The Newsweek/Washington Post’s On Faith website featured and excellent essay by Professor Susan Brooks Thistlewaite of the Chicago Theological Seminary on some of the more pertinent questions that the press (both mainstream and Internet) should be asking about Senator John McCain’s potential running mate.

In “Palin: Is She Subject to Her Husband?” she begins with a quote every Christian Fundamentalist will recognize:

“Wives be subject to your husbands, as unto the Lord.”

Ephesians, 5:22

It puts a fine point on one of the most serious issues about Sarah Palin’s nomination: Who is going to be the final authority in the Vice President’s office? Sarah, or her husband Todd (currently employed at British Petroleum, no less)? The VP of this country takes an oath to serve and protect the Constitution of this country — does that oath come before or after the one she swore to obey her husband?

This is at issue because Gov. Palin is a self-professed born-again Christian and a member of the largest Pentecostal denomination in the United States (Assemblies of God, if you’re interested). Her hard core conservative religious beliefs are astonishingly primitive even for most fundamentalists, including the bible as the literal, last word of God on any and every subject. Given the Ephesians quote above, it’s reasonable to ask: Just who are we electing Vice President, anyway?

The “evangelical base” who are reported to be so “energized” by Palin’s nomination as vice-president need to ante up here. Do they believe in the literal word of scripture or not? And if they believe in the literal word of scripture, then they need to demand that the we vet not only Sarah Palin, but more importantly, her husband, Todd Palin.

Professor Thistlewaite brings up more excellent and pointed questions in her essay. While we here at Metaphors For Life aren’t succumbing to the “dominionist conspiracy theories” about Ms. Palin, we surely have a variety of reason to be concerned about her nomination and acceptance for the second slot on the Republican ticket at this very evening’s convention.

Several weeks ago a prayer request was circulating in certain right-wing fundamentalist religious circles petitioning God to drown out the Democratic National Convention with torrential rains. They wanted a flood — not quite a “Noah” level flood, but certainly enough water to endanger not only the human beings who attended the convention, but the countless (nonpolitical) children and elderly who live in the area too.

After reading this article this morning, my advice to these petitioners would be: Be Careful What You Pray For.

For those who won’t click through otherwise, the punchline here is:

The sprinkler was located on the club level in a skybox which had recently been renovated to host a news crew. It appears the skybox belongs to Fox.

God’s sense of irony is undiminished, I see.

Enjoy.

Written fifteen years ago, Mr. Robbins’ remarks in Esquire Magazine are worth revisiting today.

You Gotta Have Soul

by Tom Robbins

Mental Bungee-jumping may not be your sport of choice, but there’s a cerebral ledge that sooner or later each of us has to leap off. One day, ready or not, we glance in a mirror, cuddle an infant, attend a funeral, walk in the woods, partake of a substance Nancy Reagan warned us to eschew, chance a liaison, wake in the night with a napalm lobster in our chest, read a message from the pope or the Dalai Lama, get lost in Verdi or lost in the stars - and wind up thinking about our soul.

Yes, the soul. You know what I mean.

Popular culture to the contrary, the soul is not an overweight nightclub singer having an unhappy love affair in Detroit. Nor, on the other hand, is it some pale vapor wafting off a bucket of metaphysical dry ice. Suffering, low-down and funky, seasons the soul, it’s true, but bliss is the yeast that makes it rise. And yet, because the soul is linked to the earth (as opposed to spirit, which is linked to the sky), it steadfastly contradicts those who imagine it a billow of sacred flatulence or a shimmer of personal swamp gas.

Soul is not even that Cracker Jack prize that God and Satan scuffle over after the worms have all licked our bones. That’s why, when we ponder - as, sooner or later, each of us must - what exactly we ought to be doing about our souls, religion is the wrong, if conventional place to turn.

Religion is little more than a transaction in which troubled people trade their souls for temporary and wholly illusionary psychological comfort (the old “give it up in order to save it” routine). Religions lead us to believe the soul is the ultimate family jewel, and, in return for our mindless obedience, they can secure it for us in their vaults, or at least insure it against fire and theft. They are mistaken.

If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It’s a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved.

To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese.

Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if not for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing.

But say you’ve inflated your soul to the size of a beach ball and it’s soaking into the Mystery like wine into a mattress. What have you accomplished? Well, long term, you may have prepared yourself for a successful metamorphosis, an almost inconceivable transformation to be precipitated by your death or by some great worldwide eschatological whoopjamboreehoo. You may have. No one can say for sure.

More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn’t get any better than that.

By Tom Robbins Esquire, October, 1993

Today’s thought from AmidaBuddha.org is worthy of further contemplation:

It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.

- T.H. Huxley

Via the New York Times, a fine article by
John. F. Burns:

LONDON — The governing body of the Anglican Church in Britain voted on Monday to approve the appointment of women as bishops, a step that appeared to risk a schism in the church in its historic homeland as the Anglican church worldwide faces one of the most serious threats to its unity in its history, over the ordination of gay clergy members.

After a debate late into the night in the city of York, the General Synod of the Church of England, an assembly that holds ultimate authority on church doctrine in Britain, voted by comfortable margins within each of the synod’s three houses — bishops, clergy and laity — to approve the consecration of women as bishops in the face of bitter opposition from traditionalists.

The vote came 16 years after the synod voted, after similarly fractious debate, to approve the ordination of women as ministers within the British church. But traditionalists unreconciled to the end of the male monopoly within the clergy revived the battle over the issue of approving women as bishops, warning that it could lead to a breakup of the church in Britain.

You can read the rest of this fine article by clicking this link.

If you are currently taking antidepressants and believe they work for you, you’re not going to like this at all. In fact, recent revelations publsihed by the New England Journal of Medicine seem to reveal that your belief in your antidepressant may well be the only reason it works for you.

Alternet.org covers the studies in the NEJM published on January 17, 2008 and I encourage you to read that article in full before you come back to this one. It ties together a chain of causality that is difficult to dismiss as mere alarm-mongering or conspiracy theory wackiness.

• The lead researcher was a former FDA medical reviewer with no ties (refreshingly enough) to the pharmaceutical industry.
• His team had to use the Freedom of Information Act to force the FDA to release studies done that were never published in scientific or medical journals. These studies, obviously, demonstrated lackluster results for antidepressants even though all the studies were biased to show positive results.
• “While 94 percent of antidepressant studies published in journals show antidepressants to be more effective than placebos, only 51 percent of all registered studies were determined by the FDA to show antidepressants superior to placebos.”
• “…in the majority of FDA drug-approval advisory meetings through 2000, half or more of the FDA advisers had conflicts of interest — financial relationships with drug companies.”

• “In addition to biased depression measurements and an absence of a true double blind control, the FDA also accepts antidepressant research in which subjects who respond favorably to placebos are weeded out from final trials.”
• Faith-based healing: “In 2004, the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry reported that among those depressed patients expecting an experimental antidepressant to be “very effective,” 90 percent had a positive response [...] while among those expecting the medication to be “somewhat effective,” only 33 percent had a positive response.”
• “As one might expect, drug companies do nothing to ensure that depressed people who have little or no faith in antidepressants are proportionately included in studies.”

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand the implications here. For all the billions of dollars the pharmaceutical industry is raking in on these medications, it would appear they are less effective than remedies like St. John’s Wort or valerian in treating depression, two natural remedies among many with a long record of efficacy outside the reach of the USFDA — the very agency, funded by tax payer dollars, that the tax payers depend upon to protect them from fraudulent or harmful drugs. It would appear that money and influence have once again compromised public safety for the sake of corporate greed. What’s saddest of all are those who have relied on these drugs in “good faith” to help them battle debilitating mental and emotional disorders — only to find out in the end that it’s likely that simple faith would likely served them as well, and their pocket books better.

With the explosion of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, parents will be well-served by reading this article on the results of a new study about “Internet predators.”

There were several points I found to be surprising. The article lead-in provided the first:

Contrary to stereotype, most Internet sex offenders are not adults who target young children by posing as another youth, luring children to meetings, and then abducting or forcibly raping them, according to researchers who have studied the nature of Internet-initiated sex crimes.

Rather, most online sex offenders are adults who target teens and seduce victims into sexual relationships. They take time to develop the trust and confidence of victims, so that the youth see these relationships as romances or sexual adventures. The youth most vulnerable to online sex offenders have histories of sexual or physical abuse, family problems, and tendencies to take risks both on- and offline, the researchers say.

Intriguing that young people seem to be, for the most part, completely aware of the adult status of those with whom they’re engaging in these relationships. This causes me to wonder how aware the young people are that it’s illegal for these adults with whom they’re interacting to engage in sexual activity with them? It would seem that children over the age of 10 or so should be cognizant on some level that this is neither appropriate nor legal behavior for an adult. It seems that the dysfunctions in the family itself erode the effectiveness of the warnings children receive regarding contact with strangers, something that sociologists and behavioral psychologists ought to note.

Another surprising revelation:

[...]in spite of public concern, the authors found that adolescents’ use of popular social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook do not appear to increase their risk of being victimized by online predators. Rather, it is risky online interactions such as talking online about sex to unknown people that increases vulnerability, according to the researchers.

“Most Internet-initiated sex crimes involve adult men who are open about their interest in sex,” Wolak said. “The offenders use instant messages, e-mail and chat rooms to meet and develop intimate relationships with their victims. In most of the cases, the victims are aware that they are talking online with adults.”

“A majority of the offenders are charged with crimes such as statutory rape, that involve non-forcible sexual activity with adolescent victims who are too young to consent to sexual intercourse with adults,” she added.

These are intriguing insights. Children face much the same risks as adults do in Internet activities, but with presumably much less awareness of the value of their personal privacy. This make them particularly vulnerable to predators when combined with the family dysfunctions mentioned above.

In conclusion, here are more words of wisdom from the study’s author:

“To prevent these crimes, we need accurate information about their true dynamics,” said Janis Wolak, lead author of the study. “The things that we hear and fear and the things that actually occur may not be the same. The newness of the environment makes it hard to see where the danger is.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Some long-time readers of this blog will remember our son’s life-and-death struggle against MRSA (Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus) three years ago. A few others will know I also fought a similar infection last summer, and that Michael wrestled with a skin-level infection last fall. Though our son’s infection was much more serious and was treated through traditional western medical modalities for over a year, Michael and I battled ours at home using natural and homeopathic remedies and recovered much more quickly.

This article on today’s PhysOrg.com’s website sheds some light on an extremely hopeful discovery in the treatment of this strain of staph that is “spreading in epidemic proportions in hospital and community settings.”

Among the deadliest of all disease-causing organisms, Staph is the leading cause of human infections in the skin, soft tissues, bones, joints and bloodstream, and drug-resistant Staph infections are a growing threat. By federal estimates, more than 94,000 people develop serious MRSA infections and about 19,000 people die from MRSA in the U.S. every year. MRSA is believed to cause more deaths in the U.S. than HIV/AIDS.

Given that my son was almost one of those statistics, it would be good to see some actual research done to confirm whether more people actually do die from MRSA every year than from HIV/AIDS.

Among the brightest points for the new treatment is:

The new findings are particularly promising because BPH-652 already has been used (as a cholesterol-lowering agent) in human clinical trials, reducing the cost and time for development.

At a time when MRSA is encamped in hospitals and schools all over this country, real-world implementations of this discovery can’t come quickly enough.

When the American Government starts hiding things, it’s time to get concerned. And when the major news media doesn’t cry foul, it’s really time to start worrying. But on March 23rd of 2006 the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) very quietly decided it will no longer publish M3 money supply data, and nobody said boo!

Now, for those of you who don’t know what the M3 is, let me briefly explain. Up until this purely political decision, the Fed tracked inflation using three sets of economic data called the M1, the M2, and the M3. The M1 covers the money you and I normal people use: Cash, checking accounts, and that sort of thing. “Real” money. To that, the M2 adds our savings accounts. (Savings accounts and retail money market and mutual funds under $100,000.) To that, the M3 tracked institutional money. So the M3 included the M2, and M2 includes the M1, making the M3 the largest, most comprehensive picture of real inflation in the United States — including U.S. Government expenditures!

So why would the BLS quit compiling the M3 data and the Fed choose to quit tracking it? Well, the official reason is nonsensical. They claim that the datum are tracked by other indicators, and so not tracking it will save the tax payer money. What other indicators? There are none!

So what’s the real reason?

I submit (and I’m not alone) that it’s to hide the real rate of inflation, and therefore exactly how much we are really being taxed to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Recall, if you will, from your high school economics class that, in order for inflation to occur, the Government has to increase the supply of money, making it more plentiful , and therefore “cheaper”. What happens when the Government prints money? Its value goes down. It takes more money to buy goods whose real value hasn’t changed a jot. We get inflation.

And what’s happening to the dollar today? It’s value is going down. (About $1.40 per Eurodollar as of close of business on Friday. Or, put another way, your U.S. dollars are now worth about 60¢ in Europe.) What do people people and governments do when the U.S. dollar falls in value? They hedge by buying gold, driving the price up. What’s happening to the price of Gold? It’s at record highs. ($838.80/oz as of close of business of Friday.)

We have inflation.

And what happens if people think inflation is out of control? They begin to lose faith in the U.S. Dollar (which is the only thing that makes it worth anything to begin with) and begin to panic, as they did in the late 1970s. And that just makes things worse.

So my theory is: To hide the fact that its printing (more than the usual amount of) money to finance itself, the Bush Administration ordered the BLS to quit compiling data for the one indicator that would reveal to the American Public what it was doing — the M3.

Consider this: In 2005 (the last year for which the data was complied) the M3 went up an annualized 9.4%; in the last three months of that year alone it rose an annualized 17.2%! Now, a 9.4% increase in the money supply (which is what the M3 measures), should have translated into a 9.4% increase in inflation. But the BLS claimed that inflation only rose a paltry 3.6%.

I know that 2005 was a long time ago, but do you recall ending 2005 with 5.8% more stuff at your house than you started with? (9.4% ? 3.6% = 5.8%) Because if the inflation rate didn’t go up by 9.4% in 2005, then you and I and everyone else had to put 5.8% more stuff in our garages and storage units that year.

Now, I’m of the opinion that conspiracy theories are worth exactly the amount of time they’re given by most people. Zero! They’re usually simplistic and often times down right dumb. Certainly we’re not looking at “the collapse of the United States as we know it” as some claim. China isn’t going to end up owning America (or the world) as others claim. And going back to “the gold standard” isn’t the answer to life, the universe, and sin as we know it.(In fact, tying the dollar to gold again would make the problem worse!)

But all that said, we do have a growing problem, and the Government attempting to deceive us is, in the long run, only going to make it worse. America doesn’t live in a vacuum. Market forces are already revealing what the Government is trying to hide from us. As more dollars are pumped out, they’re worth less and less, and global market forces do what they’ve done for thousands of years: They adjust. The dollar falls in value on international markets, gold prices skyrocket, the price of import goods goes up, and the price of export goods goes down. Inflation brews up until natural economic equilibrium is restored.

And who is going to pay? You and I. We already are. The question is: Do we want to do it with our eyes open, or our eyes shut? If we want to do it with our eyes open, we need to demand that the M3 be compiled, tracked, and reported.

To: Obama, Clinton, Huckabee, Giuliani, Edwards, Romney, and all the other candidates. For the last several presidential elections I have wondered something. Now, I’m going to ask:

Every presidential election cycle those of you running for office talk about tax relief. You talk about improving the living standards of Americans. And so it is again this year. I’ve listened to all of you as you talk about “taxing the rich” more so you can lower taxes on those in the lower income brackets. I’ve heard the discussions about how each of you is going to bring health care “to all Americans”. Some of you have plans to completely revamp the tax code, others the health care industry.

But one thing I have never heard a presidential candidate discuss: Lowering the corporate “taxes” on low income Americans. Perhaps it’s because you do not know; perhaps it’s because of the amount of money corporations give  your campaigns; perhaps its the power they wield in Washington and in the State Legislatures of the Union.

I don’t know. I do know that these corporate “taxes” cost poor Americans more than they pay in income tax. In fact, at the moment the American’s hurt the worst by these corporate “taxes” pay no income tax at all. Your tax relief programs simply do not affect them.

Why do I call them “taxes?” Because, Presidential Candidate, that’s exactly what they are. Just like the income tax, they have been approved by Congress and were signed into law by the President. Just like the tax code, regulations have been promulgated on these “taxes” that define the amounts that can be charged. And just like State taxes, by its  silence Congress gives its tacit permission for corporations to “tax” as surely as it does the States of the Union.

So, dear Presidential Candidate, it is a tax as surely as any other. It is simply a private tax.

So, what corporate taxes am I talking about?

• The Cash Tax. Did you know, Presidential Candidate, that some corporations actually charge a fee if a customer is so crass as to pay their bill in hard currency — the good ol’ American Greenback? It’s usually a fee of  around $5. Not much you say? Tell that to the young mother who could have used that $5 to buy her baby some formula!
• The Late Payment Tax. Not only are corporations allowed to charge interest on past due balances, nearly all also charge a “late fee” that can be anything from a dollar or so all the way up to $20 or more. It’s a regular cash cow for the company. And who is the cash cow? Not the middle class, who have money to budget and a savings account and probably an IRA. It’s the poor who have none of those things, who are continually juggling bills and counting pennies to feed their children. Even State governments tax the poor in this way, charging an extra 1%-2.4% of the cost of vehicle registration. They also charge interest on late income tax payments — as does the IRS.
• The Money Order Tax. Some companies don’t accept hard currency for payments on account at all. Did you know that, Presidential Candidate? And many poor Americans don’t have checking accounts. In order to pay their bills they have to purchase money orders for an average of $1 a piece. Tell me, Presidential Candidate: Have you ever stood in line behind a poor American dropping a precious $10 or $20 bill (which might be as much as 10% of all their money) on a string of money orders to pay their monthly bills? It hurts just to watch!
• The Car Tax. What’s the average miles per gallon (mpg) for cars on America’s roads today, Presidential Candidate? According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) it was almost 25 mpg in 2004. Do you think the poor, who drive the oldest, poorest maintained, least efficient vehicles on the road today get that kind of mileage? Not hardly. They can’t afford a new hybrid. They drive cars 20+ years old that get 10-20 mpg! How many bottles of baby formula or trips to the doctor for the young ones do you suppose that 10 mpg difference could pay for at $3/gallon for gasoline?
• The Bank Tax: Those in the low income brackets who try to avoid the horrendous Money Order Tax often find they’ve taken a far more dangerous road when they run into what The Wall Street Journal labeled “The Shell Game,” (In a Your Money Matters Podcast. [Listen to it: (MP3 Download)].) NetBanker.com columnist  Jim Bruene was a little more polite when he referred to the practice as the “creative engineering of transaction-processing algorithms” that generate the maximum possible number of fees possible when an account holder overdraws their account.

  It works something like this: At the end of the day transactions pending against a customer’s account are ordered from largest to smallest. In this way the account is over-drawn in as few transactions as possible, thus letting the bank charge the maximum number of over-draft fees. Also, if a pending debit card transaction takes “the available balance” into the negative, they’ll charge another overdraft fee, even though the account may never actually go negative. (For example: If a customer rents a car, the rental company might put a temporary hold [pending transaction] on the renter’s debit card for $150, thus overdrawing “the available balance.” The bank will then charge the customer an over-draft fee for that $150 “pending” transaction and every other “pending” transaction of a smaller amount, even though the rental company withdraws the $150 hold when the car is returned without incident; the money is never actually withdrawn from the account, so the never really becomes overdrawn.)

  Banks have become so aggressive with “The Shell Game” that it has now drifted “up the food chain” to people with enough money and education to fight back, as Jim Bruene’s article, Blogs Bring Negative Publicity to Overdraft Charges, demonstrates.

It is truly dismaying that it takes a the kind of press a lawyer with a minor in accounting can to bring bear to expose  these predatory practices on the poor. For certainly it is not the middle class that is hurt most by “The Shell Game”, or The Money Order Tax, or The Cash Tax. or The Late Payment Tax. Rather, it is those who have the most to lose. Those that can see an entire two weeks worth of income disappear because they were forced to make the horrible choice of either losing their electricity (and so having to pay three times the past due balance to have them restored), or attempting to float a check for a few days, till they receive their next paycheck.

The question is: What will you, Mr. or Mrs. Presidential Candidate, do about it? Will you remain silent, leaving intact these heinous drains on the meager incomes of those who already have nothing? Or will you step up to the plate and make this the flag-ship issue for your domestic tax policy?

America’s voting poor want to know! ?