Archive for the 'rant' Category

International Smogasboard

Published by
Roxeanne de Luca
at June 4, 2008 in Abortion, Pro-Life, international law and rant. 2 Comments

A few things, to keep Tieki’s blog semi-alive for the next few weeks:

An Australian MP sent  his colleagues a “graphic” picture of a foetus being operated on, which sparked waves of protest. (Story here.)  Apparently, it’s wrong to show people a picture which reveals the humanity and dignity of unborn humans.  I would upload the picture, because it’s really cool, but Wordpress is cranky these days.  A link for y’all.

In other international news, an Islamic man had his marriage annuled because his wife did not bleed on their wedding night.  (Story here.)  Okay, what actually happened: the 30-something year old man, during courtship, told his then-girlfriend that chastity and virginity were extremely important to him.  She claimed to be a virgin.  He married her.  When she did not bleed on the wedding night, he sought an annulment of the marriage the very next morning.  The French Court so granted it.

Comments are open. 

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Poorly Conceived Ideas

Published by
Roxeanne de Luca
at May 24, 2008 in Pro-Life, euthanasia, offbeat news and rant. 5 Comments

The Washington Post discusses how pregnant women are using  more luxury services than ever.  Now, this blogger doesn’t have anything against pregnant women getting all the attention and affection they can: after all, nine months of morning sickness, swollen ankles, and back aches - all for the sake of another human - ought to earn a girl some affection.  Nevertheless, it seems as if the women who consume such services do so at the expense of their husbands.  Husbands are described as “slinking into” a baby spa; their only function is to earn the salary that enables them to spend hundreds of dollars on their wives.  What ever happened to romance - a candle light dinner at home, a foot massage from the one you love?  Why replace it with an unprecedented level of selfishness, i.e.:

Event planner Jami Pennings stayed on a personal chef service while breast-feeding her daughter, delivered in December. “I knew the baby had to get good nutrition, and whether I did was pretty secondary. I was consuming it, but it was really for her.”

This knowledge also assuaged the guilt she felt over watching her husband scrounge for cold cereal or takeout every night while she ate gourmet home-delivered meals. She had to. For the baby.

Because, ya know, it’s downright impossible to be pregnant and throw a steak on the grill.  Apparently, it’s also impossible to be pregnant while seeing your husband as more than an ATM machine.

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New York City plans to deploy a special group of ambulances to recover organs from people who have died suddenly.  Saving lives is a noble goal.  Let’s be clear, though, that no one has a right to the organs of another person, no matter how great their need.  If an organ can help a dying person live but one more minute, or live with an iota less of pain, then our society has the moral obligation to ensure that no one takes his organs from him. 

Once we lose sight of the fact that humans have an absolute right to their own bodies, we’ve moved into the nightmare land where everyone’s right to their bodies, their minds, their labour, and their lives is conditional.  The logical conclusion would be to harvest the organs from the young and healthy in order to “save lives,” or to create human life for the sole purpose of ending it.  If we are to believe that it is moral and ethical to prematurely end the life of a dying person in order to “save” another, why not harvest the organs from the disabled? the elderly?  Wouldn’t it be entirely selfish of me to continue living with my own organs, when I could allow two lungs, a heart, a liver, a pancreas, a stomach, two kidneys, blood, skin, and bone marrow to be harvested to save a dozen lives? 

But wait!  Have no fear!  There are ethical guidelines that would save us from having our organs harvested out of our dying bodies:

Dubler and Burdick, the federal official, said the procedures to be performed in the ambulances and once the person arrives at the hospital are often done now in hospitals to preserve organs, and any ethical concerns could be addressed with strict guidelines.

“Strict guidelines.”  Liberals don’t believe in the criminal justice system, religion, or family as a means of controlling behaviour… but they sure have a lot of faith in the regulatory state.  Obviously, no one - ever - breaches regulations.  Especially not when it would make them heroes - those who brilliantly obtain organs to save the lives of people who have been waiting for those organs like children wait for Christmas.  Regulations always prevent people from doing wrong, so they would naturally prevent people from playing Santa Claus at the expense of their fellow human beings.  Right.  Just send your tax dollars to the nice folks who - we swear - will not rip your beating heart out of your body, because, ya know, it’s against the regulations.

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Title Should Read: “American Parents Undeserving of the Name”

Published by
Roxeanne de Luca
at May 18, 2008 in FDA, family, food, marriage and rant. 1 Comment

More food blogging:

The Washington Post reported that children are becoming more and more obese, which is leading to an unprecedented rise in health problems.  It makes this blogger sad for the kids, whose bodies are being damaged before they are even old enough to do something about it:

Doctors are seeing confirmation of this daily: boys and girls in elementary school suffering from high blood pressure, high cholesterol and painful joint conditions; a soaring incidence of type 2 diabetes, once a rarity in pediatricians’ offices; even a spike in child gallstones, also once a singularly adult affliction. Minority youth are most severely affected, because so many are pushing the scales into the most dangerous territory.

Joint conditions and high blood pressure in elementary school?  Where are the parents, you ask?

Physical therapist Brian H. Wrotniak, who works with overweight youth at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, hears resignation more than anger in his patients’ voices. “They complain of simple things like tying their shoes. They can’t bend down and tie their shoes because excess fat gets in the way,” he said.

Awww… their parents are resigned to this fate.  Who, besides the parents, is feeding these kids every day?  If your kid even starts to get too fat to tie her sneakers, then you, as a parent, need to change what you are doing.  Feed your kid oatmeal or Kashi in the morning, with a banana or an apple.  Pack her lunches every day - and if you don’t have the time to do it in the morning, do it the evening before.  Enlist her help to make the aforementioned lunches; she’s more likely to eat that which she chose to eat.  Don’t allow her to spend her money on junk food - in fact, don’t allow her to bring snack money to school.  Stop purchasing soda and junk food, so she won’t have soda or junk food in the house when she gets home from school.  It is physically impossible to eat that which is not there.  Cook healthy dinners.  Sign her up for soccer or lacrosse or swimming.  Be a parent, which generally involves allowing children to make mistakes that they can learn from, and not allowing them to make mistakes that only harm them.

What baffles me is why these doctors do not tell the parents that, unless their children get down to a healthy weight, that they will be reported for  neglect.  Not a fan of government intervention, but there is simply no reason to allow parents to do this much damage to their children’s well-being.

A final hypothesis: healthy food isn’t cheap.  Fruits and vegetables are more expensive than crackers and cookies.  Ditto for fruit juice and milk, compared to soda.  Healthy food also takes longer to prepare than junk food.  Could it possibly be that stable, two-parent households (with either double the income or double the time, or both) are better designed to provide for the well-being of their children?  that this is but one more consequence of the ethic which elevates parents above their children’?  In a post-Roe world, aren’t we supposed to only see loving, caring, dedicated parents - and ignore the fact that the rates of childhood obesity, child abuse, and other social ills has only increased since the 1970s?  Just a thought.

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Pompous Professors?

Published by
tieki rae
at October 6, 2007 in academia, education and rant. 1 Comment

Never!

I discovered the “Rate Your Students” blog via a ChristianityToday.com article about RateMyProfessors.com. Is that a random trail or what?

First, let me get the preliminary disclaimers out of the way:

  1. Re: CT’s article - I think it is somewhat creeptastic that RateMyProfessors.com has a “hotness” rating for professors. I honestly couldn’t care less if my professor is “hot or not”. I once had a professor who rotated the same two sweaters (red and navy) with the same khaki pants for half the semester. We were shocked when he showed up one day in gray. Hot? Not. Did it matter? No. Would astronomy have been any more interesting if he was better looking? Perhaps I wouldn’t have spent as much time doing my government reading during lecture, but I’m pretty sure his looks didn’t change the planets’ alignment.
  2. Re: the concept of RMP - I do use RateMyProfessors.com, in addition to what other students on campus are saying about a class, statistics from previous years, and my desire to learn about the subject. I’m not so uneducated that I am willing to take a random class without knowing if the professor has exceptionally unreasonable expectations for the class, if he/she is extraordinarily rude, if the median grade is a C (do you care more about teaching or ruining the GPAs of your students?), etc. I take none of those sources as gospel, but I look at a lot of factors before signing up for a class. It has to be worth it to me.
  3. Re: Profs’ beef with RMP - Obviously, there are students who will misuse RateMyProfessors.com or just be really immature in general. Contrary to popular belief, not everyone is as brilliant and scrupulous as I am. ;)

Now, on to Rate Your Students: The Risk of Being Real. I take issue with any professor saying,

Speaking for myself, I can tell you that I don’t care what my students think of me. Not one iota. Why should I?

Let me tell you why. I am paying $17,300 this semester for tuition. I am taking 4 classes, so that is $4325 per class. Given that my classes meet an average of 2.5 times a week for about 15 weeks, I am paying a little over $115 for each lecture and section. When you consider that my smallest class has 20 people and my largest class has 150, the university is making a significant chunk of change. No offense, but that is a lot of freaking money to let you have your on and your off days. I understand professors do not make $115 per lecture, per student. But sorry, that is not my problem. I’m still paying it.

So, when you diminish the importance of your popularity down to a few paragraphs like this:

However, the problem is I have to care about what they write on their evaluations. As I am what has been referred to as a “unmarketable, lowly, worthless slaves (i.e. Adjuncts),” good evaluations actually matter to those people who decide whether to rehire me the next year. I’ve heard rumors that there are places that will rehire a lowly Adjunct despite poor evaluations, but I’m not entirely certain that makes me safe from the ax.
One time that I was invited back to teach a few classes at the same college, the Chair said, “We would love to have you teach for us again; your students love you.” When both of those things were said in the same breath, I was somewhat suspicious that they were related. Then when a different Chair at a different college said the exact same thing to me, I went from suspicious to paranoid.
So until I reach a point where I actually have some fucking job security (which, with the way things are going, may be never), I have to care what the eighteen-year-olds think. Even the ones who don’t think.

In my opinion, you’re missing the point. No intellectual self-respecting student or administrator is asking you to sacrifice your academic integrity to reach out and be friendly to the little kiddies. As a student, I truly want to learn. I don’t want you to coddle me and make sure I like every word that comes out of your mouth. (If I did, I sure as heck wouldn’t be at Cornell.) I do, however, want you to present the material in the best way you can. Be yourself, be friendly, be passionate, be whatever. But do not tell me my opinion of you does not matter. That you shouldn’t have to care about what I think about you. Because you should.

The university may write your check, but I am the one paying you.

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