Category Archives: ethics and morals

Eat a damn cup cake

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I found this blog on the women and weight issue.  She points out that the same magazines that criticize women for being too skinny also turn around and criticize them for being too *cough* fat.  It is pathological.

She does a great job of listing the statistics of women and how  the media distorts its portrayal of women.

I love the line:  Eat a damn cup cake!

She also advocates, as I do, eating a healthy diet and not sitting on the couch all day.  It’s all about balance.

I will be forever grateful that I started doing aerobics after my first child was born.  I was active as a kid, but slacked off when I became  a teenager–sports were considered unladylike in my hometown–you were a lesbian if you participated in sports (yes, they were that backward)….and people who exercised regularly were considered “health nuts” .  Geez-o-pete.

But I do believe those years of exercising helped with the health issues I’m dealing with now—I think I would have been much, much worse off from the effects of slowly being poisoned if I had not been as healthy to begin with.

And I’ve discovered that I’m much more likely to exercise when it’s something that is active and sports-like.  I do like aerobics, but even they can become routine and boring….I’m more likely to want to do something like playing in the snow or riding a bike or hiking a trail…and on…it’s something that I think is probably more beneficial not only to the body but to the spirit, as well.  Gotta have that.

 

 

Fat?

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Seriously…this cheerleader is considered “pudgy”…?

And the question “why are women so mean” is soooo far out of line it’s unbelievable.  Men can be just as cruel.  It may be a little more subtle, but still impacts his partner.

Anyway, it is really disgusting to see how Hollywood and the media  have demanded women become anorexic in order to be considered sexy and desirable.  It is pathological and unhealthy.  (it’s also personal as my ex was constantly on me about my weight.  I was 125 pounds–and small–and he was constantly telling me that I “better not get fat”.  It was a control thing with him.)

I’m not ashamed of being a woman. Of having curves.  The only time I feel bad about that is when those curves are somehow seen as “public property” that can be groped or commented on…like I’m not even a human being….

Some good news

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The poster that I blogged about here is apparently okay, as s/he is posting again.  Perhaps didn’t see the post asking if s/he was okay.  Some good news for a change…and yes, we have lost people to suicide in this group…I posted about one a while ago, but it has been lost. <sigh>   She was mercury toxic, without a job,  money,  or health insurance, and living out of a car.   She took her life in her despair.

Meanwhile….corporations get welfare while they ponder cutting Medicare, Social Security, and food stamps….

More on Rogoff and Reinhart

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Firedoglake has this up on the *cough* research of Rogoff and Reinhart.

From one of the commenters, letsgetitdone at 16:

I think, finally, that the RR study is an example of the corruption of social science in modern times. I believe that one can show that the study was not just guilty of calculation errors and errors of omission, but that these must be seen as part of a pattern of systematic bias that permeated their whole process of inquiry beginning with their selection of the problem, moving through every decision point in implementing the study, and ending with their evaluation of their evidence and their writing of the result. They made no attempt to do a scientific study maximizing fair comparison of alternative theories having policy relevance, but instead prepared what was essentially a legal brief supporting austerity policies and the Pete Peterson line. The social costs of what they did are strewn all over the globe. See this recent post at DailyKos.

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I agree that if R and R purposely left out data (and the concensus is that they did), then what they did was fraudulent and a deliberate attempt to persuade public opinion towards austerity.
This should be *sounding the bells*  as to how very, very important our public education system is….from  kindergarten through four year colleges….the public needs to be able to understand this stuff in the most basic terms.  And the financial gurus purposely make it difficult to understand for the Jane/John Does of the U.S., to give themselves the upper hand.  Like I said about the university I attended, they made math more difficult than it had to be –the only conclusion one can come to is that they were doing it on purpose to “weed out” people.  This, in turn, means fewer graduates with Math degrees to compete in the job market, enabling them to be paid more $$.  It also means that financial gurus can bullshit people and no one will be the wiser.  When the Wall St. meltdown happened, there were econ people who could not figure the mess out…how are Jane/John Doe supposed to?
With the Liberal Arts degree, I have a basic understanding of statistics from a political science class. We were taught to look for the reasons behind conclusions of research.  Who funded it?  What other work have these researchers done (looking at other work for biases)?  Who benefits from it (will a corporation use the data as an asset or use the data to knock down a competitor)?  If it was a poll, we were taught that anything more than 2% plus or minus of the margin of error was a flawed study–the questions asked were biased in some way or not thorough enough.
That is why one should always question absolutes in science or absolute truth that anyone espouses.  If more people were less intimidated and asked “why” and to say “I don’t understand” to someone trying to buffalo them, the financial gurus and others like them would not be able to get away with the stuff that they do.  Thank God for people like Herndon and the others who seek the truth and are not afraid to speak out.
I followed the link that letsgetitdone had in the comment to dailykos, which in turn had the link to the cepr.net website.
This quote from the cepr website says it all:
This is a big deal because politicians around the world have used this finding from R&R to justify austerity measures that have slowed growth and raised unemployment. In the United States many politicians have pointed to R&R’s work as justification for deficit reduction even though the economy is far below full employment by any reasonable measure. In Europe, R&R’s work and its derivatives have been used to justify austerity policies that have pushed the unemployment rate over 10 percent for the euro zone as a whole and above 20 percent in Greece and Spain. In other words, this is a mistake that has had enormous consequences.
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Minor quibble—as everyone is leaning to, this was not a “mistake”…but a deliberate attempt to misconstrue data to suit their political ideology, and that of Pete Peterson.

San Onofre…

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…disaster waiting to happen:  http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/04/26-1

Disease clusters around nuclear power plants (PDF) here: http://www.radiation.org/reading/pubs/091116Thyroidcancer.pdf

Map on disease clusters here: http://clusteralliance.org/clusters/

More posts on nuclear here: https://sunlightonthewater.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/theres-no-climate-change/

And here:  https://sunlightonthewater.wordpress.com/2012/07/11/nuclear-disaster/

The strength of women

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This story is refreshing in that it paints a woman as empowered.  She fought back:  http://www.commondreams.org/further/2013/04/26-1

I have a quibble with it, however, because then the question from the minds of those who wish to blame women for being raped:  why didn’t they fight back…?

First, this woman is trained in defense.  Most women are not….which begs the question of why not…??  Why aren’t self defense classes for women offered in high school? (on that note, why aren’t they taught how to change the oil in a car…but that’s another subject for another post.)

Secondly, this woman apparently has enough upper and lower body strength to put on a good defense.  What if she did not?  If she was unable to fend off her attacker and was raped, would she be considered complacent?

And lastly, if this were another scenario, where she were out on a date and was raped, but not violently….she would have a much more difficult time of proving it was raped….and this would be only after her sex life and, well, her entire life were examined to *know* that she was telling the truth and not a slut…

The man behind the curtain

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…apparently is Pete Peterson.  He is behind the curtain to economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart’s seriously flawed work that advocated austerity measures:  http://www.prwatch.org/NODE/12065

From the article:

Reinhart, described glowingly by the New York Times as “the most influential female economist in the world,” was a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics founded, chaired, and funded by Peterson. Reinhart is listed as participating in many Peterson Institute events, such as their 2012 fiscal summit along with Paul Ryan, Alan Simpson, and Tim Geithner, and numerous other Peterson lectures and events available on YouTube. She is married to economist and author Vincent Reinhart, who does similar work for the American Enterprise Institute, also funded by the Peterson Foundation.

Kenneth Rogoff is listed on the Advisory Board of the Peterson Institute. The Peterson Institute bankrolled and published a 2011 Rogoff-Reinhart book-length collaboration, “A Decade of Debt,” where the authors apparently used the same flawed data to reach many of the same conclusions and warn ominously of a “debt burden” stretching into 2017 that “will weigh heavily on the public policy agenda of numerous advanced economies and global financial markets for some time to come.” (Note that not everyone associated with the Institute touts the Peterson party line.)

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Reinhart, a senior fellow at Peterson’s Institute and married to an economist also funded by Peterson.  Um-hmmm….

Rogoff, on the advisory board for Peterson.  (things that make your head spin…)

Yep.

(Stephen Colbert covered this, too.  He had Herndon on the show to explain how they discovered the errors.  Herndon is an econ student who was assigned to replicate someone’s study.  He chose Rogoff and Reinhart’s work, and to his surprise, could not replicate it.  Previously, they refused to share their data with others asking to see it, but gave it to Herndon, who found the flawed research that omitted countries that were against the Rogoff and Reinhart hypothesis.)

 

Domestic violence mirrors war

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I swear that I did not see this before making my previous comment on the connection between domestic violence and war.  Wow, what a timely article.

From the article:

Some 3,073 people were killed in the terrorist attacks on the United States on 9/11. Between that day and June 6, 2012, 6,488 US soldiers were killed in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing the death toll for America’s war on terror at home and abroad to 9,561. During the same period, 11,766 women were murdered in the United States by their husbands or boyfriends, both military and civilian. The greater number of women killed here at home is a measure of the scope and the furious intensity of the war against women, a war that threatens to continue long after the misconceived war on terror is history.

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On the photos taken of the violence at home:

The photos are remarkable because the photographer is very good and the subject of her attention is so rarely caught on camera. Unlike warfare covered in Iraq and Afghanistan by embedded combat photographers, wife torture takes place mostly behind closed doors, unannounced and unrecorded.

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An excellent point–because in Communications, the Vietnam War is known as the media war —a war that was lost because of the diligence of the press–they brought the war home every night on the nightly news.  People could see with their own eyes what was happening–politicians in Washington could not whitewash it.  The violence we were doing to others could not be denied.  The thought of a photographer taking photos while someone commits domestic violence makes my stomach turn…and at the same time, I’m thinking “is this what it takes to make it *real*….???”  Do the people have to see photos of women beaten to a pulp on the nightly news, every night to grasp how horrible this is?

Here’s another report on domestic violence in Africa following war.  Does the war cause domestic violence or is it a cycle repeating itself?