Risk information on the toxicity of commonly used chemicals bottled up by White House

What? The White House is endangering us by withholding information?

This is getting to be a familiar story, right? Here’s the typical plot: There’s something going on that poses a serious risk to Americans, and the White House decides to protect big corporations rather than protect the people at risk.

This time, the protected industry consists of chemical manufacturers. The victims are American citizens, many of them recalcitrant admirers of the Bush Administration. Here’s an excerpt of the article by the Associated Press:

The Bush administration is undermining the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to determine health dangers of toxic chemicals by letting non-scientists have a bigger – often secret – role, congressional investigators say in a report obtained by The Associated Press.

The administration’s decision to give the Defense Department and other agencies an early role in the process adds to years of delay in acting on harmful chemicals and jeopardizes the program’s credibility, the Government Accountability Office concluded.

At issue is the EPA’s screening of chemicals used in everything from household products to rocket fuel to determine if they pose serious risk of cancer or other illnesses.

How many people are dying out there because they have been exposed to common chemicals of which most people don’t know of the dangers? How many of those people are children? Every time I hear of another person getting cancer (especially when I hear of a young child getting cancer), I wonder whether it’s because he or she has been exposed too …

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Continue ReadingRisk information on the toxicity of commonly used chemicals bottled up by White House

I know that I am wealthy when I consider my lack of misfortune.

I am a wealthy person, but not in the way most people understand “wealthy.”  I don’t drive an expensive car (I drive a 9-year old Saturn).   I don’t own a vacation house.  I don’t expect to retire for many years. 

I am wealthy because I am a survivor.  I have repeatedly escaped adversity and I’ve repeatedly stumbled into enough lucky situations.   These unplanned events add up to an undeniable and compelling form of wealth.

When most people consider how “fortunate” they are, they engage in some form of “accounting.”  For starters, they add up their savings and they subtract amounts they owe to others.   That gives them a financial base line.  There’s more to figuring wealth, of course.  

Some people consider their health when they assess their wealth.  If their bodies are in tolerable working order, that’s something well worth noting, especially for those over thirty.   Among people discussing age, I often assert that after thirty, “age” is mostly about health rather than chronological age.  Young adults snicker at this (I used to).  But imagine a room full of forty-year olds.  Everyone in the room is about forty, but just look how different they are!  Some of them look and act like they’re 25 and others are functional 75 year olds, often due to obesity, history of injury or illness, lack of exercise, poor nutrition, lack of sleep or various detrimental addictions.  The bottom line is that if you’re body is working even tolerably, that’s a big plus when figuring …

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Continue ReadingI know that I am wealthy when I consider my lack of misfortune.

Moral blinders and the Banality of Evil. What you don’t ponder won’t disturb your conscience.

Who does more damage, A) mean-spirited people or B) "normal" people acting thoughtlessly? According to Hannah Arendt, the answer is clearly B. I would agree. Why? Because we serve as our own gate-keeper as to what what aspects of the world are relevant, usually oblivious to the fact that the "gate-keeper" of the flow of "relevant" facts is our sycophantic enabler, and that the gatekeeper is often willing to help us express our deepest darkest instincts. How is it that “normal” people so often behave (and vote) as moral monsters? In Eichmann in Jerusalem (discussed below), Arendt has written that the "banality of evil," the failure to think, leads to monstrous deeds--the road to hell is mostly paved with a lack of intentions. I largely concur with Arendt, but I would explain the source of most evil in terms of the psychological concept of attention: human animals have limited attentional capacities, and ghastly things can happen when this scarce human resource (the ability to attend) is diverted (often self-diverted). Moral monsters self-train themselves to pre-filter their sensory perceptions so that they don't need to attend to anything in the world that challenges their preferred viewpoints. The trick to becoming a banally evil person is to allow yourself to dwell on limited viewpoints and experience. To grow your evilness, stop being self-critical, stop being skeptical and stop exposing yourself to viewpoints that challenge the way you currently live your life. When you become a professional at selectively attending to the "things" of the world, you can feel the rush of becoming a self-certain--you'll become so certain of your beliefs that you won't hesitate to impose your narrow intellect onto everything and everyone you encounter. And even when you are incredibly wrong-headed, you won't realize it, thanks to the Dunning-Kruger effect. That is the great power of the ability to selectively attend to one's favorite parts of the world. It takes courage to expose one’s self to information that challenges one’s pre-existing beliefs. Humans are intrinsically able to be self-manipulative--being skeptical requires much more work than running with the types of believes and conclusions that have pleased us in the past. That is also the nature of the confirmation bias. Most of us, most of the time, sub-consciously (or semi-consciously) selectively expose ourselves mainly to the types of information that will substantiate our preconceived notions and motives. We’ve all seen this with the many dysfunctional people who use the Internet selectively. They seek out only web sites that are compatible with their pre-existing bigoted, consumerist or shallow life-styles. If you put on blinders that allow you to see only a limited slice of the world around you, you can spare yourself the need of emotionally reacting to desperate needs of humans around you. Most of us constantly blind ourselves to the plight of starving children in Africa. Out of sight, out of mind. It’s merely a matter of diverting our attention to something else, something not so disturbing.

Continue ReadingMoral blinders and the Banality of Evil. What you don’t ponder won’t disturb your conscience.