When God prevents pregnancy

Representative Todd Akin made it clear he has been legislating on the topic of abortion in almost total ignorance. He doesn't believe that there are many pregnancies caused by rape. The well-respected Guttmacher Institute disagrees, reporting that 1% of all abortions are the result of rape. Guttmacher further reports that almost 14,000 abortions occur each year as a result of rape or incest. That is a huge number of pregnancies. Here's what Akin recently said about abortion and rape:

"From what I understand from doctors, that's really rare," said Akin said of pregnancy caused by rape. "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let's assume maybe that didn't work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist."
Let's set aside for the moment that if Akin one day magically found himself carrying his rapist's baby, he would immediately do whatever would be necessary to "shut the whole thing down." That is the nature of modern conservative hypocrisy when it comes to reproductive rights. But his quote also raises an issue the media is overlooking. Who is it that "shuts the whole thing down" (according to Akin) when a woman is raped? Once again, it's OK for "God" to do what humans (according to Akin) should never do. Akin's approach is consistent with God's treatment of infants reported in the Bible. There is more to this story about Akin, of course, most of it centering on his lack of concern for rape victims. I would be the last person to tell a rape victim that she must carry the baby of her rapist. Amazingly, there are more than a few members of the GOP who would disagree, including the current presumptive nominee for VP, Paul Ryan. "Ryan’s longtime position has been to permit abortion only when a woman’s life is endangered by a pregnancy."

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You are a community

Jonathan Haidt makes a good case that humans are 10% bee--we are ever-seeking the comfort and resources and overarching meaning of life that can only be found as part of a collective. But peel the onion down deeper and you'll see that each of us is comprised of a vast community, as discussed by this article at The Economist:

The traditional view is that a human body is a collection of 10 trillion cells which are themselves the products of 23,000 genes. If the revolutionaries are correct, these numbers radically underestimate the truth. For in the nooks and crannies of every human being, and especially in his or her guts, dwells the microbiome: 100 trillion bacteria of several hundred species bearing 3m non-human genes. The biological Robespierres believe these should count, too; that humans are not single organisms, but superorganisms made up of lots of smaller organisms working together. . . .The microbiome does many jobs in exchange for the raw materials and shelter its host provides. One is to feed people more than 10% of their daily calories . . . The microbiome also makes vitamins, notably B2, B12 and folic acid. . . . .The microbiome also maintains the host’s health by keeping hostile interlopers at bay.  
Check out this article for much more information, including the possibility of a "stool transplant" as a potential fix for deficiencies in one's microbiome. I commented on this fascinating topic of the human biome in an earlier post.

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The psychology of waiting in line

People at the Houston airport complained that it took too long to get their luggage. According to the NYT,

[A]irport executives undertook a more careful, on-site analysis. They found that it took passengers a minute to walk from their arrival gates to baggage claim and seven more minutes to get their bags. Roughly 88 percent of their time, in other words, was spent standing around waiting for their bags. So the airport decided on a new approach: instead of reducing wait times, it moved the arrival gates away from the main terminal and routed bags to the outermost carousel. Passengers now had to walk six times longer to get their bags. Complaints dropped to near zero.
Several other good examples in this article. Bottom line is that it's torture to wait in line if you are not distracted in some way. A watched pot never boils. Various business take various approaches to distracting you.

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Liberalism vs. conservativatism as yin vs. yang

Jonathan Haidt stepped back from his liberal leanings to see that that many aspects of traditional teachings of conservatism make sense. In his book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Haidt carefully notes that in recognizing some of the good aspects of conservativism, he is in no way embracing the modern American Republican Party, which declared it as a sacred quest "to sacrifice all of the good things government can do to preserve low tax rates for the wealthiest Americans." (See footnote 36). See also, Bill Moyer's recent interview with Haidt. With the above as the context, at Freakonomics, Haidt explains is change from a "liberal" to a "centrist"

Q. You say you used to be a liberal but are now a centrist. Why the change? Vincent. A. I have the personality traits, occupation, social network and lifestyle of a liberal. It was over-determined that I would be a liberal. But in 2005 I changed my research direction. I had previously studied how morality varied across nations. After a second Democratic challenger lost to George W. Bush, in part because they failed to make compelling moral arguments, I began to study left and right in the USA as though they were different cultures. Which they are. I tried to apply a cultural psychology framework to the research, meaning that I tried to understand each side from inside. I tried to get a feel for what each side held sacred, and for what values and virtues they were trying to implement in their political and economic programs. At first I disliked watching Fox News and reading National Review. But within a year, I began to see that the conservative vision of morality, history, and economics was just as coherent as the alternative liberal vision. Once I lost my feelings of repulsion and anger toward conservatism. I discovered a whole world of ideas I had never encountered. Some of them struck me as quite good, e.g., the value of institutions and traditions for creating moral order; the principle of federalism (which failed spectacularly on civil rights, but is valuable in most other cases); and the glorification of earned success while being critical of efforts to achieve equality of outcomes without attention to merit. I now hold the view that left and right are like Yin and Yang. As John Stuart Mill put it in 1859: “A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.”

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