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Author Archive for Ebonmuse

I'm an author, skeptic and computer programmer living in New York City. I'm also an unapologetic atheist, and believe passionately that freethinkers deserve a much stronger voice in our culture than they've been given in the past. Since politicians and the mainstream media aren't willing to give us that, it falls to us to take our case directly to the public. Both on my own weblog, Daylight Atheism, and here on Dangerous Intersection, I hope to be able to spread the good news of freethought!

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By Ebonmuse on August 15th, 2009

Another ill-informed conservative argument on health care reform

Caroline Baum, a columnist for Bloomberg News, had this to say in an August 12 column about health care reform:

Take the issue of a public option. How can the private insurance industry survive with a not-for-profit government plan charging a pittance?

Ms. Baum has overlooked some basic facts that would undermine this claim. Namely, in America, there are public universities competing with private universities, public hospitals competing with private hospitals, public libraries competing with private bookstores, and a public post office competing with private package delivery companies. To cite an even more obvious example, there are already public, not-for-profit government plans like Medicare competing with private insurers. Even in Europe, where most countries already offer universal public health coverage, private insurers still operate.

In none of these instances has the public alternative put private competitors out of business. Why on earth would this suddenly change if the U.S. Congress created a public health insurance option?

American Culture • Featured • Health • Media • Politics
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Credit where credit is due
By Ebonmuse on July 15th, 2009

Credit where credit is due

I’ve criticized President Obama for not keeping his campaign pledges to end the faith-based initiative and restore transparency to government, but when he does something right, I’ll give him credit where credit is due. So, it’s good to see him taking this unapologetically progressive stance on an issue where some reason is badly needed - the precautionary use of antibiotics in animals raised on factory farms:

The Obama administration announced Monday that it would seek to ban many routine uses of antibiotics in farm animals in hopes of reducing the spread of dangerous bacteria in humans.

…In written testimony to the House Rules Committee, Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, principal deputy commissioner of food and drugs, said feeding antibiotics to healthy chickens, pigs and cattle — done to encourage rapid growth — should cease. And Dr. Sharfstein said farmers should no longer be able to use antibiotics in animals without the supervision of a veterinarian.

Feeding massive doses of antibiotics to farm animals enables them to live in crowded, unsanitary and often inhumane conditions. It also encourages the evolution of antibiotic resistance to the dangerous bacteria that inevitably live inside them, and when those bacteria spread through the food chain to humans, the result is outbreaks of virulent, drug-resistant diseases.

Having recently seen the movie Food, Inc., it’s easy for me to appreciate how serious a threat this is. Antibiotic use, like fossil fuels, have promoted a dangerously unsustainable way of life in our culture. This first attempt may or may not make it past the powerful corporate food lobby - but kudos to the Obama administration for bringing it into the national consciousness in a bold way.

American Culture • Economy • Food
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Now you can pay for the convenience of water!
By Ebonmuse on June 01st, 2009

Now you can pay for the convenience of water!

This is now the second time in a few months that I’ve gotten the following piece of junk mail:

This letter is advertising a promotion in which, for thirty-two dollars a month and up, I can pay to have bottled water delivered to my door. What a brilliant idea! How could you beat that for convenience?

Oh, that’s right . . . Instead of paying for Poland Spring water at the rate of about $1.64 per gallon, I could get clean, fresh, drinkable water of any temperature I please straight from the tap in my kitchen. I don’t know exactly how much this costs me, but I can say with complete confidence that it’s a lot less than a dollar per gallon.

Clearly, Poland Spring doesn’t want you to think too hard about the economics of this. However, for the environmentally conscious consumer, this mailing also has a page touting their green credentials:

Bottled Water Junk Mail

Recycling 900,000 bottles and keeping 1.8 million pounds of plastic out of landfills is certainly very impressive. But, the skeptic in me has to ask, wouldn’t it be much better for people to just use their perfectly good existing public infrastructure for drinking water, and not have to manufacture all that plastic in the first place?

The bottled-water industry is one of the great triumphs of modern marketing: creating demand for a product for which there’s absolutely no genuine need, selling at exorbitant cost a substance which any person in the Western world can obtain virtually for free. Even more absurd, despite its imagery of glaciers and mountain springs, most bottled water comes from municipal sources - i.e., the same water you get from your tap anyway.

What bottled water really represents is almost pure profit for the beverage conglomerates that sell it, and unnecessary environmental harm caused by the expenditure of fossil fuels needed to manufacture, pack and ship it (not to mention sending out all this junk mail touting it). It’s no healthier than the water that comes from the tap in your house. It doesn’t even taste better. What on earth could convince a person to pay money for a scheme as ridiculous as this?

Consumerism • Environment • Featured • Health • snake oil
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A 24-hour news network lineup I’d like to see
By Ebonmuse on March 17th, 2009

A 24-hour news network lineup I’d like to see

6:00 AM
The Overnight News
The morning show. Discusses significant events that happened in America the night before, as well as important stories that developed during the day in other time zones around the world.

9:00 AM
Science Today
Expert analysis of some of this week’s more significant peer-reviewed publications.

11:00 AM
Fads and Fallacies
Debunking superstition and pseudoscience at home and around [...]

American Culture • Communication • Culture • Featured • Media
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By Ebonmuse on December 23rd, 2008

Book Review: The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Summary: A superb exercise in consciousness-raising; it paints a detailed picture of the food chains that supply us every day and the environmental and health consequences of each of them.
Where does your food come from?
If you answered “the supermarket”, you’re probably like most Americans. And while most people are dimly aware that there must be [...]

American Culture • Consumerism • Food • Reading - Books and Magazines • Recommended Reading/Films/Sites
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By Ebonmuse on June 14th, 2008

The Supreme Court restores habeas corpus

In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled against the government in the case of Boumediene v. Bush, finding that the detainees at Guantanamo Bay have the right to file habeas corpus petitions in federal court. This decision strikes down a key section of the Military Commissions Act, the horrible piece of legislation [...]

Civil Rights • Current Events • Law • Politics • War • law and order
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By Ebonmuse on May 14th, 2008

The traditional media is dying

In my most recent post on Dangerous Intersection, as well as others previously, I’ve written about the many ways in which the traditional media has willfully discarded its obligation to inform the public. And so far, as the 2008 presidential election gets into full swing, there are no signs of improvement. If anything, the traditional [...]

American Culture • Communication • Media
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By Ebonmuse on May 08th, 2008

Book Review: Great American Hypocrites

Summary: An eviscerating critique of how the Republican party has won elections by obscuring actual issues with phony controversies, aided and abetted by a shallow and insipid media. At times Greenwald’s denunciations are repetitive, but he provides more than enough infuriating examples to amply justify his evident anger.
Glenn Greenwald’s third book, Great American Hypocrites, is [...]

Culture • Fraud • Media • Military • Politics • Reading - Books and Magazines • Recommended Reading/Films/Sites
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By Ebonmuse on March 11th, 2008

John McCain bribes the media; the media accepts

In some of my previous posts both here on Dangerous Intersection and on Daylight Atheism, I’ve done my best to call attention to the corrupt, degraded state of most of today’s major news-gathering organizations. But a story I read today is truly the most astonishing example yet - both in the way the mainstream media [...]

Corruption • Media • Politics
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By Ebonmuse on February 26th, 2008

Barack Obama gets it right

Earlier this week, the AP reporter Nedra Pickler published an odious story that questioned Barack Obama’s patriotism through insinuation. The entire focus of the story was to imply that Sen. Obama may not be sufficiently patriotic to be president because he doesn’t wear an American flag pin, and because he supposedly didn’t put his hand [...]

American Culture • Iraq • Media • Politics
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By Ebonmuse on January 08th, 2008

How the mainstream media has failed us

I came across an article a few days ago written by John Hockenberry, an award-winning journalist who once worked for NBC’s Dateline and is now a fellow at MIT’s Media Lab. Titled “You Don’t Understand Our Audience”: What I learned about network television at Dateline NBC, this article is a relentless, burning indictment of everything [...]

American Culture • Communication • Media • Politics
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By Ebonmuse on November 28th, 2007

Joe Klein is not a journalist

He can’t be, based on his own statements. A journalist is a person who reports - who scrutinizes what the powerful say for omissions or falsehoods, who informs readers what’s really going on, who sifts through the spin and digs beneath the surface to get at the real truth.
But Joe Klein doesn’t do any of [...]

American Culture • Communication • Current Events • Law • Media • Politics
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By Ebonmuse on October 08th, 2007

Update on Clive Wearing

The New Yorker recently published an article by Oliver Sacks, the famous neurologist and author, with an update on an equally famous patient: Clive Wearing, a British musician who suffered an attack of viral encephalitis in 1985. Although Wearing recovered, the infection destroyed the areas of his brain associated with storing memories. As a result, [...]

Current Events • Psychology Cognition • Science
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