sense and science
I’m not a scientist. I am sure that I will make a fool of myself more than once when holding forth on any topic in this category. I am however fascinated by the fields of botany, environmental biology, primate behavior, evolutionary biology, sociology and how all these subjects are brought into and used in the political realm often to make specious arguments about human nature, power relations and our hope for survival.
John McCain opposes net neutrality and Obama at the Google
Important – John McCain opposes net-neutrality. That is all I need to know.
From devilstower at DailyKos – a great diary on technology and McCain.
Of pending legislation, McCain is not a sponsor of the “Connect the Nation Act” – though Senator Obama is. McCain is not a sponsor of Senator Rockefeller’s call for a universal next generation broadband by 2015 – though Senator Obama is. And of course, McCain isn’t a sponsor of the “Internet Freedom Act” that would ensure net neutrality – though Senator Obama is.
Please share this.
And this!
Jesus = Community Organizer – GOP hits the wall.
These are only a few of the best response so for to the horrific bullshit attack on community organizers emanating from the sulfurous odors around the podium at the RNC.
These predate the GOP’s attacks but still worth seeing.
What indeed is a community organizer?
I don’t think we’ll ever see Palin working in East Palo Alto.
The Yellow Bike Project in Austin.
Superstar Community Organizer – Majora Carter – Speaking at TED on her work greening the South Bronx, the neighborhood where she grew up.
Resurrection of the Willie Mae’s Scotchouse, after the big flood.
Murderball!
And of course, the guy who’s trying to organize the American community Barack Hussein Obama.
If you are not happy with the way the GOP has chosen to attack the best people in our neighborhoods, schools and cities…please DONATE TODAY!
Tell the nasties at the GOP, you’re done with the same old stuff. If you don’t have money or a job – or even if you do… sign up to help make calls, talk to people – get a taste of community organizing yourself. Go to the site now. The campaign makes it easy as pie to get involved – and to organize your community.
Once you start it’s hard to stop. Not only is it the right thing to do, it feels amazing to connect your life with the lives of people around you to make the changes you all want and need to see. All you need to be is open and willing to help. THIS is what Obama is talking about when he says “be the change you want to see in the world.” That’s how Gandhi put it – and you know how much responsibility he handled.
And what’s this business about “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” I don’t know why those in the Grand OLD Party have such a hard time understanding that concept. It seems to jibe pretty well with that whole ‘responsibility’ thing, you flap your jaws about all the time. Then again, I’ve noticed these GOP speech writers don’t use language like normal people.
They turn good things to salt, and poison into profit.
You know what Miss Tubman said:
If you hear the dogs, keep going.
If you see the torches in the woods, keep going.
If they’re shouting after you, keep going.
Don’t ever stop. Keep going.
If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.
Even in the darkest of moments, ordinary Americans have found the faith to keep going.
Thanks for the reminder Hilary. And thanks for organizing those 18 million cracks!
And Rudy… I can’t find a community in NYC that liked ya, sure as hell not the firemen.
What would you know about community organizing in the first place?
Not a damn thing.
And Sarah, just because you ain’t gettin’ paid, doesn’t mean you don’t have any ‘responsibility.’
After I graduated from UC Berkeley I spent four years teaching adults with disabilities how to use technology. My guess is you would have slashed that program, like you did in your state.
Like someone in a video above said,
Jesus was a community organizer, Pontius Pilate, George W. Bush and Sarah Palin are governors.
And don’t get it twisted. Barack never compared himself to Jesus.
You just stepped in a giant national moose pie of your own making. As YOU said being the Mayor of Wasilla population 5000+ voted in by about 600 people – It’s not rocket science.
Books Sarah Palin wanted to Ban from the Wasilla Library
Sorry folks, an upstanding citizen [plmnjiuhb] has corrected me. (Thank you – it was an admittedly hasty post.)
Update from the Vagabond Scholar – more details.
“She asked me if I would object to censorship, and I replied ‘Yup’,” Emmons recounted Saturday. “And I told her it would not be just me. This was a constitutional question, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) would get involved, too.”
We do not presently have the list of books Sarah Palin tried to have banned from the Wasilla Library.
“She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving “full support” to the mayor.
Time Magazine Palin: A Rough Record
Will someone in a position to ask, ask Sarah Palin for that list?
Also, can we ask Sarah Palin if she would give her seal of freedom of thought to the list below?
This is a list of books that conservatives have tried to ban across the country. For more information
go to the American Library Association – and remember Banned Books Week is September 27 – Oct 4
SHOW your ire Hot Librarians Against Palin!
For a thread where librarians are digging more diligently than I on this subject please see links in comment below.
Books Sarah Palin wanted to Ban from the Wasilla Library
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Blubber by Judy Blume
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Carrie by Stephen King
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Christine by Stephen King
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Cujo by Stephen King
Curses, Hexes, and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Decameron by Boccaccio
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Fallen Angels by Walter Myers
Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) by John Cleland
Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Forever by Judy Blume
Grendel by John Champlin Gardner
Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
Have to Go by Robert Munsch
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Impressions edited by Jack Booth
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
It’s Okay if You Don’t Love Me by Norma Klein
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Little Red Riding Hood by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Love is One of the Choices by Norma Klein
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
More Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
My House by Nikki Giovanni
My Friend Flicka by Mary O’Hara
Night Chills by Dean Koontz
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women’s Health Collective
Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl
Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz
Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
Separate Peace by John Knowles
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Bastard by John Jakes
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Devil’s Alternative by Frederick Forsyth
The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Snyder
The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks
The Living Bible by William C. Bower
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
The New Teenage Body Book by Kathy McCoy and Charles Wibbelsman
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
The Seduction of Peter S. by Lawrence Sanders
The Shining by Stephen King
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Snyder
Then Again, Maybe I Won’t by Judy Blume
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary by the Merriam-Webster Editorial Staff
Witches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween Symbols by Edna Barth
Add in that she wants creationism taught in science classes, she seems determined to continue the devolution of the American school system, in order that American student can be even less competitive internationally.
The Real Deal – Let’s focus on what the man said.
Videos – for anyone still threatening to vote for McCain
Best Climate Destabilization video out there…SHARE THIS
Also check out the Manpollo Project for a whole host of helpful videos to share, remix and act on.
PZ Meyers and the wacky wafer kerfuffle…
[Note this post started as a comment on Seed’s SciBlogs here ]
So to anyone curious or artistically inclined, there is a ready supply of holy hosts – without the hassle of a congregation of hysterics chasing you out the door. It turns how you can get 250 authentic Eucharist wafers for $5.47(US) online. For $39.95(US) you can get a 210 set of pre-filled cups with a Eucharist chaser… the only crime here is one against ‘creation’ —how very, very wasteful.
Perhaps the easy access to the commoditized cannibal snack should be a more serious concern for the seriously concerned. Anyone and I mean ANYONE can buy 500 of them for a mere 85.00(US) and go to town
on a binge and purge session and no one would be the wiser. Therefore, I suggest a RFID tracking system for all containers of wafers traded globally, so the impending scourge of cracker kidnapping and desecration can be avoided.
Idolatry for those interested in religious breech would be the thing that any concerned priest should be chastising his flock for…but consistency has never been the forte of the Vatican or other manufacturers of new and disparate dogma, transubstantiation in fact, is a fairly new twist on the theme, disputed since a few decades after that very bad day at Golgotha.
Those concerned about ‘respect for Christ’…need to go check out this TERRIBLE animated avatar explaining the benefit of the easy open Eucharist kit…
http://www.kingdom.com/category.aspx?categoryID=430&adcode=Google&gclid=CLXi29rzupQCFQOjFQodWnPeSw
Who are you?
I know what I am.
I am the result of tens and thousands of years of travellers, eaters, baby and music makers. I know that my ancestors are ‘yellow’, ‘black’, ‘red’ and ‘brown’… I know that ‘white’ and all these other colors, replace this word: family.
You are my family. Not only by sentiment, though I love you – I do.
But, by science. That science, trumps love – is a strange historic anomaly
Mother, Father, Sister, Brother, Love and Friend…our time is short
I know that when you walk alone by the sea, in the woods, in the park – you can see me -because I can see you. Someday, if we meet I will tell you stories – of how I saw across time and space – and not by TV.
Let’s do what we know, and that is to love, and to love better.
Life is short.
Let us look back,
Let us love our Mother,
out Father, our breath, the tatse of the soil,
of mushroom, of corn, if rice flour and grub,
let us love,
let us let go,
let us build anew,
a banquet,
let us play music,
let us make new music,
let us make grandchildren,
let us, let go,
let us that have – make do,
let us that don’t, – embibe without restraint,
Let us love our great, great, great, great grandchildren better than ourselves.
Let us love, those of a various nature, the alien, the amoeba, the essential algae. the insistent insect…
better than enough…
It is time. Every story has led us to this.
Embrace!
David Byrne on ADD – Autism
“It is also associated with attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity. Why humans should evolve FAVORING those conditions is still a mystery.”
David is talking about a gene associated with dopamine reception and ADD and he wonders why we would be as a species favoring that gene.
ADD, ADHD is associated with a few things such as novelty and thrill seeking, curiousity driven autodidactism [is that evena word?]…it seems to me that we live and have lived in a century where the pace of change was extreme and getting more so! For someone with ADD boredom is the enemy! Perhaps we thrive while others try to impose fundamentalisms of all sorts in order to control those around them who enjoy change, novelty and freedom – beyond the freedom to conform. Indeed conservatives of all stripes need to control the pace of change itself-but can’t.
I Like To Watch – Friday Feedbag – Gnomes, Butterflys, Garden in The Middle of a Massive Gray Metro…
So the struggle at South Central Farm continues and Darryl Hannah keeps us up on the latest, gnomes show you how to hunt for oyster mushrooms and Julia Butterfly-Hill talks about all the things that we are forgeting to globalize!
Enjoy!
Provocative interview with Stephen Marshall, founder of the Guerilla News Network, on the role of citizen jouralism and why no one takes the mainstream media very seriously any longer.
Big Picture | Julia Butterfly Hill
Wonderful chat with Julia Butterfly Hill, on how to be most affective in the service of community and sustainability.
Treehugger TV – CalCars: 100+ MPG Plug-in Hybrids
Hard not to love the folks at Treehugger.TV. Here's look that the calcars.org folks converting Pruis' to Plug-in Hybrids. Send this one to your folks, you know, the one's you already talked into buying the Prius.
BAYCAT : Bayview Hunters Point Center for Arts and Technology
Highlights from the 2005 NetImpact Conference. 15,000 people attended this premiere sustainable business conference! So inspiring!
Update on the campaign to save the South Central Garden!
Folks please get the word out! Especially if you are in Los Angeles.
Net Impact Conference – Social Innovation – Stanford Graduate School of Business
A bounty of speaches from the 2005 Net Impact Conference. Just take a look at the line up. I can't tag them individually so please go to the site and view what you are interested in. Highlights include an Al Gore kickoff and Amroy Lovins on Conservation
self sufficient ish dot TV the Urban Video Guide to Almost self sufficiency
These guys are adorable. What's cuter than a couple of English hippies going mushie hunting – The answer? Two English hippies that look like GNOMES going mushie hunting
Sticky Question – Google Video
HILARIOUS…and not quite work safe for very conservative workplaces.
And the rest is via the feed:
Support Grassy Narrows First Nation
The Grassy Narrows First Nation has lived self-sustainably on their Northern Ontario land for generations. However, imperialism and enterprise has made their way of life all but impossible. Their land has been leased by the Canadian government to logging giants Weyerhaeuser and Abitibi, who have clearcut the forests and poisoned the water with their paper mills. The Grassy Narrows community has tried nearly every avenue for getting the multinational corporations to leave their land, but all pleas have fallen upon deaf ears. Finally, this spring they decided to take the fight to the international level, rallying organizations from around the world to support their cause. Find out how you can help at http://freegrassy.org.
Go here for a FreeSpeechTV video report.
Emergency – South Central Community Garden Needs YOU!
When you go to the site you are stunned. There's an overhead view of South Central LA. And in the middle of a sea of depressing grey is a beautiful patch of green. Paradise sprouting in the middle of smog city! Turns out the developers want to bulldoze it!
DON'T LET THEM.
From southcentralfarmers.org
Since 1992, the 14 acres of property located at 41st and Alameda Streets in Los Angeles have been used as a community garden or farm. The land has been divided into 360 plots and is believed to be one of the largest urban gardens in the country.
The City of Los Angeles acquired the 14-acre property by eminent domain in the late 1980s, taking it from nine private landowners. The largest of these owners, Alameda-Barbara Investment Company (“Alameda”), owned approximately 80 percent of the site. The partners of Alameda were Ralph Horowitz and Jacob Libaw. The City originally intended to use the property for a trash incinerator, but abandoned that plan in the face of public protest organized by the community."
I heard the story from Darryl Hannah's brilliant video blog – dhlovelife. You can see the clip on the site or via my video RSS feed I Like To Watch.
Please go to southcentralfarmers.org to learn how you can help and please get the word out. They are living on borrowed time and need us!
A smash opening for an Inconvenient Truth!
From kubla000's diary over at DailyKos:
Opening days indicate initial level of interest, and to really get a handle on local interest with different release paterns, you need to look at the theater average. Here are the averages I note as telling:
An Inconvenient Truth
Opening Day Theatre Average: $19,749
2nd Day Theatre Average: $11,139
X-Men: The Last Stand
Opening Day Theatre Average: $11,951
My Big Fat Greek Wedding's Opening Weekend average was in the $5,000-$6,000 Range. I really don't want to see mutants this weekend, I'd rather see Glaciers I think. Fighting one's invading Europe and Canada even, lol.
:::
And for every single one of you bloviating bloggers who have NOT seen it – and yet feel it's worth the pixels to trash Gore and cry Socialism! – proving you are really comfy being ignorant – THANK YOU and please promise to keep your previewing thoughts up for posterity. So your dear readers understand JUST where you are coming from.
:::
And our fearless feckless leader – What does he say to his chance to "engage the controversy" …
WASHINGTON (AP) — Is President Bush likely to see Al Gore's documentary about global warming?
"Doubt it," Bush said coolly Monday.
:::
“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”
– Mark Twain
An Inconvenient Truth – Gore 2008!
OK. I admit. I've given the man short shrift in the past. I've been unfair. It all started when Tipper went after rap. I just thought it was really laughable and lame. I voted for he and Clinton and then when they treated the Haitian boat people so badly I was extremely disillusioned. I seethed when he seemed to back down in the fight for his own presidency.
Al. I'm sorry. I was wrong. You had more important things to do.
“surprisingly engaging…intellectually exhilarating,…could hardly be more urgent. “An Inconvenient Truth” is a necessary film” – A.O. Scott, The New York Times
“…illuminating, fascinating and sometimes frightening.” – Claudia Puig, USA Today (* * * 1/2 out of 4 stars)
“highly persuasive” – Kevin Crust, The Los Angeles Times
Currently we’re 88% fresh at Rottentomatoes.com with 100% Fresh Rating with the Cream of the Crop critics (as of 11am ET)
GO!
Gore in 2008!
(Sorry Hil, Integrity is the new black!)
ALSO – please consider writing Viacom/Paramount to complain about the fact that they gave Nacho Libre more high profile ads and distribution than an Inconvenient Truth.
RE: An Inconvenient Truth -Distribution
press@viacom.com
And to all the trolls complaining about Gore's travel patterns – from Wired:
" Gores and all the employees of Generation lead a "carbon-neutral" lifestyle, reducing their energy consumption when possible and purchasing so-called offsets available on newly emerging carbon markets. Gore says he and Tipper regularly calculate their home and business energy use – including the carbon cost of his prodigious global travel. Then he purchases offsets equal to the amount of carbon emissions they generate. Last year, for example, Gore and Tipper atoned for their estimated 1 million miles in global air travel by giving money to an Indian solar electric company and a Bulgarian hydroelectric project.
Carbon offsets are still an imperfect tool, favored only by a few early adopters. (An Inconvenient Truth directs viewers to a personal carbon calculator posted at http://www.climatecrisis.net.) Gore acknowledges that the average US consumer isn't likely to join what is, for now, essentially a voluntary taxation system. "The real answer is going to come in the marketplace," he says. "When the capitalist market system starts working for us instead of at cross-purposes, then the economy will start pushing inexorably toward lower and lower levels of pollution and higher and higher levels of efficiency. The main thing that's needed is to get the information flows right, removing the distortions and paying attention to the incentives."
Switching off the Self
Apparently, when working on complex tasks the part of our brain responsible for emotions, sense of self and introspection shuts down. I think the author errs when describing the resulting state as 'robotic.' Flow, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes about it, is a task based mental state which is anything but robotic – and yet that dissolution of self is central to the state.
Our Nature…
Here is is an amazing peice about regeneration and hope in a post tsunami Thaliand. This touches again on the false premise that our sole natural instinct is to compete in the war of all against all. "I and thou" is a very common response to crisis. Disaster often means that the best in us has a chance to flourish as we act on our communal instincts.
Rebecca Solnit had a wonderful essay on the topic called The Uses of Disaster after Katrina published in Harper's.
Kill your TV.
This is a fantastic article on 'neurogenisis,' or the generation of new neurons in the brain. It was long held that unlike other organs the brain does not generate new neurons. Well, it does – that's the good news. The other news not necesasirly bad is that an understimulated brain loses learning capacity. Well — we're talking macaque brains here…
"Eight years after Gould defied the entrenched dogma of her science and proved that the primate brain is always creating new neurons, she has gone on to demonstrate an even more startling fact: The structure of our brain, from the details of our dendrites to the density of our hippocampus, is incredibly influenced by our surroundings. Put a primate under stressful conditions, and its brain begins to starve. It stops creating new cells. The cells it already has retreat inwards. The mind is disfigured."
Brain development is influenced by surroundings. Begging the question is a steady mental diet of Desparate Housewives helping or hurting?
Time well spent.
Well this seems very useful indeed. The Presidio School of Management has put out a dictionary of sustainable management.
We’re #1
A lot of times that’s not such a good thing.
E.P.A. WARNS OF CITY’S AIR QUALITY People who live near congested highways and in large cities like New York face an increased risk of getting cancer from air pollution, according to a national study by the Environmental Protection Agency. The study was based on 1999 data, the most recent year available, and covers 177 toxins. But the study was criticized for excluding dioxins and the parts of diesel exhaust that are believed to cause cancer.
ANTHONY DEPALMA (NYT)
Daily News:
You might want to breath carefully: The polluted air in New York State is the deadliest in the nation, federal officials said yesterday.
Data show dirty air puts New Yorkers – especially people in New York City – at the greatest risk of getting cancer, the Environmental Protection Agency warned.
NY POST:
N.Y. AIR HAS NATION’S HIGHEST CANCER RISK
By BILL SANDERSON
March 23, 2006 — Here’s something to fume about: All of our cars, buses, trucks and construction equipment are helping to put New York atop the list of cities with the worst air pollution, new federal data show.
New Yorkers are roughly 60 percent more likely to get cancer from air pollutants than people nationwide – and Big Apple folks might want to reach for oxygen masks.
Manhattanites are especially at risk: They’re three times likelier than the national average to get cancer by breathing the air.
AP:
WASHINGTON (AP) – When it comes to dirty, cancer-causing air, New York City is the worst of the worst: the city with the greatest risk, in the state with the dirtiest air, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency.
New York is followed by California, Oregon, Washington, D.C., and New Jersey for the dubious distinction of having the worst air, according to the EPA’s data. The best air was in Wyoming, South Dakota, and Montana.
An organization in the area working on these issuse: Inform, Inc.
Easy Peasy!
How to Talk to A Climate Skeptic
A very useful breakdown of the objections to well, the entire field of climatology from Coby Beck over at A few things ill considered.
A Natural History of Peace – monkey see, monkey do
As some of you have figured out I have a thing for primates, including us as primates. I am proud to say I am a great ape. (Actually, I’m a really great ape if I do say so myself.) My thing mainly is about how close we are as a species and that sense of recognition I feel when I look into the eyes of a great ape or monkey. It’s also fascinating to me that our closest ape relative is the bonobo – who is a very special ape, indeed. It’s also about our destruction of their habitat. The great apes especially will not be with us much longer without intervention on their behalf.
I am fascintated with the ways evolutionary biology is put in the service of pessimistic views of ‘human’ nature. I never trusted it and now I am happy to report that on many fronts primatology supports a more optimistic view of our potential(s).
Here is the best article yet, I’ve seen on the topic.
Summary: Humans like to think that they are unique, but the study of other primates has called into question the exceptionalism of our species. So what does primatology have to say about war and peace? Contrary to what was believed just a few decades ago, humans are not “killer apes” destined for violent conflict, but can make their own history.
Foreign Affairs: A Natural History of Peace
Robert M. Sapolsky is John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Biological Sciences and Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University. His most recent book is “Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals.”
Did anyone else break out in serious tears at the end of King Kong? I know, I know – more than one of you left the theater when the three T-Rex kung-fu fight broke out… someone really needs to tell the army of CGI geeks to lay off the bong.
Cityzen Jane - wherein our heroine pokes (and taps) things with a...hammer. 
Apparently, you can get them in ‘whole wheat’ too, which begs the question what of our gluten intolerant Catholic friends? This kind of intolerance is actually very very painful. Is it possible that Christ causes terrible IBS pain without, of course, intending to? The Cavanaugh brand is made “strictly without additives” and is packaged in a very high end well designed box. The wafer itself is never touched by human hands before being wrapped in plastic (which may or may not contain biphenol-a.) What are the additives in the down market no brand version of the wafer? Are caloric and additive labelings required? We require such stickers for just about everything else we put in our mouths. How do you know it’s just wheat, water, vegetable shortening and G*D? Can Catholics get an organic version to show their love and respect for creation or will giant agribusiness block that development in digestives labeling as they have with other ingest-ables?
The more economical Eucharistic suppliers ship in large plastic tubs, with very little marketing efforts going into the container design. From a designer’s perspective I would suggest that ‘going on the cheap’ for your flock shows real disrespect when the G*diva of wafers is available on-line right next to the crappy Micky D’s Big Gulp version, for just a bit more money. Render unto Caeser and give it up for the Cadillac of crackers! When your priest chooses the cheap-o wafer, where is the love? Also, do the homeless get ‘day old’ hosts along with their ‘day old’ bagels?
You can get them in a nice glass bottle, a plastic bag or box. The bottle and box might be the best choice, for the planet. But I must ask…can the temporary home of the host be properly recycled? The Shroud of Turin and other artifacts having touched the man/God in question must be handled, I am sure, with at least reverence surpassing a national flag. Huge swathes of Europe are dotted with shrines built around things that may or may not have been a part of or touched the actual (apologies for the dither here…) “body of Christ.” If the box, glass or can, can and it is not handled properly at the end of it’s one short and brutish life, is the priest then subject to the same kind of approbation as PZ Meyers who merely threatens mischief, when the priest blithely tosses such a holy conveyance to the garbage on a weekly schedule?
I am shocked to find the old bait and switch with regard to the ‘blood of Christ.’ Fermented wine can apparently be switched out for grape juice (also available in handy once off disposables.) Was this just a cost cutting measure on the part of penny-wise pontiffs or a conciliatory gesture to salvaged sinners on the wagon? What was the date of the papal bull that put the okey doke on the grape juice?
Wikipedia, you fail me.
Also for a mere 40.00(US) from Aquinas and More as well as, St. Andrew’s Church Supply you can get a handy freeze-dried package of holy grape juice ‘granules’ for those moments when popping an actual cork is just too much bother – or for church camp outs. Has the Vatican sanctified whatever facility is freeze drying the ‘blood of Christ’ for convenient packaging and shipping? The Jews and Muslims have the kosher and halal market going maybe it’s time for a conference call on the how-to aspects of getting a proper audited labeling system going.
The host is also available in an ‘extra thick’ wafer…and I will just leave THAT ONE just as I found it.
For any Catholic truly offended by this I suggest perusing that commandment about idolatry.
I side with those that say more serious crimes than ‘disrespect’ have and are being committed by those attacking the young man in question physically and the career of PZ Meyers actually.
Please support Professor Meyers by writing a level headed letter, and Webster Cook, the student in question who has been receiving death threats, by perhaps writing the President of UCF.
In other news, that fellow Jesus sure gets around these days. Patrons at the ice cream parlor were overheard saying, “It’s sacre-licious!”