Here is the latest news from David Gans, producer and host of the Grateful Dead Hour.
The Big Lie and The War On Some Drugs
Parents who read the New York Times or Newsweek this past summer could be forgiven for freaking out when they came across a full-page ad warning them about the effects of marijuana on their teenagers. If the kids were off somewhere sparking up a joint, the federally funded message seemed to say, they were at risk for severe mental illness. Were those parents hallucinating, or was Reefer Madness, long since debunked, suddenly a real problem to be reckoned with? The latest salvo in the never-ending war on drugs, the ads, which also ran in magazines like the Nation and the National Review, bore a stark warning. Under the headline “Marijuana and Your Teen’s Mental Health,” the bold-faced subhead announced: “Depression. Suicidal Thoughts. Schizophrenia.” “If you have outdated perceptions about marijuana, you might be putting your teen at risk,” the text went on. It warned that “young people who use marijuana weekly have double the risk of depression later in life” and that “marijuana use in some teens has been linked to increased risk for schizophrenia.” It followed with the sneering question, “Still think marijuana’s no big deal?” The rhetoric is alarming. But the research data used to support the ad campaign is hazy at best. Though carefully worded, the campaign blurs the key scientific distinction between correlation and causation. The ad uses some correlations between marijuana use and mental illness to imply that the drug can cause madness and depression. Yet these conclusions are unproven by current research. And several leading researchers are highly skeptical of them.read the rest on salon.com
“A God with whom I am not familiar”
A column by Tim Wise in the LA Weekly, forwarded to me by Bob Sarles:
A God With Whom I Am Not Familiar
This is an open letter to the man sitting behind me at La Paz today, in Nashville, at lunchtime, in the Brooks Brothers shirt:
You don’t know me. But I know you.
I watched you as you held hands with your tablemates at the restaurant where we both ate this afternoon. I listened as you prayed, and thanked God for the food you were about to eat, and for your own safety, several hundred miles away from the unfolding catastrophe in New Orleans.
You blessed your chimichanga in the name of Jesus Christ, and then proceeded to spend the better part of your meal — and mine, since I was too near your table to avoid hearing every word — moralistically scolding the people of that devastated city, heaping scorn on them for not heeding the warnings to leave before disaster struck.
further…
Did you ever stop to think just what a rancid asshole such a God would have to be, such that he would take care of the likes of you, while letting babies die in their mothers’ arms, and letting old people die in wheelchairs, at the foot of Canal Street? But no, it isn’t God who’s the asshole here, Skip (or Brad, or Braxton, or whatever your name is).
God doesn’t feed you, and it isn’t God that kept me from turning around and beating your lily-white privileged ass today either. God has nothing to do with it. God doesn’t care who wins the Super Bowl. God doesn’t help anyone win an Academy Award. God didn’t get you your last raise, or your SUV. And if God is even half as tired as I am of having to listen to self-righteous bastards like you blame the victims of this nightmare for their fate, then you had best eat slowly from this point forward.
and…
Can you imagine what would happen if the pampered, overfed corporate class, which complains about taxes taking a third of their bloated incomes, had to sit in the hot sun for four, going on five, days? Without a margarita or hotel swimming pool to comfort them, I mean?
Oh, and please, I know. I’m stereotyping you. Imagine that. I’ve assumed, based only on your words, what kind of person you are, even though I suppose I could be wrong. How does that feel, Biff? Hurt your feelings? So sorry. But, hey, at least my stereotypes of you aren’t deadly. They won’t affect your life one bit, unlike the ones you carry around with you and display within earshot of people like me, supposing that no one could possibly disagree.
…and…
Well, Chuck, it’s a free country, and so you certainly have the right, I suppose, to continue lecturing the poor, in between checking your Blackberry and dropping the kids off at soccer practice. If you want to believe that the poor of New Orleans are immoral and greedy, and unworthy of support at a time like this ‘ or somehow more in need of your scolding than whatever donation you might make to a relief fund ‘ so be it. But let’s leave God out of it, shall we? All of it.
Your God is one with whom I am not familiar, and I’d prefer to keep it that way.
Pat Robertson’s “hurricane hustle”
The title of this post comes from the Huffington Post — Max Blumenthal pointing to his column in the 9/19 issue of The Nation, a story headlined Pat Robertson’s Katrina Cash:
Robertson has used the tax-exempt, nonprofit Operation Blessing as a front for his shadowy financial schemes, while exerting his influence within the GOP to cover his tracks. In 1994 he made an emotional plea on The 700 Club for cash donations to Operation Blessing to support airlifts of refugees from the Rwandan civil war to Zaire (now Congo). Reporter Bill Sizemore of The Virginian Pilot later discovered that Operation Blessing’s planes were transporting diamond-mining equipment for the African Development Corporation, a Robertson-owned venture initiated with the cooperation of Zaire’s then-dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.
After a lengthy investigation, Virginia’s Office of Consumer Affairs determined that Robertson “willfully induced contributions from the public through the use of misleading statements and other implications.” Yet when the office called for legal action against Robertson in 1999, Virginia Attorney General Mark Earley, a Republican, intervened with his own report, agreeing that Robertson had made deceptive appeals but overruling the recommendation for his prosecution.
Operation Blessing is on the Bush administration’s list of Hurricane Katrina charities. Imagine my surprise.
Bush doing what he was hired to do
Mark Morford’s column in today’s SF Chronicle is apposite. An excerpt:
…it’s so unfair, isn’t it, to attack poor Dubya like this? Just a little misplaced? After all, Bush has always been the rich white man’s president. He is the CEO president, the megacorporate businessman’s friend, the thug of the religious right, a big reservoir-tipped condom for all energy magnates, protecting against the nasty STDs of humanitarianism and progress and social responsibility.
A real christian
I met a real Christian yesterday. Her name is Oral Lee Brown.
This is a woman who “adopted” a classroom full of first-graders in 1987 and aided them all the way through the Oakland schools and into college.
I was in her office to record her end of an interview with a Boston radio producer. While I was setting up, she was talking to someone on the phone about the effort by the Oakland Association of Realtors to find vacant homes and apartments for Katrina victims. “I don’t want to see any more people in shelters,” she told me. Her group is talking landlords into making vacant housing available at no charge to these people who are coming here from the disaster zone; they have other volunteers who will take the new arrivals shopping for food and clothing when they get here and make sure the have their needs met for as long as it takes. They’re going to try to find jobs for as many as they can, too.
As the interview progressed and I sat there monitoring on headphones, I was moved nearly to tears by Mrs. Brown’s story. She grew up in rural Mississippi, one of nine children; her father was a sharecropper who had some land of his own by the time she was born. She endured violence and raw hatred from the racists of that time and place, and she got out as soon as she could.
A chance encounter with a hungry child on the streets of East Oakland drew Mrs. Brown to a neighborhood school. She was unable to find the child she was looking for, but she wound up making a deal with the entire first-grade class that she would support them in every way she could and pay their way to college.
This page tells much of the story.
She tithes ten percent to the church, because she credits God with her own good fortune in life. She gives a lot of her money, as well as her time and social capital, to the kids – not just that first class, but several more groups of students. A new class will enter the program this month.
As I packed up my stuff, I told Mrs. Brown how moved I was by her story, and I told her how upset I’ve been by “Christians” like Pat Robertson. She agreed with me that he hardly seems to have understood the teachings of Jesus.
This is what Christianity is supposed to be about. It was a great charge to the spiritual batteries.