I wonder about those who argue that waterboarding is not torture– can they really believe it? I suppose so. Otherwise, how could this happen? Joshua Tabor, a U.S. soldier based in Tacoma, Washington, allegedly waterboarded his 4 year-old daughter because she refused to recite the alphabet. He chose the CIA-approved technique because he was aware that his daughter was afraid of water, a phobia that will surely be an ongoing issue for the poor girl. If Christopher Hitchens is to be believed, she’ll wake up with nightmares for quite some time. Hitchens was a supporter of the torture technique, at least until he underwent it. His column at Vanity Fair following the experience is titled, “Believe me, it’s torture.”
In her NYT Op-Ed, Pychologist Susan Engel advises what we are doing wrong in the classroom. She argues that we need to do more than change the way we measure progress–we need to overhaul the entire way we teach:
In order to design a curriculum that teaches what truly matters, educators should remember a basic precept of modern developmental science: developmental precursors don’t always resemble the skill to which they are leading. For example, saying the alphabet does not particularly help children learn to read. But having extended and complex conversations during toddlerhood does. Simply put, what children need to do in elementary school is not to cram for high school or college, but to develop ways of thinking and behaving that will lead to valuable knowledge and skills later on. . . .
What they shouldn’t do is spend tedious hours learning isolated mathematical formulas or memorizing sheets of science facts that are unlikely to matter much in the long run. Scientists know that children learn best by putting experiences together in new ways. They construct knowledge; they don’t swallow it.
“We’re deeply concerned for their well-being,” Van den Bosch and Falleur wrote in a news release. “The psychological stresses of detention were very great, especially during interrogation and solitary confinement.”
As of early December, when Van den Bosch and Falleur were released, the American hikers were being held in solitary confinement, a harrowing experience the Belgian men describe in detail.
“We were in cells with no outside contact and a ceiling light on day and night,” they wrote. “No communication was possible with other prisoners or with our families. Everything was designed to make us feel very lonely.”
Van den Bosch and Falleur added, “From our own experience, we can only imagine that the psychological pressure put on the hikers to confess to crimes they are innocent of is extremely intense. Their feeling of loneliness must be extreme.”
I’m getting really tired of greenwashing, so much so that I’ve creating a new category called “greenwashing” dedicated to these sorts of incidents:
A false or misleading picture of environmental friendliness used to conceal or obscure damaging activities.
Today I am featuring Exhibit A, “Elephant Poo Poo Paper.” It’s being featured here as Exhibit A not because it is the worst offender ever, but because it is my first of a series of incidents of greenwashing I’ll be pointing out over the months. It’s worth our while to point out greenwashing because these sorts of products help maintain the illusion that we don’t need to change our lives dramatically to accommodate Earth’s depleted and contaminated resources. All we need to do is to buy cute products and claim that we thereby give a damn.
Now, back to today’s featured product: “Elephant Poo Poo Paper,” which was recently purchased at the St. Louis Zoo. Just think: we can now make good use of elephant poop (as though it can’t just be left alone to enrich the soil). We can help save the planet by manufacturing heavily-dyed paper and shipping it thousands of miles away from the “elephant conservation parks” where the elephant poo is purportedly gathered and then turned into paper by mixing it with bananas and pineapples.
Buy “Elephant Poo Poo Paper” and feel like you are doing your part to save the world. Better yet, give it as a gift so you can loudly broadcast to others that you are doing your part to save the world.
If it’s actually so good to the earth to make paper out of poop, there is a lot of cow poop (among other kinds of poop) just waiting for those who want to be “green” paper manufacturers.
How can one really justify a salary of $1 Million to run a charity? Consider the case of Brian A. Gallagher, who is paid $1,037,140 to run The United Way. Or consider the American Red Cross, which pays its top person, Gail J. McGovern, $495,187 per year. These are stats from 2009 provided by Forbes.
Here’s how you fix this problem: Pass a law to make all charities disclose the salaries of its top ten highest earning officers and employees on all solicitations for donations.
Reverend Billy is a clown and a prophet. All dressed up, he is a serious clown, self-honed and bearing sharp claws in the best tradition of court jesters. At the recent True Spin Conference in Denver Colorado I had a chance to meet the Reverend Billy of The-Church-of-Not-Shopping. Reverend Billy is an outwardly cartoonish persona constructed by actor Billy Talen.
Talan has been at it for so long and so intensely, however, that it is difficult to see where Talen ends and Reverend Billy begins. Even while he was discussing his mission during his presentation at True Spin, he was prone to erupt into his preacher voice, standing up and beckoning those present to heed the central tenet of his Church: that we “Not Shop.” Although Reverend Billy is famous for his anti-consumerist sermons, he also preaches on numerous other social justice issues. One of those other concerns is that free-flowing conversational and intellectual space—the place where naturally-occurring culture used to thrive—is now jam-packed with the profit-seeking messages
of corporations seeking to deny us the natural flow of our social interactions. “They want to sponsor our stories.” He is concerned that corporations have filled our heads with their music and their values, and their buy-oriented slogans, largely displacing us of our ability and desire to construct original thoughts through natural conversion. Billy argues that we need to ramp down the shopping because on a daily basis we are selling our very souls when we unnecessarily buy. We have remade ourselves into commodities, and our unwitting plan is to deliver ourselves to our sponsors.
Pop quiz: according to Rev. Billy, what is the best thing you can get someone for Christmas?
Answer: nothing.
Why should we stop shopping? Reverend Billy might answer you with the Title to his 2007 documentary: “What Would Jesus Buy?”
No words really work well to introduce you to Reverend Billy. Take a moment, if you will, to allow Amy Goodman to introduce him to you.
Those who think Reverend Billy is only a clown fail to listen closely to his serious message, perhaps because of the outrageous way with which he delivers it. But make no mistake that Billy has carefully constructed both his message and his means of delivering it. He delivers it in a way that seems absurd in order to bring a modicum of attention to his message. Americans love their shopping and what they see as conveniences, and they fiercely resist any suggestion that they need to change their ways.
No, I’m not referring to Voldemort of the Harry Potter movies. I’m referring to Sarah Palin, who I’ve resisted mentioning, because she has been serving as the perfect freak show for our conflict-obsessed media, which uses her freakness simply to sell faux “news.” Or maybe not. Depending on who you listen to, she might actually be the future face of the Republican Party, despite the fact that she has never uttered an idea useful for solving a real-world political problem. Or maybe, as Andrew Sullivan writes, she is not a political phenomenon at all, but a religious leader. If you doubt Sullivan’s claim, check Palin’s recent quote, which Sullivan quotes at length in this post from The Daily Dish.
Sullivan’s characterization of Palin doesn’t surprise me, though; I’ve come to see most religions as special cases of politics. Both are elaborate systems that use vague and largely unsubstantiated fables and threats to enable small elite groups to coordinate and control much larger groups of people, for better and worse.
In the face of these daunting issues, what was it that preoccupied the Senate on the eve of its long weekend recess? The legislative drama du jour is the standoff between the White House and Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), who has put a personal hold on more than 70 executive branch appointments until the Obama administration agrees to fund a couple of pork-barrel projects he has earmarked for his state. One involves tens of millions of dollars for an FBI laboratory focusing on improvised explosives — something the bureau doesn’t think it needs. . . . Unless the administration agrees to give Shelby what he wants, he intends to invoke an archaic senatorial privilege that allows him to prevent the chamber from considering any of the administration’s nominees to executive branch vacancies, no matter how crucial. Without the 60 votes to force cloture — another archaic convention — there’s nothing the Democrats or the White House can do.
Writing at the NYT, Bob Herbert thinks that the U.S. desperately needs to turn things around. His concern is “frantic, debt-driven consumption, speculative bubbles, exotic financial instruments . . .” He’s not buying talk of our economic “recovery”:
We don’t hear a lot that is serious about the sorry state of the nation’s infrastructure or the trade policies that crippled so many American industries or our inability (or unwillingness) to compete effectively with China when it comes to the new world of energy for the 21st century or our abject failure to provide a quality public education for the next generation of American workers, scientists, artists and entrepreneurs.
Speaking at a conference here on Wednesday, Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania said that if we don’t act quickly in developing long-term solutions to these and other problems, the United States will be a second-rate economic power by the end of this decade. A failure to act boldly, he said, will result in the U.S. becoming “a cooked goose.”
How bad is the U.S. budget deficit? It’s so bad that I’ve lost sleep over it during the past year, even though the extent of the deficit rarely makes any local news. Here’s how Brett Arends of the Wall Street Journal summarizes the situation:
The federal government is expected to borrow $1.6 trillion this year, or about $15,000 for every household in the country. Over the next 10 years it’s expected to borrow a total of $8.5 trillion. And the government was already deeply in debt to begin with. . . Remarkably, the Treasury market has not yet panicked about the deficits: Yields have barely risen this week. Embedded in the market is a long-term inflation forecast of about 2.5 percent. I call that a dangerous complacency.
After giving the bad news, Arends gives some advice on how to protect your savings, though he doesn’t sound optimistic.
Would you like to eat local fresh food, but you’re wondering what is grown locally and when? The NRDC (National Resource Defense League) has the answers you seek.
Clarence Thomas is upset that many people have leveled intense criticism at the U.S. Supreme Court in light of the Citizen’s United decision:
Questioning the Supreme Court and other government branches needs to stay within the range of fair criticism or “run the risk in our society of undermining institutions that we need to preserve our liberties,” Justice Clarence Thomas said Thursday.
Dear Justice Thomas:
If you don’t like the criticism, there are several things you can do about it. You can resign. Or you can quit supporting the conservative wing of the Court when it makes decisions that undermine the institutions that we need to preserve our liberties.
What did you possibly think would occur when you invited corporations to pour unlimited money into the elections of our politicians (as if it weren’t bad enough already). Consider, too that Citizen’s United will allow corporations to purchase state judges too (and consider this revealing look at the “judicial philosophy of John Roberts, with whom you’ve aligned yourself). Didn’t it occur to you that you could have invoked stare decisis, and at least not made the problem worse? And answer this: Why should people continue to have respect for the United States Supreme Court when it delivers repeated crippling blows to the ability of the People to run their own government? Do you think that letting corporations buy politicians was the “original intent” of the Founders? Can you think of any liberty that is more fundamental than the ability of the Citizens to elect representatives who will be honestly responsive to them, not corrupted by huge amounts of money?
But you really don’t want to hear any of this. You’d rather that people simple pretend that you are doing a great job now matter how badly you screw up.
According to The Onion, an American bald eagle has spoken out, frustrated that so many people assume that he is pro-war.
Frustrated by the widely held assumption that he unequivocally endorses the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a bald eagle said Monday that his thoughts on the conflicts were far more nuanced than many Americans might expect. Speaking to reporters from his nest in the upper branches of a 175-foot ponderosa pine tree, the eagle explained that each member of his species was different and none should be taken for granted as a lockstep supporter of American military policy.
Planned Parenthood plans to run this pro-choice ad on Superbowl Sunday to counter an anti-abortion ad featuring Tim Tebow. This is a sophisticated spot that gets its point across without being confrontational. I do admire the work done to put it together. Then again, I suspect that tens of millions of people will see these two ads and not a single person will change his/her opinion on the issue of abortion.
About 1,000 people showed up to see Sarah Palin talk, and this garners lots of press coverage. http://cbs4.com/national/Sarah.Palin.Tea.2.1476118.html When about 1,000 people protest a needless military occupation that has killed thousands of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians, it gets no coverage from FOX (or from the local St. Louis Newspaper). h... »
For most of us here in Nashville, the convention came and went without incidence. It was largely ignored by the media, except for the local Fox tv affiliate, There was a little bit of controversy, however, when two of the speakers withdrew from the convention after finding that the convention was organized as a for profit event by a Nashville crim... »
Many people are refocusing on the kinds of eating that keep us healthy. Michael Pollan boils it down to this: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/health/02brod.html »
And here's a diet to keep you from getting cancer. It looks like some pretty good advice. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-servanschreiber-md-phd/20-new-anticancer-rules_b_450166.html »
Mark: I was told that those suffering from pinched nerves are free to try to bear the pain as long as they are willing, without danger of causing permanent injury. I was also told that if you have numbness, however, that this is a sign that the nerve is being destroyed, and that if you don't deal with it promptly, optimally within a year, that c... »
thank you for your comments. I am scheduled for 2/10/10 on c - 4,5,6,7. I am doing everything I can to talk myself out of the surgery. In 2006 I had L-4,5 fused in lower back. It went great and only two days in hospital. For some reason I am real nervous about this procedure even though I trust the doc. I am self employed and can't afford the ... »
Economist Joseph Stiglitz comments:"Indeed, there is even skepticism about whether Obama will be able to push through his welcome and long overdue efforts to curtail the too-big-to-fail banks and their reckless risk-taking. And, without that, more likely than not, the economy will face another crisis in the not-too-distant future."http://readersupp... »
CN: I suspect that these devices are illegal, based upon arguments that were raised by a state judge who recently contested a ticket (the City of St. Louis didn't pursue the case on appeal after Dierker apparently prevailed in traffic court at trial, after losing an earlier motion to dismiss- here's a description of the case http://www.timesnews.... »
I've recently viewed Beavan's documentary, No Impact Man, and I highly recommend it. The message closely parallels the message in his book, but the images are powerful. One idea that stood out: In the early days of the project, Beavan received numerous hostile emails from people who didn't merely suggest that he was an attention seeker or someone... »
Here's another way of looking at this budget. What if we had just ended a 20-year program of financial belt-tightening, and celebrated "DEBT FREE AMERICA"? The President gets on the television and announces that we've just paid off an amount of debt equivalent to $100,000 per American household, and that the the money that was being used to serv... »
Jimmy Kimmel offers this rebuttal to the anti-abortion ad by Focus on the Family. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/05/jimmy-kimmels-rebuttal-to_n_451185.html »
One major problem with GDP is that it ignores social and environmental costs of production. Some of those old debts are coming due.But it is a reasonable indication of the size of the economy and strength of the dollar. By normalizing the debt to the GDP, it indicates how big a piece of the economy those un-graspably large numbers really are.70% is... »
Last night, my husband received this "photo enforcement traffic violation". $100 fine. This is the second time he got this. He's thinking of not paying this time. Atty. Vieth, is it a good idea not to? What will happen if he doesn't pay this $100 fine? Would he get into a bigger trouble? »
Very Interesting. In terms of thesis implications, we should discuss this in person some time. Too much to type right now. There are differing theories emerging which have to do with this issue of elites and/or ideologues and complexity/need for closure/cognition/ need to evaluate ect. and there are a few interesting paths to be tread, research wi... »
The first Supreme leader of Iran was Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ruhollah Mousavi Khomeini. The current one isGrand Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Hoseyni Khameneisimilar names. Khameni succeeded Khomeni in 1989. »
