kettunainen, posts by tag: questioning everything - LiveJournal

Midwives don't "perform births". Midwives assist (if needed) and attend (if they arrive on time).


And the term "delivery" or anything related to it with regard to birth should be stricken from our collective vocabulary.

optimystik did not "deliver" our son. I was the only one in the pool and he didn't have his hands in there at all. I BIRTHED my son and guided him into this world with my own hands. I didn't deliver my baby, I birthed him.

Even if I needed help and was in a particular position that meant I couldn't catch my baby as s/he came out of me, there is still no delivery. There is catching.

"Delivery" takes all the focus from the one person doing all the work and redirects it to a mostly passive bystander. What is wrong with our culture that we repeatedly fail to recognize the birthing woman and the role she has in, say, BIRTHING BABIES?

Delivery is for pizza and mythical storks, people. Birth is what really happens when babies appear. Grar.

/soapbox rant

The section really made me all thinky about animals, the eating thereof, and the ethics surrounding eating, well, anything, really.

Killing is a culturally loaded term, for most of us inextricably tied up with some version of a command that begins, "Thou shalt not." Every faith has it. And for all but perhaps the Jainists of India, that command is absolutely conditional. We know it does not refer to mosquitoes. Who among us has never killed living creatures on purpose? When a child is sick with an infection we rush for the medicine spoon, committing an eager and purposeful streptococcus massacre. We sprinkle boric acid or grab a spray can to rid our kitchens of cockroaches. What we mean by "killing' is to take a life cruelly, as in murder -- or else more accidentally, as in "Oops, looks like I killed my African violet." Though the results are incomparable, what these different "killings" have in common is needless waste and some presumed measure of regret.

Most of us, if we know even a little about where our food comes from, understand that every bite put into our mouths since infancy (barring the odd rock or marble) was formerly alive. The blunt biological truth is that we animals can only remain alive by eating other life. Plants are inherently more blameless, having been born with the talent of whipping up their own food, peacefully and without noise, out of sunshine, water, and the odd mineral ingredient sucked up through their toes. Strangely enough, it's the animals to which we've assigned some rights, while the saintly plants we maim and behead with moral impunity. Who thinks to beg forgiveness while mowing the lawn?

The moral rules of destroying our fellow biota get even more tangled, the deeper we go. If we draw the okay-to-kill line between "animal" and "plant," and thus exclude meat, fowl, and fish from our diet on moral grounds, we still must live with the fact that every sack of flour and every soybean-based block of tofu came from a field where countless winged and furry lives were extinguished in the plowing, cultivating, and harvest. An estimated 67 million birds die each year from pesticide exposure on U.S. farms. Butterflies, too, are universally killed on contact in larval form by the genetically modified pollen contained in most U.S. corn. Foxes, rabbits, and bobolinks are starved out of their homes or dismembered by the sickle mower. Insects are "controlled" even by organic pesticides; earthworms are cut in half by the plow. Contrary to lore, they won't grow into two; both halves die.

To believe we can live without taking life is delusional. Humans may only cultivate nonviolence in our diets by degree. I've heard a Buddhist monk suggest that the number of food-caused deaths is minimized in steak dinners, which share one death over many meals, whereas the equation is reversed for a bowl of clams. Others of us have lost heart for eating any steak dinner that's been shoved through the assembly line of feedlot life -- however broadly we might share that responsibility. I take my gospel from Wendell Berry, who writes in What Are People For, "I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable in order to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade. And I am getting almost as fussy about food plants."

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http://www.phdinparenting.com/2010…

Nestle sells babyfood in Germany. On the packaging, it says this:

ORIGINAL GERMAN: Strampeln, Strecken, Greifen – je aktiver Ihr Baby wird, desto mehr Energie braucht es. Ihre Muttermilch bzw. das Fläschchen bleibt zwar erstmal Nahrungsgrundlage. Doch nach dem 4. Monat genügt das allmählich nicht mehr, um Ihr Kleines mit allem Nötigen zu versorgen. So rückt der große Moment näher: Das erste Löffelchen!

ENGLISH TRANSLATION: Kicking, stretching, grabbing – the more active your baby gets, the more energy he needs. Your breast milk or infant formula continues to provide the basic nutrition for your baby. But starting at 4 months, it is no longer sufficient to provide your little one with everything he needs. That means the big moment is approaching: The first spoonful!

The labels and the website information makes it 100% clear that in Germany Nestle has not completed label changes on complementary foods to follow the 6-months recommendation or done anything else to demonstrate its support of the this recommendation. In fact, they continue to tell women that breastmilk is no longer sufficient after 4 months of age.

Not only does this show that they clearly do not support the WHO resolution changing the duration of exclusive breastfeeding to 6 months (despite their claim that they do), but it also calls into question whether you can believe anything else that they say. If they would and have lied about something that can be so easily verified by walking into any store selling Nestle baby food in Germany, what wouldn’t they lie about?

Additionally, it still astounds me that a)many doctors and pediatricians are still recommending solids at 4 months, instead of 6 months and that b)many doctors and pediatricians are not aware of the WHO recommendation of breastfeeding until AT LEAST 2 years of age (and beyond) and that the Canadian Pediatric Society's recommendation is in complete alignment with the WHO recommendation.

If our doctors are not educated about this, how can we trust them about other matters? It's frustrating when parents are misinformed by doctors and then have that misinformation bite them in the butt later. I wish more people took greater responsibility for their own healthcare and for the healthcare of their children. Your body and your child's body is YOUR responsibility. A doctor is someone you go to when you're having problems figuring things out on your own. If you don't like what they have to say, well, that's why second opinions exist.

As an additional note on baby feeding and baby food, La Leche League has a saying: "Food before 1 is just for fun." This means that you don't NEED to start solids (with any amount of gusto) until age 1. Boob is still sufficient as the sole provider of nutrition. And even when solids ARE introduced, a lot of babies just don't go for it until age one or even later. Nothing wrong with that as long as they're still gaining weight and height.

As for Nestle: they're a multi-national corporation that exists on making you believe you need to buy their shit to make your lives or the lives of your children easier. That's what marketing is all about: mindfucking you into thinking you need $product. Think for yourself; do your research and please stop supporting these baby-killers.

A forum comment in Outsports (a gay sports forum):

"I visited Tibet and Bhutan a few years ago as some on here may remember. Since I last posted on here, Nancy Pelosi honoured the Dalai Lama with yet another award. She always grovels at his feet. I hate her. The Dalai Lama is a contradictory figure. He has called for nonviolence in the occupation by China. But he is vitriolically homophobic. When his writings are translated into English the homophobia is taken out. But read them in French, Tibetan, Chinese or Spanish. He teaches that homosexual men (like many patriarchal religous leaders he ignores dykes) will go to one of the 7 Tibetan hells. Tibetans as all Buddhists absorbed hell from the Jain faith. Tibetans mixed Buddhists hells with their own native shamanistic beliefs. They have an ice hell, fire hell e.t.c. Just because a man loves or makes love to another man the Dalai Lama would sentence them temporarily to hell. How gruesome. I can think of 'sins' that need punishment such as murder, child molestation and hate crimes but for loving another man? Nancy P flies to see the Dalai Lama in India every few months"


And there's this:

is the dalai lama anti-gay? is tibetan buddhism inherently homphobic?


*sigh*

Why is desire such a bad thing? Why is suffering such a bad thing? Don't we learn a lot more from adversity than from everything being all right with the world?

Addendum: It occurs to me that I should qualify the desire/suffering thing. I believe there's a huge difference in engaging in behaviour that caters to one's desire which causes suffering in oneself. It's vastly different to engage in behaviour that caters to one's desire which causes suffering in other beings.

y'know, I like a lot of what Eckhart Tolle says in his book A New Earth, but that doesn't mean he never falls into the bullshit trap.

When he says things like expression is better than repression because repression can make you ill -- I'm right there with him. That's pretty much spot-on. I can't really find much to dispute in this line of thinking. He never states how one should express -- only that one should. It is up to us to figure out the best mode of self-expression. This brings us to the next part:

But when he starts spouting off about how only we are responsible for how we feel in response to other people... that's when he starts veering off the path of good sense.

On the one hand, yeah, sure we're responsible. On the other hand, this can easily be taken to mean that no one has to worry about the words and language and tone they use to convey their emotions because, hey, it's not up to them how the other person reacts, right? You have free license to say the most heinous things, regardless of how well they're meant. It no longer matters what words you use because it's the other person's responsibility (read: problem) if they feel bad no matter your asshatted choice of words.

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I would love to hear what your take is on all this. Agree? Disagree?

I think there's a lot of food for thought in the bodies of work set forth by these so-called new age gurus. That doesn't mean I agree blindly with all of it. That doesn't mean it's all bad or all good. It's another human's take on the state of things. We humans are a fallible lot.

The H1N1 death that caused a ripple of anxiety in much of Quebec...may not be due to the flu
Sat, 2009-10-31 12:35.
Angelica Montgomery

Quebec's chief public health officer says a young teenager who died in Ontario earlier this week may not have been killed by H1N1.

Evan Frustaglio did test positive for H1N1, but Doctor Alain Poirier says the fact that his health went downhill so quickly has led some experts to wonder whether there was some other factor in his death.

"It could be something else," Poirier says. "It has been described as, he had H1N1, he died suddenly. There's been no other test to verify what was the actual cause of death, like an autopsy."

Poirier says some experts are speculating that meningitis or a bacterial infection may have actually killed him. We will never know, he says, because the teenager's grieving family has chosen not to allow a further investigation into his death.

"That doesn't change the reality that you could die of H1N1 at any age," says Poirier. "People understand now that H1N1 is a real problem. You'll see some other images like that, sad images."

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I think there's more to this story, and not in a fringey, conspiratorial way. Just in a 'we don't have enough information to get a complete picture' sort of way. He had H1N1 and he collapsed and died. I don't think H1N1 killed him, but it sure makes a great media spin, y'know?

I'm surprised that the Canadian government is shocked at the turnout for the H1N1 vaccine. Does this mean the general public believes the virus to be far worse than it actually is? Or is the government just really clueless about how panicked a population can get with the sort of advertising that was for the vaccine?

maybe a little bit of both...

From The Atlantic Monthly: Does the Vaccine Matter? (November 2009)

ok, so let's say that time is not linear -- that it moves cyclically or in a circular fashion, as many peoples have believed (both past and present). [ref.]

if time does not move in a linear fashion AND if all realities are happening at once (which other people have asserted) [ugh, ref. needed -- but, hey, time may not even exist!]:

a) how can time move cyclically if all realities are happening at once?

b) how could reincarnation exist if all realities are happening at once?

c) might what we perceive to be past lives be us tapping into a particular other reality, as in the Jungian Collective Unconscious or something akin to Teilhard's noosphere?


I'm just trying to make sense of my own beliefs. I believe in reincarnation and the non-linearity of time. I also believe in the oneness of all beings (this version), and the potential existence of a multiverse, but not necessarily that all of time is happening at once and all realities happening at once (but maybe that's because it hasn't been explained to me in a way I can understand).

But how can I hold these somewhat conflicting beliefs concurrently? That's what I'm working on today.

Happy Tuesday!

I am reading a few entries from Casaubon's Book that are tagged "adapting in place". This notion of adapting right where I am, instead of believing that I should leave the city limits and homestead in the country somewhere appeals greatly to my sense of practicality (also, my sense of gratification, which is more easily satisfied with the here and now than with 'someday').

I came upon one entry, a very VERY long one, entitled Best Two Falls Out of Three: Wrestling with Temptation, Discipline and Self-Denial.

In this post is the following:

I’m reminded of a story that Scott Savage tells in _The Plain Reader_ he writes:

A story that appeared a number of years ago in the Amish publication _Family Life_ told of a busload of tourists who visited an Amish farmer. The group consisted of people from many religious denominations. One of them said, “We already know all about Jesus Christ, but what does it mean to be Amish?” The Amish fellow thought for a minute and then asked for a show of hands for how many in the tour group had televisions. Every hand went up. Then he asked how many thought that maybe having a television contributed to a lot of social and spiritual problems in society. Again, every hand went up. In light of this, he asked, how many would be willing to give up having television? This time, no hands went up. He went on to explain that this was the essence of being Amish: a willingness to do without something if that thing is not good for them spiritually.

The Amish do so with both the force of community and the force of faith behind them. My own suspicions that I’d be better off without a car exist, not in complete isolation, but outside a unified cultural sense that cars are harmful - even though we know they are. We are not all going to share Amish religious convictions - but I wonder if there is a way to translate some of their culture of self-limitation into a secular reality?

In light of the rest of what she wrote in her post, the primary reason I gave up having a television (having cable, really, since I couldn't get local stations on my tv without static) was because it was easier for me to get rid of the tv than it was to limit my time spent in front of it. I don't have as much self-discipline as I would like to (do any of us, really?), so because I was pretty much addicted to tv shows, I chose to ditch access to the shows instead of trying not to get sucked it and failing miserably.

But this quote about what it means to be Amish, I find incredibly intriguing, and I wonder, right along with Sharon Astyk (the blogger), if this sort of mentality could find its way into mainstream society. Makes me think of a lot of the rhetoric in Obama's speeches about duty and responsibility and hard times, etc. And, in a related vein, it makes me think about the main character in Office Space. Sometimes, a person just wants to dig ditches, y'know? Something REAL and tangible.

I wish I could be more coherent, but I am, indeed, flu-ridden. Ugh.