You're right. Dreadgeek did not say most. Dreadgeek asked how many people do we know who would check Google Earth and the CIA factbook and how many would look down their noses at those that did? These were rhetorical questions. The unstated response/belief behind that rhetorical question is....not many. The rhetorical question itself assumed that readers would agree. I just chose to point out that I didn't.

Unless Dreadgeek wants to correct my assumption and let me know that the question was literal and she wanted an actual number for how many people I personally know who would or would not scoff or who would or would not go to Google Earth and the CIA factbook. I can get those numbers but it might take a while. So I jumped in and answered the unstated assumption behind the rhetorical question and said Many. More than you give Americans credit for.

I happen to think more people would than would not. I mean, really, this is all we are arguing about. Opinions. Dreadgeek's opinion not so many, my opinion, more that you are willing to give credit for. Other than that I'm not disagreeing with anything you say. I'm debating a few points you make, that's all.

And based on the stats you used above about FOX I'm really happy that according to those stats only 10% of the viewers and only 1% of the population (where did you get those stats from? No link or citation was posted. ) tuned into Fox for post speech discussion.

So very tentitively based on those uncited stats whose credibility I have no way of checking because I don't know the source, I'll go out on a limb and say, America, I'm proud of ya for choosing not to click over to FOX News.

Perhaps, America, you found other sources of information that you think are more credible. Or, maybe you just went to bed. Or maybe you listened, thought about it, came to your own conclusions and chose not to tune into any of the post analysis opinions that clog the airwaves. Maybe you just watched a Seinfeld rerun.

And perhaps part of the 10% that did tune into Fox went there to see what the opposition was saying, then they jammed on over to MSNBC, then they hit the internet to check on their favorite blog sites, and so on because maybe they wanted to get a bigger view of all the various discussions because they didn't want to just be tied to one point of view or party line. Or maybe some of those 10% had FOX on because Uncle Walter was over for dinner and he refuses to watch anything but FOX, so to keep the family peace they just handed him the remote. We'll never know. All we have is that stat staring us in the face. Some will argue that stat is too high and proves x, y and z. Some might cheer, like me, and say yippee, only 1% of the population tuned into FOX's post analysis and this proves x, y and z.

And maybe stats don't tell us much after all.


Rufus

My apologies for not posting sources.

linkyloo

They watched basketball and murder fiction:

right after he was done, tens of millions of viewers switched off the analysts, and turned to NCIS repeats and the pre-game show of Game 6 of the NBA Finals championship series between the Lakers and the Celtics.

linkyloo

Yes, it was a rhetorical question but I didn't have a number in mind. If I HAD to put a number I would say that as much as 40% of the American population either would either not bother looking going to a map and/or taking other actions based upon the following:

A Roper ASW poll found that 87% of Americans 18 - 24 couldn't find Iraq on a map, 83% couldn't find Afghanistan on a map and 11% couldn't find the United States on a map. Let that sink in for a moment...slightly more than 10% couldn't find their OWN country on a map!

Only half of the population will buy a book of ANY sort this year.

According to another study, only 53% of the American population know that a year is the time it takes the Earth to revolve around the Sun. Only 59% know that humans and dinosaurs didn't live at the same time. Only 47% can correctly estimate the amount of the Earth that is covered in water.

Again, let that sink in. Fully 47% of the population doesn't know something as basic as what a year *actually* is. 41% believe, against all available evidence, that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time. These aren't kids, these are adults. And yet we are supposed to be sanguine that large numbers of people would go out and take the time to educate themselves on some matter when they could just as easily watch American Idol? I see nothing to be sanguine about. If 10% of adults thought humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time--again there is no evidence in support of the idea that they did and every piece of available evidence says they didn't--that would be disturbing in itself. The idea that four times that percentage don't is deeply troubling.


If that is the case then how would YOU go about explaining the kinds of numbers above? Look around the Internet all you wish, every study or poll you find will have numbers in and around the same orbits. I wasn't saying nor did I mean to imply that a majority wouldn't bother or would scoff, I probably should have said a disturbingly large minority to have avoided this. But if the American people, overall, are so well informed can you explain why large numbers (40% of the American people is a significant number of adults) don't know basic things like why we have seasons, what a year is, what a day is.

Based upon what?

Okay then I mistook what you were saying. Because when you stated that if someone disagrees about evolution it doesn't make them ignorant it read, to me, like you were saying that it was possible for someone to be well versed in biology, know evolutionary biology at a level one could call a reasonably informed layperson, and still disagree with the theory. I would strenuously disagree. The only people I know who disagree with evolutionary theory are either inveterate liars (Michael Behe) or cranks (Fred Hoyle) or have no idea what the theory actually states (everyone else who argues against evolution using arguments of the form "well, if evolution happened where is the half-crocodile, half-man" or "if evolution happened and we came from monkeys why are there still monkeys" or "evolution is only a theory").

Or maybe it depends upon where the stats come from, how they were gathered, and how methodologically sound the survey, study or poll was in its execution. There are stats that come from, say, NARTH that I don't buy because NARTH has no interest whatsoever in empiricism--they just like using the language of empiricism to bolster their manifestly unscientific positions vis a vis homosexuality. If, on the other hand, the AAS (American Academy of Science) or the NSF (National Science Foundation) conducts a study or sponsors one, I'm going to give it some credence because both of those organizations *do* care very much about empirical data and well-designed survey tools.

I get it that you disagree that large numbers--again not a majority but one-third of a population is NOT a trivial number--of the American people are not profoundly and willfully ignorant on a number of subjects. I have no idea why you believe that or upon what a reasonable person (which I like to think I am) might base such a belief other than sheer, willful, wishful thinking. However, I would love for you to explain to me why I am wrong because here is an instance where I would be overjoyed--turning cartwheels and shouting hallelujahs from every rooftop in a 5 mile radius overjoyed--if I were. Hell, if I were wrong I would weep in joy and probably die of relieved ecstasy.

So, lay it on me. Why am I wrong? Wishful thinking notwithstanding. Really, I want to be wrong about this.

Cheers
Aj

Umm, I'll let the handwaving go but really, my core point has NOTHING to do with Google Earth or the CIA Factbook. It was a throwaway statement that is not core to the point that I'm making.

I'm not going to call 40% of Americans who don't realize what a year actually is crazy thinkers. I'm going to call them tragically uninformed.

Perhaps you get the feeling that I think ignorance or being uninformed is somehow a measure of a person's moral worth in absolute terms. I don't. I am woefully uninformed about, to take just one of a possible laundry list, auto mechanics. If the answer is beyond "you have a flat tire" or "you're out of gas" or "the car's not turned on" and I say anything OTHER than "you should take your car to a mechanic" I am spouting off about things I know nothing about. There is no reason to take me seriously and every reason to say that I am uninformed about auto mechanics and/or that I am ignorant on the subject.

I'm sorry but you have to also give people good information. To take the "Earth is 6000 years old" example. What you are saying is that in the absence of any other information, if we just teach people to think critically they will come to the conclusion that the Earth isn't 6000 years old. I disagree. Without the evidence--the facts of the matter- no amount of critical thinking skills is going to do anyone any damn good. So while some might think that educating students on what, just to take one solid piece of evidence, red shift is and why this is proof that the Universe is expanding, is telling them what to think I would say that is giving them the *minimal* information upon which they can act as critical thinkers.

I strenuously disagree with this. Most strenuously. Over the course of my academic career I have taken precisely one philosophy class and that was a philosophy of science class. I learned logic and rhetoric, largely, by reading on my own--first were books that were just truly compelling arguments. Later came books about how thinking goes terribly wrong. After that I started picking up books that I realized, about a third of the way through, were probably textbooks being used in classes to teach logic. Now, I agree we should teach logic, rhetoric, critical thinking and the scientific method in schools. The only other thing one could really call formal training in logic were family dinners when I was growing up. My parents made my sister and I read an article out of the paper, we didn't have to commit it to memory but we did have to be able to hit the who, what, where, when, why and how if relevant. We would then be asked what we thought about the article and what we thought it meant. If we said something that couldn’t' be justified or if our argument had holes you could turn a 747 around in, then they would systematically go about eviscerating our position. This taught us that it wasn't good enough to have an opinion, it needed to be an informed opinion in order for others to have any justification for taking us seriously. Can I hold my own against a professor of logic, probably not but I've never had to put that to the test. I can say, however, that I am a reasonably logical thinker and that I hope I put together well-reasoned arguments that are internally consistent more times than not.

What's more, if you go back JUST 100 or 150 years, you see that autodidacts were all over the place and not just from the upper-classes. Thomas Paine, if memory serves, was not from the upper-class and ended up working as a apprentice to a printer. While there he taught himself philosophy, logic, rhetoric, political theory by reading the books that were being printed. So it *can* be done and not by just extraordinary people with extraordinary means. Would it be better if it was done in a formal classroom setting? Yes. But it *can* be done, but first one has to decide that given their limited discretionary time they would rather use it reading than watching American Idol and when reading they would rather it be something with meat on the bones instead of People magazine.

Cheers
Aj

1 now dead...........
 

I agree that we need an educated and informed populace. You get no argument from me here. I will state, as a side note, that the founders envisioned a white male educated populace. So their definition of an educated populace wasn't that everyone needed to be educated, only certain people. It would be interesting to find out the percentage of the population that didn't know certain "givens" or "core knowledge" in 1800 versus today.

The concept of mass literacy is pretty new. I'm thinking late 1800s in Europe but it could have come about earlier in the US.

That brings me back to your next statement, and again, this is where we disagree. You think "many" (maybe this is where I got the "most" idea I had in my head) do not want to be either educated or informed. This is where we part ways. Maybe I am naive, maybe you are cynical. But I don't think "many" prefer being uneducated or uninformed. I think many are trying everyday to fix that in whatever way they can. Can I prove this? No. I can point to college enrollment stats, book purchasing stats, library card stats just as you can point to the same stats to make your argument.

The two links Msdemeanor provided were basically two opinions/intepretations of Neilson rating data. For me they showed and proved nothing. Just two writers giving me their interpretation of Neilsen data.

The stats you find tell you that people are wallowing in their ignorance and like it down there. The stats tell me that our education system is failing all of us. And cultivating cirtical thinking would put a pretty quick stop to the influence of "emotionally satisfying jingoism."

I don't know whether you teach in a public school, a private school, High school, or college (you mentioned business school) but as an educator, what are you going to do? How do we fix this lack of basic knowledge? And as an educator, why do you think people are ignorant and uninformed? To me, it goes a lot deeper than people just prefer being ignorant and uniformed.

Rufus

What part of One in five households with television sets watched President Obama’s Oval Office address about the gulf oil spill on Tuesday night, according to the Nielsen Company. An average of 24 million households and 32 million people tuned in to the almost 20-minute address, according to Nielsen, which counts only at-home viewing. is an interpretation that doesn't show or prove anything? Please explain your critical thinking process that led you to this conclusion.

There can be a problem with Auto-Didactical thinking though....and that is there is no one bit yourself to challenge or critically analyze what it is your learning. ie--Hitler was an Auto-Didact.

If people want to learn they can, the problem is that you also have to be challenged and engaged and to do that is the function of higher education.

1 in 5 is a statistic. It is a number. I believe it is also a number based on a random sample of homes that work with Neilsen to track their viewing. Any multitude of people can then come in and interpret that number to mean something. The two people that you linked to offered their own personal interpretations of that number. I don't consider these two interpretations to be particularly meaningful or correct. THey are just two interpretations of Neilsen data written by two people who work for newspapers. They didn't say anything particularly noteworthy. They just offered their opinion of what they thought the Neilsen numbers meant. So therefore, they did not show or prove anything. They just informed me of what they think the Neilsen data means.

10 different people can look at that 1 in 5 and interpret that number to mean 10 different things. Then all we can do is decide who we think offers the best interpretation. 1 in 5 is meaningless until someone inteprets that data. This is where things get sticky.

Rufus

Mitmo:

I am not at all saying that auto-didactical thinking is ideal. Not at all. Given my druthers higher education--through the graduate level--would be free to all comers who qualified. NOTHING beats classroom instruction. And absolutely one needs to be challenged and have constant engagement (which is why I miss one of my colleagues, Russell, so much--he is a smart man, and just slightly to the far right end of William F. Buckley. We would have the *best* discussions at work). My parents did us a great service by shredding, night after night, sloppy arguments we brought to the table--particularly as opinionated teenagers. :)

I merely wanted to say that it is an option--if not to be fully educated in a subject, one can get a grounding in it.

Cheers
Aj

Okay, let me clear up a misconception. I am not a teacher. I have thought about taking up 'the family business' but except for two stints, neither longer than a year and a half, have I taught as my job. I teach computer literacy classes--or did before I went back to school--but I'm not an educator. I wrestle with myself whether or not I will ever be an educator. My heart says yes, yes, yes. My very strong desire to eat says 'no, no, no'. Even at the university level (where I would want to teach) it is hard to find jobs with benefits nowadays--that is a powerful inducement *away* from teaching. Teaching in the public schools is pretty right-out for me. In many school districts teaching the subject of evolutionary biology--and I would teach biology if I taught anything in public schools--is just right out. In many more, one has to walk around the word saying everything BUT evolution. That would stay entertaining for me for all of about 10 minutes and then I would say something along the lines of "this is biology class. I wouldn't teach nor would I give serious time to astrology in an astronomy class and I'm not going to give it to creationism in a biology class for the same reasons." My time at that school would, at that point, be measured in days. If it were not for that, I would probably consider teaching at the high school level but there is that.

I hate to say it but I'll be honest, I don't *like* little kids enough to teach anything below high school. I liked my kid. I like my granddaughter (well, two year olds are hard NOT to like if you don't have to live with them all day...:) ). Other people's children? Not so much with the like.

What would I do? Having grown up with a professor of education, pedagogy was just in the air. I would move away from teaching to the test. I believe that if you have *standards* then you can, actually, assess within a reasonable level of approximation what a student knows by asking them to demonstrate that knowledge. For example, I presume that when I write about evolutionary biology I sound like I know what I'm talking about. When I have taught I could tell which students were getting it and which weren't simply by the questions they would ask (whether they spoke them in class, after class or called me over). But in order for something like that to work you have to have the emotional fortitude, as a teacher, to say that certain papers are well written and show knowledge of the subject and that research was clearly done (and documented) and certain papers do not. As long as there is any hint in the academy, at any level, that just turning in a paper--good, bad, incomprehensible--is sufficient for a student to feel good about themselves we'll have no choice BUT to teach to the test.

Don't get me started on educational issues, Rufusboi it is a passion of mine. I saw such a poignant example of the difference between the life of an educated man and the life of an uneducated man and the difference that it made in their children that I consider classrooms truly sacred spaces and teaching a vocation. Education almost but not quite rises to the level of a religion for me.

:)

Cheers
Aj

U.S. Supreme Court bolsters gun rights

Second Amendment applies to individuals, not just 18th-century militias, justices rule by 5-4 margin


Paul Koring
Washington — Globe and Mail Update
Published on Monday, Jun. 28, 2010 9:13PM EDT
Last updated on Monday, Jun. 28, 2010 9:27PM EDT

As with free speech, Americans have a fundamental right to own guns, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday, answering a centuries-old debate and threatening laws and regulations enacted by states and cities that outlaw handgun ownership or impose tight controls on assault weapons.

Concluding that citizens can own firearms for self-defence, Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, reasoned that the framers of the Constitution regarded “the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty.”

The landmark 5-4 ruling in the long and bitter battle over the meaning of the Second Amendment makes clear that individual citizens – not just 18th-century militias – have a Constitutional right to bear arms. It amounts to a major, albeit narrow, victory for gun-rights advocates, who have long argued that outlawing guns keeps them from law-abiding citizens while allowing armed criminals to run amok.

Wayne Lapierre, executive vice-president of the National Rifle Association, one of the most powerful lobby groups in the United States, called the decision “a great moment in American history,” but warned that the ruling will prove worthless unless it is enforced.

“I'm a practical guy. I don't want to win on philosophy and lose on freedom,” he said. “What good is a right without the gun?” he added, calling for the courts to roll back laws that make gun ownership difficult. “Here's a piece of paper – protect yourself. That's no right at all.”

Gun-control advocates warned the ruling will result in more bloodshed.

“People will die because of this decision,” said Kristen Rand of the Violence Policy Center. “It is a victory only for the gun lobby and America's fading firearms industry.”

Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, the largest anti-firearms lobby in the United States, said the decision still allows for reasonable limits on gun ownership.

“The Second Amendment individual right to possess guns in the home for self-defence does not prevent our elected representatives from enacting common-sense gun laws to protect our communities from gun violence,” he said in a statement.

The “gun lobby argument that its ‘any gun, for anybody, anywhere’ agenda is protected by the Constitution” was rejected by the Supreme Court, Mr. Helmke added.

The ruling sparked an immediate debate over its practical consequences. A host of challenges to local and state laws are expected. But whether gun-control laws can be redrafted to avoid infringing on what the court has ruled is an individual right may take years to become clear.

The ruling means “the Second Amendment joins other provisions of the Bill of Rights that are routinely enforced against both federal and state infringements,” Glenn Harlan Reynolds, the Beauchamp Brogan distinguished professor of law at the University of Tennessee, wrote in an online discussion at a New York Times blog of contributing experts.

“It may wind up being protected fairly well – as, say, First Amendment speech rights generally are – or poorly, as Fourth Amendment rights against search and seizure often are, but it is now a full-fledged part of the Bill of Rights, not a neglected stepchild.”

Five of the court’s nine judges wrote opinions in the case. Perhaps second only to abortion, gun control and the right to bear arms remains the most divisive and hotly contested issue in the United States.

More than 60,000 people are shot annually in the United States, many of them family members shot accidentally or in domestic disputes in households with legally owned and licensed firearms. But thousands of others are shot in violent and drug-ridden urban slums, often with illegal guns.

The court did not rule on the constitutionality of Chicago’s handgun ban – one of the nation’s toughest. Instead the decision sent the Chicago ban back to the lower courts to decide whether it conforms with the ruling.

“The reasons that motivated the framers to protect the ability of militiamen to keep muskets available for military use when our nation was in its infancy .... have only a limited bearing on the question that confronts the homeowner in a crime-infested metropolis today,” wrote one of the four dissenting judges, Justice John Paul Stevens, in his last opinion. He retired Monday.

The Supreme Court ruling was made on a challenge to a Chicago law that severely limits handgun ownership. Despite “doomsday proclamations, [the court’s decision] does not imperil every law regulating firearms,” Judge Alito wrote, adding that many jurisdictions already have reasonable laws keeping guns out of the hands of convicted criminals and the mentally ill and banning them from places such as schools and civic buildings.

For centuries, the meaning of the Constitution’s oddly worded Second Amendment has been hotly debated as to the intent of the framers. “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Proponents of gun control contend it was intended to allow for militias comprised of a largely rural citizenry of farmers to keep weapons. The Supreme Court upheld the opposing view – that the Second Amendment means that every citizen has the right to own firearms.

Judge Alito, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas comprised the majority.

Judge Stephens and Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor were opposed.

THIS SUX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 

>>> Tens of thousands take to the streets in Athens, Greece <<<

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,...ne-2356-txt-nl


"Violent clashes have broken out between demonstrators and police on the streets of the Greek capital, Athens, as some 10,000 people took to streets to protest the government’s austerity measures intended to address Greece’s debt crisis."

Interesting. An innocent living thing, the dog was used to incite fear, the illusion of control over the dog's guardian, owner? I feel horrible about what happened to this dog but I also think we as a community should consciously take note of this act of violence against a woman. All of this madness is grounded in Domestic Violence. Somewhere along the way, our society has given a tacit nod in acceptance of this sort of behavior.

I suspected it would only be a matter of moments before someone on this judicial panel would somehow imply that Kagan's judicial philosophy was tarnished by her mentee/mentor relationship with Thurgood Marshall. So many inuendos, code words, so little time. Paleezee.
______________________________________________


June 29, 2010


STATEMENT FROM NAACP LDF ON
SENATE ATTACKS ON THURGOOD MARSHALL


(Washington, DC) - During the Senate confirmation hearings of Elena Kagan to be Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, several Senators have disparaged Justice Thurgood Marshall, his judicial philosophy, and his connection to Elena Kagan, who once clerked for Justice Marshall. In response to these attacks, NAACP LDF Director-Counsel John Payton issues the following statement:

"Thurgood Marshall changed our country dramatically for the better. Astonishingly, Elena Kagan is being attacked by certain members of the Senate Judiciary Committee because she says her mentor was Thurgood Marshall. She could not have had a better mentor.

Here is what is undisputed: In the middle decades of the twentieth century, Thurgood Marshall was a leader of those forces whose faith in the Constitution and the American Dream dismantled the perverse empire of Jim Crow - with its separate and unequal schools and colleges, its rigidly segregated neighborhoods, and its profoundly unequal opportunity in every sector of American life. As the founder of LDF, Thurgood Marshall helped America understand what democracy really means; and he continued to expound that exalted vision as a Justice of the Supreme Court.

It is a disservice to the Senate and to the nation to have some, for the sake of hollow posturing, distort Thurgood Marshall's beliefs and his extraordinary contribution to our understanding of justice and equality. Simply put, Thurgood Marshall helped make our union more perfect, and that legacy illuminates the highest possibilities for all Americans yesterday, today and tomorrow."

I expected they would go after Justice Marshall......so no big surprise to me. Those old white guys are racist to their core and only like black folks like what's his name....crap I really can't remember his name....google is my friend..........Justice Thomas who has the brains of a tadpole and has never asked one question in his time on the Court.

The only activist Judges they like are the right wing ultra-conservative ones........4 of the 5 most conservative Justices ever are sitting on the Supreme Court right now.

What Boner (fake spray tan man) said was that he thought the retirement age should be raised to 70 because we live longer now......

seriously that is what he said......

I want corporate welfare to end. I want folks who are millionaires and billionaires paying 35% in income tax with NO deductions period. I pay more in taxes than the richest 5 men in this country.....most of them end up not paying ANY...ZERO.....taxes.

You know, here's the thing. I wouldn't mind being asked to work until 70 or 75 (which I plan on doing anyway) to buy the Baby Boom generation some time with Social Security and Medicare I would be happy to do so. I'm 43, it is not unreasonable for me to expect to be capable of working into my seventies. In fact, my 'third act' career plan--for which I am getting my degree(s) now--actually is predicated on me having another 20 to 25 years of work *after* I get out of school in 2014 or 2015.

In fact, I wish that the President would ask that of my generation because that would buy Social Security and Medicare the time they need to recover from the big hit the preceding generation is going to give it. But NOT for the war. Also, I think that this should only apply to people born AFTER 1965. If you are within 15 years of retirement, it would be inhumane to ask that of you but for those of us who have two decades before retirement now, what is another decade?

Cheers
Aj

update.......
 

WTH???
 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100701/...y_leader/print


Icelandic leader in milestone gay marriage

Louise Nordstrom, Associated Press Writer


STOCKHOLM – Iceland's prime minister made history last week when she wed her girlfriend, becoming the world's first head of government to enter a gay marriage.

But fellow Nordic nations hardly noticed when 67-year-old Johanna Sigurdardottir tied the knot with her longtime partner — a milestone that would still, despite advances in gay rights, be all but inconceivable elsewhere.

Scandinavia has had a long tradition of tolerance — and cross-dressing lawmakers and gay bishops have become part of the landscape.

"There is some kind of passion for social justice here," respected cross-dressing Swedish lawmaker Fredrick Federley said. "That everybody should be treated the same."

Gay rights activists said Europe in general has a better record on accepting gays at the highest levels of government than the United States.

"In the current climate of U.S. public opinion it is impossible to imagine a U.S. president who is openly gay and who marries their longtime partner," said Peter Tatchell, spokesman for the London-based gay human rights group Outrage.

"In Europe the reaction is completely different — people just don't care."

Although no openly gay American has made a potentially winning run for president, gay men and lesbians have made significant advances in recent years in winning other elected offices in the United States, often while being open about their same-sex partners.

In Europe, the situation varies.

Several top-level politicians are openly gay, including Sweden's Environment Minister Andreas Carlgren and Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe, considered a possible contender for the 2012 presidential elections.

But a gay head of government would be impossible in strong Catholic nations.

"We will never see a gay prime minister in Italy. The power of the Catholic Church is too strong," said Giuseppina Massallo, 60, from Sicily who lives in Rome. "We have institutions that make us believe that ... being homosexual is simply not the right thing to do."

The 32-year-old Federley occasionally swaps his parliamentary suit and tie for heavy makeup and revealing dresses as drag queen Ursula. Federley has been openly gay for nine years and his sexual identity has never been an issue in politics.

His cross-dressing only hit the headlines when critics in February questioned which Federley accepted an alleged media junket to the Canary Islands: Fredrik the lawmaker or Ursula the drag queen?

Gays in politics would be inconceivable in Africa, where 37 countries have anti-gay laws and where Zimbabwe's leader Robert Mugabe has described same-sex partners as "lower than dogs and pigs."

Ugandans were shocked to hear of Sigurdardottir's marriage to her partner with whom she had been in a registered relationship since 2002. The partnership was converted into a marriage on Sunday, when a new law legalizing same-sex marriage went into force. The Icelandic leader has two adult children from a previous marriage.

"Their society is finished, they have no morals," said Uganda's ruling-party spokeswoman, Mary Karooro Okurutu, described the marriage as "disgusting."

The East African nation frowns on homosexuality and is considering proposed legislation that would impose the death penalty for some gays. The bill has sparked protests in London, New York and Washington.

The Nordic countries have been at the forefront of gay freedoms.

In 1989, Denmark became the first country in the world to allow registered gay partnerships and Sweden's Lutheran church last year ordained its first openly gay bishop.

All five Nordic nations reached top-ten rankings in a 2010 study of the legal situation for lesbian, gay and bisexual people in Europe.

Even Finland, the remotest country in the region, which has been slower than its neighbors in adapting to Scandinavian lifestyle trends scored six out of 10 points.

Russia and Ukraine both received bottom-rankings in the 2010 Rainbow Europe index by ILGA-Europe, a non-governmental umbrella organization representing lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender groups.

Even in the neighboring Baltic countries that have a long history of dealings with the Nordics, gay tolerance is generally low.

Same-sex marriages are not legal and are generally frowned upon in Estonia, Latvia and particularly in predominantly Catholic Lithuania.

Gay pride marches in Latvia and Lithuania typically attract crowds of angry counter-demonstrators far larger than the marches themselves.

Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip concedes he is "somewhat conservative" on the question of gay marriages.

"I consider marriage a holy matrimony between a man and a woman," Ansip said Wednesday. "But I do fully accept that same-sex partners possess the same kind of legal guarantees as registered marriages currently do."

Doctor Treating Pregnant Women With Experimental Drug To Prevent Lesbianism

Two weeks ago, Time magazine reported on our ongoing efforts to protect the rights of pregnant women offered dexamethasone, a risky Class C steroid aimed at female fetuses that may have a form of congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). It appears many women and children exposed to dexamethasone through this off-label use are not being enrolled in controlled clinical trials with IRB oversight, in spite of a persistent consensus among experts that this is the only way this treatment should be happening.

We have learned that, this August, the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism will publish an expert consensus again stating this use of prenatal dexamethasone should only happen via IRB-approved clinical trials through research centers large enough to obtain meaningful data. An announcement of the consensus came at the Endocrine Society’s meeting in San Diego last week (and an earlier version is available here).

This consensus has been endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society, the European Society for Paediatric Endocrinology, the European Society of Endocrinology, the Society of Pediatric Urology, the Androgen Excess and PCOS Society, and the CARES Foundation. It was reached after review of the existing literature and consultation with researchers indicated significant cause for concern, including the fact that most of the children treated prenatally have been absent from follow-up studies.

The majority of researchers and clinicians interested in the use of prenatal “dex” focus on preventing development of ambiguous genitalia in girls with CAH. CAH results in an excess of androgens prenatally, and this can lead to a “masculinizing” of a female fetus’s genitals. One group of researchers, however, seems to be suggesting that prenatal dex also might prevent affected girls from turning out to be homosexual or bisexual.

Pediatric endocrinologist Maria New, of Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Florida International University, and her long-time collaborator, psychologist Heino F. L. Meyer-Bahlburg, of Columbia University, have been tracing evidence for the influence of prenatal androgens in sexual orientation. In a paper entitled “Sexual Orientation in Women with Classical or Non-Classical Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia as a Function of Degree of Prenatal Androgen Excess” published in 2008 in Archives of Sexual Behavior, Meyer-Bahlburg and New (with two others) gather evidence of “a dose-response relationship of androgens with sexual orientation” through a study of women with various forms of CAH.

They specifically point to reasons to believe that it is prenatal androgens that have an impact on the development of sexual orientation. The authors write, "Most women were heterosexual, but the rates of bisexual and homosexual orientation were increased above controls . . . and correlated with the degree of prenatal androgenization.”

They go on to suggest that the work might offer some insight into the influence of prenatal hormones on the development of sexual orientation in general. “That this may apply also to sexual orientation in at least a subgroup of women is suggested by the fact that earlier research has repeatedly shown that about one-third of homosexual women have (modestly) increased levels of androgens.” They “conclude that the findings support a sexual-differentiation perspective involving prenatal androgens on the development of sexual orientation.”

And it isn’t just that many women with CAH have a lower interest, compared to other women, in having sex with men. In another paper entitled “What Causes Low Rates of Child-Bearing in Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia?” Meyer-Bahlburg writes that “CAH women as a group have a lower interest than controls in getting married and performing the traditional child-care/housewife role. As children, they show an unusually low interest in engaging in maternal play with baby dolls, and their interest in caring for infants, the frequency of daydreams or fantasies of pregnancy and motherhood, or the expressed wish of experiencing pregnancy and having children of their own appear to be relatively low in all age groups.”

In the same article, Meyer-Bahlburg suggests that treatments with prenatal dexamethasone might cause these girls’ behavior to be closer to the expectation of heterosexual norms: “Long term follow-up studies of the behavioral outcome will show whether dexamethasone treatment also prevents the effects of prenatal androgens on brain and behavior.”

In a paper published just this year in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, New and her colleague, pediatric endocrinologist Saroj Nimkarn of Weill Cornell Medical College, go further, constructing low interest in babies and men – and even interest in what they consider to be men’s occupations and games – as “abnormal,” and potentially preventable with prenatal dex:

“Gender-related behaviors, namely childhood play, peer association, career and leisure time preferences in adolescence and adulthood, maternalism, aggression, and sexual orientation become masculinized in 46,XX girls and women with 21OHD deficiency [CAH]. These abnormalities have been attributed to the effects of excessive prenatal androgen levels on the sexual differentiation of the brain and later on behavior.” Nimkarn and New continue: “We anticipate that prenatal dexamethasone therapy will reduce the well-documented behavioral masculinization . . .”

It seems more than a little ironic to have New, one of the first women pediatric endocrinologists and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, constructing women who go into “men’s” fields as “abnormal.” And yet it appears that New is suggesting that the “prevention” of “behavioral masculinization” is a benefit of treatment to parents with whom she speaks about prenatal dex. In a 2001 presentation to the CARES Foundation (a videotape of which we have), New seemed to suggest to parents that one of the goals of treatment of girls with CAH is to turn them into wives and mothers. Showing a slide of the ambiguous genitals of a girl with CAH, New told the assembled parents:

“The challenge here is . . . to see what could be done to restore this baby to the normal female appearance which would be compatible with her parents presenting her as a girl, with her eventually becoming somebody’s wife, and having normal sexual development, and becoming a mother. And she has all the machinery for motherhood, and therefore nothing should stop that, if we can repair her surgically and help her psychologically to continue to grow and develop as a girl.”

In the Q&A period, during a discussion of prenatal dex treatments, an audience member asked New, “Isn’t there a benefit to the female babies in terms of reducing the androgen effects on the brain?” New answered, “You know, when the babies who have been treated with dex prenatally get to an age in which they are sexually active, I’ll be able to answer that question.” At that point, she’ll know if they are interested in taking men and making babies.

In a previous Bioethics Forum post, Alice Dreger noted an instance of a prospective father using knowledge of the fraternal birth order effect to try to avoid having a gay son by a surrogate pregnancy. There may be other individualized instances of parents trying to ensure heterosexual children before birth. But the use of prenatal dexamethasone treatments for CAH represents, to our knowledge, the first systematic medical effort attached to a “paradigm” of attempting in utero to reduce rates of homosexuality, bisexuality, and “low maternal interest.”

Researchers working on an interesting project tend to suggest how their work could have broader implications. This is no exception: the 2008 paper by Meyer-Bahlburg et al hints that variation in sexual orientation beyond the population of girls with CAH might also be partly explainable through prenatal androgen exposure. Such reasoning could lead to the pursuit of other “screening” and “treatment” methods for manipulating intrauterine environments.

While everyone has been busy watching geneticists at the frontier of the brave new world, none of us seem to have noticed what some pediatricians are up to. Perhaps it is because so many people are fascinated by the idea of a “gay gene” that prenatal “lesbian hormones” have slipped past public scrutiny. In any case, we think Nimkarn and New’s “paradigm for prenatal diagnosis and treatment” suggests a reason why activists for gay and lesbian rights should be wary of believing that claims for the innateness of homosexuality will lead to liberation. Evidence that homosexual orientation is inborn could, instead, very well lead to new means of pathologization and prevention, as it seems to be in the case we’ve been tracking.

Needless to say, we do not think it reasonable or just to use medicine to try to prevent homosexual and bisexual orientations. Nor do we think it reasonable to use medicine to prevent uppity women, like the sort who might raise just these kinds of alarms. Consider that our declaration of our conflict of interest.

Alice Dreger is a professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Ellen K. Feder is an associate professor and acting chair of American University’s Department of Philosophy and Religion. Anne Tamar-Mattis, an attorney, is the executive director of Advocates for Informed Choice, which employs legal advocacy to support the rights of children with intersex conditions or disorders of sex development.



Read more: http://www.thehastingscenter.org/Bio...#ixzz0sU0BA0dy

Reflecting off of Nat posting, this was on our news tonight also. Things that make you go hmmmm.

Can homosexuality be prevented in the womb?

Updated at 04:38 PM today
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More: Bio, News Team


HOUSTON (KTRK) -- Can homosexuality be prevented in the womb? The first known experiment to do just that is underway and it's stirring controversy.

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A group of New York clinicians is gearing this prenatal treatment toward girls and women with a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia. CAH is a serious hormonal disruption that sometimes results in ambiguous genitalia.
Previous research has shown that females born with CAH have increased rates of tomboyism and lesbianism. A steroid called dexamethasone, or DEX, has shown some success in preventing this. It's why researchers in this study believe it has promise in preventing girls from turning out to be homosexual or bisexual.
(Copyright ©2010 KTRK-TV/DT. All Rights Reserved.)

Interesting articles from the Wall Street Journal
 

source: http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/05/...cine-not-well/

"How Do American Journalists Cover Medicine? Not Very Well

By Scott Hensley
Journalist, heal thyself.

When it comes to covering the medical news of the day, journalists could do a much better job.

An independent analysis of 500 stories about medical topics by major consumer print and broadcast outlets in the U.S. found “journalists usually fail to discuss costs, the quality of the evidence, the existence of alternative options, and the absolute magnitude of potential benefits and harms.”

The findings from 22 months of media scrutiny appear in the current issue of PLoS Medicine. The work was done by HealthNewsReview.org, which started looking over our shoulder in April 2006.

Here’s a table from the PLoS paper that catalogs our shortcomings:

(sorry, the image did not want to download... argh!!!)

As self-respecting journalists, we asked who’s behind this schoolmarmish outfit and how do they do what they do? The reviewers are a bunch of doctors and public health types, and their painstaking process for deciding how vigorously to wag fingers at us is described here.

A reformed journalist named Gary Schwitzer, author of the PLoS paper, serves as the third reviewer of each piece. He’s also publisher of the reviews, a professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota, and, gasp, a blogger. Maybe that makes him a peer reviewer?

What about funding, you ask? Any hidden agenda? A-ha! All this journalistic second-guessing can be laid at that feet of that dastardly quality guru Jack Wennberg from Dartmouth. The financial support for the graders comes from the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making, founded in 1989 by Wennberg and colleagues.

Bonus Prescription: What can be done? A PLoS editorial that accompanies Schwitzer’s paper calls the findings “a wake-up call for all of us involved in disseminating health research—researchers, academic institutions, journal editors, reporters, and media organizations—to work collaboratively to improve the standards of health reporting.”


Another article:
source: http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/05/...research-hype/

"Academic Medical Centers Often Guilty of Research Hype

By Sarah Rubenstein
The media may be guilty of exaggerating the results of medical studies, but academic medical centers that hype the results aren’t blameless themselves.

A piece out in the Annals of Internal Medicine takes a look at press releases that academic medical centers sent out about their research, examining such details as whether they gave information on the studies’ size, hard results numbers and cautions about how solid the results are and what they mean. The conclusion: The press releases “often promote research that has uncertain relevance to human health and do not provide key facts or acknowledge important limitations.”

The authors, led by Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz of Dartmouth, looked at releases from EurekAlert issued by 20 academic medical centers and their affiliates in 2005. (EurekAlert compiles many press releases and sends them to journalists.) The researchers found that 58 out of 200 releases, or 29%, exaggerated the findings’ importance.

Exaggeration was more common in releases about animal studies than human studies. Out of the 200 releases, 195 included quotes from the scientific investigators: 26% of them were “judged to overstate research importance,” the authors write.

One example they cite: A release from the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah that had to do with a study of mice with skin cancer and was titled, “Scientists inhibit cancer gene.” It quotes the lead investigator, Matthew Topham, saying that the “implication is that a drug therapy could be developed to reduce tumors caused by Ras without significant side effects.” This was an exaggeration, the Dartmouth folks write, because “neither treatment efficacy nor tolerability in humans was assessed.”

We put in a call to Topham, who told us he thought the critique itself was an exaggeration. Though he acknowledged the release could have explicitly said the results wouldn’t necessarily be the same in humans, “we were very careful to say we had done this in mice.” The word “implication” used in the press release “suggests that we have not done anything in humans,” he says, adding he assumed it was common knowledge that animal results don’t always translate into human results.

The authors of the Annals piece didn’t look at how often exaggerated press releases actually resulted in exaggerated news reports. However, they wrote, “We believe that academic centers contribute to poor media coverage and are forgoing an opportunity to help journalists do better.”

Woloshin and Schwartz have written before about medical research and the media, including another piece about flawed press releases from medical journals and one about news reports that “often omit basic study facts and cautions” about research presentations at scientific meetings. They’re not the only ones who make a case that journalists don’t cover medicine very well."

Even if these articles date a few years back, I doubt that the situation has changed much.

Here is a thread about this:
http://www.butchfemmeplanet.com/foru...ead.php?t=1682

This is just plain scary!!! Think about the folks that would want to do this!

What is fascinating on the other side of the coin is that this could actually be data supporting homosexuality as being determined biologically- something many (as in qeer hating wing-nuts) do not want to believe.

If the way we are different is a choice, we are immoral sinners going straight to hell. If the way we are different is biological, we can be eradicated through science.

You glass half empty people *shaking head*. If it is biological, science can make MORE of us!!!!

Oregon gets it - at least the Democrats do. The usual suspects - those pro-business anti-people Republicans - voted against the bill.
New (Oregon) law prohibits credit history checks by most employers


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