Use nudity when potentially child-killing chemicals don’t garner enough attention

Back in September, Senator Al Franken and Rep. Steve Israel has introduced the "Household Product Labeling Act," which will enable consumers to determine whether potentially harmful chemicals are present in the household cleaning products they use. Here's the full text of the Senate version of the Act. Here's the problem:

In many households across the country, the entire family pitches in on household cleaning chores. The effort is obviously intended to keep everyone healthy by cutting down on germs, bacteria, and mold. But unfortunately, many of the ingredients in commonly used cleaning products may be dangerous themselves. Current law requires that product labels list immediately hazardous ingredients, but there is no labeling requirement for ingredients that may cause harm over time. Many chemicals contained in household products have been shown to produce harmful health effects. Consumers have a right to know which of these potentially harmful chemicals might be present in their kitchen and bathroom cupboards. This information is particularly important to families with small children, who as we all know have more direct contact with floors and household surfaces. This legislation simply makes that information readily available to consumers, giving them the opportunity to make an informed choice about the chemicals they bring into their homes.
This is an incredibly important bill, because consumers should have a right to know the chemicals to which they are exposing their families (see here for related post). How do you promote a bill when the "mere" sickness and death fail to attract enough attention? A private company called Method decided to shoot this clever (and somewhat provocative) video:

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Hungry Ghosts

I recently came out of an emotional bad spell - emerging from it felt a lot like hitting the surface after you've been underwater just a little too long. This spell of anxiety/fear/depression/whatever it was taught me more than usual because it happened smack dab after I had a really awesome year business wise. I was on a high. Things were so good I had to go buy a suit so I could go to Las Vegas and get an award for being so awesome. That is important to note not because getting an award is important (but it is kind of cool, right?) but because of what happened after the award. Intellectually I knew that all the activity I had in the funnel would end, and I'd be back in building mode. I knew it and even tried to prepare myself for the letdown. My business is cyclical - I know that. And I like building mode. Building mode is how one gets to closing mode. I just had a run of especially good fortune and my building mode was a distant memory, which I knew was not such a great thing for me. In the midst of my crazy happy frenetic good luck mode, I tried to prepare for what would come after the constant activity of balancing all the stuff in the hopper died down. I know how I can be - I get squirrley sometimes, so I tried to prepare. There is a saying: "Trying lets us fail with honor." I failed. I'm not sure I had any honor, either. "I woke up one morning and I was scared. Not just a little scared, either. I was in full-on panic mode. I remember thinking, "Dammit, Lisa, this is exactly what you worked to prevent." Yep it sure was. In my defense, I had a crazy end of September/October. We had family in from out of town (stressful), my Mom had spine surgery (surprisingly stressful), the foster greyhound we rescued need to be carried up and down our stairs in order to go outside (it takes both of us - constantly coordinating schedules is stressful), I bought a car (consumerism is, for me, fraught with drama, tension and guilt - stressful, but I sure like the car) and Ginger decided to feng shui our bedroom. Not only was I going through something hard, I had to do it with our bed facing a new and opposite wall. Things like that do bad things to me. I spent an entire sleepless night focused on whether the bed facing the other direction was symbolic of me never closing another deal. During that mental wrestling match I started doubting my employ-ability (I only have one suit!!) and by morning I had tearfully decided my only option was to make this thing work or I'd end up living in a paper box. I went to bed scared, I woke up panicked and I think Ginger wanted to throttle me (I wanted to throttle me). [more . . . ]

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Welcome to our store! . . . sort of . . .

Customers of this Dollar Tree store in St. Louis are greeted with the following signs located on the main entry door: img_0210 Here's how I interpret the above: Welcome, honored guests, but it you rip us off, we'll throw your ass in the slammer before you can even utter "Merry Christmas."

Continue ReadingWelcome to our store! . . . sort of . . .

Church To State: “Do What We Want Or Else.”

The divide between church and state seems on the one hand to be growing but on the other narrowing, especially when you consider how intrusive established religions have been. Representatives of the Catholic Church sat in Nanci Pelosi's office of late while negotiations for the health care bill were ongoing, overseeing what she would do about abortion. Now this. Any way one reads this, it comes out as a threat. The quid pro quo is explicit. "If you don't bend to our will on this, we will stop services your city relies on." I have in the past believed that the tax exempt status of religions was a necessary work-around to preserve the fiction of separation. In the past, there have been instances of state intrusion directly into religions in, for one example, state funding for programs in parochial schools. There was always a quid pro quo in such offers and practices. But never has a representative of the state sat in the office of a minister while he drafted a sermon to be sure certain details got left out or included. Never, despite massive abuses by religious institutions in real estate and related financial areas, has the state moved to revoke 501(c)(3) status. It may be that any state official who tried it would be booted out of office summarily, but nevertheless that has been the unspoken law of the land. Seems the courtesy doesn't go both ways. If that's the case, I think it is time to revisit the whole issue. If the Catholic Church sees itself as providing services as an arm of the civil service sector and allows itself the conceit that it may use that service as a lever to influence political decisions, then they have implicitly given up due consideration as an inviolate institution, free from state requirements of taxation and regulation. Seems fairly clear cut to me. Obviously, there will be those who disagree. But it's time, I think, to seriously reconsider the state relationship to so-called "nonprofit" "apolitical" tax exempt institutions.

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Success and Sources: the Self-Created Problem of Christianity

I'm sure this will annoy a lot of people, some more than others. This is one of those notions I stumble on from time to time while daydreaming or free associating. I've been doing a lot of thinking about religion of late---as how could many people not be, what with the state of the world (he says with tongue in his other cheek, being both ironic and absurd)?---and trying to come up with some theory of it that might bleed off the poisons that seem to bubble up from it from time to time. Someone said something to me that triggered this idea and it's probably not original. But we were discussing Roman Catholicism and the observation was made that in its long history it has absorbed more than it has suppressed. "Of course it has," I responded. "That's how it began, after all, as a congeries of pagan beliefs subsumed beneath an orthodox umbrella. It is the perfect example of an assembled religion." Regardless where the initial push came from, whatever its core ideology, the fact is that Roman Catholicism came to fruition as a political entity and it was a model of almost democratic universalism. The holidays (holy days) are mostly borrowings from other disciplines, retrofitted to make people comfortable with the new paradigm. Its rituals and mysteries are all adaptations of older religious ideas and practices, including a marvelous transplantation from Egyptian mythology of the entire Jesus myth (Horus---almost all of it is duplicated, including certain names, such as Lazarus, and the whole virgin birth motif, which itself is nothing particularly new). The architects of Roman Catholicism, let us assume to be more gracious than not, recognized a core set of beliefs that did not of themselves require the trappings of a religion or its concomitant institutions, but also saw that most people would prefer (or require) all that such physical and cultural manifestations afford. Romans above all understood in their bones the function of public architecture and ceremony. They seemed instinctively attuned to the idea that to get people to behave a certain way they should live within the physical representations of the philosophies behind such behavior. Romans were Romans as much because of their cities and roads as because of any political philosophy. The two supported each other. The church borrowed that big time. But as an assembled religion, it had a problem, which was the necessity to obscure all the past manifestations, cut the ties to all the pagan practices they'd taken over, and embark on a long-term campaign to evoke cultural amnesia in order to represent themselves as The Truth. The problem with this is two-fold: [more . . . ]

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