Christian Leftist

[*I say hunting because he married off adolescent girls to older men without their conesnt.]

I find it more than a little ironic that the most religious of zealots call things like AIDS, cancer and Hurricane Katrina “signs from God” or “God’s wrath” as punishment of sinful people, but when an extremely rare genetic disorder blights a closed population who practice a blatantly illegal and immoral act, it’s blamed on “the drinking water.”

The residents of Colorado City, AZ and Hildale, CO are all closely related. And when I say closely, I mean they’re doing more than playing ping pong with their cousins. Few people escape the clutches of the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints and even fewer join up for a life of poverty, tyranny and fifteen kids, so the gene pool has suffered from a limited number of people all intermarrying.

Hence the problem reported by Yahoo News. Many residents marry their first cousins (or worse). Now the towns are paying the price: at least 15 children have had fumarase deficiency, a disease where brain cells starve for nutrients and fail to grow properly, resulting in retardation, nervous system functions and facial features. Often victims suffer an early death.

I cannot believe the sheer irresponsibility of marrying another person who shares recent ancestors with me. I would say that they deserve what they get, but the genes aren’t punishing the parents; they’re punishing the children who had no choice in being born.

Logic would say bring in fresh blood. Reason would say have them all sterilized. Kidding! Seriously though, what morons. But at least the young ones will fit right in.

In keeping with the spirit of this post on the mess that is the home nursing industry, here’s an article from Yahoo discussing today’s Supreme Court decision that said that health care workers who are employed at home are not entitled to either minimum wages or overtime pay.

Well, that’s one way to make someone’s wiping your Aunt Crotchety’s butt for $4.50/hour more like a human being.

One of the most redeeming aspects of the television news industry is that it can expose the worst possible outcome of any scenario and drive a point starkly home in the space of thirty seconds. That’s what ABC News did on Thursday when it covered the Paris Hilton jail scandal. I don’t think there is an accurate estimate of precisely how much medical suffering goes on in prison, but I’ll hazard a guess and use my treatment when I was in lockup as an example.

If your medical condition requires that you take certain pills on a daily basis to function and it has been proven that going cold turkey on said pills WILL cause severe physiological effects (say, a complete mental breakdown and suicidal tendencies), it is in everyone’s best interests that you receive those medications. When I pleaded for medical attention, the guard took a look at me, snarled, “She’s not dying!” and walk away. Among several other civil rights violations, I was released rather than treated because it would have meant more trouble for the police. If there hadn’t been lawyers filing en masse for a group of us as a whole and a significant media presence surrounding our arrests, other protesters and I would have languished in roach-infested cells as long as the paperwork backups continued, possibly for weeks.

Google the Washington Post articles on Jonathan Magbie, and you’ll understand how cruel and heartless the criminal justice system truly is towards anyone who isn’t as healthy as a horse. That’s just a taste of the horror stories to have emerged from U.S. prisons. I can’t imagine the treatment in countries poorer than our own.

Medical care is not supposed to be a ‘luxury that prisoners don’t deserve.’ It is a basic human need, and there is no excuse that can justify the physical and mental suffering of a patient whose problems are treatable.

Michael Griffin stands out from your average chief of a program that relies on federal funding: he agreed to an interview on National Public Radio and spoke frankly when asked his opinion, which is more than one can ask of so many CEOs, CFOs, political appointees or representatives. That act in itself is commendable. Now comes the time when we cringe at exactly what those opinions are.

Here is an excerpt of his responses from an ABC news article on the implications:

“I have no doubt that a trend of global warming exists,” Griffin told Inskeep. “I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with.

“To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change,” Griffin said. “I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.”

You might remember the brouhaha last year over an elimination of the words “to understand and protect our home planet” from the NASA mission statement, or you might not.

Or perhaps the saga of the 2005 attempt to silence James Hansen, NASA’s senior climate scientist who works at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, slipped past your attention. Two years ago, Hansen warned the public that the earth was approaching a “tipping point” on global warming. The Bush appointee who had censured Hansen lost his job when word leaked out, but that result only came after national exposure of his incompetency.

These quiet uproars are the sort of AP briefs that fail to capture the attention of the major TV news networks. It is difficult to remember to save and document every incident of a political coup when it advances in inches, not feet, over the span of four decades.

Micheal Griffin doesn’t appear to be in danger of losing his job, yet. This raises the issue of what – or who – the word ’scientist’ represents.