Archive for March, 2008

http://www.unnaturalcauses.org/

Of course it is.

My one problem with this doc is that it is a textbook case of preaching to the choir. No poor person or POC will be surprised to learn that science has corroborated what we have seen played out over generations in our communities: Stress due to a lack of power and resources leads to physical illness. The real question is weather or not anyone really cares about the physical health of those who have less power than themselves.

Often in this doc, comparisons are made between the US and other rich or industrialized nations. Other nations with less stark income gaps or with more socialized public policy tend to have better health outcomes. Here is what the filmmakers are missing: the US is THE RICHEST NATION. Many people in the US believe that we got “here,” the top of the economic heap, through bloody competition and that to stay there will require even more callus attitudes about the quality and worth of human life. We need only look at the disparities that exist between those who have designed the Iraq War and those who die in it to see that better health outcomes for the powerless are considered a small price to pay for world dominance in the minds of some very powerful Americans.

If you are not watching the broadcasts, try and get your hands on this thought provoking doc.

This documentary draws attention to a fascinating area of public health research that charts the correlations among socio-economics, race and health. One study of thousands of British civil servants showed that the lower on the hierarchy a worker was positioned, the worse their health was. Another study showed that the amount of time your parents owned their own home during your childhood, the better your immune system will be at fighting off a cold. The explanation for this consistent link between wealth, race, and health is stress. Stress increases the level of a Cortisol in your blood stream, a hormone that increases memory, blood pressure, and generally gives you a performance boost in tight situations. But, in high and prolonged doses, Cortisol contaminates your system and essentially ages you more quickly.

I would love to see a study of how poor people explode this linkage with traditional and subversive cultural strategies. Isn’t music basically a Cortisol reducing strategy at its core. Dancing has to be a way of reducing Cortisol. Laughing is definately all about bringing down the blood pressure. I want to see the stats for how many conga drummers defy the averages for heart attack among their socio-economic peers. I wonder how many street artists are exceptions to the rule.

I caught most of a pretty incredible replayed audio of a lecture given by Julian Darley of the Post Carbon Institute. After reading Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy, this talk was a sorely needed bit of meat added to the bones of a vision of the planets uncertain future.

“>Go here for more on Darley.

Rev. Wright’s remarks brought crack back into the public conversation. Lest we forget that indeed the US government seems to share some of the blame for this monstrous epidemic:

Check out some of the reported facts around the Iran Contra-Crack connection from no less than PBS’s News Hour.

He makes a great point here:

Reverend Wright suggested in one of his sermons that AIDS was intentionally allowed to infect people because it would probably do most of its damage in the black community. White Americans see this view point as racist paranoia. But black Americans remember the Tuskegee experiment when black men who had syphilis were left untreated intentionally so the progress of the disease could be studied by government doctors. This actually happened and its memory has caused a collective distrust of doctors in the black community for which white Americans can not see any rational basis. Again we are stuck with dealing with the evil deeds that were done before many of us were born.

Read the full text.

Gary Kimaya on Salon.com:

. . .the same all-American flag-wavers who called loudest for war against Iraq are now denouncing Wright as a hate-monger and a traitor, and attacking Michelle Obama for saying that only recently has she had reason to feel proud of her country. They insist that anyone who is not permanently proud of the United States, whose patriotism isn’t plastered on his or her face like the frozen smile of a beauty queen waving from a Fourth of July float, is beyond the pale. Never mind that the glorious results of their debased version of patriotism — 4,000 American troops dead, a wrecked Iraq, and a greatly strengthened terrorist enemy — are plain for all to see.

White pundits are completely baffled. They cannot find a grain of truth in the comments of Rev. Jerimiah Wright that have surfaced over the last weeks. Black pundits except, presumably, those like John Mcwhorter, or Shelby Steele who generally represent the self immolating wing of black culture, find themselves in the tough position of explaining to whites why an obviously sane and savvy, ivy-league educated, black man would associate with a preacher who says things that seems so offensive to “typical” white people. Here is what these pundits cannot say:

Western empire from its genesis as a super power has suffered from a fatal flaw that John Ralston Saul called “the dictatorship of reason.” The very mindset that helped power the rise of colonialism, conquest, mercantilism, capitalism, industrialism, and now moneyism is the same mindset that powered Slavery and Genocide in a number of contexts.
(here is where this piece becomes extremely opinion based) White culture, largely does not accept this idea and mostly believe that acts of violence in the history of Western empire are aberrant acts of madness caused by flawed men or devised by the Devil himself. I believe this denial is a distinguishing characteristic of white culture and goes far in explaining the gulf between American whites and blacks over the comments of Reverend Wright.

Evidence for this denial is in ample supply these days. Consider the hard time Americans are having accepting the idea that the Iraq War was - more than just a mistake - it was a planned coup of reasoned policy that has contributed to the acceleration of waning American power around the world politically and economically. American’s for instance still believe in large numbers that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. The proponents of the Bush revolution are happy to allow this confusion to float, just as I assume they are happy to allow the mostly Shiite Iran to be misunderstood as supporting the Sunni Alqieida. It seems to me that these sorts of confusions are a necessary piece of strategy of the conservative war machine. These confusions are expressions of a deeper belief in the baseline goodness of Western society; unquestioning faith in the conclusions arrived at by Western style rationalism as it is deployed on everything from world affairs to the economy.

At least two problems arise from this blindness:

a. A blind, or un-critical reliance on rational thought embraces abstraction and leads there for to a disconnect from the world of bodies, feelings, and empathy. The world of subjective experience within ones body along with the intuition that comes as a side effect, the feelings and emotions that this body can experience, and the empathy for others that results is the world that brought humanity into being. It is the world that we inhabited for tens of thousands of years before we began the recent explosive cultural shifts of urbanization and modernization. Reason itself is not the problem here, but an over-reliance on it. I am reminded of the many commentators this week who have decried an over-reliance on mathematical models in the finical services industry that ushered in an abandoning of business sense and helped set the stage for the recent financial crises.

b. When this system of rationalism breaks down, we are loathe to admit it. We will deny that something is wrong until it is way too late. This was the case with colonialism, slavery, the holocaust, the atom bomb, and is now the case with global warming.

How does this confusion relate to Jeremiah Wright? Generally speaking, black people are well aware that the Western empire has a cruel shadow that, when unchecked can wreak violent havoc upon the Earth. Wright’s sermons, like many sermons being given every year across this country, points out this dirty secret. Nothing that I have heard Rev. Wright preach in the infamous excerpts is disputable in terms of the historical record. Yes, Iran-Contragate revealed that drugs were shipped into the US under the auspices of the CIA. Yes, at the same time the nation instituted racist sentencing guidelines for drug convictions and began to surpass the construction of schools with the construction of jails. Yes, the US has sponsored a number of disreputable military actions around the world from Chile, to Iran, to the Congo and has supported regimes of the lowest ilk from Saudi Arabia to South Africa. And that is just the stuff that we have admitted to. So when Wright says “God damn America,” he is speaking in a context that many people the world over including the descendants of formerly enslaved people in the US can accpet if not agree with.

But, the mainstream of the Wester empire is in denial. The sad part is-when you consider the results of deregulated money markets and the costs of preemptive wars-it becomes clearer by the day that the chiding of men like Pastor Wright is the very conscience that this empire must begin to listen to in order survive the next century.

Today Senator Obama made what some have called the most important speech on race in America since Dr. King was alive. Obama’s speech was delivered from Constitution Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This backdrop subliminally associated his presentation with the intellectual idealism of the nations founders as opposed to the shallow nationalism that oozes from the set pieces chosen for most heavy-handed political propaganda. Remember Bush’s speech on the aircraft carrier proclaiming the Iraq war had been won?

I must admit I haven’t finished listening to the speech, but what I have heard so far was impressive and a bit humbling. I was humbled by the realization that the forces against which Obama is working would except nothing less than this sort of tight rope walking when it comes to the issue of race and the history of America. It is as if Centuries of slavery, brutalization, and psychological warfare have to be willfully forgotten for the sake of reaching the long term goal of meaningful political and cultural representation. For a moment, I started to believe that this brother really feels himself becoming a bridge between communities that are separated by a huge chasm of misunderstanding. For a moment I started to believe that it really might do this country some good mediate our differences with the help of a talented young bi-racial president.

Ferentz Lafargue on Huffington Post:

When friends ask me why I’m supporting Barack Obama I enjoy saying it’s because of his name. As a fellow former black kid with a funny name, I believe there are certain invaluable lessons that one learns while growing up in this country with a “non-traditional” American or Anglo-Saxon name. I would even argue that this experience is instructive in building character because of how it forces a person very early on in life to think critically about his or her relationship with this country.

Michael Crowly in The New Republic:

His target audience was working class white voters–Reagan Democrats with a historic tendency to let racial prejudice and fear override their other social and economic interests, and whose view of Obama the Jeremiah Wright controversy threaten to permanently warp. That’s one reason Obama sounded a striking note of sympathy for racial resentment within white America…

Sam Stein reports on Jesse’s response:

The head of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, who supports Obama, claimed the Illinois Democrat had averted “crisis” and created “opportunity” by laying out a unifying vision to confront racial and political divides.

The Times reports that a new national study found that 1 in 4 girls age 14 to 19 has a sexually transmitted disease. Thinks that’s a bad number?

Nearly half the African-Americans in the study of teenagers ages 14 to 19 were infected with at least one of the diseases monitored in the study — human papillomavirus (HPV), chlamydia, genital herpes and trichomoniasis, a common parasite.

I’ve been reading lately about the biological realities of young adulthood and how this subtext gives rise to complex cultural norms (slightly heterocentric and esoteric, but bare with me).

The danger of childbirth in the hunter-gatherer context, the risk of anemia due to menstruation and childbirth, and the relatively long period of close parental involvement required to raise a human, co-emerges with:

-The entrainment of ovulatory cycles among close social relations helping to coordinate the distribution of sexual involvement in small clans
-The use of fire (the Promethean secret) to cook meat for an otherwise vegetarian by design helping to allay the risks of anemia
-During the spike in pre-teen male testosterone girls 11-14 experience relative size parity or dominance and anovulatory menstruation (a pre-modern phenomenon occuring less and less) making childbirth less likely

The entrainment of menstruation with the moon makes women the first in the species to understand “deep time.” Deep time aides in hunting animals for meat and eventually becomes the cornerstone adaptive advantage for humans among other animals.

The argument goes that in this biological context, human women become the first female on earth to “choose” their “partners.” There are other monogamous species but most of the others are generally pliant to estrus regulated sexual activity. Human women can have sex at anytime of the cycle and refuse sex at anytime of the cycle. Human women arguably have the most dramatic orgasms of any living animal. But, to attain this they need patient (read good father, diligent hunter) partners.

In many cultures the result of this biological framework is that sex is thought of as something that women give to men. It is a secret that men desire to unlock or in some case to stamp out. Culture is also the strata on which a backlash against the human female’s unique qualities has taken place. The honoring of mensturation became the vilification of it. The first rights of women hood, became the first burdens. We cannot discuss sex with out acknowledging the way power has been inscribed through gender and biology.

Why do I bring all of this up? Because I would argue the along with a re-framing of sexual pleasure and sex-positive personal responsibility, we have to reconsider some of the behaviors that we have developed as a response to the repressive anti-female cultural practices that exist throughout our history. I don’t think it is enough to admonish youth to understand themselves and their desires better. I would argue that they crave a set of parameters within which they can experiment sexually. In many ways young people are as much curious as they are horny. Suppressing this curiosity is just as damaging as suppressing the act of sex itself. However, though it has been twisted, the puritanical prohibition of teenage female sexuality holds in it a grain of wisdom. This grain of truth is that young women have a vastly greater set of risks to deal with in being active sexually.

Can we then imagine a world in which youth choose to be sexual beings before being sexual actors? This is an almost unspeakable conundrum outside of fundamentalist communities. I think the answer lies in the body itself. The teenage body must express its new found energies and tendencies. But, perhaps these expressions should not be bound by tradition or convention of either the puritanical or the cosmopolitan sort.

We might have some examples in youth sports which is commonly referred to as an “outlet” for young people’s energy. That might be a start, but unfortunately, some sports settings also encourage a very traditional understanding of gender among youth. I need only tell you some of the stories from my high school soccer team days as evidence. I think a more conscious approach to this balancing act could yield all sorts of ideas about what teenagers can do with their bodies so that the need for sexual expression is honored without elevating the act of sex to a level of obsessive interest that overrides their needs for safety and health. I suspect that if we look back at the traditional cultural activities of our own bloodlines, we will find various ways in which youth were able to express their sexual desires constructively. I am imaging a village crowded around the youth who are performing a courting dance.

I am not advocating abstinence (per se). Young people are going to have sex. But when 12 year old girls are performing oral sex at school (a story that I have heard but can’t prove) we can be sure that there are forces at work that should not be met with approval and acquiescence. I think that respecting the deep connection between the mind and body and the evolutionary history that our minds and bodies express can lead us to creative constructive approaches to honoring the sexual desires of our youth. Some may cringe at the idea of a resurgent traditionalism that teaches young girls to treat sex like a commodity that needs to be horded. I am only interested however, in the traditional to the extent that it honors the feminine (and the masculine). What if we combined the communal aspects of traditional societies with the respect for personal freedom and self-expression of the modern West. This, to me, is the challenge before us. This hybrid cultural framework will not tell people who to sleep with, but it also will not tell people that they should sleep with any and everybody. What if parents and teachers stepped in front of BET and MTV, but instead of taking up the role of guard they took up the role of guides.

For more on human evolution and sexuality (including some not so heterocentric ideas), check out:
The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond
Sex, Time, and Power by Leonard Shlain

Paul Beatty, author of Tuff and White Boy Shuffle explains how he was finally compelled to join the bustling throng following behind the pied piper of the Democartic Party:

Early on in the presidential race, I never understood what the big deal was about the junior senator from Illinois. I’d turn to the TV, read an interview, download an op-ed piece hoping to get some insight into why everyone was so excited. I didn’t get it. Where was the vaunted professorial intellect? The galvanizing charisma? All I saw was a man with a suspect afro and an even more suspect health plan mispronouncing Taliban the same way Governor Schwarzenegger mispronounces California.

While under the utmost duress, he’s reached that transcendental stasis that back in the day the homies referred to as “maintaining.” Cops got your face pressed against the wall for no good reason, and someone asks how you’re doing? You’re maintaining. Bills due? Maintaining. Sitting through another agonizingly stilted Halle Berry performance? Maintaining.

Read the full text…

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early