From around the Blogosphere and such

Greetings!

It's been too long since I've posted, and I still don't have the time or focus to put together anything original or intelligent. Nevertheless, what follows are some stories or thoughts which have caught my eye recently. Let me know what you think.

On the Peace and Nonviolence Front...

Catholic Lt Col at Gitmo chooses the Cross over the Flag

Darrel Vandeveld is a devout Catholic. Not so long ago he was also a military prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay. However, what he saw and experienced there struck him as immoral and un-American. His well-formed Catholic conscience was not comfortable. He emailed Fr. John Dear, a peace activist, and after much mental anguish chose to quit the US military. Watch the BBC's interview here and read more here

US Torture policies in Iraq have lead to the Deaths of countless Americans

Matthew Alexander was an interrogator for a special ops task force in Iraq in 2006. Other people in his position chose to torture alleged and/or known terrorists to attempt to get what they wanted. Alexander refused, and in an article titled "I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq" for the Washington Post he writes:

Torture and abuse are against my moral fabric. The cliche still bears repeating: Such outrages are inconsistent with American principles. And then there's the pragmatic side: Torture and abuse cost American lives.


I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.

Read the entire article here.

The FDA: What were they thinking?

This is Silly: Prescription Handguns!??

According to their website, the mission of the FDA is as follows:

The FDA is responsible for protecting the public health by assuring the safety, efficacy, and security of human and veterinary drugs, biological products, medical devices, our nation’s food supply, cosmetics, and products that emit radiation. The FDA is also responsible for advancing the public health by helping to speed innovations that make medicines and foods more effective, safer, and more affordable; and helping the public get the accurate, science-based information they need to use medicines and foods to improve their health.

If that's the case, why are they approving a miniaturized thumb-triggered handgun as something which can be prescribed? What!? Oh! In the near future it may be covered by Medicare. Ladies and Gentleman, your tax dollars hard at work!

More here.


This is dangerous and reprehensible: Gardasil - Bad for women (a shocker I know)

Remember how Gardasil was supposed to help prevent much of cervical cancer? Forgetting for a moment that you shouldn't have to be vaccinated for a disease caused by STDs, because... you know... your free will, chastity, abstinence, the moral life, etc. Forget about all that. Generally speaking a drug might be considered a good thing if it can prevent a large portion of the population from getting a deadly form of cancer. Well, as it turns out, Gardasil may actually make things worse.

Natural News reporter Mike Adams has uncovered some interesting facts about this vaccine. The FDA has been aware since 2003 that Human Papillloma Virus [1] does not cause cervical cancer. The Gardasil vaccine is unable to eradicate HPV virus from women who have been exposed to HPV (nearly all sexually active women). This makes vaccinating all young women in Texas against HPV virus a very questionable decision.

To make matters even worse it has now been learned that vaccinating women with Gardasil may actually increase the risk that those women harboring a benign cervical HPV viral infection have a 44.6 percent increased risk of having their benign HPV infection converted into a precancerous state by the HPV vaccine administration. Thus women vaccinated with Gardasil not only receive no benefit those who were sexually active before the vaccine administration have become at increased risk for developing cervical cancer.

Read the entire article here.
Hat tip to feminine-genius.

Anyone have any thoughts on any of this? Let me know.

Sex and the City revisited

Recently I wrote on two different (Catholic) perspectives on Sex and the City discussed on Vox-Nova. Katerina believed that the show and movie were inconsistent with Catholic/ Christian life and damaging to culture by promoting and sensationalizing immoral actions and attitudes. Radical Catholic Mom, however, that the show was an exaggerated glimpse into the struggles we all have and was indicative of our need for more than selfish desires in order to find fulfillment. Over at Catholic Educator's Resource, Colleen Campbell argues that the show is problematic to say the least. She concludes:

For all their pretensions to envelope-pushing, the movie's producers apparently could not improve on the age-old answer to a woman's romantic yearnings: the very ideal of traditional marriage so often disparaged by the series. Even the promiscuous, materialistic fashion plates of Sex and the City ultimately succumb to the desire to direct their erotic energies into something more enduring than one-night stands and shopping sprees. They want, as most women do, the kind of lifelong love that can survive wrinkles and stretch marks and the dowdier duds of old age.

Of course, such happy endings may prove more elusive for viewers. Decades of bed-hopping and gold-digging look glamorous on television, but in real life, a woman who sleeps with scores of men is more likely to wind up with a sexually transmitted disease and an attachment disorder than a doting husband and storybook marriage. And in real life, a woman who postpones motherhood until well into her forties faces the very real chance that she never will conceive.

The popularity of Sex and the City suggests that many women accept the show's premise that a woman can spend decades treating people like things and things like people without compromising her future prospects for marriage and motherhood. That one TV show could sell that canard to so many women indicates that Sex and the City is more subversive than either its fans or its fiercest critics imagine.

My inclination is to side with Colleen and Katerina. Although I understand RCM's point, I think the majority of the people who watch the show/movie are not as savvy in reading and interpretating media as she is. I think most just see, they are doing it, so can I. Some of the statistics quoted by Colleen in her article bear this out.

Sex and the City...a proper Catholic perspective...

As someone who has probably never seen a full episode of Sex and the City, and has no intention of watching the movie, I may not have much authority to be authoring a post about it. Nevertheless, over at Vox-Nova there is an interesting discussion, coming from two differing perspectives, on the value of the series. Katerina argues that the promiscuity and materialism exhibited by the characters are bad examples and role models for many people, especially the young, who glorify the characters and want to imitate them. She believes shows such as these have no real value in that they don't inspire us or encourage to become better Christians. Radical Catholic Mom claims that the series shows that the women do not find fulfillment in sex or materialism and over time they learn to love more and more selflessly. She sees a little bit of each of the characters in herself, and in all of us.

What do you think ?