Stop trashing fathers...

Andrew Sullivan examines Mitt Romney's statements about same sex partnership, and advises him, "going around trashing mothers is not the best politics. Especially when the next generation is so over this crap. And especially when one of those moms is the daughter of the vice-president."

Of course, Romney has no plans to start "trashing mothers" in general, nor does the "Christianist base" expect him to. What social conservatives desire is cultural acknowledgement that, in general, the best arrangment for raising children is a mother and father who are living together?

Will there be exceptions to this? Absolutely. Do they deserve our support and assistance? Yes. Does that mandate pretending that these arrangements are the ideal and treating them as such? I really don't think so. Is failing to do so tantamount to "trashing mothers?" Clearly not.

Because the message that goes out isn't just what a great mothers Mary Cheney and her partner are. The message that goes out is that fathers are unncecessary. Again, that doesn't mean that every father is a good father, or that anyone raised without a father is doomed. Just that fatherhood involvement is something that should be encouraged, and that treating arrangements like Mary Cheneys as equivalent moves us in the opposite direction.

Now, my post title is tongue and cheek. Obviously, Sullivan is not intending to trash fathers; he wants equality for committed same sex couples. I get that. I wish he would somehow indicate that he gets that those opposed aren't out to "trash mothers," either.

Saletan's Bias Against Pediatric Psychiatry

In Saletan’s latest edition of “Weird News about Humans”, he gives a little blurb on a Canadian study looking at children from divorced families and prescription rates for ADHD meds. The upshot – kids whose families get divorced are about twice as likely as those from other families to be prescribed a stimulant medication. His theories:

A) Divorce causes behavior problems, which leads to prescriptions. B) Doctors and parents assume divorce causes behavior problems, so they drug the kids. C) The same parental behavior that caused the divorce messed up the kid. D) The kid's behavior problems contributed to the divorce.

I have a problem with this: nowhere does he mention the possibility that a) ADHD runs in families, and b) adults with ADHD are likely at increased risk for divorce. Anyhow, we exchanged a couple of comments, which culminated in the following rant. If you’re curious, you can visit the thread here.


I get irritated with the controversy revolving around kids and psychiatric medications. There’s no lack of criticism for prescription rates, but a real dearth of discussion about the reasons why rates are so high (other than parent blaming, that is, but what else is new?). Didn’t I see you highlight the case of the 8-year-old in Florida who was arrested for school misbehavior, at the school’s behest? It’s a single case, but it’s consistent with a definite national trend towards increasingly punitive responses to behavioral problems exhibited by children and adolescents.

So on the one hand, we have the masses decrying a mental health system who failed to provide someone like Cho a strategic pharmacological intervention, and on the other hand, we have the horde criticizing the rates at which psychiatric diagnoses are made (autism, pediatric bipolar, ADHD) and medications prescribed. The parents of children with emotional and behavioral problems are truly stuck between a rock and a hard place, being forced to choose between pathologizing their children with a diagnosis and medication, or watching their children be identified instead as budding delinquents, and treated with all of the tenderness and compassion associated with the overburdened juvenile justice system.

And there’s the kids, of course, who resist taking medication as part of their broader effort to develop and maintain a positive self-concept, which turns out to be quite a challenge, in a world where people are damn quick to point out everything that’s wrong with them, but offer damn little in the way of helpful guidance and advice.

Utilizing external props to modulate emotions or arousal is as old as alcohol, and as ubiquitous today as Starbucks. But the same kids who actively choose to consume energy drinks containing obscene amounts of a phosphodiesterase inhibitor, and of individual amino acids that multiply by the thousands what one might encounter in natural sources (with unknown long-term effects) – the same kids who’re smoking BC bud at potencies their parents never dreamed of in their own rebellious teens, refuse to take demonstrably helpful medications at established therapeutic doses, manufactured in quality-controlled, regulated laboratories, in part because they listen to the anti-pharmaceutical propaganda of people who find it much easier to criticize than offer alternative solutions.

As far as the children of divorced parents are concerned, well, they turn out to be at increased risk for a whole host of problems. The reasons for this are undoubtedly both legion and interactive. If a psychiatric medication turns out to effectively mitigate some of these difficulties, reducing the amount of ego-challenging environmental feedback they have to cope with and thus helping them develop and maintain a self-concept that’s both positive and sufficiently adaptive to help adequately modulate their behavior, then who are you to criticize, even at such a distance, the efforts of their parents and allied professionals to provide whatever they can to help these kids cope?

The problem isn’t the ubiquity of pediatric psych prescriptions, Will; that’s merely one of a number of symptoms that there is something seriously awry with the world in which we are raising our children. Writing about that is hard work, though – it requires complex conceptualization and broad awareness of the impact environmental influences exert on behavior. Much easier to write blurbs like yours today (or even research articles like the one on which your blurb was based); they allow us to feel righteous and superior, without implying any unpleasant obligation for us to actually do anything about any of it.

Oh the plus side, however, it is very nice to see you on the board. Thanks for taking the time to read and respond to my post.

Thoughts on PBS...

We don't get cable in the JohnMcG household, so we have five or six TV options, one of which is the local PBS station.

Currently, they're in pledge drive mode.

A few observations on this:

• It seems like these come around more often then they used to.
  
• It also seems like we sit through a lot of things that sure look like commercials. But they don't break into the kids programming anymore, so that's nice.
  
• I seem to remember that the pledge period was like sweeps months for the networks -- they trotted out their best programming. Not, it seems the relationship between the performances and PBS is more, er, bidirectional. In other words, it seems like the artists being featured are keeping their careers alive by being on PBS. So we get Dennis DeKamp, the Moody Blues, the "source energy" guy, Johnny Mathis and lots of Susie Orman. The artists get exposure, PBS gets some tickets to give away to members.
  
• On a non-pledge drive related note, I have noticed that Bill Moyers is the abolute master of booking someone to say a certain thing, and then acting surprised when he says it. He'll be interviewing the author of a book called, "The President is a liar," and during the interview, Moyers will act shoced and ask, "so you're saying that the president has been lying to the American people??" Always a treat.
  

Colonic Blogging

The following recounts an actual colon irrigation. If you have delicate sensibilities or if you are presently eating your lunch, stop reading now.
I did not come upon this course of action hastily. It was not something I elected to do on a whim. I’d decided to go for a colonic because I had recently gotten my first cold in almost two years, and afterwards, my plumbing just didn’t seem to be working all that well. Plus I’d been eating poorly for some time—a major digression from my healthy and wholesome diet of many years—and I felt it was time to get back on track. Since I was going for a colonic, I thought I might as well do a cleanse, too. Provided one can handle the food restrictions, cleansing is a great way to get oneself set on a new course. It takes all the junk food and sweets and baked goods away in one fell swoop and sets you off on a nutritionally dense diet. After a week or so, you feel so good that you don’t crave the junk, don’t miss it, and don’t want it back. I was going to have the colonic on the first day of my cleanse, and another one on the last day.

As one does not go for massage without showering, nor visit the dentist without brushing and flossing, so I would not go for a colonic without proper attention to grooming and hygiene, but because I’m the sort of person who can’t sweep the kitchen floor without cleaning the fridge, I got a tiny bit carried away. I got ready the night before. I showered and washed my hair. I shaved, I exfoliated, and I moisturized all over with lavender-scented lotion. I put self-tanning gel on my face and chest and shoulders. I blew my hair dry and straightened it with the flat-iron. I considered giving myself a pedicure, but I wanted to look like a natural girl: no chemical-laden nail lacquer for me. I settled for rosemary-and-mint scented foot lotion, feeling that this would make the air sufficiently pleasant down in the vicinity of my feet. After I was all clean and smooth and shiny it didn’t seem right to go to bed on old sheets, so I put fresh ones on and went to sleep.

* * * * *

The Next Day

The hydrotherapy clinic is on the third floor of an office building in New Westminster. I arrive at my appointment, and Lena, the hydrotherapist, leads me into the treatment room. She leaves me with instructions to remove my clothing below the waist and lie on the treatment table on my left side. The room is clean and clinical in appearance. Lena is about my age, maybe a bit older, with that air of self-possessed formality that the Spanish often have. Really though, her demeanor is perfect for this work: the formality is tempered with warmth, and there's a hint of the hippy evident in her tied up hair and the loose cotton pants she wears under her white lab coat. She seems very capable, and I feel safe in her hands.

It's not my first time here and when Lena returns to the room she doesn't stop to explain the process to me, but merely inserts the plastic valve and opens the channel to start the flow of water. She instructs me to turn over onto my back. The apparatus she's using for the procedure consists of a table with a narrow tube for water coming out of it and a wider tube for drainage, both of which are attached to a valve with a switch that opens one channel or the other. The business end of the valve is a short tube about three-quarters of an inch in diameter. It tapers to a narrow tip which she lubricates and inserts inside me. The tip retracts to allow inflow and outflow. In the top of the table is a wide section of clear lucite tubing that allows one to see of the content of the outflow. A mirror above the treatment table provides me with a good view of the clear tubing.

Lena holds the valve in place without touching me and attends to the volume of water flowing into my colon. Once the pressure has reached the limits of my tolerance, I give her the signal and she shuts off the inflow and switches the valve over to let the water wash back out, carrying with it such material as is willing to go. If one is particularly backed up, the first part of this process can be distressing. When the logjam starts to break up and wash out, one can be overcome with the sudden, near-irresistible urge to leap off the table and make a dash for the bathroom. This urgency may be accompanied by cramps and a terrific pressure in the lower bowel. Perseverance requires deep breathing and confidence in the water's ability to do its work. I'm not feeling that discomfort, that urgency, now. This time I've had a few days to prepare by juicing and eating foods that would help things along, and I'm feeling relaxed and comfortable.

At first, the outflow is clear and then it turns a deep burgundy. Lena looks back at me. "Beet juice?" she asks. I nod. In an hour, we go through four or five cycles of fill and release, fill and release. Like an apostate returning to the fold, I confess my years-long digression into an unhealthy diet and a stressful lifestyle. Lena makes clucking noises at me. Water flows in, expanding my colon, and she lists the tasks I must perform in order to gain absolution for my sins. Saunas, she says, everyday. For breakfast she recommends two tablespoons of flaxseed, ground in a coffee grinder, soaked in water overnight, sweetened with stevia and eaten with thawed blueberries in the morning. "These women who think they can get by on salads—we need fiber!" I agree to everything: I'll take saunas, cut down on coffee, get more sleep. She thinks that the Ritalin and Adderall are hard on my body. "Your liver needs a break," she says, as the pressure mounts in my bowel. I'm not planning to give up the stimulants, yet I stop taking them the next day.

I'm full of water. I feel blown up like a balloon. I give the hand signal and Lena switches the valve over. She pushes on the right side of my abdomen with her free hand, leaning into it, massaging the ascending colon. "This is going well," she says, watching the water and fecal matter moving through the clear tube. "Considering what you told me, you're not doing badly. You still have good tone." I'm relieved. I had no idea that redemption would come so easily. She pushes again. "See? Good tone." I don't know what she's talking about, but I nod anyway, trusting that she would not compliment my tone if it were not worthy.

In the bathroom is a low, wide stool upon which one is meant to place one's feet while seated on the toilet. This posture, meant to approximate the squatting position that our ancestors used for millennia before we invented toilets, is supposed to aid in the evacuation of the bowels. It doesn't take much of this to drain the last of the water out of me, and as I wash up and get dressed to leave, I'm feeling light, as if all my burdens have been swept away with the water. I'm elated, mildly euphoric. I realize it's just the endorphins, but that doesn't stop me from enjoying it.

I'm seated with Lena at her desk moments later. She gives me warm ginger tea and we talk about other things I might do to promote wellness and renewal. She doesn't like my insistence that I need animal protein. Amaranth, she says, is the food of the gods. It has plenty of protein. She recommends warm castor oil packs on my belly to draw out toxins. This sounds like voodoo to me, but I agree to try it because the idea of lying still with a warm oil-soaked cloth on my stomach for an hour every other day sounds pleasant. Coffee enemas, she suggests, will stimulate the liver, encouraging it to remove toxins. I agree to try the amaranth. She books an appointment for thirteen days hence, and writes up an invoice which she gives to me with a bottle of castor oil. Cost for one colon irrigation: $75.00. A bargain.

Entropy Production and the Best of All Worlds

[No, I don't really expect any comments. It's a pared-down version of my blog post, maybe easier to read. Less text means less text that's wrong.]

Chemical engineering has historically been a phenomenological science, meaning that it's more based on observed phenomena than it is built bottom-up from the sub-microscopic nuts and bolts of the universe. If you were to, oh I don't know, go to graduate school in the field, you'd find a good third of the curriculum devoted to Transport Phenomena, which describe the rate at which thermodynamic variables--momentum, thermal energy, chemical potential (and charge too, though it's not usually lumped in there)--dissipate along gradients.



The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy of a closed system increases toward a maximum. When you start talking about the rate of entropy production, how fast it increases, you've entered the field of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. That's a way of describing transport phenomena too.

Entropy is also interesting that it has a statistical (informational) basis, which is generally wiped out by the abovementioned phenomenological approach with its tendency to lump all that microscopic mumbo-jumbo together. It turns out, however, that just as phenomenology has a habit of washing out microscopic events, enormous systems-of-systems wash out details of the usual phenomenology. Interestingly enough, non-equilibrium and statistical approaches both appear to become very useful at this distant level. I've read some (public access) articles recently on the hypothesis of maximum entropy production for complex systems (such as weather, ecosystems, or economies) which states that a really complicated system will organize itself to dispel gradients in state variables in the most efficient way possible. The hypothesis appears to be completely baseless, but it has nonetheless been (evidently) successful in describing some complex phenomena, and suggests that the recurrence of certain structures in large systems is because they dissipate the great big energy gradients most efficiently. I hate the examples that these authors have used--phenomenological models describe waves and vortices and so on well enough--but to suggest that they can be interpreted as optimum dissipative structures is, well, interesting.

The question arises: is human evolution (genetic or social, take your pick) merely the most effective path that has so far developed to dissipate that huge solar energy gradient? You can see the danger of drawing out the cranks here, but just because speculation is silly and intellectually dangerous doesn't mean that it can't be fun.

People aren't at equilibrium (certainly not when they're alive), and neither is society. With the constant application of solar energy, we maintain at a roughly steady-state non-equilibrium condition. You can irresponsibly ask thermodynamics the same questions that philosophers have struggled with for millenia. Is human nature a development that, when averaged out, facilitiates entropy production, and does human organization facilitate it further? Is the nature of our ensemble developing over time, and do we waste heat better if we are brutal or if we are constructive? If we're happy or sad? Can it get better than this? Has it ever been, really?

Keifus

Some public access reading, if you just can't get enough:

Maximum entropy production vs. Darwinism (science reporting, easy to read)

Entropy production and life as we know it (accessible, but I found it tedious)

Hey man, quantum mechanics isn't dissipative. Where's the entropy? (big words and a little math, read 1/3 of it and didn't seem bad though.)

Fluctuation theory for small systems (from Physics Today)

Goddamn Hockey

So it's Monday night. I've just taken my Totino's Pizza Rolls out of the microwave and lovingly placed them on a paper plate with ketchup for dipping sauce. I saunter excitedly into the TV room to absorb yet another episode of The Real Wedding Crashers on NBC, "The Hope Network", the network that brought you Massacre At Virginia Tech. And what instead greets my hungry eyes? Fucking hockey.

Hockey. It's not even a real sport. There I was, parked comfortably in my recliner, looking forward to various & sundry reception hijinks that usually involve mistaken identity, double entendres, and misapplied affection or inappropriate forwardness. But instead I get a fake athletic competition on ice splattered all over my Emerson Trinitron like blood-tinged spit after a poorly executed body check.

Listen, boneheads. If you're going to preempt one of the best reality shows since Melrose Place with a special sports presentation, it had better damn well be Online With Halo All Stars, or something involving thongs and peanut butter, not with a sport that was invented primarily to keep our brothers to the north distracted from common law marriages and ice fishing.

It verges on the unchristian.

Hey NBC. !!!Newsflash!!! Nobody watches hockey. Especially when it's up against Celebrity Scrabble, airing Tuesday nights on The Learning Channel. It's called "Sweeps Week" for a reason, laser brains. Try it.

Hockey? Whatever! Now get it the heck off of my television set, like, immediately.

(This post brought to you courtesy of baiting bacon. [The poster, not the food item.])

Why Giuliani (and Romney) won't do for pro-lifers

George Will writes about the appeal of Rudy Giuliani to social conservatives, in spite of his positions that go against them. He writes:

So, last year, perhaps a million women and their doctors committed murder. However much a person deplores abortion and embraces that legal logic, nobody believes that either the legislation or the constitutional amendment that Republican platforms have praised will be passed. Hence the sterility of today's abortion debate. And hence the inclination of some social conservatives to focus on limiting abortion by changing the culture, and their willingness to evaluate candidates by criteria unrelated to abortion.

This social conservative gets off the bus at the last comma there. I am committed to ending abortion, and that this will include government action, but I am coming to the realization that doing so means more than just electing candidates who check the "pro-life" box on the form. That's where this "changing the culture" stuff comes in.

Part of "changing the culture" is choosing leaders. And for me, at least, choosing a leader who embraces war, capital punishment, and torture of detainees moves the culture in the wrong direction.

Which is why it is my opinion, that in spite of being "pro-life," and having a record completely consistent with pro-life values, George W. Bush has done more to hurt the pro-life position than help it. He has given evidence to all those inclined to believe that pro-lifers only care about people until their born. He claims to be pro-life, but has exercised zero leadership on this score, focusing instead on things like the war in Iraq and privatizing social security, which calls our seriousness into question. And his polarizing style, which some conservatives are now getting a taste of in the immigration debate, turns people away who might have grown sympathetic to pro-life arguments.

Given that, why would we want to elect a president who seems to share all these negative qualities, but doesn't even pretend to be pro-life? If we're now concerned mostly about culture, what would electing such a leader from what used to be the pro-life party do to the culture?

Some say that as long as Giuliani is functionally pro-life, i.e. appointing "strict constructionist" judges, which we're supposed to trust is secret code word for "inclined to overturn Roe v. Wade, it doesn't matter. The same argument is made for those who are concerned that Mitt Romney's recent change of heart on this issue has more to do with electoral calculation than person conviction.

But, as this president has shown, the presidency is more than just checking the right box when confronted with a problem. The president sets the agenda, and chooses which battles to fight. I have no reason to believe that either Giuliani or Romney would actively work for the unborn. They may make the right calls when given no choice, but my suspicion is that they would avoid the issue as much as possible.

The message this sends to those inclined to dislike the pro-choice movement is that we're not that serious about the issue. Yeah, we'd like to elect a president who's pro-life, but that candidate need not make it a priority. The important thing is sticking it to the pro-choicers.

Looking at the field, the candidate most likely to bring about the cultural transformation needed is Obama. Yes, I know, his position is indistinguishable from the other candidates, including his recent criticism of the Supreme Court for not finding a right to partial birth abortion in the Constitution. But it is my opinion that we've ridden this current political structure as far as it can take us, and it's not far enough. Even if a President Giuliani or President Romney nominates and confirms a Supreme Court justice who becomes part of a majority to overturn Roe v. Wade, it would be a hollow victory indeed, and be greeted with an enormous backlash.

Ending abortion will require a cultural and political transformation. Such a transformation will require a leader unsatisfied with the current politics, and courageous enough to change it.

Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney seem to be fine with today's politics (it got them where they are), even if it means that evils like abortion and torture continue. So long as they get to be president.

That won't do.

Can both sides lose?

I'm having a hard time finding a a side to support in the comprehensive immigration debate.

On the one hand, the Administration seems to be doing a replay of the Iraq war sale, and I didn't much care for that the first time. This includes:

• Asserting that immediate action is required, when it might not be.
  
• Name-calling against all those opposed.
  
• Aspirations of some grand historical event that will establish a legacy.
  

Add in that part of the motivation seems to be to try to win Latino voters to the Republican Party, and I'm even less enthused.

On the other hand, I'm not too thrilled with those opposed either. There's
the subtext of xenophobia and racism. There's the extreme labelling.

And now, there's the feigned shock that the Bush Administration would engage in ugly name-calling against those who stand in the way of its political goals. Can you imagine? George W. Bush imply that his political opponents are unpatriotic? The nerve! I thought he was a uniter, not a divider! Who could have foreseen this turn of events?

Warner and the McCanns

Follow the link for context, then continue if you so desire...


It seems like Warner would be on solid ground if she omitted the next-to-last paragraph of her original piece.

As it is, it looks like she is laying the blame of the abduction at the feet of the SAHM movement. I read a good bit of American parenting commentary, and I've yet to find a condemnation of resort babysitting services, let alone the suggestion that leaving children alone is a prefereable alternative. If the McCanns were really moved to do what they did by societal condemnation of outside child care, it's hard to imagine that this would be the first or last time they would do something stupid based on societal influences.

This is as distasteful and hateful as blaming it on lasseiz-faire parenting.




Can we agree on two principles?

1. The McCann's decision to leave their children alone in a hotel room was a stupid mistake.

2. The face that they made this stupid mistake does not make them "bad parents," or mean that they deserve what happened to them. Many parents do things equally or more stupid with no consequence. They were unlucky. Accountable, but unlucky.




I'm reminded of a case study dave posted to the Fray some time ago (now sadly unlinkable), about a parent who threw their kid out of the house, who then was beaten and raped (if I remember correcty), and asked us to assess blame.

What I took away from that is that with all the culture wars, we lose sight of our basic duties. We decide whether we're in the "tough parent" or "easy-going parent" category, and act consistent with that self-image rather than just being a parent. Maybe throwing the kid out was consistent with the "tough parent" script, but it is inconsistent with the basic responsibility of providing shelter.

Similarly, if we accept Warner's thesis that the McCann's did what they did based on cultural stigmaitization of hired child care (which I don't), then it seems they did so because they were following the script of stay at home parents rather than simply parents, making avoiding hired child care a higher priority than providing care at all.

It seems the thing to do is not to point fingers at one side or the other of the "Mommy Wars," but to agree on what basic responsibilities all parents have, regardless of where they align themselves.

It may not be as fun as throwing stones at working mothers or stay at home mothers, but it would probably do more to help.