If Ottawa ever needed to hear your voice…
This is probably the second most offensive plan Ottawa has set in motion – and they need to hear your voice. Like, a in, yesterday!
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That too is my view: that the GOP, deep down, is behaving as a religious movement, not as a political party, and a radical religious movement at that. Lofgren sees the “Prosperity Gospel” as a divine blessing for personal enrichment and minimal taxation (yes, that kind of Gospel is compatible with Rand, just not compatible with the actual Gospels); for military power (with a major emphasis on the punitive, interventionist God of the Old Testament); and for radical change and contempt for existing institutions (as a product of End-Times thinking, intensified after 9/11).
That’s how I explain the current GOP. It can only think in doctrines, because the alternative is living in a complicated, global, modern world they both do not understand and also despise. Taxes are therefore always bad. Government is never good. Foreign enemies must be pre-emptively attacked. Islam is not a religion. Climate change is an elite conspiracy to impoverish America. Terror suspects are terrorists. When Americans torture, it is not torture. When Christians murder, they are not Christians. And if you change your mind on any of these issues, you are a liberal, an apostate, and will be attacked.
Religion has replaced all of this, reordered it, and imbued the entire political-economic-religious package with zeal. And the zealous never compromise. They don’t even listen. Think of Michele Bachmann’s wide-eyed, Stepford stare as she waits for a questioner to finish before providing another pre-cooked doctrinal nugget. My fear – and it has building for a decade and a half, because I’ve seen this movement up-close from within and also on the front lines of the marriage wars – is that once one party becomes a church with unchangeable doctrines, and once it has supplanted respect for institutions and civility with the radical pursuit of timeless doctrines and hatred of governing institutions, then our democracy is in grave danger.
Ok, just for a min, ignore that Richard Dawkins is all over this like ugly on an ape. Ignore Sullivan himself and his attitudes as well. Just think about the message…
He’s right.
I spent my early childhood years mostly on the dark continent watching every imaginable form of political chaos and genocide take place. And I learned something: Democracy will not work everywhere. Democracy will only work where a population places greater allegiance in concepts like the rule of law, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, humanist care for the common good, reason, logic and all of the above are elevated over concepts like family and religion or ideology.
When a political party cheers for the death of a sick or foolish person who is ill because it fits their ideology, we’re already there.
Even if the death penalty were morally legitimate (and I think it isn’t), and even if we could be justifiably confident that every one of those 234 executed prisoners was actually guilty of the crimes for which they were sentenced (and I think we can’t), it would still be grotesque to react to those executions with cheers and applause, as the audience did at this week’s Republican debate. Surely a mood of solemnity and regret would be more appropriate. These Republicans howling and hooting over executions are the kind who formerly reveled in seeing Christians thrown to the lions. The fact that they now have the effrontery to call themselves Christians only adds insult to injury (literally).
There are some videos that are so stark, some messages so telling and some heart attitudes so chillingly cold they tell their own story to any who has eyes to see such that no other comment is necessary.
The reality of Social Services interventions
American Psychological Association
CPS involvement did not improve long-run outcomes, a 2010 study found. Such involvement sometimes harms children by taking them from their families unnecessarily – which, in my office’s experience, happens more than 100 times each year in the District. These removals traumatize children and devastate families.
I wish I could disagree with the study, but, while I have always followed the code drilled into me at least once every month of my training and constantly by every brief of the laws I am under, about 2/3rds of the time, I ended up wishing I had not. Most of the time, it’s like watching an episode of some sort of absurdist sitcom entitled, “The invasion of the mental munchkins.”
The same is true when adults report rapes etc. It’s been my experience that less then 2-3% of the offenders ever see a night in jail – while the victims get to experience a system that pretty much torments them for months and leaves them tormenting themselves long after. I’d say that the majority of the PTSD symptoms that later emerge are not the result of the rape but, rather, the result of police and social services stupidity.
As sad as it is to say, it’s getting so therapists need to issue guidelines for reporting to them…
Just a few of the things that are never taught in the ivory castles of education by those who epitomize the statement that, “Those who can, do, the rest teach,” to say nothing of even being remotely grasped by the legal system…
via Salon.com.
In a chapter titled "The Sun Will Save Your Life," you discuss the possible connection between autism and vitamin D deficiency. I was wondering if you could expand on that a little.
This is a fairly new study. There were two articles, one in Scientific American and the other in a Swedish journal, that presented compelling evidence that low vitamin D levels in pregnant mothers can be one of the triggers for this heartbreaking affliction. Unfortunately, a lot of autism groups still blame vaccinations even though this explanation really isn’t being borne out scientifically.
In what ways is the public misinformed about the dangers of sun exposure and how did we go astray?
Dr. John Canell, whom I interviewed for the book and is a council member for a nonprofit group of physicians studying the health effects of vitamin D, argues that we’re the first [modern] generation of cave people. Nature intended for man to take in a lot of sunlight. For proof, one need look no further than the statistic revealing that 10-15 minutes of sunbathing will provide us with the same amount of vitamin D as 200 glasses of milk. And this vitamin is one of our most potent anti-cancer agents. I think we started running into trouble when we shifted away from an outdoor, agricultural society to an indoor, manufacturing one.
The second blow was the invention of the air conditioner, which insured that everyone kept his or her windows closed. Window glass completely blocks out the ultraviolet rays that enable our bodies to manufacture vitamin D. Unfortunately for kids, I think the final straw has been the computer and video-game craze of the last 30 years. Unlike past generations, children today spend a lot more time indoors than they do playing around in the sun. Testing shows that our vitamin D levels are now a small fraction of what we think they were 100 years ago. These kinds of tests weren’t administered back then, so there’s no way for us to know for sure.
So does this mean the cast of "The Jersey Shore" is less likely to develop melanoma?
Ultimately, everybody knows how much sun they can safely take in. You really should try not to burn, especially if you have blue eyes, fair skin and red or blond hair. Melanoma claims approximately 9,000 lives in the U.S. per year, which is worrisome, but it’s also worth noting that upward of 250,000 lives could be saved from cancer-related illnesses if people had the proper amount of vitamin D in their bloodstreams. It’s better to get too much sun than too little.
Finally, real researchers are starting to stand up against the sunscreen fearmongering. And, the numbers are stark: Keeping the sun off your skin may prevent easily seen and removed skin cancer, but it makes you 27X more likely to enjoy organ cancer you can’t easily see or cut off.
Nice…
Laws are not made because they are righteous. Laws are made because they advance somebody’s political career.
(It should be noted that these are words that don’t come from a rock-throwing masked guy, but from a professional politician in suit and tie.)
And this one:
I sometimes hear people claim that laws exist to be followed. These people are the most dangerous people who exist in a society. Tyranny is never upheld through law; it is upheld through thousands of bureaucrats that follow the letter of the law just because they believe in rules and law.
And then this one as well:
A society where people regard rules as general guidelines is a lot healthier for its neighbors and citizens alike than a society where laws and rules are enforced blindly and swiftly.
A little embarrassing that the Pirate Party seems to have a greater grasp of the – yes, pre-cross no less – teachings of Jesus then the church and the two North American nations that purportedly follow such…
Compliments of the inestimable wisdom of Bill Maher… Yes, he’s his usual profane self, he completely fails to grasp what Jesus was up to with The Sermon on the Mount and, he is still so very worth listening to.
Rather interesting that you can get a better grasp of the heart of Jesus out of an avowed pothead and atheist then you can out of your average pulpit on Sunday morning…
Via: gizmag.com
One of the theories regarding the cause of schizophrenia suggests that, due to an excessive release of dopamine, the brain remembers too many irrelevant things. Schizophrenics are then overwhelmed by the vast amounts of facts, thoughts and memories all crammed together in their heads, and start processing them into conclusions that aren’t based in reality. It’s called the hyperlearning hypothesis, and researchers at the University of Texas in Austin recently tried to see if they could simulate it – in a computer.
After an hour of work on my inlaw’s Windows machine, I knew there had to be a credible explanation…
via Spiegel.de. (Yes, it’s a long read, and it is SO worth reading…)
No bars. No walls. No armed guards. The prison island of Bastøy in Norway is filled with some of the country’s most hardened criminals. Yet it emphasizes self-control instead of the strictly regulated regimens common in most prisons. For some inmates, it is more than they can handle.
This paradise has been around for 20 years — and has a warden who loves statistics. The numbers, after all, prove him right. Only 16 percent of the prisoners in this island jail become repeat offenders in the first two years after leaving Bastøy as compared with 20 percent for Norway as a whole. In Germany, where recidivism is measured after three years, the rate is 50 percent.
The warden also feels vindicated because there has never been a murder or a suicide on the island — and because no one left Bastøy last winter even though the sea ice was frozen solid.
One only has to look as far as the rabid rhetoric surrounding tougher penalties, harsher prisons and longer sentences coming out of the newly empowered Republican party of the States and the tired rantings of the Conservatives here in Canuckistan to see the brilliance of this article in and of itself.
When more sober minds actually do credible research, they discover that criminals are not afraid of shame, rules, punishment, bondage or being pursued – indeed, they long for all the above and a system that uses the withdrawal of freedom as a punishment is no punishment at all. The twisted irony of the whole thing is that the North American mind is so obsessed with freedom we fail to grasp that there are some who so fear relational responsibility and freedom that our, “Punishments,” are actually a reward and an incentive.
Criminals actually have a problem coping with freedom – not incarceration…
The most effective treatment you can inflict is actually to force a criminal to deal with freedom wherein shame is replaced with having to take responsibility for the longings of one’s own heart and figuring out how to live with relationships in community. The terror that freedom strikes in the hearts of those we call criminals apparently defies the grasp of even professionals in the field.
But, the truth here goes even deeper.
The parallels with what Christ was up to are striking: The God of the universe came down to a system run by legalists who believed the solution for human evil was more rules, bondage and tougher punishments – and He declined to play.
He did the most offensive thing human evil could imagine – He exposed the wardens as worse then the inmates. Then, He took away the system’s power to make inmate or warden bad thereby stripping all of their rules for living. Next, He added insult to injury by instituting an island life where people had to live in freedom, where relational responsibility was unavoidable and where inmate and warden alike have to depend upon such as a guiding force for life given the absence of a big stick of law and punishment to guide them. Ya, no wonder we’ve been trying to get back into prison ever since…
But there’s where the similarity ends. In Norway, when you can’t cope with freedom, you tell the truth about it and put in for a transfer to a prison. They send real wardens with real guns and handcuffs and take you back to a real prison with real walls and barbed wire. No one tries to act like you are not in prison.
In North America, we too can’t handle freedom. We too get our warden/reverends to take us back to a prison of rules – but then we ask them to use words that sound like we are still on the freedom of the island. We ask them to paint the bars of our shame with a seascape of grace like terminology and to tell us that the barbed wire of this strange Evangelical combination of Judaism, Gnosticism and the New Age Movement is really passion driven, heart led relational responsibility.
Not only do we have exactly the same problem with freedom, we also have a problem with reality and truth.
Stress and our breaking wave of, “Conditions.”
Via: democracynow.org
Dr. Maté’s work focuses on the centrality of early childhood experiences to the development of the brain, and how those experiences can impact everything from behavioral patterns to physical and mental illness. While the relationship between emotional stress and disease, and mental and physical health more broadly, is often considered controversial within medical orthodoxy, Dr. Maté argues too many doctors seem to have forgotten what was once a commonplace assumption, that emotions are deeply implicated in both the development of illness, addictions and disorders, and in their healing. [includes rush transcript]
All I have to add is: Thank you medical community — it’s SO about time!!!
