Opinion – Page 6

December 31, 2012December 31, 2012

U.S. gun deaths since Sandy Hook: 345

This recent statistic of 345 gun deaths is about the average for a two week period in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” The number comes courtesy of Slate.com, which has just started an online project to track gun killings. As Slate announced today:

“Since the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, we at Slate have been wondering how many people are dying from guns in America every day.

“That information is surprisingly hard to come by. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence

, for example, has a tally atop its website of “people shot in America.” That number, though, is an estimate, based on the number of gun injuries and deaths recorded by the CDC in 2008 and 2009, the most recent years for which statistics are available. It seems shocking that when guns are in the headlines every day, there’s no one attempting to create a real-time chronicle of the deaths attributable to guns in the United States. Continue reading “U.S. gun deaths since Sandy Hook: 345”

December 30, 2012December 31, 2012

Stepping up the marketing of God

It seems that this year’s omnivorous expansion of “Christmas” isn’t quite enough. A national decline in church attendance, the struggling economy and the challenges of converting millennials have all led to a new movement to market God.

Apparently, The U.S. is witnessing a wave of experimentation by evangelicals to reinvent “church” in an increasingly secular culture. The mega-church boom of recent decades is winding down, along with it’s trappings of stadium seating, Jumbotrons and smoke machines. So churches are trying new tricks.

As reported in today’s New York Times, “’It’s unsettling for a movement that’s lasted 2,000 years to now find that, ‘Oh, some of the things we always assumed would connect with the community aren’t connecting with everyone in the community in the way they used to,’ ” said Warren Bird, the director of research for the Leadership Network, a firm that tracks church trends. Continue reading “Stepping up the marketing of God”

December 29, 2012December 29, 2012

Dean Spade on the shootings and mental health care

“We have a long history in the US of giving people involuntary medical treatment and using mental institutions to lock up people who are “different” or threatening to social norms,” says University of Washington law professor Dean Spade, author of the book, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law.

Spade was speaking about California’s “Laura’s Law” which provides court-ordered outpatient treatment for the seriously mentally ill. “So many people who could use mental health care do not reach out for it because they are afraid that they will be locked up involuntarily if they reach out to a provider,” Spade said.

Spade is the subject of an interview appearing in today’s issue of The Nation conducted by Laura Flanders. The article begins,

“Exactly as the shootings debate is playing out, funding for mental health services are teetering on the fiscal brink. Obama and Speaker John Continue reading “Dean Spade on the shootings and mental health care”

December 29, 2012December 29, 2012

Misunderstanding Media Violence

As we enter the most recent round in the media violence debate, a story from the past is illustrative of the difficulties in drawing conclusions too quickly from what seem like common sense observations.

In a now-famous study conducted in the 1970s, a group of American researchers were convinced they’d come up with a perfect way to measure the effects of violent media.[i] They had decided to study teenage boys who lived in residential facilities and boarding schools where television viewing could be completely controlled. For a period of six weeks, half of the boys were permitted to watch only violent programs and the other half non-violent shows. Everyone expected the boys exposed to violence to become more aggressive and unruly, as similar studies of younger children had demonstrated. Continue reading “Misunderstanding Media Violence”

December 28, 2012December 29, 2012

Autism means reduced health care access

Autism is in the media spotlight these days, but for all the wrong reasons. Despite the absence of any causal connection between autistic spectrum diagnoses and propensities for violence, worries abound nevertheless following the Sandy Hook shootings. Meanwhile, children and adults with some form of autism become the subject of greater stigma – and their odds of receiving adequate care diminishes further. Autism already is highly misunderstood in terms of its origins, causes, manifestations, and treatment. Continue reading “Autism means reduced health care access”

December 28, 2012December 28, 2012

Medal of Honor drops gun sales links

It’s hard to feel too much sympathy for Electronic Arts, the video game giant that displays no fewer than 14 corporate logos of real-life gun makers on the partner page of its bestselling game Medal of Honor. But at least today the links to gun stores are gone.

For anyone who has followed movie and game censorship issues, this kind of nimble response to complaints (first reported in national media two days ago) typifies an entertainment industry that always has been able to move much quicker than any legislative body. From the Hollywood movie Production Code of the 1930s to the ESRB game ratings of the 1990s, the industry has always been able to keep one step ahead of policy-makers by taking just enough action to forestall any legal intervention. The result has been an entertainment-industrial-complex that pretty much produces exactly what it wants. Continue reading “Medal of Honor drops gun sales links”

December 28, 2012December 29, 2012

E-books and the death of print

For many of us, this week’s final print edition of Newsweek was no great loss. Think of it as an editorial dinosaur succumbing in an age of the blogosphere.

But those of us who still write a bit for things actually published on paper get the sense they are coming for us next. The recession has been rough on everyone, but for publishers this has been a nightmare (especially for small, independent presses).

If it isn’t big bookstore chains squeezing diversity from the retail marketplace, it’s e-books merchants like Amazon who (following the iTunes example) extract ever larger slices of profit margin from both writers and original publishers. Today npr.org published a quasi-apology about the new e-reader. A few opening paragraphs are reproduced below:

“What counts as a book these days, in a world of Kindles, Nooks and iPads — and eager talk about new platforms and distribution methods? Continue reading “E-books and the death of print”

December 24, 2012December 24, 2012

Game Theory?

Of course the “media violence” debate will be revisited in coming weeks and months.

Below we see the introduction of “Game Theory” in the New York Times, a series primarily devoted to what games its reviewers like for their entertainment value. But the first “edition” of Game Theory ventures into the emotion-laden topic of game violence. Notable in the article, as in almost all of the discourse on media violence, is the absence of any empirical evidence to support alarmist arguments that young imitate in real-life what they play on their computers.

“Welcome to the first edition of Game Theory, a conversation about the year in video games. Some introductions for the uninitiated: Stephen Totilo is the editor in chief of the gaming news site Kotaku.com, and he also writes about video games for The New York Times; Kirk Hamilton is the features editor at Kotaku; and I’m the deputy editor of Yahoo News, and a writer of video game reviews for The Times. The three of us will be bickering — I mean, coming to a friendly consensus — about the year’s best games, the year’s worst games and about what 2012 indicated about the state and future of this creative medium. Continue reading “Game Theory?”

December 23, 2012

The Civil Rights issue of our time

“While there’s still a lot more work to be done, 2012 saw some remarkable milestones for transgender people both in the U.S. and abroad,” said today’s Huffington Post in the beginning of its 2012 year-in-review series

“From Vice President Joe Biden declaring transgender rights as the ‘civil rights issue of our time,” to the huge update made by the American Psychiatric Association to its Diagnostic And Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders, trans acceptance has certainly made some enormous strides this year.

“We even saw one of our favorite TV shows, ‘Glee,’ include a transgender character in its diverse cast, and the transgender flag was flown in place of the iconic rainbow flag at Harvey Milk Plaza in San Francisco for the first time ever.

Check out some more phenomenal transgender stories from 2012 in our roundup below and be sure to let us know what other moments captured your attention in the comments section.”

For more on this story, see “2012 Top Transgender Moments” in Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/22/top-transgender-moments-stories-2012_n_2347346.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices

December 23, 2012December 23, 2012

Where your charitable gift really goes

If you’re thinking of giving to charity this holiday season, you might want to take a second to find out where your money is going.

“A report released today by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman found that a staggering amount of the money raised by charitable telemarketing winds up going to pay the telemarketing companies, and all too often, little if any money actually makes it to the cause in question,” states today’s Village Voice.

“How bad is it? Schneiderman investigated 602 charitable telemarketing campaigns from 2011, which together raised more than $240 million. In 78 percent of the campaigns, less than half of the money raised actually went to the charity. In 76 of the campaigns, the charity actually lost money on the deal — zero money went to the cause, and the charity paid the telemarketers out of pocket.

“New York City organizations fared slightly better than average, with about 46 percent of money raised going to charity. Long Island charities were the worst in the state, keeping a scant 27 percent.

There’s a pattern here — the percentage of gross receipts from New York charitable telemarketing campaigns has hovered between 30 and 40 percent for the past decade.That’s not to say that different charities and telemarketing companies aren’t better than others. Oxfam America, USAFA Endowment, and Child Fund International pass along more than 90 percent of their telemarketing revenues. They were the only ones.

“But according to the Attorney General’s report, if you donated to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center through a telemarketer last year, exactly none of your money found its way to its intended target. Same for the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, the Christopher Reeve Foundation, Ducks Unlimited, Feed the Children, the Food Bank for New York City, and the International Rescue Committee, to name a few. Why big-name charities accept such a miserable return on investment isn’t clear.”

For complete story, see: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2012/12/the_charitable.php

December 22, 2012December 22, 2012

Growing up in North Korea

Welcome to the world of North Korean childhood. Today’s Asia Times carries an article on the strident nationalism in state education in North Korea: “In this world, cartoons such as ‘Pencil artillery shells’, by Cha Kye-ok, call on children to study well. Unlike in South Korea, where the same imperative is justified by intellectual fun and social success of the students, the North Korean educational paradigm suggests another lucrative objective: good students are better prepared for the defence of their country against invaders.

“In the constantly emphasized potential war, North Korean children are summoned to prepare for the worst. Verses of their songs widely employ idioms such as kyolsaongwi (desperate readiness to die [for the leader, the country, the party]) orch’ ongp’ at ‘anadulttal, (sons and daughters of guns and bombs/living guns and bombs). See, for example, a typical children’s poem by Kim Ch’angmu, They Envy Us, They Are Afraid of Us: Continue reading “Growing up in North Korea”

December 19, 2012December 19, 2012

Mental illness creates disability around the globe

Mental illness is the largest contributor to worldwide disability, according to a report card on the health across the globe. The seven papers comprising the report and two commentaries will be published in a collection entitled “The Global Burden of Disease” (GBD) in The Lancet. As reported in Bioscience Technology:

“GBD 2010 is a collaborative project led by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington (UW) in the US and involves 302 institutions across 50 countries. This is the first report since the inaugural study was published in the early 1990s. Continue reading “Mental illness creates disability around the globe”

December 19, 2012December 19, 2012

America’s culture of violence examined

“On an international scale, America exports its culture of under-regulated violence.” Today’s edition of Le Monde carries an article by Heidi Morrison that puts recent events at U.S. elementary school in the context of broader patterns of American violence in recent years and the nation’s history. Reminiscent of Richard Slotkin’s classic Regeneration through Violence, Morrison examines this tragic tradition, as excerpted below:

“Seeking an explanation for tragic violence, we often turn to history and ask ourselves how we got to this point. Writing the historical narrative for the forces that led to the horrific elementary school massacre of 28 people, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook has already Continue reading “America’s culture of violence examined”

December 18, 2012December 19, 2012

Seniors in debt over kids’ school loans

“The early-morning calls from debt collectors continued even after her massive stroke, waking Bella Logan to daily reminders that she owed $75,000 in student loans. Logan is 94.” This is from today’s Columbus Dispatch, and the story is a grim recessionary tale:

“The federal government garnisheed $200 a month from Robert Austin’s Social Security checks for years for student-loan debt, leaving Austin without money he needed for medications. He is 83. After Ray Stockman’s wife died, he wanted to move but was turned down three times Continue reading “Seniors in debt over kids’ school loans”

December 18, 2012December 18, 2012

University of California’s troubled new look

What ever were they thinking at the University of California? After a hailstorm of negative responses to its new “modern” look

the prestigious university has dropped the new monogram many said looked like a badly done corporate makeover. As university officials wrote in their press release today about its “visual identity system:”

“A controversy has developed over an element of an integrated visual identity designed for use by the University of California’s systemwide office. This controversy has created a major distraction for the UCOP External Relations Division as it pursues its broader mission: communicating to all Californians the vital contributions UC makes to the quality of their lives and the prosperity of the state. Continue reading “University of California’s troubled new look”

December 17, 2012December 17, 2012

Autism is not linked to violence

“Among the details to emerge in the aftermath of the Connecticut elementary school massacre was the possibility that the gunman had some form of autism,” reports todays Los Angeles Times

“Adam Lanza, 20, had a personality disorder or autism, his brother reportedly told police. Former classmates described him as socially awkward, friendless and painfully shy.

“While those are all traits of autism, a propensity for premeditated violence is not. Several experts said that at most, autism would have played a tangential role in the mass shooting — if Lanza had it at all. ’Many significant psychiatric disorders involve social isolation,’ said Catherine Lord, director of the Center for Autism and the Developing Brain at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

Autism, she said, has become a catch-all term to describe anybody who is awkward. Some type of schizophrenia, delusional disorder or psychotic break would more clearly fit the crime, experts said. Continue reading “Autism is not linked to violence”

December 17, 2012December 18, 2012

“I am” Adam Lanza’s mother

The essay below was written by Lisa Long, not the actual mother of Adam Lanza, but a woman whose son has some of diagnoses attributed to the young man who committed the recent murders at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. The essay is about the complexities of living with and caring about a child whose behavior makes parental love a challenge.

“Three days before 20 year-old Adam Lanza killed his mother, then opened fire on a classroom full of Connecticut kindergartners, my 13-year old son Michael (name changed) missed his bus because he was wearing the wrong color pants.

“‘I can wear these pants,”’ he said, his tone increasingly belligerent, the black-hole pupils of his eyes swallowing the blue irises.

“‘They are navy blue,’ I told him. ‘Your school’s dress code says black or khaki pants only.’ Continue reading ““I am” Adam Lanza’s mother”

December 16, 2012December 16, 2012

Gabrielle Ludwig takes the court

Gabrielle Ludwig takes the courtAs the buzzer sounds to announce the substitution, a handful of Mission College basketball supporters chant: “Gabbi! Gabbi! Gabbi!”

The Contra Costa Times reports that “’ost of the 50 or so onlookers in the dingy, yellow-tinted gym briefly look up from their chili-cheese nachos and smartphones, and then back down. A few whisper and point at No. 42, marveling at her size.

‘It was the debut of Gabrielle Ludwig, and at 6 feet 8, 220 pounds, with tattoos on her arms and legs, she stands out in the Contra Costa College gym. At 50, the Fremont resident is about three decades older than her Santa Clara community college teammates and opponents — and much taller.

‘What many at the 19th annual Comet Classic did not know was Ludwig had only been a woman since July, when she had a sex change operation. Continue reading “Gabrielle Ludwig takes the court”

December 15, 2012December 15, 2012

Nate Silver points to shifting gun discourse

Opponents of stricter regulation on gun ownership have accused their adversaries of politicizing a tragedy.

Poll analyst Nate Silver looks at the statistical aspects of gun discourse much with the same care and scrutiny he gave the recent presidential race. On his FiveThirtyEight site he states:

“Advocates of more sweeping gun control measures have argued that the Connecticut shootings are a
demonstration that laxer gun laws can have dire consequences. Let me sidestep the debate to pose a different question: How often are Americans talking about public policy toward guns? And what language are they using to frame their arguments? Continue reading “Nate Silver points to shifting gun discourse”

December 15, 2012December 15, 2012

This time, the right kind of moral panic

At last we may be entering what sociologists call a “moral panic” over guns. While the term may sound ominous, moral panics historically have been behind may progressive (and conservative) social changes.

According to Stanley Cohen, author of Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) and credited as creator of the term, a moral panic occurs when ” condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests”.Those who start the panic when they fear a threat to prevailing social or cultural values are known by researchers as moral entrepreneurs, while people who supposedly threaten the social order have been described as “folk devils.” Continue reading “This time, the right kind of moral panic”