justice

These are two of my sons, Judah and Zion. Adorable, no? Yeah, I think so too. And they are so sweet. Zion loves animals, he wants to know everything about them. And anything that begins with the letter Z 'My yetter!" Judah is one of the sweetest natured kids on the earth - if someone tries to take something from him, and I tell them to give it back, he'll say "It is ok, I will share." He wants to help with every single thing in the world - he's the first volunteer to do anything, to clean, to help find something. And someday they will be Black Men. Tall, and strong, with cars and hoodies and…
by Jonathan Heller Most public health practitioners, and those who work on health impact assessment specifically, want to improve the health of vulnerable populations. Most efforts to do so are well-intentioned, yet they often don’t lead to significant change. What do we need to do differently? Below is an analysis we at Human Impact Partners put forward. What Do We Mean By Inequity and What Are Its Causes? First, we are intentional in our choice of the word equity. Health inequities, as Margaret Whitehead said, are differences in health status and mortality rates across population groups…
“Talent hits the target no one else can hit; genius hits the target no one else can see.” -Arthur Schopenhauer You've probably heard the story, by now, of Kiera Wilmot, the 16-year-old girl who performed a mildly dangerous chemistry experiment on school grounds, mixing together household cleaner and aluminum inside a sealed container. You can get the full story (excellently covered) via DNLee, but to give you the 15-second version, she was arrested, expelled, and is presently being charged with a felony that carries up to 5 years in prison. The school board is not backing down, the attorney…
"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future." -Niels Bohr What's going to happen next? It's perhaps the most important thing to know if we want to be prepared for practically anything in our lives. And without even thinking about it, most of us are actually very good at this in a huge number of aspects of our lives. For example... Image credit: Crazy Adventures in Parenting. I was hungry at work today, and I was prepared for it. Somehow, I knew that I was going to need food throughout the course of the day, and so I was prepared for it by bringing food from home. This…
Isn't it obvious? We gave women the right to vote. As Raw Story reports: Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, a tea party activist that's appeared several times on Fox News, and founder of an organization where Sean Hannity serves as an advisory board member, said in a sermon recently published to YouTube that America's greatest mistake was allowing women the right to vote, adding that back in "the good old days, men knew that women are crazy and they knew how to deal with them." I'm completely on Patterson's side, in fact, I'm sure he agrees with me that the real problems began when we extended the…
A number of readers have asked me what I think about the Wall Street protests. In general I think public protest is usually a good thing, and I'm pleased to see demonstrations in favor of good things like corporate accountability and against bad things like climate change. I think there are plenty of reasons for political activism in our country, and am always pleased by it. On the other hand, do I think that this is the beginning of something profound and important? I can't say for sure, but I would guess not. Protesting Wall Street isn't a bad idea - but there's a fundamental problem in…
From the current issue of _American Educator_, fascinating research on Equality issues by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (PDF alert!) that shows that greater economic and social equality don't make things better just for the bottom: It may seem obvious that problems associated with relative deprivation should be more common in more unequal societies. However, if you ask people why greater equality reduces these problems, the most common assumption is that greater equality helps those at the bottom. the truth is that the vast majority of the population is harmed by greater inequality.…
Madeline Holler at Salon has a rather cute essay about her failures at becoming a radical homemaker. On my first quick skim through it (it was sent to me by several readers, so thanks!), I was inclined to give it a total pass, because I found myself rather liking Holler, and sympathizing to an extent. At least she was trying to live on a comparatively lower income. At least she made the yogurt. If she really hated it, well, at least she was sort of trying to live up to her principles - something all of us have a tough time doing. I may make my own bread, but I have my own hypocrisies.…
I'm back from my northeast travels - I had a great time at both NOFA and NESEA, and am slowly recovering from a glazed state of sleep deprivation to something sort of coherent enough to finish the book (3 weeks to go!). But I'm still sleepy and tired, so to remind you that Pi day is coming, I include my classic (ok, if I have any classics ;-)) essay on why the world can be saved with Pie. If you are inspired to follow up with a submission to the Pi-day contest, that would be awesome. The other day I got embroiled in one of those endless discussions/debates/headbangings about what the best…
Not long ago I was out at a dinner of climate activists, at the beginning of a conference I was at, and as we were climbing into the car of one of the program leaders, there was talk about whose car was messier. This is a competition I always win - I mentioned to them that not only do I have little kids in my car, messing it up, but I drive goats around in my Taurus. Several people asked me why I drive goats in a car, (which even to me seems like a reasonable question). The answer is that I am a farmer with goats, but I don't have a pick up truck, so when they go to be bred or to the vet,…
tags: The Constitution of the United States of America, DNA Evidence, criminal trials, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr, Supreme Court, William G. Osborne, justice, ethics Some days, I am ashamed to be an American. These past two days, I've been astonished and outraged -- and ashamed -- by yesterday's 5-4 Supreme Court decision that prisoners have no constitutional right to DNA testing that might prove their innocence. This decision was inspired by Alaska prison inmate William G. Osborne's petition to be allowed to undergo DNA testing -- at his own expense -- to establish whether he is…
The US national news is all about American journalist Roxana Saberi who has received an 8 year sentence in an Iranian prison for who knows what. There are plenty of places to read about it (CNN here). There aren't that many places to read about another Iranian miscarriage of justice affecting scientists and doctors, the Alaei brothers: An Iranian appellate court rejected the appeal of Dr. Kamiar Alaei, an internationally recognized AIDS physician and doctoral student in the University at Albany's School of Public Health. Alaei and his older brother, Dr. Arash Alaei, also an AIDS doctor, have…
I may be one of the few people in the world of TV watchers who has never seen a single episode of CSI: Whatever, a show featuring (I am told) "scientific" forensics work. Mrs. R., however, is fond of watching another show, Bones, which features a forensic anthropologist who works with a team that routinely accomlishes astounding feats of scientific detection (example: "That bug we found on the corpse is found only in a parking lot across from a school in Arlington, Virginia. Let's go. The new kidnap victim is probably there.") They can also reconstruct faces from fragments of skull bone and…
"The [Environmental Justice (EJ)] movement," writes Gwen Ottinger, "was galvanized in the early 1980s by the observation that toxic chemicals and other environmental hazards are concentrated in communities of color. EJ activists, many of them veterans of the civil rights movement, began to argue that social equality demanded an end to this 'environmental racism.' Currently, however, it is not equality but health that dominates grassroots activists' campaigns against chemical contamination." Ottinger is a fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation's (CHF) Center for Contemporary History and…
I came home this evening after a grant submission and uploading a bunch of grant reviews hoping to open a bottle of Gruet Brut and write up my account of last week's Friday Fermentable Live!!! at ScienceOnline'09. While sitting down, my dear PharmGirl, MD, asked me to read this op-ed essay and scrolled it such that I could not read the author. I immediately suggested that the author was Bill Clinton or Henry Kissinger. While I was raised in an unusual form of ethnic catholicism (not Roman), I have had just as many Jewish colleagues as Muslim given where I grew up and where I have lived since…
Some people noticed a remarkable thing that happened on the Washington Mall on Sunday at the Obama pre-Inaugural concert, a part of which I posted on Tuesday. The second last appearance was by Pete Seeger, his grandson Tao and Bruce Springsteen singing Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land. What made it remarkable is the inclusion of three verses from the original version that are rarely heard under any circumstances and never heard in the corridors of power, much less in front of a world wide audience and in the presence and in honor of someone about to ascend to the Presidency of the…
The other day, as I was bemoaning the tanking of the dollar versus the Euro (yes, my European friends are not crying in their beer over it; I'm glad for them. Now they can visit), I mentioned that it wasn't just the dollar that had taken a bath since GWB but also the US reputation as a force for Good in the world. Now the BBC World Service has put some numbers on this in a survey of 26,000 people from 25 different countries: As the United States government prepares to send a further 21,500 troops to Iraq, the survey reveals that three in four (73%) disapprove of how the US government has…
Two political posts in two days. Apologies to those who come here for the science but these are the issues getting my attention and energy this week. Billy Bragg is a special guy in my life and this song from 2002 was particularly prescient. In memory of those lost in the 11 September attacks, the Spanish 11 March bombings, the thousands of allied forces and Iraqi people dead and injured, and all around the world whose needs have gone unmet in exchange for financing an unguided and unnecessary war. . .
It's been a roller coaster of a week for Charles E Jordan High School in Durham, North Carolina. (Wikipedia history here). As we noted earlier this week, Jordan's Shivani Sud took first prize in the Intel Science Talent Search for her work on biochemical markers of stage II colon cancer. The Intel (formerly Westinghouse) Science Talent prize is referred to often as the "junior Nobel prize." Two and three days later, we learned the identities of the suspects apprehended in the murder of Eve Carson, student body president at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Both young men,…
Eve Carson | student body president | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill This photo was taken on Monday, 3 March. Eve was shot less than 36 hours later. The entire campus, community and alumni mourn her death. She had a ethic of public service so strongly symbolized in her response to why she does what she does. [Photo by Tony Deifell] Primary UNC-CH website 10,000 celebrate Carson's lifeRose Hoban WUNC-FM report on celebration of life Chancellor's message to students following arrests of suspects (13 March) Remarks of Eve's father, Bob Carson Remembering the student's president Eve…