Former Cardinal Keith O’Brien sits in his office at his official residence on February 27, 2013 in Edinburgh, Scotland. O’Brien, who was Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic and head of the Scottish Catholic Church, has resigned following allegations from three priests and one former priest of inappropriate behavior. By Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images.
Nicole Flatow summarizes a talk given by CalTech physicist John Schwartz:
During an address before a medical marijuana conference Friday, John H. Schwartz explained how the DEA and [National Institute on Drug Abuse] act as a “tag team” to censor science, with NIDA holding a monopoly over legal access to cannabis for research, and the DEA refusing to reconsider the drug’s designation in the Controlled Substances Act as a dangerous substance with no medical value on the basis that sufficient research does not exist. He alleges that the government has blocked research even though it has long been aware of marijuana’s potential to serve many medical benefits including shrink aggressive cancer cells is because it might “send the wrong message to children”.
In his talk, Schwartz compared it to putting “the Institute for Creation Science … in charge of approving paleontology digs and the science of human evolution.” And for him, it’s personal:
His wife, Patricia, resorted to remedies as extreme as electric shock before turning to marijuana to treat her chronic bladder inflammation — the only remedy that worked. “After a few months of using it,” around the time of the passage of Proposition 215′s passage in California 16 years ago, he said, “her bladder function returned to normal and so did our lives, except for one thing: we were now facing the wrath of the most powerful government in the world.”
Labuan bajo, Indonesia 6.20 pm
Photographer Sara Naomi Lewkowicz explains how she suddenly found herself documenting a scene of domestic violence:
Shane and Maggie had started dating a month prior to meeting me, and Shane told me about his struggles with addiction and that he had spent much of his life in prison. Maggie shared her experience losing her mother to a drug overdose at the age of eight, and having the challenges of raising two small children alone while their father, who was in the Army, was stationed in Afghanistan. Before they drove home, I asked if I could continue to document them, and they agreed. I intended to paint a portrait of the catch-22 of being a released ex-convict: even though they are physically free, the metaphorical prison of stigma doesn’t allow them to truly escape. That story changed dramatically one night, after a visit to a bar. …
Shane attacked Maggie, throwing her into chairs, pushing her up against the wall and choking her in front of her daughter, Memphis. After I confirmed one of the housemates had called the police, I then continued to document the abuse — my instincts as a photojournalist began kicking in. If Maggie couldn’t leave, neither could I.
The resulting photo essay is here.
Hans Rosling’s latest video on child mortality:
Colin Marshall captions:
Opening with a visualization of 1960′s world child mortality numbers graphed against the number of children born per woman, Rosling uses his signature method of statistical-animation showmanship to explode myths about the potential of developing nations. We see that, as a country’s wealth rises, its health rises; as its health rises, its child mortality drops; and as its child mortality drops, so does its number of children born per woman, which leads to a sustainable overall population size.
Freddie goes another round:
Saletan expresses his defense of drones with precisely the same condescending certitude he displayed when he insisted that those who wanted to minimize civilian casualties in Iraq had to shut up and support the war. And that points to the bigger problem: it’s not just that he got it so wrong; it’s that he seemingly took nothing from getting it so wrong, and that there are no professional consequences for him not evolving in response to getting it wrong. I pulled out that argument because it is nearly identical, in every respect, to the one he is making today about drones. The thinking is totally the same. Saying you’re sorry for getting it wrong is important. But changing your thinking in reaction to getting it wrong is even more important.
Previous round here.
It might be the Italian comedian-turned-politician Beppe Grillo, whose anti-establishment 5-Star Movement, in an effort to permanently disrupt the Italian political system, collected nearly a quarter of all votes cast in the general election. The resulting hung parliament has sent shockwaves across Europe and rattled world markets. There was speculation that Grillo might ally with Pier Luigi Bersani’s center-left coalition to break Italy’s sudden gridlock, but as of today that seems unlikely:
Grillo, who holds the balance in parliament, slammed the door in Bersani’s face and poured insults on him and other centre-left leaders on his blog. He accused Bersani of making “indecent” proposals to his anti-establishment movement. The fiery comic and blogger called Bersani “a dead man talking,” and political stalker, saying he should have resigned after falling badly short in the election which pollsters had expected the centre-left to win.
Ian Steadman sizes up the online presence of Grillo, who writes Italy’s most-read blog:
Grillo’s blog has long hosted names of politicians convicted for charges of corruption, and in posts the satirical comedian has railed against the corruptions problems in Italian politics. In 2007, he corralled his supporters into a one-off “V-Day Celebratio” where the “V” stood for vaffanculo — “fuck off”. Other campaigns targeted certain bills or vested interests, with the culmination being the launch of the Five Star Movement (M5S) in 2009, a populist bloc whose unifying characteristic isn’t so much what it’s for as what it’s against — the status quo. Its members organise online, it has an extreme direct democracy slant, and [now M5S has become] the third-largest political bloc in the Italian parliament.
He goes on to detail the movement’s platform:
A 20-hour working week, free internet for everyone, free tablets for schoolchildren, a freeze on interest payments that could make the country default on its debt, tax cuts for working people, stricture rules to punish and prevent corruption, strong new environmental laws and increased corporate transparency. There’s even a proposal to replace PIL (Gross Domestic Product in Italian) with BIL (Gross Domestic Happiness). It’s avowedly populist…
Steadman also points out that “the fact that we may well see the world’s economy thrown out of a whack by a principled blogger taking a stand is definitely some kind of watershed moment in social media.” Regarding the makeup of the M5S’s supporters, Jamie Bartlett summarizes the results of a recent survey of nearly 2,000 of Grillo’s Facebook fans:
His supporters come from across the spectrum; they are neither clearly left nor right. They are all, however, angry about the state of democracy in Italy and Europe. Our survey showed only 2% trust parliament and only 11% trust the press. … His skill has been to channel Italians’ general frustrated apathy into a powerful political movement, spurning mainstream media to talk to them directly through Twitter and Facebook. Grillo has, by an enormous margin, the largest social media following of any politician in Europe: he has more than one million Facebook friends, and a similar number of Twitter followers – [center-left leader Pier Luigi] Bersani has about a quarter of that (as does David Cameron).
John Hooper compares Grillo’s rise to that of former PM Silvio Berlusconi:
Twice in the last two decades, outsiders have burst onto the [Italian] political scene. Both have done so by exploiting their understanding of the medium that was most relevant at the time. Berlusconi took Italy by storm in 1994 after creating a virtual monopoly of private television; Grillo has relied instead on making himself a master of digital communication.
(Photo:Beppe Grillo, leader of the Movimento 5 Stelle, Five Star Movement, speaks at Piazza San Giovanni during his last political rally before the national election on February 22, 2013 in Rome, Italy. By Laura Lezza/Getty Images)
Naunihal Singh thinks it’s Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana:
[Turkson] will not lessen opposition to gay marriage or undo the directive stating that men with “deeply rooted homosexual tendencies” should not be ordained as priests. On the contrary, Turkson has defended anti-gay legislation in Africa and argued that “alternative lifestyles” should not be considered human rights. When asked about the possibility that the priestly sex scandal could spread to Africa, he replied this was unlikely because African culture discourages homosexuality. Here Turkson makes the conservative argument that blames gay priests, rather than celibacy or a lack of institutional safeguards, for the sexual abuse of children by the clergy. In doing so he ignores not only the results of a United States Bishops’ investigation, which found no support for this position, but also serious reports of African nuns being sexually abused by priests as well.
Similarly, there is no reason to expect shifts on abortion, birth control, or the ordination of women should Turkson become Pope. He does not deviate from the party line even on topics where a variety of positions are theologically permissible, such as the end of clerical celibacy.
Earlier Dish on the possibility of a black Pope here.
(Photo: Cardinal Peter Turkson, left, of Ghana and Cardinal Sean O’Malley listen to introductions at the 3rd annual Boston Catholic Men’s Conference at Boston Convention and Exhibition Center in South Boston on March 17, 2007. By Wendy Maeda/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
The joy of dead leaves:
How does an author decide on a character’s name without stealing someone’s in real life? Having been contacted angrily by a person with the same name as a character in one of her books, Rebecca Makkai considers the conundrum:
This Peter’s surname was spelled exactly the same as my fictional Peter’s. In a story, I’d tone down the following for believability; but what follows is the verbatim email: “i thoought when you write a novel all people whom have that name should be notified before writing a novel for the people won;t sue you for infringe ments on said name. and also royalties there are three of us left with the name peter t______.”
So the poor guy had Googled himself, and, instead of links to his small business, up had popped some literary fiction about a gay actor in Chicago. (The story had been anthologized by this point, and unfortunately the Google algorithm had decided my imaginary Peter was a more relevant search result than the real guy.) I almost understood his logic: If I can’t open a restaurant and call it Burger King, why can I sell a story using this man’s name, a name that is also the name of his business?
Wondering if authors steal too much from real life, she is comforted by another writer’s experience:
He told me that seeking a Polish surname for a character in his novel Vestments, he’d borrowed his neighbor’s, Olchefske. After the book was published, he got an email from a woman across the city, asking where he’d gotten the name. It’s rare, it turns out, an unusual spelling. And it turned out that the woman and his neighbor were long-lost cousins. John put them in touch, and thus the two branches of the Olchefske family of St. Paul were reunited.
Okay, so we take and take and take. We mooch and we leach and betray. But only to give something back. If we’re very lucky, one reader out there will pick up a story and recognize herself. If not her soul, if not her secrets, maybe just her name. And maybe that will be enough to absolve us. If we don’t get sued first.
The Dish 