicators rising; weather-related disasters setting records; human population surging as other species decline; global ice melt accelerating; wetlands drying up, forests disappearing, etc. All manmade problems, all ignored by the powers that be. And yet we continue to hold Earth Day.

It would be more healthy and helpful to take our kids aside and say: the powers that be don't care about your future.

All right, so Alan Bisbort is seriously cynical. But I don't blame him. And at least his approach has the merit of honesty.

U.K. leading conservative on climate change

Now why is it that conservatives across the pond can see the danger of global warming but our conservatives can't? The Independent has an article by it's leading conservative entitled, "David Cameron: 'We need a greater sense of urgency on climate change'". Here's how it gets started:

Since becoming leader of the Conservative Party I have sought to push the environment up to the top of the political agenda. Not only is it something that I feel strongly about, but I am aware that my position has given me a unique opportunity to stimulate national debate on an issue that we cannot afford to ignore. I intend to take it.

This is one of the reasons I decided to go on a fact-finding visit with WWF to the Arctic Research Station at Ny Alesund in Norway. I want to see for myself the effects of climate change, not just to see a retreating glacier but to meet leading scientific and research experts. Climate change is one of the biggest threats facing the world and we must have a much greater sense of urgency about tackling it.

It's "one of the biggest threats facing the world," he says. I would say it's THE biggest threat. Now why can't the Republicans see that? Don't they have children? How can they be so short sighted as to put this year's profits ahead of next year's survivability?

Real Christianity

Unknown News has a page entitled, "Message to Christian America" . Here's the way it ends:

You don't need new laws to defeat your temptations, and you don't need new weapons for your armies to defeat your enemies. What you need is to stop living in the lie.

Right now is the time to actually be what you say you want to be: just like Christ.

Have mercy, do not judge. Be humble, not proud. Trust in God, not the President. Turn the other cheek, instead of dropping bombs. Love your enemies, don't live in fear. Feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, comfort the broken-hearted, heal the sick! Farm your fields, don't pave them over! Free the prisoners -- and free the jailers too!

Free your selves: confess your wrongs, at least to yourself. Look in the mirror -- who are you fooling?

Good, huh? I wish the fundies among us would read it.

Pathetic

Next he's going to throw his toys out of the play pen:

I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation. But I'm the decider, and I decide what's best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the Secretary of Defense.

~George W. Bush

Just a reminder

We need to keep this principle ever before us:

Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate.

~Ulysses S. Grant

This is truly depressing

Media Matters has an article today about something Michael Savage said. This is someone the right wingers listen to. Brace yourselves now:

On April 17, nationally syndicated radio host Michael Savage called for "kill[ing] 100 million" Muslims and referred to the woman who alleged she was raped by members of Duke University's lacrosse team as a "drunken slut stripping whore."

On his radio show, Savage told listeners that "intelligent people, wealthy people ... are very depressed by the weakness that America is showing to these psychotics in the Muslim world. They say, 'Oh, there's a billion of them.' " Savage continued: "I said, 'So, kill 100 million of them, then there'd be 900 million of them.' I mean ... would you rather us die than them?" Savage added: "Would you rather we disappear or we die? Or would you rather they disappear and they die? Because you're going to have to make that choice sooner rather than later."

These people (I mean Savage and his ilk) simply are not civilized. And they obviously cannot be reasoned with. As I said above, it's truly depressing.

He's insane

I want to share with you an article that is about something I truly believe we have to face. The title will tell you what I mean: "Don't impeach Bush. Commit him". Ted Rall, the author, believes Bush is insane. And so do I. Here are some excerpts:

Until I read Seymour Hersh's expose in The New Yorker and subsequent follow-up coverage by other journalists about the Bush Administration's plans to start a war against Iran, I had dismissed talk of George W. Bush's messianism as so much Beltway chatter. True, he hears voices, even claiming that God and Jesus Christ talk to him. "I believe God wants me to run for president," he told a friend in Texas.
...
Despite the man's wacky religiosity, I have been giving Bush the benefit of a small amount of remaining doubt after five years of the most disastrous rule this nation has ever suffered. I believed that he was breathtakingly bigoted, stupid and ignorant. But I didn't think he was out of his mind. Until now.
...
"One of the military's initial option plans," reports Hersh, "...calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites." An intelligence insider says that "Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap. 'Decisive' is the key word of the Air Force's planning. It's a tough decision. But we made it in Japan."

"We're talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years," he went on. Crazy stuff. But whenever someone inside the Administration opposes the nuclear option, "They're shouted down." The pro-nuke faction, led by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is responding to internal critics with a "B61 [nuclear bomb] with more blast and less radiation."

You may have heard that Bush dismissed Hersh's article as "wild speculation." At first I, like you, responded with a sigh of relief. But I've come to learn that Bush doesn't talk like a human being. His policy pronouncements are carefully lawyered to give him the kind of technical out that Bill Clinton could only have dreamed of. Bushspeak is crafted to ensure that what Mr. Straightshooter says is rarely what he means. Filtering "wild speculation" statement through Bushspeak analysis shows that it's no denial at all.
...
Bush has not denied Hersh's article. Therefore, we should accept it as accurate.
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Many people have asked me during the last year whether I thought Bush would attack Iran. I said no, because he's out of troops, out of cash and out of political capital. He couldn't so he wouldn't.

Those things are still true. Not to mention that Iran would make Iraq look like a cakewalk. Yet, as Hersh reports, the U.S. may bomb at least 400 cities and towns inside Iran. "Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups." You don't need troops, money or the support of the American people when God talks to you. And when you're insane.

Look folks, this article didn't come from some extreme left-wing fringe site. It's Yahoo News for crying out loud. And Ted Rall is liberal but he's still mainstream. Please let this sink in everybody: A mainstream commentator is saying on a mainstream news site that Bush is insane. My guess is that this is the tip of the iceberg. There are probably plenty of journalists out there scared out of their minds because they truly believe Bush is out of his.

About health insurance

Well, here's some disturbing news. The article is entitled, "Study: Health Insurers Are Near-Monopolies" and here's part of what it says:

Consolidation among health insurers is creating near-monopolies in virtually all reaches of the United States, according to a study released Monday.

Data from the American Medical Association show that in each of 43 states, a handful of top insurers have gained such a stronghold that their markets are considered "highly concentrated" under U.S. Department of Justice guidelines, often far exceeding the thresholds that trigger antitrust concerns.

The study also shows that in 166 of 294 metropolitan areas, or 56 percent, a single insurer controls more than half the business in health maintenance organization and preferred provider networks underwriting.

"This problem is widespread across the country, and it needs to be looked at," said Jim Rohack, an AMA trustee and physician in Temple, Texas. "The choices that patients have now are more difficult."
...
Critics say that carriers are not only creating monopolies and oligopolies in many regions, they also control the other side of the equation in what is known as monopsony power. That means in addition to having the most enrollees, they're also the biggest purchasers of health care and can dictate prices and coverage terms.

It also makes it harder for new carriers to emerge, as pricing already has been set by the dominant carrier.
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The AMA says it has taken up this antitrust issue with the Department of Justice, but says it has run into roadblocks with regulators. AMA officials say regulators seem uninterested, even though government officials are more than willing to target doctors' groups and hospitals on antitrust matters.

Justice Department officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Well, surprise, surprise. The Justice Department is on the side of big business and big profits at the expense of the common welfare of Americans. Who knew?

Credulity and incredulity

Appropriately snarky:

A UCLA study shows 7% of people still believe in the Easter Bunny. I believe these are the same people who believe President Bush is doing a good job in Iraq.

--Jay Leno