Unfit to Print

Terrorism Buster

admin — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 21:16:31 +0000

Apparently everyone but me has known about this since October, but there’s a new official logo for the CIA’s efforts against terrorism:

I am also not making up the fact that the CIA is referring to this as the “Terrorist Buster” logo. I really hope I’m going to start seeing this logo in public places, ideally on signs proclaiming a neighborhood to be a “terrorist-free zone.” And that when they come knocking down our doors because we’ve been determined to be in the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating social change, they’ll be carrying proton packs.

(Note that on the CIA’s website, they seem to have now taken down the image itself, though the page is still there. Maybe they’re hiring a better graphic designer.)

The Inevitable Result of Caging Animals

admin — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 18:28:57 +0000

…is that they will try to escape. And sometimes, they’ll succeed.

A Siberian tiger escaped from her enclosure in the San Francisco Zoo a few days ago, and mauled several people (killing one) before being shot to death by police. “Tatiana,” as she was called, had been shipped to San Francisco a few years ago from another zoo in Denver, in order to get her to mate with a tiger here.

In many ways, I’m even more opposed to animals kept for human entertainment than I am to animals raised for meat. The latter (humans eating other animals) makes sense to me in an abstract way; I’m not against meat-eating, per se, but against the breeding and farming of animals. Were industrial society not to exist, were agriculture and animal husbandry not to exist, I’d have no problem with a person hunting down, killing, and eating an animal. But the concept of imprisoning an animal in order to gawk at it is something completely beyond me.

There are those who argue that zoos are necessary to preserve endangered species, like this tiger in question. But tigers are endangered for the same reason zoos exist: humans treat animals as commodities, not as living, autonomous creatures. If this were not the case, we wouldn’t need to “save” species by locking them in cages. Further, if the only function of zoos was to provide habitat for animals that would go extinct in the wild, for whatever reason, they wouldn’t be open to the public, and they would only house endangered species. The primary function of zoos has never been to protect animals, but to provide entertainment.

Some maulings and other incidents involving captive animals in the US, courtesy of the AP:

Feb. 24, 2007: A 140-pound jaguar named Jorge fatally mauls a zookeeper at the Denver Zoo before being fatally shot. Zoo officials said later that zookeeper Ashlee Pfaff had violated the rules by opening the door to the animal’s cage.

Nov. 29, 2006: Trainer Kenneth Peters, 39, is bitten and held underwater several times by a 7,000-pound killer whale during a show at Shamu Stadium at SeaWorld Adventure Park. Peters escaped with a broken foot. The 17-foot-long orca is the dominant female of SeaWorld San Diego’s seven killer whales. She had attacked Peters on two prior occasions, in 1993 and 1999.

Sept. 10, 2005: Three chimpanzees from Zoo Nebraska are shot and killed after they escape from their enclosure and could not be captured. A padlock on the cage was not completely closed after being cleaned, officials at the zoo in Royal, Neb., said.

July 13, 2004: A state wildlife officer fatally shoots a 600 pound tiger that escaped from the property of former Tarzan actor Steve Sipek in Loxahatchee, Fla.

Oct. 3, 2003: Illusionist Roy Horn is severely mauled by a tiger during the Siegfried & Roy nightly show at The Mirage casino in Las Vegas, biting him in the neck and dragging him off stage.

Hijab Hysteria

admin — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:08:24 +0000

There’s an excellent article by Laila Lalami in The Nation, reviewing a new book on the politics of the veil in France, a country home to more than 5 million Muslims. The book, by historian Joan Wallach Scott, focuses on what Scott calls the French obsession with the foulard islamique, or Muslim headscarf, beginning with debates in the late 80s about their presence in schools. You might remember some press on a law passed in France in March 2004 that banned any “conspicuous signs” of religion in schools. While small religious medallions (crosses, stars of David) and copies of the Qur’an were allowed under the law, headscarves were not, and critics have protested that the law obviously was enacted specifically to strip Muslim schoolgirls of their hijab.

As I’ve written before, hijab is a powerful symbol for both Muslims and non-Muslims, and is often used to indicate the status of a nation or population as a whole. For Muslims, hijab can be an indicator of modesty and piety, cultural pride, or a particular political position, depending on your background, class, ethnicity, and country. For non-Muslim France (and for large portions of the West as a whole), it has come to represent religious fundamentalism, oppression of women, conservative political Islam, and even terrorism.

Lalami writes, on the 2004 headscarf ban,

There was to be no room for the compromises that had been negotiated in years past (scarves on shoulders, “lite” scarves, bandanas); the law was designed to dispel the tensions these compromises had embodied. It became the law of the land in March 2004, and its enforcement began the following October. Without the softening effect of the other recommendations, the headscarf ban became a definitive pronouncement: there would no longer be compromises or mediation—it was either Islam or the republic.

The real history of the symbolism of the veil in France, Lalami says, lies in the French invasion of Algeria in 1830. The campaign was followed by “the imposition of French laws deemed necessary for the civilizing mission to succeed.” Lalami continues,

Women were crucial to that enterprise. In articles, stories and novels of the day, Algerian women were universally depicted as oppressed, and so in order for civilization truly to penetrate Algeria, the argument went, the women had to cast off their veils. General Bugeaud, who was charged with administering the territory in the 1840s, declared, “The Arabs elude us because they conceal their women from our gaze.” [….] As late as 1958, French wives of military officers, desperate to stop support for the FLN, which spearheaded the war of liberation against France, staged a symbolic “unveiling” of Algerian women at a pro-France rally in the capital of Algiers.

Decades later, millions of French citizens with ancestral roots in North Africa are being told much the same thing: in order to be French, they must “integrate” by giving up that which makes them different–Islam. The religion, however, is not regarded as a set of beliefs that adherents can adjust to suit the demands of their everyday lives but rather as an innate and unbridgeable attribute. It is easy to see how racism can take hold in such a context. During the foulard controversies, it did not appear to matter that 95 percent of French Muslims do not attend mosque, that more than 80 percent of Muslim women in France do not wear the headscarf or even that the number of schoolgirls in headscarves has never been more than a few hundred. The racist notion of innate differences between French citizens of North African origin and those of European origin defined the debate.

And, of course, there’s the not-too-surprising fact that once again, a debate involving Muslim women has primarily been defined by non-Muslim men. Once again, the schoolgirls in question were by and large never even asked their opinion on the matter, or why they chose to wear hijab. Instead, it was taken for granted that the hijab was something imposed on them, not possibly something they could have chosen for themselves, and that therefore the debate wasn’t really about the individual girls.

Read the full review here.

What You Blog Can and Will Be Used against You

admin — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 01:17:48 +0000

The hot murder story this week is that of Meredith Kercher, a British exchange student in Perugia, Italy, who had her throat slit after fighting off a sexual assault of some kind. One of the prime suspects is her roommate, Amanda Knox, along with Knox’s boyfriend and another acquaintance. The three of them have been arrested, but there’s no apparent motive to speak of, and the police have only been able to speculate on the murder being fueled by drugs and an inclination towards “violent sex.”

Arturo De Felice, Perugia’s police chief, told reporters that Kercher was “morally innocent” and was a “victim and nothing more”. Knox, on the other hand, is being cast as a “bad girl,” someone who was sexually promiscuous and took drugs recreationally. The Daily Telegraph reminds readers that that Knox “regularly brought men back to the flat for sex, despite her relationship with Sollecito.” The Independent writes that police now believe “she was stabbed after refusing to join in an ‘extreme’ drug-fuelled sexual game initiated by her American flatmate Amanda Knox….” And the Italian newspaper La Stampa has even referred to Knox as “the Dark Lady of Seattle,” referring to Knox’s hometown.

What’s really troubling in the media coverage of the murder, though, is the obsession with Knox’s online life, and specifically, a story she wrote and posted on her MySpace blog. The Times UK writes that “the emerging picture of Ms Knox’s lifestyle in Italy is at odds with her reputation in the United States as a clean cut student, though not with some of the darker fantasies of her blog, in which she called herself “Foxy Knoxy” and wrote a story in which she imagined a drugged girl being killed.” The headline of a story in the UK Telegraph reads “Amanda Knox wrote stories about rape,” and the author writes that “Knox, writing under the name Foxy Knoxy, also reveals a different side to her character with a series of short stories - one concerns a stalker and another talks about the drugging and rape of a young woman….”

Now, even if Knox was writing rape fantasy fiction, I’d argue that it has no place in evidence; sexual fantasy is just that — fantasy — and being aroused by rough or “forced” sex scenarios does not in any way indicate a “sick” or troubled individual. But the thing is, the story in question isn’t even rape fantasy writing. It’s not erotica. It’s not Knox writing about rape as something sexy or appealing. It’s a piece of short fiction about a dispute between two brothers, one of whom has committed a rape; in fact, the story isn’t even really about rape, but about a sensitive young man feeling sad and lost after realizing his little brother isn’t ever going to be the man he wants him to be. (The Stranger has a critique of the story here, and you can read the original in a mirror of her MySpace blog, here.)

The Telegraph story also notes that “detectives currently questioning Knox are expected to trawl through the blogs, and every element of her life, in the coming days.” TIME reports that “as with every unsolved murder case, police are trying to piece together the timing and movements of the suspects. But the Kercher killing has taken on a dynamic of its own with the unlikely characteristics of the suspects, and ordinary citizens scanning blogs and MySpace entries for photos of those involved to try to glean clues to their personalities.”

Who cares about things like motive, when we can simply speculate about the personalities of suspects? Evidence? Who needs that, when it’s clear from Knox’s MySpace blog that she was a party girl and a depraved individual?

Dan Gonsiorowski of Seattlest puts it well:

From the papers in Europe, and particularly in England, you’d think that UW student Amanda Knox had already been tried and convicted of sexually assaulting and killing her roommate Meredith Kercher in Perguia, Italy…. The Perugia polizia interrogate her for three days, probably with no lawyer present, certainly with no American lawyer present, there’s a confession and “caso chiuso?” Why bother with a trial at all? The English media has already dug up plenty of evidence from the detritus a student leaves on the internet in the course of a modern life…. no doubt her recent Twitters will be brought to light any day now by the hard-Googling British press.

Pumpkin Extravaganza

admin — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 20:53:15 +0000

One of my favorite Halloween activities has always been carving jack-o-lanterns. One of my favorite post-Halloween activities is figuring out what the hell to do with all this pumpkin before it rots. Here’s two recipes that I came up with…

DELICIOUS CURRIED PUMPKIN SOUP

1/2 medium-sized pumpkin, peeled and chopped
1 onion, chopped roughly
6 cloves garlic
2 T Braggs or soy sauce
4 cups water
1-2 bouillon cubes
2 tsp. garam masala
1/4 tsp. cayenne
1/2 tsp. ginger

Sautee the onions and garlic in oil until soft. Add pumpkin and 1 cup water; cover and cook at a medium to low temperature until pumpkin is soft. Using a strainer, scoop pumpkin (and onion) out of the pot and puree in batches in a blender or food processor. Return puree to pot and add the rest of the ingredients. Simmer on low for at least ten minutes to combine the flavors.

I then peeled, chopped, steamed, and pureed the other half of the pumpkin, and set it aside to cool. For the following recipe, keep in mind that I used fresh, steamed and pureed pumpkin, not canned pumpkin or pumpkin pie mix — if you use canned pumpkin, you’ll probably need to add a little water or soy milk to the mix.

SERIOUSLY FUCKING GOOD PUMPKIN BUNDT CAKE

2 cups pumpkin puree
1 cup oil
1 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp. apple cider vinegar

2 1/2 c. sugar
2 1/2 c. flour (I used whole wheat; white or barley would probably substitute)
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tablespoon Ener-G egg replacer (dry)
1 tsp. nutmeg
1 tsp. cloves
2 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. salt

Mix wet and dry ingredients separately, then combine and stir until just mixed. Pour into a 10-inch bundt pan and bake at 350 for 1 hour, or until the cake springs back lightly to the touch and the edges are lightly browned. Let cool in the pan, then transfer to serving platter. You can dust this with powdered sugar or make a glaze: I mixed melted Earth Balance with some maple extract, a tablespoon of rice milk, and enough powdered sugar to make a thick, wet frosting.

Islamo-Fascism and Feminist Instincts

admin — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 04:07:01 +0000

Somehow, I missed that last week was Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. Damn!

From the official website:

In the face of the greatest danger Americans have ever confronted, the academic left has mobilized to create sympathy for the enemy and to fight anyone who rallies Americans to defend themselves. According to the academic left, anyone who links Islamic radicalism to the war on terror is an “Islamophobe.” According to the academic left, the Islamo-fascists hate us not because we are tolerant and free, but because we are “oppressors.” Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is a national effort to oppose these lies and to rally American students to defend their country.

Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week hasn’t gone unnoticed in the progressive-lefty media circle, but unfortunately, some of them seem to have really missed the point. At least one of them, anyway.

Barbara Ehrenreich, a writer I usually have some respect for, wrote this column about I-FAW in the Nation. Check it out. It’s short.

Shockingly, the only real problem that Ehrenreich seems to have against I-FAW is that its organizers are hypocrites; she argues that the speakers lined up for the week have “credibility problems” in their stances in opposition to the oppression of Muslim women. She notes that

Another participant in the week’s events is former Senator Rick Santorum, whose book, It Takes a Family blamed ‘radical feminism’ for pushing women into the workforce and thus destroying the American family. A 2005 column on that book in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, began with: “Women of America, I hope you look good in a burqa. If Senator Rick Santorum,R-PA, has his way, we will all be wearing the burqas discarded by our recently liberated sisters in Afghanistan…”

Now, I’m not sure if the quote here is from Ehrenreich or another author; either way, it is incredibly offensive and extremely Islamophobic. Not to mention bizarre.

But here’s where we really find out what Ehrenreich thinks about Islam, and why she’s so upset about I-FAW: the anti-feminist speaker Christina Hoff Sommers apparently listed her as

…one of the “feckless” feminists who refuse “to pass judgment on non-Western cultures.” What? If Sommers had even done ten minutes of research she would have noticed, among other things, a column I wrote in the New York Times in 2004 stating that Islamic fundamentalism aims to push one-half of the Muslim world–the female half–”down to a status only slightly above that of domestic animals.”

That’s right — Ehrenreich is pissed because the I-FAW folks are cutting her (and other Western feminists) out of the anti-Muslim camp. She’s actually arguing, here, that she’s just as judgmental of Muslims as the next person.

Yes, feminists tend to hate war…[but] we especially hate a war that seems calculated to inflame Islamic fundamentalism worldwide. If many Muslim women around the world willingly don head scarves today, it’s in part because our war in Iraq has, tragically, pushed them to value religious solidarity above their feminist instincts. (emphasis mine)

Or, in other words: I understand that Muslim fundamentalists are evil and oppressive and hate us, and I’m against the war in Iraq precisely because it makes them even more angry at us, and makes their women put scarves on their heads. To show how much they hate our freedom. Because putting a scarf on your head, well, that’s just the worst example of how these poor, uneducated Muslim women buy into the oppressive patriarchy of Islam, which is far worse than the oppressive patriarchy found in the Western World.

And honestly, I don’t think I’m exaggerating a whole lot, here. That really does seem to be the essence of what she’s saying.

To get back to that oppressive, oppressive headscarf: Ehrenreich — like quite a few other Western feminists — falls into the trap of associating hijab (whether interpreted as a headscarf, veil, chador, or burqa) with the oppression of women. And while I certainly don’t condone enforced veiling, as occurs in some Muslim countries (I don’t support enforced dress codes of any kind, in fact), I think it’s a damn shame to write a whole chunk of Muslim women out of the feminist circle because they wear a certain piece of clothing that most Western women do not. It presupposes the meaning of hijab, and ignores the fact that Muslim women often choose to wear or not wear the veil based on the cultural, political, and religious significance it has for them. (More on that here, excuse the atrocious title chosen by the editors.)

There have always been feuds within feminist circles about the ways that women choose or are forced to present themselves in the public sphere. For some of us, the “feminist instinct” has led us to discard certain items we feel are indicative of a patriarchy that enforces rigid standards for women’s appearances, if not legally than certainly socially. (Makeup, for example, or shaving one’s legs and armpits.) Yet, among most non-radical feminists, it is generally considered to be not okay for a hairy-legged woman to criticise a non-hairy-legged woman for selling out on feminism or submitting to oppressive beauty standards. And the reason for that is because feminism teaches us to respect a woman’s choice in how she presents herself, and to not immediately assume that a woman who wears makeup or a short skirt is a tool of the patriarchy, that she may have her own reasons for choosing to dress the way she does. (And this is all far more complex, of course…)

Yet somehow, among Western feminists, it’s okay to blindly criticise a Muslim woman for wearing a scarf on her head or a simple cloth over her body, and to assume that a liberated, feminist woman would never wear such a thing if she wasn’t (a) oppressed by Muslim men who force her to wear hijab or (b) ignorant of the enlightened feminist ways of Western women.

It’s the same damn thing, people.

Knights and Ladies

admin — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 22:32:38 +0000

My mom sent me a link to this article she’d received as a link in an education e-newsletter; she described it as “outrageous,” and I tend to agree.

The author, Judith Costello, describes her shock at discovering her daughter had been thrown down by a boy at her school. “When I was young,” she argues, “it was considered so taboo for a boy to treat a girl that way that it never happened.” (Oka-a-ay.)

Costello contends that the blurring of gender lines (that is apparently so rampant in today’s public schools) is a problem, because boys will treat girls as equals rather than as delicate flowers, and then, of course, the girls will get hurt.

…when girls and boys are told they are essentially the same, except for a detail of biology, then a basic boundary—one that used to insure decency and respect—no longer exists. Confusion reigns because boundaries are unclear. Disrespect becomes the norm because children don’t see respect modeled and reinforced in society.

The fact that negating a little girl’s sense of personal agency and strength might be a little disrespectful doesn’t seem to have occurred to her.

The story behind the girl who got thrown down, by the way, was that the girl in question was practicing a self-defense move with a classmate. The move failed. Or, in Costello’s interpretation, “The boy decided to show her he was the stronger one. And, of course, he was.”

Instead of being proud of her daughter for learning self-defense, Costello is resigned to doom her to a fate of powerlessness in the face of any man physically larger or stronger than her. Which is, of course, why self-defense moves like wrist and arm escapes (which her daughter was practicing) are crucial for girls and young women to learn; most women are physically smaller than most men, and must therefore learn methods other than brute force to overcome an attacker.

Back in the classroom, the teacher agreed with Ms. Costello, and instituted a short course in how “gentlemen and ladies” are supposed to behave. Using a Medieval theme, the teacher began to teach the boys and girls how to properly conform to rigid gender norms:

The boys would be given opportunities to be physical in the context of preparing themselves to be “defenders and protectors of all that is good, true, and right.” The girls would be given opportunities to seek out beauty and learn about healing. As ladies they would be the “nurturers and caretakers of all that is good, true and right.” …Using their fine motor skills, the girls worked on creating headdresses and decorating their castle. The boys used large motor skills to create huge dragon posters that they helped to string up between trees.

In the end, the “knights” went into battle with the dragon posters, and the girls “rushed to their sides with healing herbs from the pouches they had created.”

Ms. Costello concedes, in the end, that her daughter is “still” a tomboy, but “she is also beginning to see that becoming a ‘lady’ is a worthy and noble goal.”

Full story here, at Teacher Magazine; requires registration.

Alan Moore on Anarchism

admin — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 23:57:00 +0000

The good folks at Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness had a fantastic interview with Alan Moore, anarchist fiction/comic author extraordinaire. I’m reprinting part of it here; for the full version, go here: Authors on Anarchism - an Interview with Alan Moore

I’ll start with the basics: What are your associations with anarchism?

[….] I tend to think that anarchy is the most natural form of politics for a human being to actually practice…. It’s only when you get these fairly alien structures of order that are represented by our major political schools of thought, that you start to get these terrible problems arising…. It seems to me that the idea of leaders is an unnatural one that was probably thought up by a leader at some point in antiquity; leaders have been brutally enforcing that idea ever since, to the point where most people cannot conceive of an alternative.

This is one of the things about anarchy: if we were to take out all the leaders tomorrow, and put them up against a wall and shoot them— and it’s a lovely thought, so let me just dwell on that for a moment before I dismiss it—but if we were to do that, society would probably collapse, because the majority of people have had thousands of years of being conditioned to depend upon leadership from a source outside themselves. In order for any workable and realistic state of anarchy to be achieved, you will obviously have to educate people towards a state where they could actually take responsibility for their own actions and simultaneously be aware that they are acting in a wider group. And obviously, no government, no state, is ever going to educate people to the point where the state itself would become irrelevant. So if people are going to be educated to the point where they can take responsibility for their own laws and their own actions and become, to my mind, fully actualized human beings, then it will have to come from some source other than the state or government.

[….] Way back in the early 80s, when I was first kicking off writing V for Vendetta for the English magazine Warrior, the story was very much a result of me actually sitting down and thinking about what the real extreme poles of politics were. Because it struck me that simple capitalism and communism were not the two poles around which the whole of political thinking revolved. It struck me that two much more representative extremes were to be found in fascism and anarchy.

Fascism is a complete abdication of personal responsibility. You are surrendering all responsibility for your own actions to the state on the belief that in unity there is strength, which was the definition of fascism represented by the original roman symbol of the bundle of bound twigs. Yes, it is a very persuasive argument: “In unity there is strength.” But inevitably people tend to come to a conclusion that the bundle of bound twigs will be much stronger if all the twigs are of a uniform size and shape, that there aren’t any oddly shaped or bent twigs that are disturbing the bundle. So it goes from “in unity there is strength” to “in uniformity there is strength” and from there it proceeds to the excesses of fascism as we’ve seen them exercised throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.

Now anarchy, on the other hand, is almost starting from the principle that “in diversity, there is strength,” which makes much more sense from the point of view of looking at the natural world. Nature, and the forces of evolution…did not really see fit to follow that “in unity and in uniformity there is strength” idea. If you want to talk about successful species, then you’re talking about bats and beetles; there are thousands of different varieties of different bat and beetle. Certain sorts of tree and bush have diversified so splendidly that there are now thousands of different examples of this basic species.

And if you apply that on a social level, then you get something like anarchy. Everybody is recognized as having their own abilities, their own particular agendas, and everybody has their own need to work cooperatively with other people. So it’s conceivable that the same kind of circumstances that obtain in a small human grouping, like a family or like a collection of friends, could be made to obtain in a wider human grouping like a civilization.

In “Writing for Comics” you write about how stories can have relevance to the world around us, how stories can be “useful” in some way. How do you think that stories can be useful? And how do politics inform your work?

Well, I think that stories are probably more than just useful; they are probably vital. I think that if you actually examine the relationship between real life and fiction, you’ll find that we most often predicate our real lives upon fictions that we have applied from somewhere…. Even if it’s a real person who’s inspiring us, it may be that they were partly inspired by fictional examples. And given that, it is quite easy to see that in a sense, our entire lives— individually or as a culture—are a kind of narrative.

We constantly fictionalize our own experience. We edit our own experience. There are bits of it that we simply misremember, and there are bits of it that we deliberately edit out because they’re not of interest to us or perhaps they show us in a bad light. So we’re constantly revising, both as individuals and as nations, our own past. So yes, I think that stories have a great part to play, in some ways more than the development of laws or the development of any other kind of sociological marker. I think that it is the development of our fictions and the development of our stories that tend to be the real measure of our progress.

As to how politics relate to the storytelling process, I’d say that it’s probably in the same way that politics relate to everything. I mean, as the old feminist maxim used to go, “the personal is the political.” We don’t really live in an existence where the different aspects of our society are compartmentalized in the way that they are in bookshops. In a bookshop, you’ll have a section that is about history, that is about politics, that is about… the environment. All of these things are not compartmentalized; they’re all mixed up together. And I think that inevitably there is going to be a political element in everything that we do or don’t do.

Can you point to any effect that your stories have had on the world?

I would like to think that some of my work has opened up people’s thinking about certain areas. On a very primitive level, it would be nice to think that people thought a little bit differently about the comics medium as a result of my work, and saw greater possibility in it. And realized what a useful tool for disseminating information it was. That would have added a very useful implement to the arsenal of people who are seeking social change, because comics can be an incredibly useful tool in that regard. I’d also like to think that perhaps, on a higher level, that some of my work has the potential to radically change enough people’s ideas upon a subject. To perhaps, eventually, decades after my own death, affect some kind of minor change in the way that people see and organize society.

Hypochondria vs. Reality

admin — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 02:11:40 +0000

Last night, an intense pain in my abdomen woke me up. My thought process: It’s a tumor. That’s why I’ve felt so bloated over the past few months. It’s a tumor, and it’s gotten big enough that it’s starting to hurt. I’m going to need surgery. I can’t afford surgery. I wonder how quickly I could get health insurance?

Before dismissing this as silly sleep-deprived hypochondriac thought, I should note that this wouldn’t be an altogether surprising or new experience. Seven years ago, I was suddenly beset by abdominal pains that came on so severely that I couldn’t stand up straight. After a night of cramps, diarrhea, and vomiting, I went to the first of several doctors I’d visit over the next four days, all of whom would tell me that I had some sort of gastrointestinal malady that would work itself out. They’d ruled out appendicitis, which was my first worry, and so I followed their advice of a simple diet, rest, and lots of fluids.

It didn’t get better. I ended up in the emergency room, and an ultrasound determined that I had an ovarian cyst, a tumor larger than my fist. (Or, in the words of the official medical report, a tumor the size of a baby’s head. I was in Germany, where that disturbing description was compressed into a perfectly normal adjective.) The tumor was benign, and the surgery was successful. Ever since then, though, I’ve occasionally wondered about whether or not I would now be able to tell if another tumor was growing inside me. And increasingly, I’ve become convinced that my chances are pretty good that I’ll have some sort of cancerous growth plaguing me before I reach middle age.

The other day, my boss was telling me about how he was getting a headset for his cell phone, that he didn’t want to get brain cancer from holding a microwave-emitting device so close to his head for so much of the day. I shrugged, and said, “I figure I’ll probably be getting cancer soon enough anyway, with the way the world is today.”

He laughed. “You’re too young to be so cynical!”

Of course, cynicism was only part of my snarky response; it was equally fueled by skepticism, and an association of “cell phones cause brain cancer” with other wingnut conspiracy theories.

Then I read this article on new evidence that shows a link between regular cell phone use and, yes, cancerous tumor growth. The “new” aspect of this research focuses on long-term cell phone users — ten years or more of daily use. While previous studies have had inconclusive results, according to this article, it’s the long-term and constant use that may be a problem. Or rather, the reason we’ve been able to scoff at such notions before comes from the fact that we just hadn’t been using cell phones for long enough; cancers take at least ten years, and often longer, to develop.

The study (published in the journal Occupational Environmental Medicine) claims that people who have used cell phones for ten years or more are more than twice as likely to get a cancerous tumor on the side of the brain where they tend to hold the phone to their ear. The new study pulled together research from seven different countries with widespread cell phone use, assembling the findings of eleven different reports.

The scientists assembled the findings of all the studies to analyse them collectively. This revealed that people who have used their phones for a decade or more are 20 per cent more likely to contract acoustic neuromas, and 30 per cent more likely to get malignant gliomas. The risk is even greater on the side of the head the handset is used: long-term users were twice as likely to get the gliomas, and two and a half times more likely to get the acoustic neuromas there than other people.

What is it about cell phones that could possibly be creating tumors inside your brain? Cell phones use a frequency between 850 and 1900 MHz; the radiation they produce is non-ionizing radiofrequency energy (RF). At higher levels, such energy can actually heat tissue; this is how microwave ovens heat up food, and why the US military has been developing a microwave ray for use as a “non-lethal” weapon to break up riots.

On a cell phone, the main source of this energy is in the antenna, which on most modern models is hidden inside the phone. The closer that antenna is to your head, the greater your exposure to this energy.

But some people argue that no matter how close the energy source is, the power is still too low to actually affect human cells — RF energy is non-ionizing (meaning that it doesn’t ionize atoms and break cells down, as gamma rays do). There’s physically no way for non-ionizing radiation to cause cancer. Not on its own, anyway. It’s because of this that “safe” levels of radio and microwave radiation don’t take long-term health risks into account; because there is no danger for RF waves to actually distrupt or mutate cells, the only safety issue is to prevent tissue or surfaces from becoming too hot.

So the jury’s still out, and the only thing I know at this point is that I know far too little about physics and biology to know what to believe. I’m maintaining a healthy skepticism on both sides. Meanwhile, a lot of folks are in the “it may be fine, but I still want to reduce any possible risk” camp. The basic recommendations I’ve found so far:

Choose a cell phone with a low specific absorption rate (SAR). The SAR is the measure of RF energy absorbed in the body by a device that emits electromagnetic radiation. The FCC has set a safe exposure limit of 1.6 watts per kilogram (W/kg). (My cell phone, I discovered after a great deal of research, has a SAR of 1.21 W/kg., which does not make it “low-radiation.”)
Don’t cover up the antenna on your phone; this makes some models “work harder” to get reception. Check your phone to find the location of the internal antenna, if it’s not visible.
Reduce the amount of time you spend on the phone. Duh.
Use the speakerphone or a handsfree device to get the antenna away from your head (some sources argued that Bluetooth devices could actually increase the radiation, however).

Any scientists out there: any good research sources would be much appreciated!

Cancer-Causing Chemicals and Chips

admin — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 22:49:28 +0000

Two new, exciting Things That Are Bad For You that are being released into our environment.

1. Methyl iodide, a carcinogenic chemical used in pesticides. In 1987, the ozone-depleting chemical methyl bromide was banned by an international treaty, with a compete phase-out to occur by 2005. In 2004, the US government began to call for a US exemption for the treaty, because of “economic reasons.” In 2005, with the phase-out imminent, the US considered converting methyl bromide into methyl iodide, a chemical marketed by Arysta Life Sciences and which supposedly did not contribute to ozone depletion and could therefore be used under the treaty. However, it has been categorized as a carcinogen by the state of California. And while the EPA has itself reported that the chemical causes thyroid tumors, the agency has now (October 5) approved methyl iodide for widespread use in pesticides and other substances.

2. Mandatory chip implants for farm animals, which may cause cancerous tumors. The National Animal Identification System (NAIS), being pushed as part of the 2007 Farm Bill, requires that all farm animals must be implanted with a computer chip for national tracking. Earlier this month, the USDA approved two chips for use in the system, both of which have already been used in pets, and, less frequently, in humans. There seems to be some evidence to support the connection between the use of these devices and tumors, at least in animals.

(Both news tidbits summarized from the Organic Consumers Association.)