¿Dónde está la Sociedad del Futuro?

When I want to know where my [South Indian] friend is, I text "donde?" When I asked a new friend if her last name was Hmong, I prefaced it with "pregunta sobre tu nombre". In California, I assume everyone has some knowledge of Spanish. (Even if mine is a little jacked)

I found a fun Spanish language station out here, La Kalle, tu ritmo Latino, and I love listening to the DJs chatter seamlessly between Spanish and English. Comida is practically a synonym for food, hola is another way to say hi.

Who is it that wants to be around white people all the time? My "White Population in California" blog post gets a lot of traffic, I don't know why. Maybe it is a few deluded white people thinking that diversity isn't amazing.

She Doesn't Like Puppies!

Palin's take on Net Neutrality

Beyond Freud

There was a special on NPR on Thursday about schizophrenia. I think I understand this condition. Mentally, you hear voices and/or paranoia gets the best of you. Social anxiety is a mild, more innocuous form of paranoia creeping up and thwarting one's best laid plans. Schizophrenia comes up fast, possibly because the paranoid, negative thoughts become loud and frightening. A woman told a story about her father's recovery that was aided with proper nutrition.

My outlook had a full turnaround in March with the introduction of proper nutrition, starting with balancing my macronutrients. It continues to improve as I add more pieces to the nutrition puzzle. It is time we stop thinking that just talking through problems will solve them. As valuable as psychotherapy can be, it ignores the very physical factors that impact mental illness. In other words, it is time we stop pretending that they way we act, think, and feel is anything more than a [more complex than we can currently understand] physical process.

Taking Birth Outside of the Hospital

Why are people still giving birth in a place where people die every day? Birth needs to be moved out of the hospital, period. Yesterday on KQED's Forum, there was a discussion about hospital infection. It is scaring me to go to a hospital when I am legitimately sick, and pregnant women most certainly are NOT sick. One of the worst things we've done for women's culture is turning pregnancy into a medical condition.

The AMA had a strong hand in this during their early years because they saw midwives as competition for their services.* We've lost a great deal of women's culture to the hospitalization of birth and the elimination of midwives as a normal part of pregnancy. Furthermore, at this point, hospitals have become dangerous places even for healthy adults. Why expose a newborn child and her healthy mother to hospital infections? And let's not even get into birth on the back and forced episiotomies.

The alternative to hospitals are NOT home births, however. We needn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Medicine has done a lot to improve pregnancy and birth, but it doesn't mean that it is THE way to give birth. Birth needs to be moved out of the hospital and into another building, at the very least. The other option is using alternate institutions that are specifically designed to assist women give birth. Assist women and be there for complications, including cesarean sections. In the 21st century, with irresponsible doctors giving out antibiotics to people who don't need them, with people clustered into closer and closer conditions, there is no reason that this is not a good idea, there is no good reason to keep maternity wards in the same building with MSRA.

*I noticed that they did not do the same thing with the dental profession, which was largely male.

Where I Point Out an Important Point

I read somewhere about the people that "believe in Hell" and that believe that one day, all of us sinners that do not believe the way they believe, or act the "right" way, will burn eternally, without the comfort of death to end the suffering. Beyond that, they strive to enjoy that, for the sake of their belief. For them, there is no mercy for the willful unbelievers. They, presumably, had their chance, and their screams are supposed to be music to the believers' ears. I thought I read this in Daylight Atheism, maybe I did, but I didn't find it. What it is, however, is evidence that religious feelings can define certain bad attitudes or behaviors (enjoying the suffering of others) and give merit to meaningless attitude or behaviors and consider them "good" (faith in the validity of an unproven (disproven, really) and outdated book).

By soothing the conscience of terrorists, tyrants and theocrats, imaginary virtues provide one of the clearest examples of how superstitious beliefs harm real people. Morality with no connection to the real world enables and encourages people to feel good about their actions when the appropriate emotions should be guilt and remorse.
-Source

Lincoln vs. Darwin?!?!

At the gym, there are a lot of old magazines, including an old Newsweek. I've seen this a lot, and every time I see it, I ponder the ridiculousness of the question. I've never read the article and I don't really care to*. Maybe it has a critique on how they both helped and hindered racism in America, or maybe it is more mass-media tripe.

Obviously, there is no reason to pit historical figures against one another in a "battle" for relevance or influence. They're dead. Furthermore, to even compare a man that discovered the process of evolution to a politician is evidence how devalued the theory of evolution is in society. Even as evolution allows advances in the fields of medicine and agriculture, saving the lives of many and improving the lives of everyone, we argue that a lawyer that found himself President at pinnacle moment in our nation's history can hold a candle to it's discoverer.

This is not to say that Lincoln was not influential or important in our history. No, it is only to say that evolution is a powerful and so far, correct set of ideas that lay the foundation of many of the things we take for granted in the modern world. Darwin first published those ideas and, for that, will always be more relevant.

*OK, whatever, they have the same birthday, blah blah blah

I Guess I Have to Get to Bed Now

I was the first to arrive at the YAG meeting tonight, explained that I had just come from the gym, people trickled in, pleasantries were exchanged, foody items brought, and Facebook etiquette discussed. Then we started up the movie where we had left off, with all of the non-Rwandan people leaving The Mille Colines. Hotel Rwanda is one of those movies, like Schindler's List that could never be MST'ed. It is suspenseful and horrifying and real. Had I been alone, I would have started crying at the end.

We discussed the movie afterwards, with questions from a book. They were questions asking people to draw parallels in our lives to what had happened on the screen. When I heard the first question, I said that nothing in my life has any possible comparison to what those people went through. I mean, I've stood up for myself a number of times, but nothing in my life - nothing in the lives of anyone I actually know - compares to what happened in Rwanda back then. And we decided not to compare, just discuss the movie.

As I watched the movie, I thought about how the settings looked familiar. I remembered late nights in restaurants, those plaid bags, walking through that town after dark to the hostel. I also remembered hearing gun shots in my hostel in Paraguay during the failed coup in 2000, but it was nothing compared to this. It was easy to see myself in those white and Asian people that left - relieved that they were leaving, but horrified to leave people to die. I don't know if could have left - I would have, but I don't know if I could have left. How do you cope with that? How do you cope with a world that didn't care after what you saw? How do I cope with the memory of this as a non-event - just more Africans killing themselves - in my own lifetime? How do we stop this? At least it is over, right? Is it over? What about Iraq? What about Sudan?

And after the white people left, after the UN left, there was just the corrupt General to be fed bribes. Bribes handed out with supplies obtained by a visit to hell. Bribes fed with a visit to the diplomat's office while the hotel was left unguarded. Bribes to keep 1200 people alive, to keep them from the machetes, to keep them from the frenzy of the men whipped into a rage by a radio announcer, calling them to kill all of the Tutsi's and eventually any Hutu that helped them. Bribes and calls to family outside of Rwanda, a refugee camp with the appearance of a 4-star hotel all to keep a few people from lying dead on the road with everyone else.

Watch this movie.

Oh, the People You'll Meet

The telecom supervisor that told me about how much more he used to make as a contractor, the 22-year-old that never turns off cruise control so driving is more like a video game, the male feminist and agnostic Columbia law student living in Chinatown, raised by Southern Baptists in Utah, the street vendor who lengthened that necklace for me, on the spot, the airplane repair project controller from Carson City, participating in the AIDS Walk with Team Gap with her teenage daughter that works there and her daughter's boyfriend, the NOLA native that danced in several Mardi Gras parades along with another co-worker from Baton Rouge, the former crack addict whose life was saved by the gay southerner who had lived everywhere, tried everything, and now does fundraising drag shows all over the bay area, and culminating with the homeless hippie kids who hitchhike to new places every few weeks [separately, they had just met up a few days ago themselves], find food, shelter, and showers wherever they might be, and live just to live.

This world is so full of people, experiences, and incredible wonderment.