Category Archives: Daily Post
About Vaccines
In my morning internet wanderings, I found a couple of articles at Mothering about whooping cough. The first was by Lauren Feder, MD, and the second by Jay Gordon, MD. I have things to say about both of them, but right now I’m going to talk about the second one.
It’s not quite clear to me what Dr. Gordon’s goal with this article was. The entire thing seems to boil down to “there’s a lot of uncertainty and disagreement in the medical community, talk to your doctor.” For the most part it just seems to muddy the waters. But after reading it, and particularly these parts, I want to talk a bit about the how and why of vaccination programs.
If vaccines work—and I believe they do—then vaccinated children are not endangered by unvaccinated children.
…points out that vaccinated children have still contracted whooping cough. The reasons for this include the bacterium adapting to the vaccine and thus negating its protection… Read the rest of this entry
Who is the Atheist Census?
Here’s a strange thing. An atheist census, run by… well I don’t know. There’s no name or organizational affiliation mentioned. The terms and conditions are very detailed though, very corporate, which makes me very, very curious who these people are. If you agree to their terms you’re agreeing to be bound by certain laws in Alberta, Canada. That’s the most solid information I’ve found so far.
The site is well designed, with slick animated graphs that, frustratingly, don’t show any actual numbers. I have issues with some of the questions, for example the “Irreligion” question has the following answers:
- Atheist
- Agnostic
- Atheist Agnostic
- Humanist
- Rationalist
- Buddhist Atheist
It seems far more sensible to me to remove “Atheist Agnostic” and make the question “Check all that apply”. (After a lot of thought, I finally went with humanist because that’s more important to my identity than any beliefs and I’m not a very good rationalist.) There’s a similar problem with the “Religion Raised In” question, in that it’s quite possible to be raised in multiple religions. And the gender binary lives on, only Male or Female are available.
There’s a very weird feeling to the site. It has no personal touch at all, pretty graphs that aren’t very useful, a clause requiring arbitration in any legal dispute unless you’re violating their copyright, and requires email validation before your data will be counted. There’s a definite corporate feeling to it, which seems very strange to me after getting used to the people at FreeThoughtBlogs as the voices of modern atheists.
I sent an email asking some questions to the site, if I get any answers I’ll post them here.
Catholics vs Girls
First up, an Arizona high school forfeited the championship baseball game rather than play a team with a girl on it. This would honestly bother me less except that they played two games during the season and made her sit out, rather than offend delicate eyes with all her femaleness. Apparently asking other schools to keep girls out and refusing to play if they don’t are more or less standard procedures for this one.
I’m a little upset at how far people are going out of their way for these assholes, they made her sit out twice and are working really hard to be respectful. Look at this,
“I respect their views, but it’s a bit out of the 18th century,” said Mesa Prep athletic director Amy Arnold
See myself I’m feeling that I don’t respect their views, because it’s a bit out of the 18th century. I also really wish her coach had refused to bench her, or even dignify the request with a response, when they first asked her to sit out. It’s one thing to respect someone’s idiosyncrasies, but coaches should really stand by their team.
Strictly speaking this school isn’t Catholic, but run by the Society of Saint Pius X, who broke away from Rome back in the 80’s because they thought the church wasn’t medieval enough. I note the distinction because details matter, but to be brutally honest it just feels like it’s the old Catholics from before Vatican II.
Our second story is real genuine Catholics being pushy assholes. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has launched an “official inquiry” into the Girl Scouts. Apparently they’re upset because GS material has links to groups like, I shit you not, Doctors Without Borders.
I swear it feels like these guys live in a twisted, backwards world where everything that I see as good is clearly bad and wrong to them. I mean if I were going to name a single group that does nothing but good and couldn’t be considered controversial, that’s it. Apparently supporting birth control at all is now considered controversial. We’re moving backwards, people.
“I know we’re a big part of the culture wars,” said the Girl Scouts’ spokeswoman, Michelle Tompkins. “People use our good name to advance their own agenda.”
“For us, there’s an overarching sadness to it,” Tompkins added. “We’re just trying to further girls’ leadership.”
Sadly, just that is probably enough to piss off most patriarchal groups. Conservative groups have been working very hard in the last year to push back women’s rights, and undermining a group that teaches girls leadership would be a strategic advantage there.
I really don’t understand why anyone pays them any attention or gives them any power at all.
This isn’t the Middle Ages anymore. If the church isn’t going to move with the times, people really need to start leaving it. And I know that most won’t, and that makes me sad. There’s too much human suffering already and yet churches like this seem determined to add as much as possible.
From Nothing?
This started as part of the second installment of “Why Creationism Horrifies Me”, I felt it was wandering too far off topic (even for me!) so I cut it. Since it’s still relevant, and since I’m too far behind to trash this much writing, I’m posting it on its own, even though I think I’ve said all of this before in older posts.
A common criticism I hear, or rather read, from creationists is that the scientific explanations say we came from nothing, or that the universe came from nothing. Although I freely admit that I don’t understand these relevant theories completely, I know enough to say that this isn’t so.
The thing is, we are the same matter and energy as everything else in the cosmos. Our matter came from the Earth, and our energy came from the Sun. It’s clearly true of life now, we can follow the cycles through the food chain and see that, and there’s no reason to believe it was any different for the first self-replicating molecules, the progenitors of what we call life. Read the rest of this entry
Love, Guilt and Hell.
The blog Pharyngula has an ongoing series called “Why I am an atheist” which consists of stories submitted by readers. You can probably guess the subject.
Saturday’s story really stands out, though, and I’ve been meaning to share it since I read it that morning. It’s author calls herself mouthyb, and it starts like this,
My childhood sounds like the word “jesus,” repeated until it falls into noise, and you realize that it never meant anything to begin with.
My mother used to repeat it in the car, on road trips. She spent twelve hours of reminding us of this: jesus said that he had no mother, no brother, and that no one would get into heaven but by loving him more than anything or anyone else.
It was okay that she didn’t love me, she said. It meant that she was going to heaven.
It’s difficult to read, and yet I recommend you do. Read the rest of this entry
Why are you a Republican?
I realize it may undermine the seriousness of this question to ask it right after that Funny or Die video, but if any Republicans are reading this, I’d really like to know. Why are you a member of that party? What attracts you to it, what about it inspires loyalty? Let me know in the comments!
If you’re like to brush up on your Republican party knowledge, here’s a link to their 2008 platform.
Let’s force doctors to lie to their patients!
Seriously, Kansas, what gives? The abortion/breast cancer link is nonexistent, it isn’t real. Are you so ethically bankrupt that you just don’t care?
If you don’t feel like clicking, the linked article is about a Kansas bill that would change tax code to make abortions more expensive and force doctors to tell the lie that a link has been found between abortion and breast cancer.
I can sort of understand how people could be so opposed to abortion, if I imagine that a blastocyst is a complete person and a woman isn’t, then clearly abortion would be murder. (I’m not sure what to call a miscarriage in that scenario.) But I really can’t understand the dishonesty, the willingness to lie for this cause. That feels like the act of someone who doesn’t really care about truth or reality, but has simply picked a side and is out to “win” no matter what.
And I am totally, utterly baffled by the sheer volume of hate directed at Planned Parenthood, one of the few organizations I’m aware of that seems to make the world a better place to live in with no downside I can see. Is this because the propaganda and misinformation is effective? I hear crazy conspiracy theories like PP provides false information and faulty birth control so that women will get pregnant and then PP will lie and hard-sell them into getting abortions so that PP can make huge profits from taxpayer’s money!
This scenario is so divorced from reality that I can only assume the people who believe it don’t think very hard about it and also have never actually set foot inside a Planned Parenthood building. And also haven’t noticed that it’s illegal to use government funds for abortions, for some damn reason.
Since this post has wandered into the area, I’ll take a moment to talk about what Planned Parenthood actually does. They provide sex education, STD testing and treatment, contraception, prenatal care, and a wide variety of general and reproductive health services for women and men, and also people who aren’t so easily defined. Including, yes, abortion.
They take good care of people, and it’s really hard for me to see that as a bad thing.
“We are not anti-gay, we are pro-marriage,”
My title quote comes from this article, and was said by one Tami Fitzgerald, explaining why her organization, Vote for Marriage NC, thought it was so important to pass an amendment to NC’s constitution banning same-sex marriage.
Frankly Tami, I think you’re lying. The reason I think this is that this amendment hurts marriage, by making it (even more) impossible for some couples who want to get married to do so, while it enshrines the treatment of gays as second-class citizens at best in the state constitution.
If you were really pro-marriage you’d be making it as easy as possible for people to get married. Since same-sex marriage is already not legally recognized in your state, this does nothing but spit in the face of every gay citizen of North Carolina. It denies them their self-determination, their equal place in our society, and their human dignity.
The future of music?
Check this out. Amanda Palmer recorded a new album, and is using Kickstarter to fund production. Right now she’s several times over her target goal with four weeks to go, so I’m not especially worried that she won’t manage it. But I’m still going to scrape up $25 during the next few weeks because I want that CD, dammit.
But I’ve been speculating on the future of music, and I wonder how well this will work in general. For someone like Amanda Fucking Palmer, hey no problem. Tweet the link a couple times and watch the funding roll in. But how about a brand new band? How do they go about funding their first album?
I think it could work with some savvy use of social networking and a little money to start with. Record a music video and put it on YouTube, offer sample mp3s on your home page, interact with your fans on Twitter and encourage them to share your work with more people. Nobody’s going to be blasting past $100,000 for their first album, but with work and care I think they could manage to get one out there. Then I suppose a tour would be in order, that seems to be standard procedure for an album release.
I don’t have a very solid understanding of how the music industry works, but I kind of get the feeling that RIAA and the big recording companies are slowly becoming irrelevant. I’m not sure how this will change over the next ten or twenty years, but it should be interesting to watch.
The problem with short posts
Maybe it’s twitter’s fault, when I free myself from the 140 character limit, I just get verbose. I like to think I’m living Bruce Lee’s philosophy of being like water, I shape myself to the available writing space.
Anyway, the post I started last night is getting long with no end in sight, and I have places to be today, so this will have to do this morning. I’ll try to have something with substance up tonight. Have a great day!
Falling off the wagon.
It’s been a while. Funny thing about people, they (or at least I) seem to get into a sort of inertia. Write every day, and it’s not too hard to keep writing every day. Missing a day is a stumble, but it doesn’t really change all that much. Once you’ve missed several days, or a week, you’ve lost your momentum and it’s much, much harder to get started again.
This is my first post in sixteen days. It’s been surprisingly difficult to get started on it. But I’m moving again now, that’s something.
The funny thing is, I haven’t been without stuff to write about the last two weeks. I’ve had plenty of ideas, they even seemed to work against me, colliding in my head so that I couldn’t sort them out enough to start writing one.
Anyway, for the next few days I’m going to try for short posts, more than one per day. I’m also going to aim for lighter subjects, but I don’t really know how well that will work. We’ll see.
Although I won’t really feel confident about it until I’ve got a solid week of posts, I’m going to tentatively say that I’m back. We’ll see how long it takes me to get into the swing of things again, and how long until I write 1,200 words of rage finding a new and interesting way to insult congress.
Waxing nostalgic
Once upon a time, I was stalked by a mad artist.
Friday mornings were when my stalker would strike. I’d find them on my front porch, usually just sitting on the doormat, strange art projects which clearly had some work put into them. I remember one included a cassette tape with a recording of PJ Harvey’s “Rid of Me”, which broadened my musical horizons a bit.
Once it was a cloth pouch held together by straight pins with interesting things taped to it and a lock of hair inside. Yesterday I found the hair behind my dresser, where it had probably fallen years ago, slowly pushed off the edge by encroaching clutter. It was filled with dust, brittle and breaking from the hot summers in an old house, and the rubber band was rotting away. I took a photo and felt strangely sad as I threw it away, thinking of a time in my life when beautiful things happened mysteriously.
The Adventures of Leo Tarvi 