I was tempted to share some advertisements I recently spied for luxury items to be purchased in the name of Jesus’ birthday, but such ads are ubiquitous. Pointing them out would be unneeded fuel on a small fire.

Instead, I’ll share a post I wrote two years ago about the Grinch.

I find it ironic that the Grinch’s moment of allegedly great heroism occurs when he actually embarks on an act of much greater evil than his Christmas Eve burglarly. That the Grinch pulls off his finale to the applause of a huge annual audience demonstrates that our acquisitive instincts have fully commandeered our conscious cognitive abilities.

Dangerous intersection is now more than 1 1/2 years old.  We currently have a couple dozen active authors who have contributed 1,500 posts on 60 categories.  These posts have drawn almost 7,000 comments.  Many of these posts (I’m guessing perhaps one-third of them) make reference to news of the day, and will age quickly.  There are many other posts that may be of some value months or even years after they were written, however.  Our authors work hard to embed useful quality links in their posts in an effort to inject lasting value into their posts.

Quite often, I run into a topic that has been addressed in some detail by a previous post.  Tracking down those older posts can sometimes be a challenge. The Dangerous Intersection website, which is built upon WordPress, includes a search function that often works fairly well in digging up previous posts and comments.  On other occasions, however, the algorithm of that simple search function pulls up too few or too many search results to be useful.

On those occasions, I have turned to the exquisite “Advanced Search” function of Google.  Google’s Advanced Search allows you to focus on the content of a particular website.  You can do this by inserting the URL of that website into the “Domain” field. For instance, if you wanted to search only content found on Dangerous Intersection, merely insert http://dangerousintersection.org/ into the Domain box.

At that point, you can continue to fine-tune your search in many additional ways.  See, for example, the top four fields on the advanced search screen.  You can request Google to return only those results that contain each of the words you enter, or an exact phrase, or all those results containing at least one of a string of words.  You can also ask Google to exclude content containing a word or words that you designate.

You can fine-tune your search request in other ways too.  For instance, you can request content within certain date ranges or limit your search to content found in certain parts of a webpage (e.g., only in the title).  For more assistance in using Google’s advanced search, see the Google Help Screen for it’s Advanced Search.

I offer this information regarding Google advanced search for those of you who might want to search for information on this site (or on any website) where the simple search feature offered on the website itself doesn’t quite get the job done.

Back in the 1970s, when I was an undergrad student at the University of Missouri, I took a psychology course that required me to interview someone who worked in the mental health field.  A nurse working at the Missouri State Mental Hospital (on Arsenal Street in the City of St. Louis) graciously agreed to talk with me.

The woman (her name now escapes me) told me that she previously worked as a nurse at a mental hospital in Canada, back in the 1950s.  Many people don’t realize that in the 1950s there were very few drugs available for doctors to prescribe for people with serious mental illness.  Therefore, the hospitals often served as places where people with “mental illness” stayed for their own protection or to protect society from them.  Protecting these patients was often a big challenge for the mental hospital staffs.

The nurse I interviewed told me about two categories of patients that were especially challenging.  The “catatonics” were severely depressed, to such an extent that they literally stopped getting out of bed.  In fact, they lay in bed in the same position for such long periods that they were at risk for developing dangerous infectious bedsores.  Another category of challenging patients were the manics, people who “raced up and down the halls” knocking things over and running into other people.

The nurse told me about the imaginative “solution” to dealing with these two types of patients at her hospital.  The professional staff took one catatonic patient and one manic patient and paired them up, connecting them with handcuffs.  The nurse was dead serious as she told me this story.  She explained that the manic patient kept the catatonic patient on the move, thereby lessening the risk of bedsores.  On the other hand, the catatonic patient slowed down the manic patient, thereby lessening the risk of collisions in the hallways.  She told me that this handcuff technique was used on a regular basis at her hospital and that it was a “successful” technique.

I can’t imagine how frustrating this situation must have been for the patients.  I can only hope that none of the patients injured each other (or killed each other) out of frustration.  On the other hand, it must of been incredibly challenging for the hospital staff to deal with these serious types of mental illnesses without any of the psychoactive prescription drugs now available. 

I haven’t discussed in this interview with anyone else who worked in a mental hospital in the 1950s, but I would be interested in knowing whether the “handcuff technique” was a widespread practice, or whether it was simply a technique used by the Canadian hospital where the nurse I interviewed worked.

The NYT has written a long piece of Mike Huckabee. Who is he? 

Huckabee is an admirer of the late Jerry Falwell (whose son, Jerry Jr., recently endorsed his candidacy) and subscribes wholeheartedly to the principles of the Moral Majority. He also affirms the Baptist Faith and Message statement: ‘‘The Holy Bible . . . has truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter. Therefore, all Scripture is totally true and trustworthy.’’

Huckabee says he believes that the next president of the United States will have to lead Western civilization in a worldwide conflict with radical Islam.

He spent a year at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Tex., before dropping out to work for the televangelist James Robison, who bought him his first decent wardrobe and showed him how to use television.

As indicated by Alternet, the fact that Huckabee dropped out of the seminary doesn’t keep him from claiming that he has a theology degree:

About a month ago, Republican presidential candidates were trying to position themselves as the best suited to combat global terrorism. Giuliani pointed to 9/11, McCain pointed to his military service several decades ago, and Mike Huckabee pointed to his ministerial training.

“I think I’m stronger than most people because I truly understand the nature of the war that we are in with Islamo fascism,” Huckabee told the Christian Broadcasting Network. “These are people that want to kill us. It’s a theocratic war. And I don’t know if anybody fully understands that. I’m the only guy on that stage with a theology degree. I think I understand it really well.”

Now, on its face, it’s a pretty unpersuasive pitch. After all, how much could Huckabee have learned at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in the 1970s about 21st-century fundamentalist Islam? Probably not much.

But as it turns out,the theology-degree claim may be more than unconvincing; it may also be false.

Alternet published this email that Joe Carter, Huckabee’s research director, recently sent to Jim Geraghty of the National Review: 

Jim, Governor Huckabee doesn’t have a theology degree. He only spent a year in seminary.

Intrigued by my review of numerous articles on neural plasticity, I concocted a simple experiment that had dramatic results.  I set out to see whether I could cause people to have the illusion that a cheap rubber hand could “become” their own hand.  Over the past few years, I’ve run this experiment on about a half-dozen people, just out of curiosity.  Most of my “subjects” found that the experience was “creepy,” in that it appeared that the rubber hand “became” their own hand.  It’s an do-it-yourself artificially-induced out-of-body experience.

Here’s how I ran my experiment.  Step one is to buy a rubber hand, the creepy kind often used in gags.  

Here’s one place where you can buy a fake hand.  Alternatively, here’s a site that teaches you how to make your own rubber hand.  You’ll also need to bend a coat hanger into a “Y” shape. 

Finally, you’ll need a simple barrier, such as a large book.  That’s all the equipment you’ll need.  Here’s how you run the experiment.

Put the rubber hand side-by-side with the person’s same-side real hand. 

You’ll be using the “Y” shaped coat hanger to touch precisely the same part of the rubber hand and the subject’s hand simultaneously.  Move the hanger around and tap on or stroke a wide variety of corresponding parts of the two hands.

While you tap on the same portions of each hand, the subject should only be looking at the rubber hand–that’s why you’ll need some sort of barrier.  As you can see below, even a pad of paper will do the trick.

You’ll need to do this tapping and stroking of the two hands for a minute or two before the subject experiences the illusion. You’ll want to exercise great care that the ends of the hanger always touch or stroke the corresponding parts of the real hand the the rubber hand simultaneously so that the illusion is repeatedly enhanced. 

Most subjects will be laughing as you start.  After a minute or two, they will start commenting that “something” is happening.   (more…)

If you read and listen to enough information and testimony by proponents of Intelligent Design, you’ll discover that the basic premise is: “If I don’t understand exactly how something happens, then it must have been done by a supernatural agent.”

This telling phrase is rarely used by Design Proponents, who evolved from Creationists via the missing link “CDesign proponentsists” that was excavated from a draft of their textbook during discovery for the Dover Trial (click to watch the Nova Documentary of the trial).

One Intelligent Design website has an article it calls Intelligent Design in a Nutshell. Anyone with an understanding of science or information theory will find the unsupported and largely disproved assertions laughable. However, by mis-stating the scientific method, and claiming as supporting proof scientific conclusions that have long been discarded, it makes a convincing case.

Former child actor, and aging teen heartthrob Kirk Cameron is a visible proponent of this odd IDea (sic). Here’s a short video of a Fox News report interviewing him after he taped a debate against Richard Dawkins. There are some annotations placed by the video editor, but the interview itself is untouched. Watch it and see that my initial assertion is correct. Kirk actually says to the unapologetically supportive Creationist (”unbiased”) interviewer, that if he doesn’t understand how it could have formed, then we must accept that it was obviously designed.

(more…)

Check out this video.

Isn’t this exciting? This new technique is called seam carving.

Seam carving is an image resizing algorithm developed by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir. This algorithm alters the dimensions of an image not by scaling or cropping, but rather by intelligently removing pixels from (or adding pixels to) the image that carry little importance.

The importance of a pixel is generally measured by its contrast when compared with its neighbor pixels, but other measures may be used. Additionally, it’s possible to define (or autodetect) areas of high importance (faces, buildings, etc.) in which pixels may not be deleted, and conversely, areas of zero importance which should be removed first. From this information, the algorithm detects seams (continuous lines of pixels joining opposite edges of the image) which have the lowest importance, and deletes those. This shrinks the image by one horizontal or vertical line, depending on which direction the seam ran.

Seam carving can also be run in reverse by adding (interpolated) pixels along the lowest energy seam.

With this technique, it’s now possible to scale pictures by a large amount, while still retaining details. In normal Image scaling, scale factors greater than 2 or less than 0.5 usually result in visible image quality degradation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seam_carving

For more scientific details go to Shamir’s website and take a look at the paper. And if you just can’t get enough, there’s also a larger version of the video on the website for downloading (I recommend this, the quality is much better and you can see more details).

I’m pondering an idea which is certainly not original, though it is an idea powerful enough to make a mockery of any moral system that looks to the consequences of actions to characterize the moral quality of those actions. 

Here’s the thought:  Every so often something really bad happens to me.  I’m in an auto accident.  I lose my job.  My marriage fails.  My children ignore me.   Something expensive breaks.  Someone I care about dies. My attempts to impress someone important go completely unnoticed.  I spend endless hours on a project and it does not turn out the way I had hoped.

Each of these things are the types of things we would easily categorized as “bad.”  They are so obviously bad that we can predict that our friends, upon hearing of these things, will console us.  But are “bad” things really bad?

After all, while I’m healing from that auto accident, an incredibly important thought occurs to me and I change my life for the “better.”  Even though I’ve lost a job I cherished, I then find another job which I like even better.  After my marriage fails, I make some changes in my life and I encounter a new love.  When my children ignore me, I learned to pay more attention to them and then I benefit from an improved parent-child relationship.  That thing that broke is something I didn’t need in my life anyway.  The death of my close friend inspires me to be a better person.  When that person I was trying to impress ignores me, I realize that I should have been spending my time doing other sorts of things anyway.

On countless occasions, a “disaster” turns out to be a great excuse to do something we should have done anyway. When one door closes shut, three other doors open wide.  And I’m not talking only about tiny disappointments.  I’m talking about major disasters.  The sorts of things that you are absolutely certain are horrible. But in the long run, they often aren’t. Fifteen years later (far enough removed that you don’t feel the intense mental or physical pain that you felt in the past), you realize that that “bad” thing was perhaps the best thing that ever happened to you, even though you hated it at the time and you were certain that it was ruining your life.  You did something really stupid, for instance, but you learned a big lesson and never again screwed up in that way again.

Someone might object that natural disasters, all genocides and at least some wars are absolutely bad, given the horror, the permanency of death and the lasting pain. That is certainly true from the perspective of many individuals. Such events, however, are often catalysts for widespread change that prevents future events of even greater magnitude. Perhaps a hurricane provokes officials to implement a new warning and rescue system. Perhaps the horror of a genocide causes society to reevaluate bigotted attitudes and helps stave off future genocides of even greater magnitude. Wars always provoke episodes of heroism within the insanity of the violence and they do sometimes cause the defeat of a malignant regime (e.g., the defeat of Hitler in WWII). There is the possibility that even a senseless war will teach long term lessons that might avoid future senseless wars (though this often doesn’t happen). 

The other side of the coin consists of acts which seem “good,” that result in widespread horror.  I would put rampant consumerism in that category.  (more…)

If you would like to review the sad details of this lost “war,” visit Rolling Stone’s recent article, “How America Lost the War on Drugs.”

Thanks to new research, U.S. policy-makers knew with increasing certainty what would work and what wouldn’t. The tragedy of the War on Drugs is that this knowledge hasn’t been heeded. We continue to treat marijuana as a major threat to public health, even though we know it isn’t. We continue to lock up generations of teenage drug dealers, even though we know imprisonment does little to reduce the amount of drugs sold on the street. And we continue to spend billions to fight drugs abroad, even though we know that military efforts are an ineffective way to cut the supply of narcotics in America or raise the price.

All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs - with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used. Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 1.5 million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. We have nearly 500,000 people behind bars for drug crimes - a twelvefold increase since 1980 - with no discernible effect on the drug traffic. Virtually the only success the government can claim is the decline in the number of Americans who smoke marijuana - and even on that count, it is not clear that federal prevention programs are responsible. In the course of fighting this war, we have allowed our military to become pawns in a civil war in Colombia and our drug agents to be used by the cartels for their own ends. Those we are paying to wage the drug war have been accused of ­human-rights abuses in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. In Mexico, we are now ­repeating many of the same mistakes we have made in the Andes.

You know who you are!

In March, 2007, National Geographic published a story about a perfectly planned city that didn’t quite turn out perfectly.   It’s a story of a powerful commercial enterprise designing a community from scratch under a figurehead government, combined with input from mega-churches.  It’s the story of Orlando.  It’s also a story that illustrates many of the problems faced by any planned economy.

Everything happening to America today is happening here, and it’s far removed from the cookie-cutter suburbanization of life a generation ago. The Orlando region has become Exhibit A for the ascendant power of our cities’ exurbs: blobby coalescences of look-alike, overnight, amoeba-like concentrations of population far from city centers. These huge, sprawling communities are where more and more Americans choose to be, the place where job growth is fastest, home building is briskest, and malls and megachurches are multiplying as newcomers keep on coming. Who are all these people? They’re you, they’re me, and increasingly, they are nothing like the blue-eyed “Dick and Jane” of mythical suburban America.

Orlando’s explosion is visible in every shopping mall and traffic jam.

What are some of the problems?

Today Orlando is a cauldron of all the communal characteristics Disney sought to control. In its Parramore district, you can stock up on crack, meth, and angel dust. According to the Morgan Quitno research firm, in 2006 it joined such cities as Detroit and St. Louis to become one of the 25 most dangerous cities in America. The result is armed guards at the gates of “communities” where entry is solely by invitation. The Orlando area also has one of the highest pedestrian death rates among the largest metro regions in the country. Four decades after Disney’s fateful flyover, Orlando is a place of enormous vitality, diversity, ugliness, discord, inventiveness, possibility, and disappointed hopes, where no clown in a character costume can tell people how to live, let alone where to park.

I recently visited Chicago with my nine-year old daughter.  We stayed at an old hotel near the city center, just south of the Chicago River.  Though it was a high rent district, one of our neighbors worked as a beggar.

When the beggar first approached us on that wide sidewalk in front of Corner Bakery, my daughter was apprehensive.  He asked us for money and I flatly turned him down.  He grumbled something. 

I almost always reject requests for panhandling and I’m always troubled by my own behavior.  What if that person was legitimately in need, I usually wonder.  What if the beggar is mentally ill and he doesn’t really have the intellectual wherewithal to make the kinds of decisions necessary to improve his situation?  Though I don’t believe in the existence of any sentient God, another thought sometimes occurs to me:  what if God Himself actually does exist and He has taken the form of a beggar to test us, to see how we treat those who are less fortunate than us?

When my daughter and I returned to our hotel that night, the same fellow was still walking about, asking people for money.   When we saw him the next morning too, I decided to try to learn a few things about him.  I gave him two dollars and asked him if he would tell me a few things about himself.  He looked happy to meet someone who cared enough to listen.

Herman [not his real name] is 50 years old.  He used to work at an accounting firm, “sweeping up,” but claimed that he “couldn’t work anymore” because of a chronic leg injury.  He didn’t walk with any noticeable limp. Herman explained that he went through some “tough times” a few years ago, leading up to the deaths of his parents.  I asked him if he had tried to get a job recently.  He said that he simply “couldn’t.”  He told me that he was homeless. He allowed me to take his photo and he gave us the “thumbs up” as we parted ways (I’ve blurred out his face). 

My daughter asked me why we spoke to the man.  I told her “because he is a human being and he has a story to tell.”

The following day, Herman waved hello to us, calling out “St. Louis!”  We chatted a bit more in the 25-degree weather.  Herman walks the Chicago sidewalks from 7 am to 7 pm every day.  He shakes a small Styrofoam cup at people twelve hours, every day, even in the frozen Chicago wind that causes many people to scurry to get inside.

Here’s the obvious question: Though Herman “couldn’t work,” he was willing to spend long hours every day not working—and doing it with dedication.  Why . . . why couldn’t he just use that same energy to work a real job?

We spoke a few more times over my three-day stay in Chicago. During that short time, he changed from a potential threat to an acquaintance to both me and my daughter. 

Herman and I live in completely separate worlds, I’d like to believe.  Then again, Herman was out there again tonight, shaking his little cup at people while, 265 miles away, I wrote about him and found myself disturbed by his predicament.  But not disturbed enough to do anything about it.  There’s no moral to this story, I keep whispering to myself.

As reported by Scientific American, Researchers have concluded that only 10,000 years ago, the human transition from living off the land to actively raising crops and domesticated animals was accompanied by an accelerated rate of evolutionary change. The pressure for this change occcurred because populations became highly concentrated compared to hunter/gatherer societies.  This concentration raised many new biological challenges, such as staving off serious diseases that were common in crowded living spaces. How much did human biological changes accelerate?

Comparing the amount of genetic differentiation between humans and our closest relatives, chimpanzees, suggests that the pace of change has accelerated to 10 to 100 times the average long-term rate, the researchers write in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

What kind of biological changes occurred in our species in these recent times?  One quite visible recent change was skin color, but there were many other recent changes:

“Their bodies and teeth shrank. Their brains shrank, too,” he adds. “But they started to get new alleles [alternative gene forms] that helped them digest the food more efficiently. New protective alleles allowed a fraction of people to survive the dread illnesses better.”

By looking for wide swaths of genetic material that vary little from individual to individual within these sections of great variation, the researchers identified regions that both originated recently and conferred some kind of advantage (because they became common rapidly). For example, the gene known as LCT gave adults the ability to digest milk and G6PD offered some protection against the malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum parasite.

“Ten thousand years ago, no one on planet Earth had blue eyes,” Hawks notes, because that gene—OCA2—had not yet developed. “We are different from people who lived only 400 generations ago in ways that are very obvious; that you can see with your eyes.”

According to the researchers, not all human populations changed equally.

For example, Africans show a slightly lower mutation rate. “Africans haven’t had to adapt to a fundamentally new climate,” because modern humanity evolved where they live, [anthropologist Gregory] Cochran says. “Europeans and East Asians, living in environments very different from those of their African ancestors and early adopters of agriculture, were more maladapted, less fitted to their environments.”

On Bill Moyers’ Journal, Bill Moyers discussed this multifaceted issue with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. 

This video is well worth watching for many reasons.  The introduction includes a clip of John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech to Southern Baptist preachers to answer their opposition to a Catholic president.  Kennedy’s understanding and articulation of the wall between church and state is inspirational. 

Watching this video, I learned of the “You Choose” site within youtube.com, where you can watch the candidates speaking on issues, side by side.  For instance, here are the candidates’ positions on energy independence. (check out Barack Obama’s position on energy in a speech he gave in Detroit.  In my opinion, he is one of the few candidates that “gets it.”).

Jamieson and Moyers spend substantial time analyzing the “avalanche of misogyny” aimed at Hillary Clinton, some of these attacks Bible-based, many of them verging on pornographic (here’s another site documenting these attacks).  Here’s a sampling of the discussion between Moyers and Jamieson:

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON:  [U]nderlying many of these assertions is the assumption that any woman in power will, by necessity, entail emasculating men and, as a result, a statement of fundamental threat.

So, why shouldn’t you vote for Hillary Clinton? Well, first, she can’t be appropriately a woman and be in power. She must be a man. Hence, the site that says Hillary Clinton can’t be the first woman president; Hillary Clinton’s actually a man. But also explicit statements that suggest castrating, testicles in lockbox. She’s going to emasculate men. It’s a zero-sum game in which a woman in power necessarily means that men can’t be men.

BILL MOYERS: And you can’t use your uterus and your brain. That’s the old argument, right? You can’t be caring and tough. That’s the old argument against women, right?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Well, and at one time there was actually an argument that if women became educated, they would become infertile. There was also, for a long period of time, serious penalties for women who tried to speak in public. And the residue of this is a language that suggests that women in power cannot be women and be in power. And as a result, as Hillary Clinton certifies herself as being tough enough to be president, competent enough to be president, these attacks say then she can’t be president because she’s not actually a woman. And you can’t trust someone who is that inauthentic. So underlying this and underlying the vulgarity and underlying the assertions of raw sexual violence is deep fear about a woman holding power.

Mike Huckabee doesn’t want to discuss the sermons he gave while he served as an evangelical pastor. Why not? Is he embarrasssed? Tim Grieve of Salon.com’s  ”War Room” writes about the evolution of Huckabee’s ”explanation” about how people came to exist on Earth.   In one of Huckabee’s early documented sermons he proclaimed:

“It doesn’t embarrass me one bit to let you know that I believe Adam and Eve were real people.”

As we noted the other day, it does seem to “embarrass” Huckabee the candidate to say that now. Over the past six months, Huckabee has gone from saying that he doesn’t believe in evolution, to saying that he doesn’t think he evolved from apes, to saying that evolution is “not a yes or no question” and that he thinks “there was a God behind” the creation of man, to saying that while he believes God created man, he doesn’t know “how he did it, in the intricate manner.” “I think some people get all wrapped up [in] ‘OK, was it, did he take the rib out of Adam? Did he make it like’ — I have no reason to believe he didn’t. But I don’t know.”

Is that the same thing as saying that you’re not embarrassed to declare that “Adam and Eve were real people”? Huckabee told reporters back in October that if there’s a conflict between science and what he believes of God, he’ll stick with God because science changes and God doesn’t. Maybe that’s right. But the question is, has Huckabee changed? Is what he said as a pastor different from what he says as a candidate? Which one represents the “real” Huckabee? If a man says that his faith drives the decisions he makes, aren’t voters entitled to ask those questions and expect that they’ll be answered?

Tim Grieve raises another good question regarding all of these deeply religious people who don’t want to talk about their specific religious beliefs.  What if Huckabes believes that the world is going to end in three years (it’s not clear what he believes in that regard)?  Wouldn’t that affect the sorts of policies he would promote as president?  You’d think so.

Here’s my take.   Here’s the reason these guys (Romney and Huckabee) resist freely talking about their specific beliefs in front of a big general audience (not just their fellow believers hunkering down inside of a church).  They know that they’ll look silly because their beliefs are silly.  When I say “silly” I mean unsupported by any credible evidence.  

Not that people who make far-fetched supernatural claims are trying to be silly.  In my opinion, there is a serious need believers are trying to address, but it has nothing to do with anything supernatural.  For more on why people really proclaim the oxymoronic sorts of things they proclaim in churches, see this post.

The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood is demanding that McDonald’s immediately stop advertising on children’s report cards. 

Last week, students in Seminole County, Florida received their report cards in envelopes adorned with Ronald McDonald promising a free Happy Meal to students with good grades, behavior, or attendance.

“This promotion takes in-school marketing to a new low,” said Susan Linn, director of CCFC and a psychologist at Judge Baker Children’s Center.  “It bypasses parents and targets children directly with the message that doing well in school should be rewarded by a Happy Meal.”

The advertisement appears on report cards envelopes for students in kindergarten through fifth grade.  The envelopes are used to transport report cards to and from home throughout the school year. 

Campaign For A Commercial-Free Childhood is a

national coalition of health care professionals, educators, advocacy groups and concerned parents who counter the harmful effects of marketing to children through action, advocacy, education, research, and collaboration. We support the rights of children to grow up – and the rights of parents to raise them – without being undermined by rampant commercialism.

Here’s how Christina Page addresses this question:

• 98 percent of American women have done it.
• 37 million Americans are currently doing it.
• Most of the GOP candidates oppose it.
  What is it?

“It” is using birth control.   The GOP candidates have made it clear that they oppose the right of women to choose abortions.

The GOP candidates have not yet been forced to explain their generally ridiculous positions on this incredibly important issue of whether birth control should be freely available to consenting adults.  It’s time for this free ride to end.  They should be forced to take a position.  Why?  Honesty on this issue will reveal their ambitions to destroy additional personal liberties in order to hang onto the votes of fundamentalist zealots (I know that this is redundant).  Here’s how Page explains her position:

These guys [GOP candidates] may try to outdo each other on anti-abortion rhetoric and explain, unflinchingly, how doctors will be thrown in jail when Roe fails (an inevitability in their minds). But it’s the contraception question that really scares them. Because once the presidential debate focuses on how the candidates plan to alter the average American’s sex life (made possible thanks to family planning) it is lifted from the pink ghetto of “woman’s issues” and becomes a concern of male voters too.

For more evidence regarding the prevalent GOP position that birth control should not be freely available to American adults, see these previous DI posts:

Beware Claims of Pregnancy Resource Centers

The Bush administration relishes unplanned pregnancies - new evidence.

Focus of religious organization: Ban all birth control

Bush’s new head of family-planning programs opposes birth control

Protecting pharmacists who refuse to fill valid prescriptions for legal drugs

Those abstinence-only programs are really bringing down the teen pregnancy rate . . . or are they?

Conservatives: Stop having sex for the pleasure of it! 

Special proms for prepubescent fundamentalist girls 

I’m in Chicago with my nine-year old daughter and Shedd Aquarium was an important destination for us.  We spent much of our Aquarium time at the Wild Reef exhibit. 

The coral reefs of the world support about a quarter of our sea life, so they are immensely important, yet humans are destroying them in a wide variety of ways. 

As important as the reefs are to world ecology, reef life is also stunningly beautiful.  You can see these communities up close at Shedd.  The irony is hard to ignore whenever you can view warm water life in Chicago while it’s bitterly cold outside. 

Shedd Aquarium does a wonderful job displaying its marine life.  It’s difficult to stop taking photos, if you have a digital camera. I took more than 100 photos, then deleted many of them, leaving about a dozen photos I liked.  The challenge is not finding beautiful scenes to photograph.  The Aquarium is full of such opportunities.  The challenges are the low light conditions (no flash photography allowed, for the protection of the animals), combined with the quick movements of some of the creatures.  Note:  I took all of these photos with a Canon A700, a modest consumer-grade digital camera that is about 2-years old.  Also, these photos are only minimally retouched.  Comparable scenes await anyone interested in traveling to Chicago to visit Shedd Aquarium.

Many of the organisms living at a reef look like underwater plants, but they are actually animals.  Those animals include the corals themselves, as well as sea anemones, sea urchins. crinoids and sponges (for more on our sponge cousins, see here–actually all living things our the cousins of humans).  Some of the reef animals simply sound like plants, such as sea cucumbers.  To learn more about the lives of corals, wonderful footage and explanations are included in David Attenborough’s Blue Planet series, which costs $43 at Amazon.  As an aside, I can’t believe the large number of people who consider $43 to be too much to spend on a educational documentary of breath-taking beauty, yet they will spend more than $100 many times each year to take their families to watch their favorite sports team play games.

Without further ado, here are some more of the incredible (and incredibly beautiful) things you can see at an ocean reef (or at the Shedd Aquarium):

This display includes several jelly fish pushing up against the glass and against the bottom of the display (the jellies are about 5 inches in diameter).  Members of this species of jelly fish hold their tentacles out (rather than dangle them down) to capture prey.

My daughter viewing one of the elaborate displays of coral at Shedd Aquarium.

Garden eels stick up out of the sea floor.   

My favorite animal counsin, the sponge. (more…)

Now Florida has joined the Creationism debate. In brief:

Florida’s public-school students for years have been studying “biological changes over time,” but proposed revisions in state science standards would for the first time use another term for that concept: evolution.

Let the games begin. Letter writers are up in arms about letting this evil word come between their public-school educated kids and the blessed truths of the ancient texts.

In response pro-science letter writers, Christian and otherwise, are fighting to keep Florida off the laughing stock list.

Always the latest on this issue at Google news.

I’m in Chicago with my 9-year old daughter this weekend. It’s a wonderful city to walk, even in the cold. You just bundle up and start walking. And when you do, you’ll feel the energy on the streets and you’ll see some incredible architecture. I never get tired of it.

I took these two photos with a Canon A700, a consumer grade digital camera that is about 2-years old.  It’s amazing what can happen when you go out and just point and shoot, even in the evening, as long as you brace your camera against something solid to accommodate the slowed shutter speed.  This first shot is from the Shedd Aquarium, lookng north toward downtown.

This second shot is looking southwest from a location near Michigan and Wacker. 

I decided to add one more.  My daughter and I are staying in the Club Quarters Hotel (really reasonable, great location in downtown Chicago).  We went up to the 38th floor and shot this photo through a tiny window–(some of the shadows are reflections from the inside).  But you can sense the cold temperature outside, right?

 My daughter has a doll called Kaya.  I really don’t mind this doll at all, although many dolls aggravate me.  Most dolls are unabashedly materialist.  Kaya genuinely seemed to be an earnest survivor–a native American just trying to get by.  American Girl did a great job with Kaya. She is hardworking (according to the books that describe her tales) as well as gorgeous.  My oldest daughter (aged 9) admires Kaya for the right reasons.  Meet Kaya.

Well . . . my daughter and I traveled to Chicago to have a special father-daughter vacation.  My daughter asked to visit the Chicago American Girl Store.  I quickly agreed.  It was her vacation too, and I like to believe that I am an armchair anthropologist.  Therefore, I’m always at work. 

If you have trouble finding the store in Chicago, ask anyone walking down the Magnificent Mile and they’ll tell you.  The American Girl store is a major Chicago institution.

I just assumed that I knew what kind of merchandise was in the store, but I was wrong.  There is a lot more to American Girl than brave little Kaya.  There are all kinds of dolls, including trendy, preppy, smug, materialist little dolls.  And how dare I call what they sell “merchandise”!

Here’s a slogan prominently displayed throughout the store: Those dolls are “just like you.”  Just like me?   Oh, I suppose they weren’t really talking to me.   But those dolls are supposedly just like all those little girl customers.   You’ll recognize those girls by the way they drag their parents around the store and convince their parents to pull out their credit cards for those expensive accessories–even Kaya has lots of accessories, including a set of plastic food for $20.

“Just like you.”  What does that really mean?  It means that the professional staff of the store can match those dolls up with your daughter’s physical traits.  It also means that you can buy matching clothes for your daughter and her doll(s). By the way, that staff does include more than a few young men.  Men who aren’t afraid to play with (or at least sell) dolls.  The staff can match you up with your doll-counterpart fairly easily, because they have dozens of potential matches:

If you have medium brown colored skin, they have a $100 doll for you.  I asked one of the staff whether they match up the personality with each girl’s personality.  She looked confused, then laughed and said “no.”  Those dolls are a lot like you–except (and don’t tell this to any of the little girls) they are plastic and not alive.  Don’t tell that to anyone at the store, because they spend their energy succdessfully convincing the girls otherwise.  The store has a big theater where real people portray the dolls in elaborate productions.   Each ticket to one of these productions is about $26.  

Ooops.  Did your doll have a bad hair day?  If so, you’ll need to take her to the American Girl Salon, for a $20 hair styling:

If your doll loses her head (or arm), you can take her to the American Girl Hospital.  They don’t make housecalls and they don’t have an ambulance that comes out to the scene of the accident.   But they are great doctors, according to the young female clerk.  I asked whether any of the patients have died at the hospital and she gave me a nervous laugh.

I asked her whether those “Restrooms” mentioned on the sign are for the dolls or for the girls.  She told me that they are restrooms for girls, though those restrooms include special accommodations for the dolls in the restroom, some sort of doll lounge, so that the girls don’t need to take the dolls into the stalls.  (more…)

Mitt Romney has made it clear that he intends to serve the law first, his religion second. That he feels he ought not to have to justify his religious beliefs in order to run for president of the United States. The parallels to John F. Kennedy’s Houston speech are dripping with relevance and poignancy.

As far as it goes, I agree with him. This question ought to be utterly irrelevant. What matters are policy positions, the ability to function under stress, a certain eloquence, all the quite Earth-bound concerns that, regardless of our spiritual dispositions, really do bind us all.

But after Reagan, religion has become more and more a policy issue. Little by little, until our current president, organized religions have become part and parcel of a president’s campaign stance and now inextricably linked to policy. Bush has breeched the assumed wall of separation. Hard to really blame him for it, he told us he would, and he made good on his promises in that respect. Reagan toyed with the religious right in order to gather votes, but for all the smoke and thunder he never really did anything toward giving them something concrete (other than recognition, which was bad enough). Once the alliance was made, though, it became harder and harder for a presidential candidate to sidestep questions of faith. Even the Democrats have to deal with the legacy of the what I call the Reagan Compact.

Up till Reagan, most fundamentalist groups eschewed politics. Most didn’t even vote. They saw it as pointless. Why be concerned about This World when it will soon pass away in the Second Coming? Why be bothered by petty politics when it is all mere vanity and could distract from the important work of praying to a god that can grant reward and punishment based on a scale that has nothing to do with nuclear disarmament, or farm bills, or social security, or…

But wait. The world must be in a particular condition before Jesus will return. It seems to be lurching in that direction (rough beast-wise) but it’s taking so damn long! Maybe politics can be used to move us along that path faster.

In fact, it becomes clear that all this effort to create a Palestinian state and get the Middle East settled peacefully and willing to accommodate Israel is, in fact, the precise opposite of what Must Be for the stage to be set for the Rapture. These politicians must be stopped!

There were many groups who bought this argument and brought it to the table when they supported Dubya, and even if he publicly thought it was stupid and claimed not to know anything about it, a lot of his campaign supporters knew all about it and pushed it into the debate that went on inside the White House. Not overtly–these folks are not so guileless–but couched in the language of policy decisions. Hence we’re in Iraq in a bad way. Hence we irritated a lot of Palestinians by rejecting the election of Hamas (making ourselves look once again like anti-democrats). Hence we never call Israel to task for boneheaded bad policies which exacerbate the rifts between them and, well, everyone else in the Middle East.

Belatedly, Bush seems to have realized that some of his earlier policy decisions have led to worse problems, not solutions.

But, aside from corporate interests, the people funneling advice and policy papers into his administration have been those interested in certain religious outcomes.

The questions aimed at Romney come from a growing discomfort on the part of the rest of us about overtly religious mindsets inhabiting the Oval Office. Which means that while the sentiment Romney espouses is perfectly correct (religion shouldn’t matter), he is expressing them at a time when his predecessors have made it matter.

There is a huge difference between what Kennedy said and what Romney is saying. Kennedy wanted to move religion off the table. Religion, he suggested, has no place in policy. That regardless of what one may wish the world to be like as dictated by a particular religious viewpoint, the world is what it is and needs to be dealt with based on the commonality of that experience–which is secular. Kennedy didn’t use that term, to be sure, but that’s what he meant. And he vowed to be a secular president. Romney isn’t saying that at all. He’s promising to be a religious president—just not of any particular stripe. In other words, he believes that religion has a place in politics and he intends bringing that viewpoint to the office.

Two things: the first is, everyone brings who they are to that office. I do not believe we ever elected an atheist president. Hard to know, really, but it’s a safe bet. In that sense, how can anyone not bring something so centrally important to their lives into the job they hold? It really is like trying to ban prayer in schools—you really can’t because you can never tell when someone is praying, unless they make a big show of it.

The other is, one’s religion obligates one to a certain code of conduct and colors the way they see the world. This is nothing revolutionary–any philosophy does that, including all the varieties of secular thinking. It only becomes a problem when a decision must be made based on information that runs counter to a religiously-held belief. (Evolution, stem cell research, peace in the Middle East, welfare…)

How serious of an issue is this? Well, let’s see. Kennedy does not seem to have made any decisions that could be defined as Catholic (with the possible exception of his support for the Diem regime in South Vietnam). Nixon was a Quaker, but you’d never have been able to tell from the way he conducted his presidency. Jimmy Carter was a self-professed Born Again Christian, but aside from an admission of secret lust and seeing a UFO there seemed to be no overtly fundamentalist decisions he made. Reagan…not sure what he was, but his use of the term Evil Empire had apocalyptic overtones, and his antipathy toward homosexuals vis-a-vis AIDS research and the funding of related CDC programs strongly suggest a religious take on the world. Bush the First is an unfortunate case. He was wedded to the Religious Right by virtue of Reagan’s election and I think he walked a fine line between lip-service and increasing pressure to radicalize policy. A shame, really, because without that monkey on his back he might have been a far better president. We’ll never know. But the about-face he made on social issues between his positions when in Congress and his ascension to the White House are clearly concessions to the religious wing of the party. Clinton is a Baptist, but he ran the most secularized administration possible. GWB is…

Well, we know what he is.

Romney’s smarter than Bush. I doubt his vice president will run anything, whoever it might be. And as far as it goes, his speech is based on a solid ground. He did make one statement that can be construed as religious partisanship, namely that religion and freedom go together or fall separately. What about secularists? Given that most fundamentalists and many fringe christians have tended to see secularism as a religion (albeit one they detest), I don’t think he intended to shut atheists or agnositics out. In the vocabulary of the religious, we secularists adhere to a faith, we serve a religion–a poor, headless, ignorant religion, according to them, but still–and therefore we can be included, too.

So where’s the problem? Most people, whether they admit it or not, already put a wall between their religion and the way they deal with the world at large. If they didn’t, frankly, they wouldn’t try to make things better in this life for anyone. It only follows that if the world is going to end or if the most important thing is the afterlife, then any effort put into making better homes, developing better health care, solving environmental problems, trying to get better educations for our children are all wastes of time and energy. But while many people claim to believe in the promises of their religions, they act as if the world isn’t going anywhere and that this life is the only one they’re going to get, so we better make it as good as we can.

A politician, though, has a higher responsibility–to reflect the concerns of a constituency. So who is Romney’s constituency?

Fundamentalists don’t trust Mormonism. It ain’t, to them, christian. So if he gets elected, will he have their support? Will he understand their needs? Do they even speak the same language?

(Just as a side issue, here. It’s easy to take potshots at Mormonism. Its beginnings are recent enough to be well-documented. Joseph Smith was a dowser who wasn’t very good at it and there were a number of clients who sued him for misrepresentations and failure to deliver. He “discovered” a new version of christianity, founded a movement, and left New York. To many people, it’s obvious he was a smooth-talking charlatan with a gimmick. In that regard, he was not at all unusual in that time or place. It is, however, difficult to understand why it took root the way it did. But success is attractive and, for better or worse, Mormonism survived and prospered. It’s much harder to poke holes in the founding of christianity, although one reading of the conversion of Paul–and it’s very clear in the text to modern eyes–is that he suffered an epileptic seizure and heard voices, a phenomenon well-documented today, but for some reason unpersuasive to Believers. Nevertheless, the same questions apply–why would anyone buy into either religious movement?)

At the end of the day, when we go to the polls to elect a new president, Romney is right—his religious should not be a barrier to his running or being elected. Other things should guide us. Policy things. And on that basis, I certainly won’t vote for him. If he holds these policy opinions because of his religion, so be it. My problem with him is that he indeed holds those opinions. It doesn’t matter why.

The question we really have to ask of people like Romney is this: if you discover that you were wrong in your policy decisions, will you–can you–change your mind?

Someone who is profoundly committed to a religious view of the world, and has declared that religion is to be part of his administration, may find that he cannot say Yes to that. And that is a far more serious problem than the specifics of whatever religious creed one might profess

While doing the research for my previous post, A Slaughterhouse of One’s Own: A community confronts Santeria, I came across several explanations of exactly how animal sacrifice works in this religion, physically and metaphorically speaking.

The animal is bound and its throat is cut. The carotid artery is sliced with a ceremonial knife and the blood of the animal is drained from its body in the belief that,

…the energy contained in blood of an animal sacrifice opens a channel of direct communication with the Orishas.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/santeri1.htm

(Orishas are the multitude of gods that represent various aspects of life, much as in the Hindu pantheon or the Christian saints.)

The question that first occurred to me when I read this was “Who figured this out?”

I mean, there is no Santeria “bible”, it’s an oral tradition. Someone somewhere in Africa got it in her head that the blood of animals somehow “speaks” to her God and she was persuasive enough to convince others that it was true. So persuasive in fact, that people are still doing it to this day just because a teacher tells them to, even though there is no “written word of God” to back her up.

The original priestess of Santeria must have been wishing really hard for something big and when she killed a goat her wish came true. She deduced that it was the killing that caused the good thing to happen and I can only assume she followed that up with more killing and more good luck.

The second thought that occurred to me was, “How do they know it still works?”

For that matter, how does anyone who prays know that their message is reaching God and that God will act on their request? In a recent scientific study it was proven that prayer is usless from a medical standpoint.

Distant prayer and the bedside use of music, imagery and touch (MIT therapy) did not have a significant effect upon the primary clinical outcome observed in patients undergoing certain heart procedures, researchers at Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI), Duke University Medical Center, the Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC) and seven other leading academic medical institutions across the U.S. have found.

“Prayers for the sick and healing-touch are among the most widely practiced healing traditions around the world,” said Mitchell Krucoff, MD, interventional cardiologist at Duke and lead author of the study. “As widespread as these practices are, few rigorous studies exist to explain any mechanism of action or reliable measures of safety or effectiveness. While many of us are fascinated culturally or philosophically with the mystery of healing and prayer, for the practice of medicine we need to understand these phenomena with data-driven insight.”

I’m sure this is old news for regular readers of DI, but I decided to conduct a personal (i.e. anecdotal, unscientific) experiment of my own. So that I couldn’t be accused of persecuting anyone’s religion, I decided to put my own family’s faith in the spotlight. (I was raised Roman Catholic.)

I thought back over the years to the many times that members of my family were in major medical distress and we prayed for help. Did it work? Let’s see…

Great Aunt Mary: Cancer.

Her sisters, my grandmother included, were avid churchgoers all their lives. They prayed for Mary for many months as she suffered with her disease.

Result: Aunt Mary died.

Cousin Jeremy: Because he was born with a heart defect Josh needed periodic surgeries to expand his chest cavity to accommodate the growing organ. At 12 years of age during one such operation his body became wracked with infection. Our family prayed for him.

Result: Jeremy died.

Baby Jake: My sister’s son became feverish and was diagnosed with meningitis. We were all asked to pray for him.

Result: Jake got better.

Lynne: My cousin’s wife was 37 years old with three small children when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. We prayed like we’d never prayed before.

Result: Lynne died.

Rose: The 38 year old sister of a close friend discovered a tumor on her spine. She was a single mother of a small daughter. His family and my family both prayed for her.

Result: Rose died.

That’s 1 out of 5. Pretty lousy track record if you ask me.

What did we do wrong? Are we a bad family whose members deserve to die painful tragic deaths? As far as I can tell we are no better or worse than anyone else.

I wonder if the practitioners of Santeria fare better statistically than Catholics. Even the proverbial flip of the coin, 50/50, would be a big improvement! I’d like to know because if draining the blood from a screaming animal can increase my odds of getting what I want and save my family from untimely death…I’m joining!

Mitt Romney doesn’t want to be discriminated against on the basis of his personal beliefs. He wants it so bad that he decided to badmouth all people who don’t give homage to invisible supernatural sentient beings:

As expected, [Romney's] speech itself was a delicate tightrope walk. He evoked the patriotism of the Founding Fathers, and the clear message of John F. Kennedy in 1960, when Kennedy rejected the idea of a religious test for the White House. Romney pandered to the Republican Party’s evangelical base, which wants more Nativity scenes and public references to God. And he alienated, to some extent, a vast portion of secular city dwellers by asserting that “freedom requires religion,” effectively dismissing the worldviews of those who do not source their meaning — or their morality — to a higher celestial power.

Here’s the precise quote from Romney:

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

How those deist founding fathers ever managed to establish this country without believing in angels or believing that Jesus preached in Central America shortly after his resurrection is one hell of a mystery, indeed.  It’s ironic that so many of our country’s founders, many of whom rejected organized religion, must therefore be burning in hell despite risking their lives so that people like Romney could insult them as part of his own alleged exercise of freedom of religion.

At least Romney’s attempt to