Skinheads, NeoNazis, Veterans Day, and Cocksuckers

I stayed up late last night watching documentaries on YouTube about skinheads and NeoNazis in the United States, Europe, and Russia. One of the documentaries was actually a National Geographic special, as opposed to one renegade filmmaker's perspective, which validated all of the other independent filmmakers' work on this subject for me. These are terrorists among us, on American soil, and these are the people that red-blooded Americans should be weeding out, imprisoning and torturing in Guantanamo!

Today we celebrate Veterans Day in the United States. Our World War Two veterans sacrificed the best years of their lives to overthrow the Nazis. Meanwhile, some of their children and grandchildren are buying into the neo-Nazi and skinhead movements due to lack of employment, hatred of Mexican immigrants engaged in low paying jobs, and greedy companies outsourcing.

Today, the United States military has thousands if not millions of Americans serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. A percentage of these people are doing their military time in order to train for the white revolution. Some of the soldiers who return from the Middle East bring a hatred of Muslims back with them. Some who have not even served in the US military are writing asinine editorials titled "Why Can Muslims Serve, Not Gays?". The Advocate, normally a reputable news source for the LGBT community, has used extremely poor judgement in publishing an Islamophobic editorial written by--wait for it--A PORN STAR DIRECTOR/PRODUCER.

The best part is that the editorial has nothing to do with allowing gays to serve in the military, but everything to do with the incredibly flawed belief that Muslims cannot be patriotic citizens because they "hear the Koran". I am so ashamed that The Advocate published this trash! And what about all of those gay Arabic interpreters who were booted from the military simply because of their sexual orientation--some of them were Muslims, too. I was shocked to find out that many of those who responded to this porno guy's editorial agreed with him! I could not help but post a comment in response to the editorial.

Just replace "Muslim" with "Jew", or "queer", or your choice of minority in Lucas' editorial, and it is chilling. Read the comments posted, and see how many people agree with this guy. I wonder if Lucas is going to suck the cocks of closeted White Power dudes next.

Reaction to Obama's Speech to America's Schoolchildren

President Barack Obama spoke to America's schoolchildren at Wakefield High School in Arlington County, Virginia on Tuesday September 8, 2009. High school senior Timothy Spicer-- athlete, AP student, and class president--had the honor of introducing the President to his school. Spicer was introduced before he got on stage. The fact that he is a successful African-American student made his role in the event even more significant.

The speech only lasted for twenty minutes, which was just enough time to make the point. Just about everything that Obama said was what a parent who values education would have said to their child. And more. This is because Obama had a similar childhood as many poor kids from single-parent homes. He knew every excuse that a kid could make for not succeeding in school, and he was on to all of them.

Some quotes from Obama's speech:

"We can have the best teachers, the best schools, the best parents--but it won't make a difference unless you put in the work."

"You have a responsibility to yourself to find out what you are good at."

"If you quit school, you're not just quitting on yourself--you are quitting on your country."

"Some of the most successful people in the world have had the most failures."

He encouraged students to study hard, to set their own goals for their education, and to use failure as a teacher, not as an identifier. He encouraged students to ask adults whom they trusted to help them stay on track of their educational goals. He told students that right now, school is their job.

I heard a lot of these things from my own parents. I am sure that a lot of Republicans heard this from their parents as well. I hope they feel good and silly making all of that fuss about this speech. If they are still mad, well...they will have to attend an anti-racism workshop or two.

Obama's Speech to America's Schoolchildren

The concept of children writing essays about the President, or what they could do for their country, or what they could do to help the President, is not new. Only now, people getting bent out of shape because a president actually provided lesson plans to accompany his speech to schoolchildren. You can access these lesson plans for K-6 and 7-12 here.

No one said that the assignments were mandatory. In fact, no one said that listening to the speech was mandatory. Actually listening to the speech would be a good idea, though, simply to overcome one's fears, or to have something tangible to critique. Maybe this speech would encourage kids to become more engaged in civics and public affairs, and make them realize that they are not too small to make a difference. Where is the harm in this?

History Repeats Itself...

Especially if you put people in jail for telling the truth about history.

Don't get me wrong. For centuries the Russian people have done great things. It cannot be denied that they defeated the Nazis and made them eat dirt. It cannot be denied that 25% of the Russian population died in World War II. And for people to want to take down Soviet World War II memorials, well...they should remember that they, their children, and their grandchildren wouldn't be here if it weren't for those Soviet soldiers who fought the Germans and often died terrible deaths as prisoners of war.

At the same time, Stalin killed far too many of his own people before, during, and after World War II. Not only were mass graves of Jews filled by Ukrainian Nazi wanna-bes, but also by Russian soldiers. Stalin also had a lot of Russians, Ukrainians, and other folks killed too during that time. 8 million orphans roamed across the Soviet Union in search of peace, land, and bread.

There were a lot of non-Russian folks living under Soviet control who thought the Nazis would rescue them from oppression. If you want to pretend like that never happened, and put people in jail for saying it did, then history is just going to repeat itself over and over again. It doesn't make things better when you shut your gas off so the Ukraine doesn't get any, and so forth and so on. This is not justice, and certainly not a strength to crow about.

The Conspiracy Continues

"Obama gave Bush's education policy a third term."

Is An Anti-Racism Conference Racist?

US May Boycott Anti-Racism Conference

The United States, Canada, and Israel might boycott an anti-racism conference because they feel that it unfairly targets Israel as a racist state, and Zionism as a racist policy.

For the record--the UN has gone back and forth on its position on Zionism. I do not normally cite from Wikipedia, but you can find a condensed history of the UN's changing point of view of Zionism here.

If Israel is to be called a racist state, then what about France, whose school history textbooks tell all French schoolchildren (including those descended from Arabs, Africans, Vietnamese, and Tahitians) that their ancestors were the Gauls, and that the French brought civilization and light to the world? If Israel is to be called a racist state, then what about Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations who publish school history textbooks that teach children not to trust Jews, Christians, or other "non-believers"? If Israel is to be called a racist state, then what about Japan, where the government severely restricts immigration from other nations and does not allow immigrants without Japanese ancestry to become full citizens?

Let's be fair, folks, no matter what our political opinions are on the Occupation.

Critical Thinking Gone Out the Window

Growing hate groups blame Obama and Latino immigrants for the failing US economy.

This is a terrific article, referencing the Southern Poverty Law Center's "Year of Hate" report as well as FBI statistics and observations from a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. If you don't believe that this increase in hate crimes is taking place, look up those reports and statistics!

In any case, these hate groups are violating some major guidelines of critical thinking:

Guideline 1: Ask questions; be willing to wonder. Why are the people in hate groups so willing to believe what they are taught? How is it solving their problems?

Guideline 2: Define the problem. If the people who join hate groups followed Guideline 1, they would soon have to follow Guideline 2. The problem may not be immigrants, but immigration policy itself. The problem may not be immigrants "taking" jobs, but Americans "rejecting" them, or Americans simply not qualified to do those jobs. If they could define the problem with more clarity, these people would busily be engaged in overthrowing the government, not attacking minorities!

Guideline 3: Examine the evidence. The US economy was failing before Obama got into office. In fact, the US economy has been failing since the 1980s!

4: Analyze assumptions and biases. The hate groups are making a big assumption that Latino immigrants are "taking" American jobs and not paying taxes. The hate groups do not like Latinos to begin with, and as a result they are allowing their bias to dictate their beliefs.

5: Avoid emotional reasoning. It would be interesting to do a study on the members of hate groups to determine how many of them have been cited for violence due to anger. Also, are these people in hate groups spewing hatred simply because it makes them feel good?

6. Don't use either/or thinking or overgeneralize. Do white supremacist groups believe that all "white" "Aryan" people are naturally good, while all "non-white" people are naturally bad?

7. Consider other interpretations. What type of information about the economy, immigration, and up-to-date government legislation does the average person receive? Adults make choices as to what they will believe as true or not.

Does Talcum Powder Cause Cancer?

Talcum Powder and Cancer

A friend had emailed me this article, and it made me quite paranoid because we both powder ourselves liberally. I decided to check whether or not the author of this article had cited from any real research studies, and if what she had cited was correct.

The first study of a potential link between talcum powder and cancer was originally published in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute. It did show that a significant percentage of women who used talcum powder were at higher risk for developing ovarian cancer than others. Researchers involved in this study, however, did not want to make the claim that talcum powder caused cancer because they did not feel that the study asked enough questions of the patients in regard to the age when they started talcum powder usage, what brands of talcum powder were used, and whether the women were menopausal or pre-menopausal.

This second study published by Epidemiology, according to the abstract, also shows that use of talc increases the risk of ovarian cancer. I wish I had access to the article, because the researchers had looked at other factors such as smoking, endometriosis, tubal ligation, etc.

The third study that I found showed no correlation between talc use and ovarian cancer! According to the abstract of this study, hospital based studies showed no increased risk of ovarian cancer and talc use, while population studies did. The researchers believed that, in population based studies, the researchers already had a bias as to a particular type of women to target for the study.

I could go on, but...I am just going to take a powder.

Censorship

Do people follow the guidelines of critical thinking when they censor or ban books?

Heinrich Heine, a famous German Jewish writer, had once said "Where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people."

The American Library Association has developed an Intellectual Freedom Manual to teach librarians how to address the freedom to think through collection development and reference services. Public and school librarians are often faced with requests to remove books from the collection, for various reasons. Sometimes the patrons win. Here are two recent examples:

Court Declares Vamos a Cuba OK to Be Removed from School Library Shelves
(Reason? The book is a positive depiction of life in Cuba, from a child's perspective.)

Teacher Wants to Expel Huck Finn
(His reason? "We have a black president now, a really articulate guy, yet all of the books we have students read in class show blacks as uneducated and unarticulate.")

How Medical Conclusions Are Made

Autism ruling fails to convince many vaccine-link believers.

According to a CNN report, "special court", composed of "special masters", decided that there is no link between autism and infant vaccines that contain "thimerosal", a mercury-based preservative.

I was a bit disturbed by this article, for the following reasons:

1. I would like to know who these "special masters" are who made this determination. The federal government's US Department of Health and Human Services appeared all too ready to accept this determination, based on "three or four" studies.

2. No information is given about studies conducted to determine whether or not a correlation between autism and thimerosal exists. How do we know that the results of those studies are even sound, or that the research samples were large enough to make a determination?

3. The studies to determine a correlation between thimerasol and autism were only conducted when parents of affected children sued the US Department of Health and Human Services. According to the article, the parents were unable to sue to the manufacturers of these vaccines directly. Regardless of this, is it not the responsibility of the manufacturers and the federal government to test all substances that enter the human body prior to putting them out on the market as safe, trusted, FDA approved substances?

4. The last part of the article:

This week's ruling brought a different outcome from the Hannah Poling case. In November 2007, the Division of Vaccine Injury Compensation concluded that the Georgia girl's illness that had predisposed her to symptoms of autism was "significantly aggravated" by the vaccinations she received as a toddler and that her family should therefore be compensated.

But Thursday, Special Master George L. Hastings Jr. wrote in his ruling in the Cedillos case, "The evidence advanced by the petitioners has fallen far short of demonstrating such a link" between autism and vaccinations.

What was the difference between the Poling case and the Cedillos case? Nothing in the article revealed any difference in the information provided. Why, then, did those decisions contradict each other?

To begin with, autism is such a complex disorder that medical professionals cannot even decide on a definition for the disorder or its symptoms, as they fall into a wide spectrum of variation. Second, no one knows for sure what exactly causes autism. Third, because not all autistic children display all of the the same symptoms of autism with the same level of severity, nor do those symptoms appear within the same age range for each child, the number of official diagnoses vary from year to year. Some children are only diagnosed with autism when they are already in primary school, while others are diagnosed as early as six months old.

So before any more guidelines to critical thinking are violated in the study of autism, here are my humble suggestions:

1. Scientists, psychologists, and pediatricians must go back to the drawing board. First, they must ask more questions about autism in order to determine what autism actually is. It may not be one disorder, but a group of related spectrum disorders, such as Asperger's Syndrome (which has already been isolated as distinct from autism, although it has many similarities to autism). Second, they have to do more studies on what could cause autism so that future parents could receive this education, even if they do not have a history of autism within their families.

2. Pharmaceutical companies must take all human factors into account when creating vaccines and medications, and they should review the history of medicine! Since the nineteenth century, it has been well-documented that the ingestion of mercury has caused various types of damage to the human nervous system (hence the expression "mad as a Hatter", as people who worked in hat factories had used mercury to treat the fabrics to make the hats, and they had been permanently brain damaged from overexposure to mercury). Old fashioned thermometers used to contain mercury to measure temperature, but no longer do because a person could get brain damage or even die from the amount of mercury in a thermometer should it crack in their mouths. Thermometers used to measure internal temperatures of foods also do not include mercury for this reason. Why oh why, then, did a pharmaceutical company decide to use a mercury based preservative in a vaccine for infants and toddlers, whose nervous systems are still developing and often at risk for damage from high fevers or other phemonena? The federal government has told people what type of fish they can and cannot eat, and in what amounts, based on the amount of mercury found in recent catches of those fish. Why oh why, then, is the federal government saying that it is still OK to produce a vaccine for infants and children that contains a mercury based preservative?

Barriers to Critical Thinking

On Wednesday evening, there will be a panel discussion on campus on a topic whose name alone stirs up a great deal of controversy. Some people will call it the Israeli Occupation, some people will call it the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, some people will call it a massacre, some people will call it revenge, some people will call it just desserts. It is very easy for people who live thousands of miles away from the Middle East to sit back in their armchairs and name things.

In any case, a passage from the original notice posted to a faculty listserv regarding this panel discussion caused a great deal of controversy in its tone:

Since the Palestinians elected the Islamic Movement Hamas in 2006, Israel has sealed off Gaza from the outside world, and has been starving it ever since. Just before the inauguration of Barak Obama, while the world was celebrating Christmas, Israel assaulted Gaza from air, sea and land spreading death and destruction on a largely disarmed, starved and scared population for 23 days. In the US media, this war crime went largely unreported, although US taxpayer funds it and US politicians provide cover for it. This panel aims to educate the public, mourn the dead, and express solidarity with those who survived.

A faculty member, concerned about the tone of the email, asked the following question:

Will the panel provide the other sides of the story?

The response he received offlist:

"You have the whole world demonizing the Palestinians for you, and am sure you do a great job yourself. You don't need me to do that for you."

This caused someone else to post the following:

The poster attached to the scsu-announce is obnoxious, insensitive and vulgar....all words used when swastikas were found on campus last year. The juxtaposition of the recent violence in Gaza with actual historical photos of the Nazi Holocaust in Europe is completely inappropriate. If the HURL professors want to speak on behalf of Palestinians and Gaza and Hamas...so be it, but their suggestion that Israel, Jews, are equal to Nazis....is completely out of line and does not belong in a university which is supposedly on guard for such vulgar manipulation of discourse.

The announce list should not be a means of such mean-spirited views.

I have stood with two of these professors in solidarity....I will not be silent. Their opposition to Israeli policies is obvious, the use of Nazi photos goes far beyond that opposition.

Which finally led to the poster of the original announcement to respond:

This is not the space to respond to Dr. Edelheit's attack on the forum Gaza 2009. The accusation of the connection of this panel with the swastikas found on campus last year is unfounded,and inappropriate. There are no Nazi photos in the flyer. There are photos of two ghettos that were both sealed off, starved, and disarmed.

Peace comes only with proper historical understanding of injustice, and no other place is more equipped to do that than a university. If we are interested in pursuing peace, we should try to understand the situation from the perspective of the most helpless victims. Closing discussion only prolongs the injustice. We welcome all views and questions in this forum.

With the exception of one poster, who asked a simple one sentence question, all other posters involved accused each other of terrible things, made assumptions about each other's political beliefs, and ended up closing dialogue before it could even begin. If participants in the panel discussion perpetuate such behavior, are they truly engaged in educating students about what is happening in Gaza right now, or are they going to mis-educate students into prejudice and one-sided information?

For the record, I am not against the creation of a Palestinian state. I am, however, against faculty setting a bad example of ad hominem for students.