Hypocrisy on parade

Perhaps you've heard about the American hikers being held in an Iranian prison? A couple of Belgian bicyclists who were detained at the same prison have some updates on their situation:

"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."
Yes, no doubt the psychological pressures one must face in those sorts of situations must be intense. Not as intense as the pressures innocent Muslims face in America's torture prisons and secret black-ops sites, but extreme in any case!

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Greenwashing – Exhibit A: Elephant Poo Poo Paper

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. img_1165

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.

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On Feeling Small

There are many people out there who fight Darwin's theory of natural selection because it makes them feel "small," it makes life "meaningless" or it causes only despair. In the February/March 2010 issue of Free Inquiry Magazine, Christopher Hitchens substitutes the word "stoicism" for "despair," then poses several questions in response:

[I]s this Darwinian stuff really the goods or is it not? You can't take a position against it on the mere ground that might make humans feel small. (Incidentally, isn't religion supposed to make people feel small and worthless: mere sinners created from dust by an angry and jealous deity? Our own well charted descent from lowly amoeba and bacteria is surely nothing as humiliating as that.) I suppose you could argue that my next question is to some extent a matter of taste and therefore ultimately undecidable, but how is it more uplifting to human beings to compare themselves to well-tended but helpless farm animals, grateful for any favor from the owner and not believing themselves able to manage any sustenance without a corresponding guardianship?
The point Hitchens raises has puzzled me for many years. How could any life feel worthwhile without a sense of autonomy? As soon as one hands one's fate over to Someone Else (who is guided by God-knows-what), it would seem that the "meaning" of one's life exists merely in the hand-over of control, and not in one's many earthly choices, no matter how impressive they might seem.

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Expensive CEO’s of charities

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.

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