Monthly Archives: September 2011

Michele Bachmann should refund her salary

Ripple in Stillwater has been keeping track:

Michele Bachmann has failed to show up for work in Congress 58.7 percent of the time since July 1, missing 145 out of 247 roll call votes. The last time Bachmann even cast a vote was August 1. If we were to pay our goldbricking congresswoman on a pro rata basis for the time she was actually working for us in the past three months, we would dock her $174,000 annual paycheck $25,534.50.

Details

Edit the Pledge

Edit the Pledge of Allegiance to remove the phrase “Under God”

The Pledge of Allegiance is said every day in schools across America. It is a government sanctioned speech, and should remain neutral in matters of religion. In its current state, it supports the existence of God, which goes against several religions, and supports others. This bias should not be supported by the country according to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

There’s a petition you can sign. Here.

Illegal Banned Book Library In a Private School

This, if real, is over the top cool.

I go to a private school that is rather strict. Recently, the principal and school teacher council released a (very long) list of books we’re not allowed to read. I was absolutely appalled, because a large number of the books were classics and others that are my favorites. One of my personal favorites, The Catcher in the Rye, was on the list, so I decided to bring it to school to see if I would really get in trouble. Well… I did but not too much. Then (surprise!) a boy in my English class asked if he could borrow the book, because he heard it was very good AND it was banned! This happened a lot and my locker got to overflowing with the banned books, so I decided to put the unoccupied locker next to me to a good use. I now have 62 books in that locker, about half of what was on the list. I took care only to bring the books with literary quality. Some of these books are:

GO HERE

Hat Tip Sean Archer

Stop the newest attack on Planned Parenthood

The extreme anti-choice members of Congress have launched yet another all-out attack on Planned Parenthood.

This time, Congressman Cliff Stearns, as Chairman of the House oversight committee, has initiated a massive investigation into the activities of Planned Parenthood and its affiliates based on the blatantly incorrect assertion by rightwing activists that Planned Parenthood misuses federal funds to pay for abortion services

Go here and sign the damn petition!

You come from Cannibals

A man “lies crumpled on the sand … Behind him a dark trail leads back to the spot from which he has just been dragged. Looking closer, we notice something slightly odd about the figure crouching over the wounded man. His posture does not suggest a doctor attempting to staunch bleeding, or even to check heartbeat or pulse. Look a little closer still, and you may be inclined suddenly to reel back or to close your eyes. The man sprawled at such an odd angle beside the injured [man] has his face pressed against a gaping tear in [his] throat. He is drinking blood fresh from the wound…” Why? Well, to cure his epilepsy, of course. The date is 24 AD, the injured man is a gladiator, and the man drinking the blood must have bribed his way to the front of the line because he’s getting what a lot of other people in Ancient Rome routinely sought. A nice blood meal, for medicinal purposes, of course.

Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires

And that is not the most shocking thing you’ll read if you devour Ricahrd Sugg’s Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians. In this scholarly yet macabre book, Sugg documents the practice of consuming or wearing or otherwise messing around with human flesh, skin, fat, brains, and blood as generally recommended by the best and most reputable healers, and as generally practiced by people of means and education, among others. “James I refused corpse medicine; Charles II made his own corpse medicine; and Charles I was made into corpse medicine.” Corpse medicine. Sounds like cannibalism to me!

Suddenly, the Eucharist makes sense. The consumption of human tissue in Europe for quite some time was a primarily Christian practice. Some of the tissues were harvested from the bodies of the freshly executed. Were the fabled crowds gathered to see the bad men hang after something other than a good show? Was it like a drive-through, a buffet, or more of a sit-down affair? Interestingly, though the roots of this tradition go back to the Classical Period, and it was developed to its full science during the Medieval Period, Medical Cannibalism seems to have reached it’s height during the early Renaissance and continued into the Victorian Era, though much reduced in fashion. You have to read this book.

Is cannibalism normal?

In my last essay on Cannibalism (Among Cannibals) I asked if you thought that cannibalism could ever be considered as just one of many of the diverse modes of human behavior, recently abandoned by virtually all societies and thus seen as much odder and demented than it should be viewed. In particular, I was asking about cannibalism where you go and kill someone so you could eat them. The stuff I mention above, from Sugg’s book, seems a bit more like ritual cannibalism where you eat your ancestors, perhaps cremated and calcined and made into a sort of soup, as part of a ritual. So maybe, if you are of European Ancestry, you can keep believing that your people have never really been cannibals. But I’m not so sure. Sucking the blood from the gaping wound of a dying gladiator is probably not what you were thinking as an example of “not demented” or fully ritualized. And, once there is a sufficient demand for human body parts, tissues, and fluids, would you think for a moment that there were not agents who could provide these valuable items in ways that were exactly the same as killing someone so you could eat them … because people were killed, so they could be eaten, then, well, eaten?

No. Sorry. If you are of European Ancestry, you come from Cannibals.

One way to make sense of this all is to consider blood, and bodily fluids in general. These days, in Western society, we know that these things are dangerous. Some people (smart people) carry around portable shields that allow them to give mouth-to-mouth to strangers and not get a disease. Ambulance workers and other first responders routinely don protective materials to avoid contact with fluids. I’m not sure … do mothers still suck the blood from their children’s wounds like they did when I was a kid? Probably not. Do people still suck the blood from their own wounds? (Not counting when you bite your own tongue.) I’m not sure, you tell me. When was the last time you tasted human blood?

Our fear of fluids has gone so far that you can’t get a good piece of red meat out any more unless you go to the highly specialized restaurant’s, where despite the availability of Pittsburgh you will see people ordering “medium” or even, gasp, “well done.”

Given this, the whole idea of paying to suck the blood from the gaping wound of a dying gladiator is enough to put you off your lunch, but I submit that this disgust is a cultural trait that you need not be endowed with. I’m not saying sucking blood is a good thing. I’m just saying that it is a bad thing, to you, because you learned to be that way. And in other times and other places, the distaste for human body parts, tissues, or fluids may not have been routinely learned.

It’s all cultural

And maybe in some cases, quite the opposite may have happened: Such a taste may have been cultivated. And once you’ve got a culture where eating raw human liver or rendered human fat or whatever is seen as a good thing, it is very hard to not define such a culture as “Cannibals.”

So why, then, is it the case that in our Western literature the prevailing notion (over the last couple of centuries) is that dark skinned people living in far off lands are sufficiently cannibalistic (even when they aren’t) that the term “Cannibals” can actually become the primary term by which they are referred (used in much of the literature more often than “Natives”), but French, English Germans, and others who, if of sufficient status, mainstream, and solvent, did it whenever they could but are not thusly labeled?

Because the meaning of the word “cannibal” has almost nothing to do with who eats whom.


See more on Cannibalism

Japan Nuclear Disaster: Update # 36: Sushi Recommendations

One of the interesting items we have this week is a study by Greenpeace in which various organisms from the sea near Fukushima were sampled for radioactive isotopes. Let’s take a closer look.

The data in the table provided (see the first item in Ana’s feed for the link) show the amount of radiation (radioactive decay) by isotope type per kilogram of plant or animal tissue from various samples. On the higher end is a fish with 357 bq/kg of radiation and some seaweed with 190 bk/kg.

What does this mean? Hard to say. I can tell you this: A normal human has about 4,000 or more bq (in total for the human) of radiation primarily from the most common source of radiation (radioactive potassium) So if Greenpeace had sampled a typical human not from a radioactive region they would get a result of about 4,000 bq total. Say a human weighs 70 kilos. That means the human being sampled would yield about 50 bk/kg. So the radioactive fish is about 7 times more radioactive than a human, and the plant almost 4 times as radioactive. A concern here would be where on the food chain one is, if radioactive isotopes are being concentrated through trophic activity (things eating things). Also, a concern would be how long this radioactive stuff will be radioactive.

Regarding the second question first, roughly half the radioactive material found in the Greenpeace samples has a half life of just over 2 years, but the rest has a half life of 30 years. Regarding trophic level, note that among the less radioactive samples both fish and seaweed have similar amounts, but among the more radioactive samples, it is the fish (which are trophically higher than plants) that have more, which simply indicates that the samples could be revealing things about a real biological system (subject to revision). In other words, were the reverse true, I’d be scratching my head and not because of dandruff.

The most radioactive fish is a Rockfish, which is an opportunistic carnivore often feeding on other things that eat things and sometimes things that eat things that eat things, and they are probably relatively long lived. In other words, rockfish are high on the food chain and would be expected to concentrate radioactive isotopes that are in the environment. The next highest fish in terms of contamination is the halibut, which is also a carnivore, but eating more crustaceans and probably not as high on the food chain. A kind of cod, with a similar diet to halibut is next. The lowest in terms of radiation is a kind of mackerel, which probably eats pelagic crustaceans (shrimpy things that float around near the surface) which in turn eat plankton. This would be the lowest on the food chain of the sampled fish, but also the highest in the water column. So, it might be hard to tell the difference here between how high something is on the food chain and how high (top feeder) vs low (bottom feeder) the fish is in the water column. My sushi recommendations? Surface feeding low-torphic level short lived fish. From the Atlantic Ocean.

None of these samples were particularly close to the power plant, some were purchased from markets some taken directly from the sea. The plume of radiation from the plant is rather large.

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Scan Ana’s feed for a lot more on contamination issues.

And as these data become available we also see bans on Japanese produce being lifted for US military commissaries. The effects of food bans are being explored, and radioactive contamination is being found in novel places such as industrial waste.

News regarding nuclear plant incidents, construction patterns, and potentials in the US, as well as further conversations about nuclear safety, are all over Ana’s feed. And it’s OK, the IAEA has a plant to make reactors safe. They also have this barn door they intend to close. The plan will be voluntary, of course.

Meanwhile at the reactors, water has been used to cool them down to the point where the hot spots are only barely boiling and bubbling. In other words, we are still in a state where Step One control over the situation has not yet been achieved, even though it was declared achieved weeks ago. It is now expected that cooling below boiling levels may be achieved by some time next year.

It does appear that rainwater is passing more or less feely into the lower levels of the nuclear power plant where it interacts with uncontrolled globs of nuclear material, then presumably disappears from the planet all on its own. Or perhaps it flows into the nearby sea. They’re still working on that.

I want to take a moment to express my very sincere thanks to Analiese Miller for the tremendous work she does in putting together this feed. I know that she’s been very busy with other things over the last few weeks and that this has been an extra burden on her. You are awesome, Ana.

Continue reading Japan Nuclear Disaster: Update # 36: Sushi Recommendations

Utah Miscarriage Bill is a Miscarriage of Reason and Justice

Apparently the original bill has been watered down a bit, but not enough, and it shouldn’t exist anyway.

The bill provides for charnging women who have miscarriages due to “intentional or knowing acts.” The previous version of the bill included reckless acts along with willing acts. So, being a poor driver and getting into an accident and your unborn fetus being killed would make you a criminal. The new bill still would allow that to happen, of course, if vehicular homicide is a crime, this would presumably be as well.

But, the details are complex and rather nuanced. I recommend this piece at alternet.

Hat Tip Betsy McCall