All the news that’s fit to ignore?

I’ll sign on again later to catch up on last week’s Campaign 2008 funnery, but for now I simply have to ask: how is it possible for the NY Times to write a whole story on Obama’s safety and Secret Service protection (even providing us with his Secret Service code name), without mentioning the disturbing fact that at last week’s Texas rally, that same Secret Service “protection” inexplicably suspended security checks at the entrance of the stadium, and that they have apparently been doing this at Obama rallies around the country?

“Giving up” versus “taking on”

We’re in the second week of Lent, already, so I’m late in calling your attention to this: Maggie Dawn resurrected a series of posts she wrote a couple of years ago on the meanings and traditions of Lent. You can navigate using her menu-arrows, or click through to each installment here:

First, second, third, fourth, fifth.

Some food for thought there, if you’ll pardon the pun. Instead of giving something up for Lent this year, I’m trying the “taking on” approach, attempting to institute a degree of actual practice (i.e., habit, repetition) to what are otherwise euphemistically called my “spiritual practices.” For one, I’m trying to close each day with a reading/reflection from this lovely series: Quantum Grace: Lenten Reflections on Creation and Connectedness. (For Sundays, Quantum Grace: The Sunday Readings.)

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has created an emailed series of Lenten reflections centered on creation care. The installments could be a lot more substantive and/or inspirational, but they’re trying. Father Jake calls attention to a similar effort by the Episcopal Public Policy Network.

(The beautiful photo above of Buckskin Gulch, Utah was recently offered as a National Geographic Picture of the Day. I’ll leave it up as long as I can get away with it.)

The world’s oceans: “no area is unaffected by human influence”

A study in the journal Science this week analyzed the ecological impact of 17 different human-caused factors on the world’s oceans. The factors included such things as agricultural run-off (pesticides, fertilizers), industrial and artisanal fishing, off-shore oil rigs, commercial shipping, pollution, invasive species, climate change in temperature and acidification, etc. “Our analysis indicates that no area is unaffected by human influence and that a large fraction (41%) is strongly affected by multiple drivers.” But if it’s any comfort, “…large areas of relatively little human impact remain, particularly near the poles.”

I grabbed the map above from the AOL News summary (sent by a student) of the Science article. The colors red, orange, yellow, green, and blue represent - in that order - decreasing intensity of human impact. You’ll need a subscription to read the full article in Science, but the abstract is free, as are the technical details of methods and results.

Oh. Mon. Dieu.

And to think… I would have missed this gem, I might have gone through life thinking Ms. Pickler was actually smarter than a sack of hammers (if I thought about Ms. Pickler at all), had the You Tube link not been featured in the sidebar of this NYT story, “Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?“

But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.

She pointed to a 2006 National Geographic poll that found nearly half of 18- to 24-year-olds don’t think it is necessary or important to know where countries in the news are located. So more than three years into the Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with some college could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a map.

Ms. Jacoby, dressed in a bright red turtleneck with lipstick to match, was sitting, appropriately, in that temple of knowledge, the New York Public Library’s majestic Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue. The author of seven other books, she was a fellow at the library when she first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11.

Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

I think I’m going to want to read Jacoby’s book, The Age of American Unreason.

The week in review

So much to chat about this week, but since my classes began on Super Tuesday, I didn’t have any time to mull over the events with you: Romney’s bizarre campaign “suspension” (I guess that term leaves plenty of room for him to change his position in the coming months - as he’s already done on abortion, gay rights, immigration, etc) (but, say, how many other people do you know who would willingly suspend the hemorrhaging of $40 million in personal fortune in order to prevent Democrats from surrendering to terror? the man is a true patriot), Obama’s even-better-than-expected showings, and recent polls showing that Obama is more likely to beat McCain. When I tossed off that remark about crossing a Clinton-McCain bridge if I came to it, I wasn’t all that concerned that I’d come to it! But with Clinton and Obama virtually tied, and the decision increasingly likely to be left in the hands of Democratic Establishment “superdelegates” (more on that when I get my thoughts in order), I guess I’d better start my cost/benefit analysis on Clinton and McCain.

A scathing new Frank Rich column discusses the dangerous game HRC continues to play with her “thick deck of race cards.”

Game? What game?

I didn’t see even a fraction of The Ads during what turned into an exciting Super Bowl, but of the ones I saw, this was my favorite.

As long as we’re on the subject…

This story was bad enough that even the networks couldn’t really ignore it and the USDA has begun an investigation.  An investigator working for the Humane Society of the United States took a job at the Hallmark Meat Packing plant in Chino, CA and proceeded to document horrifying routine practices that include dragging sick cattle with chains, prodding them with fork lifts, spraying high-powered streams of water up their nostrils and shocking them, all to get them standing up long enough to pass USDA inspection for slaughter.  (What USDA inspector is “fooled” by this, and how much does he/she get paid under the table?)  “Downer” cattle are not allowed into the food supply, just in case they carry Mad Cow Disease.  Hallmark sells meat to Westland Meat Company, which sells meat to the national school lunch program.  That, more than the blatant abuse, is what has most people in a tizzy.  But hopefully, these awful images will start to bother folks who don’t usually spend much time thinking about how cows turn into hamburgers.

(Another great portrait by Jordan McClement. Click on this thumbnail for a higher-resolution version.)

As long as I’m ruining your appetite, read this feature from last month’s Mother Earth News, explaining how globalized industrial poultry farming - not migratory birds! - has increased the threat of avian flu:

The globalization of this Westernized industrial model of poultry production has not only facilitated the spread of deadly viruses like H5N1, but also plays a role in their emergence in the first place. After all, people have been raising birds in their back yards for thousands of years and birds have been migrating for millions. Only in recent years have we seen an exponential increase in the number of outbreaks of highly pathogenic (disease-causing) strains of bird flu. As leading flu scientist Ilaria Capua remarked, “We’ve gone from a few snowflakes to an avalanche.”

The world’s foremost expert on bird flu, Robert Webster, director of the U.S. Collaborating Center of the World Health Organization, was asked by the senior correspondent of the TV show “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” to identify the “change in conditions that suddenly lit a match to the tinder” — in other words, what started the avalanche. Dr. Webster replied:

“Farming practices have changed. Previously, we had backyard poultry. I grew up on a farm in New Zealand. We had a few backyard chickens and ducks. The next door neighbor was so far away it didn’t matter. Now we put millions of chickens into a chicken factory next door to a pig factory, and this virus has the opportunity to get into one of these chicken factories and make billions and billions of these mutations continuously. And so what we’ve changed is the way we raise animals.”