Pregnant Woman Maced by Riot Police and Miscarries — Serve and Protect?

UPDATE July 2013: a small measure of justice?

In some places the police were unbelievably violent in their quest to silence the Occupiers. Oakland, California was one of those places. . .This week the U.S. district court in San Francisco awarded a group of 12 protesters one million dollars after they sued the department for police brutality. The dollar amounts vary, with some protesters getting $20,000 and another getting as much as $500,000. . .

The settlement was a step in the right direction for the police department and it was a victory for the movement. The actions of law enforcement officials towards the Occupy protesters across the country were atrocious. Last year the University of California Davis offered each of the students who were pepper sprayed at close range by campus police $30,000…The monetary awards are small but at least they are an acknowledgement. The way the Occupy movement was silenced was a disgrace.

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What does it mean for armed authoritarian police in riot gear to “serve and protect” — and who is being protected from whom, for what, under what Authority? Are Thinking Citizens ready for this debate, finally?

Pregnant woman miscarries after being sprayed with pepper spray

What follows are comments JJ is making in an effort to marshal moral principle that might transcend a conservative man’s flinging his own authoritarian feces about, all while claiming to be a multicultural minority himself and more compassionate as proven by charitable donations than “liberals.”

About miscarriage following pepper spray, he said without a trace of self-mocking:

unlike many leftists, we believe in law and order and contesting within the system and established norms, and put our lives on the line fighting for it, and unlike anarchists and their fellow travelers, we dont worship killers of cops, judges and soldiers and dont automatically blame everything on police brutality.

That’s what got me trawled/trolled into the conversation, starting with a quote intended to describe the Authority Personality he seemed to fit and drawing a retort from him that he agreed with Fromm but “it goes both ways” (??):

“. . .the individual’s goal must be to become his own authority; i.e. to have a consciousness in moral issues, conviction in questions of intellect, and fidelity in emotional matters. However, the individual can only have such an inner authority if he has matured enough to understand the world with reason and love.

The development of these characteristics is the basis for one’s own authority and therefore the basis for political democracy.” — Erich Fromm, 1957, “The Authoritarian Personality”

If the “it” that goes both ways, is maturing in reason and love (so that we can transcend animal authority and become Real Boys and Girls) then certainly I agree.

Pregnant women are a very specialized “minority” btw. Even those of us who have been one know primarily how to live as NOT one, because it can’t last long. It might be interesting for us to think about that.

First, no one is born that way or stays that way, although Mrs. Duggar comes close.. 😉

And second, the whole community has a stake in pregnant women, both literally and emotionally: she biologically holds the power within her own body (corpor-al personhood?) to bring forth life and continue the human race, yet to do it, she becomes at her most vulnerable, and is often mistreated for it both by authoritarian individuals and authoritarian society’s rules, laws and cultural hierarchies.

Pregnant women — would it help to rebrand them as citizen creators? — tend to be stunned/shocked/struck (all violent weaponized police control concepts, think about THAT!) by just how dramatically their status change brings out the “authoritarian” in personalities! People get proprietary, want to touch us and tell us what to do and not do, where to be or not be, what to ingest or not, etc etc etc. They call it protection the same way cities and campuses are claiming police violence against peaceful citizens is protection. The same way America’s war-waging is called the defense department . . .

We could have our own reasonable and loving mature debate on, say,

RESOLVED: This culture is more authoritarian toward citizen creators and their corpor-al personhood than toward job creators and corporate personhood.

Judy Blume for Banned Books Week: “Children are the real losers”

. . .when anyone tries to control what they can read, and know, and ask and talk about. Are you ready to read a banned book tomorrow to help kick off the 30th anniversary of the ALA’s Banned Books Week? We sure are!

See other author and book-champion videos on the dedicated Banned Books Week youtube channel. Play with the interactive “censorship” map of the US here. (Show your kids it’s not just YOUR backward town or state! It’s everywhere!)

Snook posts for Banned Books Week every year — this makes six because the blog started just in time for the 2006 celebration, which was the silver anniversary. Last year’s posts are here: Think for Yourself and Let Others Do the Same and If I Had a Robot, Would I Hammer in the Morning?

And there are lots of book-burning related posts through the years, most notoriously this and maybe this from 9/11 last year:

On this notorious day as Americans remember, reconstruct and reject both the best and worst of our national identity all at once — because whatever else we the people may be, we’re never easy! — the images of hate in my mind aren’t of burning towers but burning books, burning flags, burning bigotry and yes, burning flesh.

See a more comprehensive collection of links to explore here: Ideas Are Incombustible! (that means you can’t burn ’em up no matter how big your bonfire.)

But I think the most fun we had discussing Banned Books Week probably was in 2007:

. . . a Maine woman and an Alabama granny-girl combo using the eerily similar publicity stunt of kidnapping a book that shocks them and holding it hostage, supposedly so no one else can ever read it.

LOL – Southern ladies used to be so much more clever with their public manners, to solve such problems with devastating yet impeccably polite little social gambits.

If I were the shocked Granny, I might’ve

Homeschooling D-I-V-O-R-C-E With Children

Homeschooling knows divorce. It threatens the end of homeschooling and even when that bullet can be dodged, it always means CHANGE and there’s lots for Thinking Parents to think about. Some examples are seared in my memory, most recently Unity-n-Diversity and there was the North Carolina cult classic with the mom’s best friend libeling the custody judge online in the name of homeschool defense, remember that one?

Also, how can we fight over divorce without first fighting over marriage, and when or whether there will be children of that union — conceived, born, adopted, kidnapped, abandoned — and how they are to be treated within that family, by society and by the courts?

See “Blurring Family Value lines Might Benefit Us All” and “The Most Important Lesson Whatever We Call It”:

For just one example, I have a good friend IRL I hadn’t seen in years, until Monday. Her life has changed dramatically in the ten years I’ve known her. When first we met, she was a happy, secure, homeschooling SAHM with two beautiful and smart little girls, wanting to start their own home-education Brownie troop. We spent a lot of time together because Favorite Daughter was the same scouting-curious age, and as moms we had values in common, including independent thinking and libertarian leanings.

FavD and I soon lost interest in scouting but my friend continued as troop leader, field trip organizer and general supporter of other families learning without school. She added two little boys to her brood, and the last time I saw her in person was at the fire house field trip, with her fourth child in a big sling, not slowed one bit. The oldest was a joy in pigtails, helping not just her mom but all the smaller kids on the tour.
Until.

From that time to this, this settled and happy mom faced a difficult divorce and the need to find a family-sustaining career for herself, which meant getting different kinds of educational “support” than we typically dwell on in independent unschooling circles — child care and legal advice and putting the older kids in public school after custody challenges and even “going back to school” herself. I know there were times she agonized about her kids, but not whether they mastered the state learning standards and passed algebra — it was what they were learning about life!

Then day before yesterday, we ran into each other

Women of the TEA Party

UPDATE: Christine “I dabbled in witchcraft” O’Donnell

From a (female) Cornell psychology professor: Who are they and what do they want? If they take America away from the rest of us, what will they do with it and will there be enough of it to share with the whole class?

JJ’s approach would be to compare their supposedly family-friendly advocacy with Teresa Heinz Kerry’s work for a healthier planet and for healthier women and children and families, living healthier lives upon it.

See also Natural Parent Power Kind to Climate, Children, Women Too.

Yes, Sarah Palin and all your grizzly pit-bullies, I’m talking to you. What counts is what you DO, who and what you live and work FOR rather than against, who and what you take responsibility FOR and what results you get. Is the world more heaven and less hell because you’re in it, or vice versa? People notice the difference sooner or later, you know:

As a young Methodist once upon a time, I remember deciding that heaven and hell described the state of mind each of us lived out in real time on earth, created by who I became, how I lived and why.

We can read heaven and hell into everything from the daily news to married life; in both journalism and marriage counseling, for example, what counts is what’s done, not just the words — of position, prescription, praise or promise — but their meaning manifest in reality, what’s behind the words, the circumstance and change described and delivered.

Show, don’t tell.

Whether in preaching or politics, inspiration literally means a new spirit goes “in” and becomes part of who you are, that you are affected and the totality that is “you” changes somehow that makes an outer difference for others. I suppose all presidents inspire the people and thereby change the nation’s reality but some presidents including the present one — hey, does the word president share a root with present? — inspire us to healthier change than others!

More Than Muslims, Remember Real Threat Today

I’m a Southern girl born and bred. So I know a lot about burning — of books and flags and bridges, with passion and anger, repressed resentments and expressed bigotry. In my childhood culture, the resident gods saw everything in black and white and stayed too busy punishing teen sex with babies or at least shunning and damning Yankee carpetbaggers to hell from morning to night and twice on Sundays, to kindle culture war against furriner infidels.

The first book I loved enough to make me hate those who would burn it or ban it, was a bible as worth living by and dying for as any other, by god, the SOUTHERN bible — Gone With the Wind!

You never read it because it’s not your bible? Oh well, maybe you saw the movie, or at least a clip of the ignorant yet self-aggrandizing Prissy “don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ babies” as played by Butterfly McQueen, who as a real woman in real life read from many books and learned not to take its real meaning on faith:

What is the “faith of our forefathers” and how much faith does it have left in what’s right? Which identity is it we’re fighting to save, and which “them” is the real threat to it?

Their first class discussion was about the complex meaning of identity, thinking critically about how (and why) you define who you are as an individual within any society — or mob — relentlessly pressing individuals to conform with (often quite radical) norms.

Stubborn symbolic belief in “who we are” beyond all reason and science is all some folks have, the only story with any power to put them on top of a social group, and so they are willing to turn the sciences of larger society upside down, on the basis of that belief.

On this notorious day as Americans remember, reconstruct and reject both the best and worst of our national identity all at once — because whatever else we the people may be, we’re never easy! — the images of hate in my mind aren’t of burning towers but burning books, burning flags, burning bigotry and yes, burning flesh.

When Your Daugh- um, Your Olive Oil Isn’t Like a Virgin

Ruminations of Olive Oil by Favorite Daughter (when she was 16 going on 17) —

I never really understood the concept of Extra Virgin Olive Oil to begin with. Is it made from olives that aren’t allowed to touch other olives? Are they modestly shielded from life’s elements by tarps?

And Extra Extra Virgin Olives – what on earth does that entail?

Or does the “virgin” refer to the oil itself? Has it never been mixed with another oil, commingling and developing new, brassy flavors? I certainly hope not, one takes for granted when one buys olive oil that it is, in fact, olive oil, and not some other hybrid. But then it seems that they shouldn’t have to bellow about its virginity so explicitly.

. . .It’s not just olive oil – women, too, now, are expected to come with a label that reads Extra Extra Virgin.

Much of society appears to have decided – rather abruptly, if you ask me – that it is not enough to wait for a person, time, and place that connote “right” and “safe” before you have sex for the first time. . .

I could say a lot of things about the abstinence program. I could say that repression, sexual or otherwise, isn’t healthy. (See this movie to learn how it leads to broken families, insanity, and arguably the Great Depression.)

I could say that it makes people ashamed of what’s perfectly natural, and thus leads to self-loathing.

But I think I’m going to focus mainly on how creepy it is. . .

(She was indeed a devout Disney Princess disciple growing up.)

Now comes news in the year 2010, finding Favorite Daughter a senior in college, age 20 and a student of power of story religious and not, are you ready to face facts? Your actual, literal (not metaphorical) olive oil may be acting all coy and innocent, telling you what it thinks you want to hear. But it’s lying!

A new study from the University of California- Davis claims more than two-thirds of random samples of imported so-called extra-virgin olive oil don’t make the grade. . .

“It’s become a very sophisticated practice, the adulteration of olive oil throughout the world,” Shoemaker says. He says the lab can prove defects, degradation and dilution in olive oil beyond what human taste buds can figure out.

Suppose two-thirds of supposed teenaged virgins are lying to us, too. And some of those who AREN’T lying, don’t think it’s any of your business anyway. Now what? Nobody much listens to Favorite Daughter even when

Why Educate Our Kids? Part Three: Their Enemy Is Us

Teach your parents well,
Their father’s hell will slowly go by.
You who are on the road,
Must have a code that you can live by. . .
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a goodbye.

UPDATE:
[C]ults – whether they are political, religious, psychotherapeutic, commercial, or educational – seek to make people dependent and obedient.

. . .When we get serious about thwarting cult recruiters we will expose those techniques of persuasion and prepare our young people with the tools to combat cultism. . . take it upon ourselves, in our homes, schools and even places of worship, to address and expose cultism and give our children, parents and teachers the tools to combat it.
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“Despite what opponents of this legislation say, this bill does not hinder a woman’s ability to have an abortion,” [GOP lt. governor Jeff] Kottkamp wrote. “However, it most certainly provides the opportunity to change their hearts — and open their eyes.”

A Thinking Student might use analogies to help analyze whether this is actually an argument for free education or authoritarian exploitation, of individually sovereign girls and women.

For examples, we’re all about education freedom here, and we’ve been debating vaccine freedom as a civil rights issue. Both education choice and antivax arguments assert the individual family’s ultimate right to be left alone by society, to have nothing forced on it physically or mentally.

An educated student might notice the overlap is extensive in arguments for individual rights up to and including homeschool mom brinksmanship about public education standards as not merely “an opportunity . . .to change their hearts and open their eyes” — until we come to anti-abortion activists, making Kottkamp’s argument that government should intrude right into the examining room and force an emotionally exploitative mandate by government fiat upon the individual, expressly designed as public interference with the individual’s right to make her private decision regardless of the rest of society.

Would Kottkamp support a similar bill to mandate that at any well-baby checkup involving a vaccine delayer/refuser, the child would be held by a social worker in another room while the mom was forced to view (and PAY FOR!) sophisticated video simulations of her own child suffering all manner of ravage from childhood diseases, ending with an image of the mom herself weeping over a grave . . .?

The antivax/antiabortion argument about individual rights is wrong to demand for moms the right to be left alone by government in one case, but not the other.

Tim Tebow: The Boy Who Lived

. . .destined to grow up as an example to us all. Of — um —

Are you ready for some football?
(Olympic Excess coming up next!)

We homeschooling families like learning at home in our living rooms, especially for free. You could even say we celebrate it! But you’re a Thinking Parent as well, so think about this — is “Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life” a sports message best taught on tv as multi-million dollar ad wars? Or is it paid political speech we’ve learned from real-world experience celebrates division and shooting to kill, the kind of combative warfare all learned people know that neither Christ nor America was ever about, despite false advertising through the ages?

What lessons are being taught in our living rooms, not by individual homeschooling parents or great literary characters like the Boy Who Lived but by corporate-controlled televised sports as entertainment, and is it sacred business, serious business, or funny business (if business has any business teaching any of us any of it?)

Our best entertainers and artists in any era help us conjure our own Patronus against the universally human fear of the dark.

Who in this story capitalizes, controls, one might even say conjures, this unarguably public education for which corporate America is unelected and unaccountable?

What if Tim Tebow had been born gay instead of gridiron-gifted? Would his mom still have been chosen for her choice to teach SuperBowl fans everywhere her ethics and how to define “family and life” worth celebrating? What if her unaborted son once grown to be a sports star, openly credited magic rather than miracles? Would he still have been chosen by CBS to dramatically break the network’s policy against advocacy ads mixed with hero worship? Is ignoring your doctor’s advice as Pam Tebow (and Sarah Palin) chose for themselves and apparently preach as mom gospel to everyone including the Supreme Court, a lesson CBS will be held accountable for as both profit-seeking and public broadcast system?

Here’s something your children will NOT learn about celebrating family and life watching the CBS SuperBowl:

“Women take decisions about their health very seriously. They consider their doctors’ advice, they talk with their loved ones and people they trust, including religious leaders, and they carefully weigh all considerations before making the best decision for themselves and their families.”

“My daughter will always be my little girl,” [the sports star] says. “But I am proud everyday as I watch her grow up to be her own person, a smart, confident young woman. I trust her to take care of herself. We celebrate families by supporting our mothers, by supporting our daughters. By trusting women.”

Upon which [the evil schoolmarm as minister of education] retorted tartly that students couldn’t be trusted to know what was good for them and they were a bunch of negative whiners . . .

Ethical? Educational? Christ-like? Good enough for your child at any age or stage?

Preparing for SuperBowl Sunday as a secular Gator up on cultural controversy, I’m reflecting on my own education through many years of bleeding orange and blue and watching UF sports, especially Tim Tebow as our most famous student-athlete ever. Yes, the most famous ever.

The Boy Who Lived has clearly surpassed even Steve Spurrier’s renown although the reasons seem murky and not merely statistical — perhaps because not even the most fanatical fan nor the SEC, the Heisman Committee or The Old Ball Coach himself, ever confused Steve Spurrier with Christ-like beatitude? 😉

I think my best self-learning on this subject was laid out in biblical allegory style, in What Should We Call Christ as a Kick in the Head? Tim has had his last on-field performance as a Gator for God but his first as a bought-and-paid-for shill airs tomorrow. I’ll let you know if it teaches me anything new . . .

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What Should We Call Christ as a Kick in the Head?

Just drove Young Son to Irish dance and musical theatre. Their performing arts studio is in a neighborhood shopping center with a sandwich shop and pizza place, a chinese food restaurant, a small computer shop — and a huge, very busy martial arts place with big glass walls across the front so you can watch from the sidewalk or your car, called Karate for Christ Ministries.

I’ve waited for the kids and wondered about this incongruous pairing of east and west before. School football players in the South seem very well-educated if Christianity is the standard and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes is the measure. My favorite quarterback Gator Tim Tebow is always blessing the tv announcers and thanking his lord Jesus Christ for his touchdowns. His whole family goes on mission trips and he even convinced his coach to join him on one last summer. But school football and school religion are compatibly American — at least so I was taught — especially in the Bible Belt.

Karate though? For Christ?

So today as Spunky started a new conversation about what it means for a child to be “well-educated” I noticed it afresh and thought I’d mention some of what it makes me wonder, about what’s being taught and learned and why to our kids out of school, not in.

The phone number is painted on the glass, too: want your child well-educated in mind, body and spirit all at the same time? Who needs School OR Church? Just call 8-WE-KICK.

I called up wikipedia instead:

“We’re the Smart Ones. . .”

We’re the smart ones.
We’re the ones who are “reality-based.”
We can win without being counterproductive.
We can figure it out.

Put it on t-shirts, embroider it on pillows, whisper it to teeth-gnashing, garment-rending fellows as needed . . .

Read Their Lips: Some SERIOUS Mental Mistakes Out There!

Here are three connected “what’s in a name?” rants from today:

Rant One
So the Dickensian SC Lt Gov has just ruined the whole freedom storyline about the GOP No-Go to any human services for anyone (Haiti too?) He let the cat out of the bag literally, when he compared people in need to stray animals that need to be left to starve — and without health care, no doubt — so they won’t breed.

“You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply,” Bauer continued. “They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”

Somebody in this story doesn’t know any better all right, but to me, it sounds like him! America as Animal Farm, and some pigs are more equal than others? Maybe his pack of alpha wolves deserve credit for shrewd animalistic survival instincts at least. No wonder they need all those guns guaranteed by their piggy view of the Constitution, rather than the human services by which all living animals could be treated humanely. So many strays are starving and sick these days that they might turn on their overlords and start fighting back . . .

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Rant Two
I just saw a nice conservative Christian school and homeschool teacher, well-educated, longtime advocate for home education — with whom I collaborated to oppose mandatory universal preschool among other things — use a puzzling term completely new to me:TOTUS. She linked it to a news story about the President giving a speech in these dire times, followed by her comment: “The TOTUS speaks to children.”

Treasury head maybe?

I was determined to figure it out for myself, ran through various possibilities as if I were doing a crossword puzzle, but no luck. The thumbnail looked like it could be the President? — maybe among themselves they sneer at him as Teacher or Totalitarian of the US?

Sigh, finally I Googled it. Maybe I am the last person to hear this for the first time or maybe you don’t know either. If you do know, have you really thought about what this label packs in its punch?

These are people agitating to change the constitution to define all human life as fully human even before birth, even when it is just a potentiality — in the same breath they politically dehumanize this extraordinary (and certainly living, breathing) human being who represents all Americans and leads our humanitarian efforts throughout the globe.

At least when their derision insisted he wasn’t American-born and wasn’t black enough or too much like Hitler and was palling around with terrorists, he was still presumably — if barely — “human!”

And at least when Limbaugh snatched away that humanity to call him a giant alien cockroach, he was still a LIFEFORM. But this new political derision is more damning and dismissive even than that: now the President Barack Obama is not only not human, but not even animal life like the stray cats and dogs we must harden our hearts against and not feed, to prevent them from breeding more unfortunate lives to clutter up our conscience (see Rant One): now he’s not even animal or insect, not even ALIVE. Only a machine.

And not even a learning machine that can think for itself and help humankind in valued partnership, like say, Data on “Star Trek: Next Generation.” A stupid machine we should junk. (Alternately, evil enemy technology.)

They are crowing this week that it’s a triumph for American values that suddenly even CORPORATIONS are human and guaranteed individual human rights — but not the Teleprompter?
Think about it. WWJD?

See The Lucifer Effect for more.

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Rant Three
Sean Hannity said today on his radio program, and I quote: “I think it is wrong to plan your life.” (Really, then surely it’s wrong to plan other people’s childbearing and marriages and sexual expressions and access to human food, shelter, medicine and health care through government, much less raise armies to fight wars to reshape lives and nations and whole regions of the globe to suit YOU. And if it’s wrong for anyone to plan this life, surely it’s even wronger to spend a moment’s effort trying to plan the next one??)

Meanwhile, back on earth, in reality, among sentient beings, Hannity’s broadcast stance against the morality of human volition, of planning and pursuing life goals, surely devalues every individual’s hard work, savings, initiative, education. All missionary work and politics. All commitments such as friendship, marriage and raising a family. All these are by his simple pronouncement that planning is wrong, rendered worse than pointless — actually wrong!

These are stupid, exasperating and poorly thought out ideas, dangerous even — still I wouldn’t call him not human or not alive, for spouting them.

JJ’s Reading Serious Stuff About Vaccine and Public Health Foolishness

Science doesn’t kill people, people kill people. With politics and mind games.
And “fear spreads as rapidly as any virus . . .”

David Shenk is the author of five books; his next book, The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told about Genetics, Talent and IQ is Wrong, will be published by Doubleday in March 2010.

Oct 20 2009, 5:59PM
Health / Medicine:
The New Pandemic of Vaccine Phobia

We no longer believe that witches control the weather or inhabit the souls of adolescent girls. We no longer believe that the earth is flat, and we have even held our ground against the pseudoscience of “intelligent design.”

Now it is time for all who respect logic, rationality, and the scientific method to come together and say NO MORE to anti-vaccine demagoguery.

No one pretends that vaccines are perfect, or 100% risk-free. But approved vaccines work. They save lives. They do not cause mercury poisoning or autism. They carry very low risks — risks almost always worth taking. And, to top it off, vaccines have become something of a civic responsibility: they work best when everyone takes them.

Six recent helpful articles:
[see at story link]

Wired Magazine is out with its new cover story about a prominent vaccine scientist and historian/biographer, who is to vaccines what Richard Dawkins is to evolution — someone who gets death threats for his modern medicine the way doctors who courageously provide women’s family planning and reproductive health care do:
An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All

Then I came across a progressive Indiana pediatrician at HuffPo blogging health care and insurance reform in a way that appeals to my intelligence: RATIONAL ARGUMENTS: a blog mainly (but not entirely) about health policy. . .his radio talk about intelligently negotiating health insurance reform is here.

Why Don’t Pregnant Women Tip Over?

Ask an Ig-noble award winner! — Yes, the Ig-Nobles, Improbable Awards for Improbable Research, dedicated to “achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think” —