Odds and Sods - Aries 2011 edition

Happy Aries and happy April. Hope all is well in Blogdonia!

As for me, I am doing much better than, say, Ashley Judd, who started a controversy with this quote from her recent book:

"As far as I'm concerned, most rap and hip-hop music -- with its rape culture and insanely abusive lyrics and depictions of girls and women as 'ho's' -- is the contemporary soundtrack of misogyny."

And now everybody is mad at her. (sigh)

See yesterday's post. This is why the current discourse remains at kindergarten level, because public figures are chronically afraid of "offending" someone by offering an honest opinion. As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes at the above link, Judd is already backpedaling and trying to minimize the impact of her statement.

~*~

By way of Suzan, here is the always-amazing truth-teller Chris Hedges:

Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point. The No Child Left Behind program, modeled on the “Texas Miracle,” is a fraud. It worked no better than our deregulated financial system. But when you shut out debate these dead ideas are self-perpetuating.

Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of analytical intelligence. This kind of intelligence is prized by money managers and corporations. They don’t want employees to ask uncomfortable questions or examine existing structures and assumptions. They want them to serve the system. These tests produce men and women who are just literate and numerate enough to perform basic functions and service jobs. The tests elevate those with the financial means to prepare for them. They reward those who obey the rules, memorize the formulas and pay deference to authority. Rebels, artists, independent thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts—those who march to the beat of their own drum—are weeded out.

Amen, amen! Preach it!

(And my kindest, most loving thoughts go out to my favorite teacher, whom I hope is reading.)

~*~

If you eat fish or even take fish oil supplements, please read this account from TIME magazine, titled How My Mercury Level Hit Double the Safety Limit:

But here's what I want to know: How was I exposed to mercury? I don't exactly handle the metal in my job, so I probably wouldn't be directly exposed to it. But I do eat seafood — a lot. I probably have a tuna sandwich twice a week for lunch, and I eat sushi — a habit I picked up during my reporting stint in Japan — almost as often. I always thought those choices were healthy — and indeed, fish like tuna are a valuable source of protein and omega-3 fatty acids, which are good for the heart. But those same fish can have high mercury levels.

~*~

This post is a MUST READ work of art, hands down. Thanks to the intrepid Mr Daisy for forcing me to read it. The graphic alone is worth an award!

Money quote:

I’ve spent the last month helping my neighbors deal with their current health care crisis. She’s not really my neighbor, as she and her sister live next to my parents down the street, but when you live in a town of 300, everyone is your neighbor. They’ve lived next to my folks since I was thirteen. The elder sister (76) was married to an American, and they fled Beirut to America in 1983. Her husband died, so now it is just her and her sister (70.) Her sister had been having some problems, so they went to a doctor, then went to an endocrinologist, and long story short, it appears that she has a thyroid tumor the size of a canned ham in her chest. If she does not have it removed, it will continue to grow and kill her. We don’t know if it is cancerous, and there is no real way to know for sure, as it is so big that any biopsy of one area may not show anything, but cancer may exist elsewhere. Over the past few weeks, we have been to ENT doctors, cardiologists, thoracic surgeons, general practitioners, we’ve had biopsy, nuclear stress tests, cat scans, EKG’s, EEG’s, the works. In a couple weeks, she will have life-saving surgery, and she is healthy as a horse and will probably live for another twenty years.

Why am I telling you this? Because Medicare is paying for it. You, me, and everyone else who pays taxes is keeping this woman alive, and I am here to tell you it is worth every penny. She’s a wonderful, witty, charming woman with a lot to give the world. Without medicare, and under the Ryan “plan,” there is no chance she would be able to afford insurance, no one would insure a woman of her age with this health problem (just like it was before there was no medicare), no chance she would be able to afford the work that has and will be done, no one to provide the care she will need after surgery, and this tumor would be a death sentence. Her options would be… to die.

~*~

Sometimes, you think they must be making this stuff up. For instance: GOP Marks Oil Spill Anniversary With Drilling Push. Are they joking with that?

Nope.

We're one week away from the first anniversary of the worst oil spill in the nation's history, and to commemorate it, House Republicans spent Wednesday marking up a trio of bills that would dramatically increase drilling in the US.

The bills, all from Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), the chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, would open new areas for drilling in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic oceans, as well as Alaska's Bristol Bay. They would also speed up the process of approving drilling permits; after 60 days permits will be considered approved regardless of whether an environmental review is complete.

(((screams)))

~*~

And when I read stuff like the following, I just shake my head, stunned... see, in these parts, the dispute would be that someone did NOT want to say the Pledge of Allegiance:

Town wrestles with Pledge of Allegiance

BROOKLINE, Mass., April 13 (UPI) -- A Boston suburb is embroiled in a dispute about saying the Pledge of Allegiance in its public schools.

The policy approved last week by the Brookline School Committee requires the recitation of the pledge once a week in all K-8 schools. School officials said they were trying to find a policy that would meet both the state mandate on the pledge and court rulings banning students or staff members from being forced to say it, The Boston Globe reported Tuesday.

The school committee specifically said no student is required to join in, but those who do not must maintain a respectful silence. At the same time, the committee said children who do recite the pledge must not make fun of or harass those who do not.

The pledge became an issue when Gerardo Martinez, principal of Devotion School, one of the eight K-8 schools, sent parents a letter in December. He said the Pledge of Allegiance, which had not been recited at Devotion for about five years, would be said voluntarily once a week.

Brookline, a liberal enclave in one of the most liberal states and the hometown of former Gov. Michael Dukakis, who was accused of lack of patriotism when he ran for president in 1988, became a target on conservative blogs.

Parents and other residents have lined up on both sides. Katie Tagliavia said she found it "horrifying" that most of the girls in her Scout troop did not know the pledge, while Martin Rosenthal, a former selectman and father of a Devotion student, said he does not see any educational value in reciting it.

It's like news from another country.

Maybe it is. After all, for four years, this WAS another country, called the Confederate States of America. I hope to address the Civil War nostalgia of the moment (150th anniversary of the war) in a later post. Simply put, I believe the election of a black president has brought the nostalgia to a rather noxious boiling point. Ugh.

~*~

And finally... your much-delayed dose of cute: Harley and Daisy endure necessary housing repairs!

This would very much upset my (quite spoiled and overprotected) kitties, so I think they are doing GREAT! I hope everything is back to normal in your home soon, Harley and Daisy! :)

Stalemate and ADD

I keep drawing the Two of Swords, which I can't figure out. I've never drawn it for myself until lately. The problem with attempting to read one's own tarot (or be one's own therapist!) is that you simply can't figure out this stuff for yourself, just as we can't always figure out we don't look good in certain clothes we love anyway. No objectivity!

And it doesn't help that many of the tarot-experts and sources can't agree on the card's meanings. Hm.

I choose the meaning I think is most likely: Stalemate. I am stalemated. At least I know that much.

However, if I am indeed lying to myself (one of the meanings of the Two of Swords), how could I know what the card means? Obviously, I am already in denial, and that means I don't have a clue.

She really needs to take off the blindfold!

~*~

Speaking of blindfolds (how's that for a segue?), Chaos is Normal posted FTY: Students, which included an excerpt from a bang-up interview (by Amy Goodman) of one Canadian Dr Gabor Maté. This incisive excerpt sent me over to Democracy Now to listen to the whole show, titled Dr. Gabor Maté on the Stress-Disease Connection, Addiction, Attention Deficit Disorder and the Destruction of American Childhood. Highly recommended!

I hear about ADD every day, as my customer-parents attempt to deal, often buying supplements for their children. I hear all about the endless "symptoms"--which so often to me, sound like, well, just being a child. When did simple childhood become a disease?

I didn't grow up hearing about ADD, which also fascinates me. Is this some "new and improved" diagnosis, in that case? If so, is our culture to blame for stigmatizing certain behaviors? And as with autism, are those same behaviors possibly 'rewarded' elsewhere? (i.e. the preponderance of autism in the Silicon Valley) Dr Gabor Maté believes actual brain development in children has markedly changed over the last generation or so, due to our radical changes in culture. (I have often believed this about addiction, so when somebody with smarts comes out and backs me up, I am thrilled.)

Quotes from Dr Maté I found especially pertinent:

In the United States right now, there are three million children receiving stimulant medications for ADHD... Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. And there are about half-a-million kids in this country receiving heavy-duty anti-psychotic medications, medications such as are usually given to adult schizophrenics to regulate their hallucinations. But in this case, children are getting it to control their behavior. So what we have is a massive social experiment of the chemical control of children’s behavior, with no idea of the long-term consequences of these heavy-duty anti-psychotics on kids.

And I know that Canadians statistics just last week showed that within last five years, 43—there’s been a 43 percent increase in the rate of dispensing of stimulant prescriptions for ADD or ADHD, and most of these are going to boys. In other words, what we’re seeing is an unprecedented burgeoning of the diagnosis. And I should say, really, I’m talking about, more broadly speaking, what I would call the destruction of American childhood, because ADD is just a template, or it’s just an example of what’s going on. In fact, according to a recent study published in the States, nearly half of American adolescents now meet some criteria or criteria for mental health disorders. So we’re talking about a massive impact on our children of something in our culture that’s just not being recognized.

...

The normal basis for child development has always been the clan, the tribe, the community, the neighborhood, the extended family. Essentially, post-industrial capitalism has completely destroyed those conditions. People no longer live in communities which are still connected to one another. People don’t work where they live. They don’t shop where they live. The kids don’t go to school, necessarily, where they live. The parents are away most of the day. For the first time in history, children are not spending most of their time around the nurturing adults in their lives. And they’re spending their lives away from the nurturing adults, which is what they need for healthy brain development.

...

In ADD, there’s an essential brain chemical, which is necessary for incentive and motivation, that seems to be lacking. That’s called dopamine. And dopamine is simply an essential life chemical. Without it, there’s no life. Mice in a laboratory who have no dopamine will starve themselves to death, because they have no incentive to eat. Even though they’re hungry, and even though their life is in danger, they will not eat, because there’s no motivation or incentive. So, partly, one way to look at ADD is a massive problem of motivation, because the dopamine is lacking in the brain. Now, the stimulant medications elevate dopamine levels, and these kids are now more motivated. They can focus and pay attention.

However, the assumption underneath giving these kids medications is that what we’re dealing with here is a genetic disorder, and the only way to deal with it is pharmacologically. And if you actually look at how the dopamine levels in a brain develop, if you look at infant monkeys and you measure their dopamine levels, and they’re normal when they’re with their mothers, and when you separate them from mothers, the dopamine levels go down within two or three days.

So, in other words, what we’re doing is we’re correcting a massive social problem that has to do with disconnection in a society and the loss of nurturing, non-stressed parenting, and we’re replacing that chemically. Now, the drugs—the stimulant drugs do seem to work, and a lot of kids are helped by it. The problem is not so much whether they should be used or not; the problem is that 80 percent of the time a kid is prescribed a medication, that’s all that happens. Nobody talks to the family about the family environment. The school makes no attempt to change the school environment. Nobody connects with these kids emotionally. In other words, it’s seen simply as a medical or a behavioral problem, but not as a problem of development.

Daisy pauses to scream a hearty YES!

You see, now, if your spouse or partner, adult spouse or partner, came home from work and didn’t give you the time of day and got on the phone and talked with other people all the time and spent all their time on email talking to other people, your friends wouldn’t say, "You’ve got a behavioral problem. You should try tough love." They’d say you’ve got a relationship problem. But when children act in these ways, we think we have a behavioral problem, we try and control the behaviors. In fact, what they’re showing us is that—my children showed this, as well—is that I had a relationship problem with them. They weren’t connected enough with me and too connected to the peer group. So that’s why they wanted to spend all their time with their peer group. And now we’ve given kids the technology to do that with.

...

...human beings are shaped very early by what happens to them in life. As a matter of fact, they’re shaped already by what happens in uterus. After 9/11, after the World Trade disasters in those terrorist attacks, some women who were pregnant suffered PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. And depending on what stage of pregnancy they suffered the PTSD, when they measured their children’s cortisol levels—cortisol being a body stress hormone—at one year of age, those kids had abnormal cortisol levels. In other words, their stress apparatus had been negatively affected by the mother’s stress during pregnancy. Similarly, for example, when I looked at the stress hormone levels of the children of Holocaust survivors with PTSD, the greater the degree of PTSD of the parent, the higher the stress hormone level of the child.

So, how we see the world, whether the world is a hostile or friendly place, whether we have to always do for ourselves and look after others or whether we can actually expect and receive help from the world, whether or not the world is hostile or friendly, and indeed our stress physiology, is very much shaped by those early experiences.

Listen to/read the whole thing; Dr Maté has an overall approach you probably haven't heard before. And I think it helps immeasurably that Dr Maté has ADD himself, and has the necessary inside-understanding to talk about the issues.

His newest book is titled In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, which I have just ordered from AMAZON.

(Thanks Chaos!)

Nikki Haley begins terrorizing the poor and disabled of South Carolina

The mainstream press can't stay away from the story of the first woman governor of a deep-south state, born to immigrants. Nikki Haley is the lady of the hour, much as she was during the summer, when she won the primary and made the cover of Newsweek.

Needless to say, all this press-adulation undoubtedly translates into political capital:

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley says she won a huge victory as the budget board unanimously accepted her choice to run the agency that oversees the state's finances and bureacracy.

The five-member Budget and Control Board on Thursday approved Eleanor Kitzman as executive director.

Unanimous votes are rare on the board led by the governor. For eight years, former Gov. Mark Sanford fought with the board's legislative leaders.

Haley says she hopes the vote is a sign of things to come.

I'm sure it is.

It is notable that Haley is appointing a lot of women to state positions. Not my favorite women, but women nonetheless. (It's a mama grizzly thing, I wouldn't understand). From WIS-TV:

Haley nominated attorney and former prosecutor Lillian Koller to take over as head of South Carolina's Department of Social Services. "She brings a true amount of experience in a time where South Carolina needs it," said Governor Haley, "She brings a lot of reform and conservatism at a time where South Carolina wants it."

Koller promises to cut more services.

Which services are those? I wasn't aware we had any social services left, but I'm sure they'll find something to take away from us.

And guess what? LET THE GAMES BEGIN! Lawsuits Follow New DSS Director Lillian Koller To SC:

In November of 2010, a lawsuit was filed claiming the state of Hawaii was falling behind on handing out food stamps to families in need. Federal guidelines require food stamp applications to be processed within 30 days.

Documents in the suit filed against the state of Hawaii and director Koller say that only 78 percent of applications were processed on time. During that same time, the departments staff was cut and the state lowered the eligibility requirements for food stamps, encouraging more to apply.

If the federal government finds that states don't distribute 80 percent of the benefits in a month there could be fines. So far, Hawaii hasn't been fined.

South Carolina gets Hawaii's cast-offs! Oh goodie.

And today, Haley outlines cuts of just more than $110 million:

Gov. Nikki Haley will propose cutting payments to doctors and hospitals for treating poor patients in a state-run health care program; requiring the use of generic cancer, HIV/AIDS and mental health drugs; and eliminating state funding of South Carolina ETV and the state Arts Commission in her State of the State speech tonight, according to an Associated Press interview.

...

The largest savings would come from reducing what doctors and hospitals are paid to treat patients in Medicaid, the state-run health insurance program for the poor and disabled. For each percentage point reduction, according to the state Department of Health and Human Services, the state could save about $10 million. Lawmakers previously have barred the agency from cutting the rates that the state pays doctors and hospitals.

Allen Stalvey, vice president of advocacy and communications for the S.C. Hospital Association, said hospitals have been preparing for this news.

...

Hospitals are working on alternatives to a rate cut, Stalvey said, including increasing the $264 million in taxes that they pay to the state each year.

Still, Stalvey said, health care providers will be impacted.

“The small rural hospitals,” he said, “it could be disastrous for them.”

Ken May, executive director of the S.C. Arts Commission, said losing $2 million in state funding would shutter that commission's doors.

The commission, formed in 1967, supports South Carolina's arts community through arts education programs that bring authors, artists and dancers into schools, grants to individual artists, and operating money given to local arts organizations.

Much of the commission's state funding is matched by federal dollars.

"Cutting our funding means leaving federal dollars on the table and doing serious damage to the arts statewide," May said, adding a thriving arts community helps attract new industry and an educated workforce to the state.

"Everybody who talks about the world economy realizes that, if we are going to succeed, it must be through creativity and innovation. It's not going to be through blue-collar jobs or cheap labor. That's all gone overseas. If we're going to attract the people who work in those emerging industries, we have to offer a quality of life that attracts them," he said.

Eliminating the state portion of ETV’s budget would save $9.5 million.

Requiring poor patients on Medicaid and mental health patients to use generic cancer, HIV/AIDS and other drugs would save $991,000 a year, Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Jeff Stensland said.

Good thing I can get North Carolina public TV from here. Good thing I have medical insurance.

And those are the only good things I can think of in response to this horrific bullshit right now.