every doctor should have this secret up on their wall

Courtesy of postsecret.com

I <3 nerve.com

A daily piece of FYI courtesy of nerve.com:
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McCain Opposes Equal Pay For Women Because It Leads To "All Sorts Of Problems"
Posted by Katie Halper

John McCain is putting his foot down on the necks of uppity working women who will NOT shut up about being paid less than men.

The presidential nominee came out against the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, a bill seeking equal pay for women (which Republicans killed earlier this week, thank God). Although McCain is "in favor of pay equity for women," in theory, he opposes the legislation that would mandate it, in fact, because it "opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems." McCain is the only presidential candidate who is man enough to admit that civil rights, like women, should stay out of the public sphere. And Daddy McCain knows best: what these women need is “education and training," not equality! If only hysterical women were more rational and focused more on education, they wouldn't be so distracted by the fact that they're paid less than men.

wow...

I didn't know they'd sell you billboards for such purposes!

A Faith for All Changes?

I came across this article ("Some young religious voters focus on social justice") on Yahoo News today. On one hand, I'm thrilled that the younger generation of religious voters are no longer blindly voting conservative and Republican. It's a move that illustrates how mature and savvy young voters are increasingly becoming, and an auspicious sign that my generation - far from being entitled slackers, as some naysayers have dubbed us - is in fact an intellectually and socially curious bunch. To quote someone else, "The revolution is here, the revolution is within us."

However, some quotes from the article do discomfort me [italics mine]:

Wallis, an evangelical Christian who also runs Sojourners, a social justice community, said these young adults "want their faith to make a difference. They're asking the question of vocation more than of career."

This resonates with Underwood, who hopes to use his divinity school studies and political involvement as a vehicle for social change.

"The one thing that I do think that I'm called to do is to help bridge the gap between the moral voices coming from the church and the moral decisions being made by those running the government," Underwood said.

Is anybody else worried by this quote? The article is about liberal religious voters, but that could have been said by ANY religious voter - including those who were raised to adopt a conservative, family-and-faith-based world view from their churches. Thus, the drive of religious Americans to see their values more fully embodied in U.S. civil life constitutes a double-edged sword for secularists like me.

In an ideal world, the above quote would not bother me because religious voters would realize that their religion is just one stream that feeds into their general understanding of a just society. However, the more Christians I meet, the less I am convinced that they are so rational. I can only hope that there are enough of us secularists voting next November to balance out the word of God with equally important perspectives such as personal experience, social history, and pragmatic economics.

This is perhaps untimely but...

... wow. I never saw a comic that expresses so well what it's like to be in Day 6 of visiting your Asian parents during the holidays...

Talib Kweli's "Hostile Gospel (Pt 1)"

Check it out:

ugh

I feel so stupid. And the worst part is...

Powerful Article

From the AP: Begging in the name of Islam

Boy flees Islamic school that makes beggars of African kids

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI, Associated Press Writer1 hour, 4 minutes ago

On the day he decided to run away, 9-year-old Coli awoke on a filthy mat.

Like a pup, he lay curled against the cold, pressed between dozens of other children sleeping head-to-toe on the concrete floor. His T-shirt was damp with the dew that seeped through the thin walls. The older boys had yanked away the square of cloth he used to protect himself from the draft. He shivered.

It was still dark as he set out for the mouth of a freeway with the other boys, a tribe of 7-, 8- and 9-year-old beggars.

Coli padded barefoot between the stopped cars, his head reaching only halfway up the windows. His scrawny body disappeared under a ragged T-shirt that grazed his knees. He held up an empty tomato paste can as his begging bowl.

There are 1.2 million Colis in the world today, children trafficked to work for the benefit of others. Those who lure them into servitude make $15 billion annually, according to the International Labor Organization.

It's big business in Senegal. In the capital of Dakar alone, at least 7,600 child beggars work the streets, according to a study released in February by the ILO, the United Nations Children's Fund and the World Bank. The children collect an average of 300 African francs a day, just 72 cents, reaping their keepers $2 million a year.

Most of the boys — 90 percent, the study found — are sent out to beg under the cover of Islam, placing the problem at the complicated intersection of greed and tradition. For among the cruelest facts of Coli's life is that he was not stolen from his family. He was brought to Dakar with their blessing to learn Islam's holy book.

In the name of religion, Coli spent two hours a day memorizing verses from the Quran and over nine hours begging to pad the pockets of the man he called his teacher.

It was getting dark. Coli had less than half the 72 cents he was told to bring back. He was afraid. He knew what happened to children who failed to meet their daily quotas.

They were stripped and doused in cold water. The older boys picked them up like hammocks by their ankles and wrists. Then the teacher whipped them with an electrical cord until the cord ate their skin.

Coli's head hurt with hunger. He could already feel the slice of the wire on his back.

He slipped away, losing himself in a tide of honking cars. He had 20 cents in his tomato can.

___

Three years ago, a man wearing a skullcap came to Coli's village in the neighboring country of Guinea-Bissau and asked for him.

Coli's parents immediately addressed the man as "Serigne," a term of respect for Muslim leaders on Africa's western coast. Many poor villagers believe that giving a Muslim holy man a child to educate will gain an entire family entrance to paradise.

Since the 11th century, families have sent their sons to study at the Quranic schools that flourished on Africa's western seaboard with the rise of Islam. It is forbidden to charge for an Islamic education, so the students, known as talibe, studied for free with their marabouts, or spiritual teachers. In return, the children worked in the marabout's fields.

The droughts of the late 1970s and '80s forced many schools to move to cities, where their income began to revolve around begging. Today, children continue to flock to the cities, as food and work in villages run short.

Not all Quranic boarding schools force their students to beg. But for the most part, what was once an esteemed form of education has degenerated into child trafficking. Nowadays, Quranic instructors net as many children as they can to increase their daily take.

"If you do the math, you'll find that these people are earning more than a government functionary," said Souleymane Bachir Diagne, an Islamic scholar at Columbia University. "It's why the phenomenon is so hard to eradicate."

Middle men trawl for children as far afield as the dunes of Mauritania and the grass-covered huts of Mali. It's become a booming, regional trade that ensnares children as young as 2, who don't know the name of their village or how to return home.

One of the largest clusters of Quranic schools lies in the poor, sand-enveloped neighborhoods on either side of the freeway leading into Dakar.

This is where Coli's marabout squats in a half-finished house whose floor stirs with flies. Amadu Buwaro sleeps on a mattress covered in white linens. The 30 children in his care sleep in another room with dirty blankets on the floor. It smells rotten and wet, like a soaked rag.

Buwaro is a thin man in his 30s who wears a pressed olive robe and digital watch. The children wear T-shirts black with filth. He expects them to beg to pay the rent, because there are no fields here to till.

But their earnings far exceed his rent of $50. If the boys meet their quotas, they bring in around $650 a month in a nation where the average person earns $150.

Buwaro expects the children to suffer to learn the Quran, just as he did at the hands of his teacher.

So when Coli failed to return, Buwaro was furious. He flipped open his flashy silver cell phone and called another marabout who kept a blue planner with names of runaway boys. The list stretched down the page. He added Coli's name.

___

His tomato can tucked under one arm, Coli jumped on the back of a bus, holding on to the swinging rear door. He was hundreds of miles from the village where he grew up speaking Peuhl, a language not commonly heard in Dakar.

He could not ask the Senegalese for help. So he got directions in Peuhl from other child beggars, who like him were trafficked here from the zone of green savannah just outside Senegal.

Coli made his way to a neighborhood where he had heard of a place that gave free food to children like him.

"Do you know where you come from?" asked the kind-faced woman at Empire des Enfants. The shelter's capacity is 30 children, but it usually houses at least 50.

Coli knew the name of his mother, but not how to reach her. He knew the name of the region where he was born, but not his village. "My mother is black," he said. "I'm sure I'll recognize her."

The shelter worker told Coli what to do if his marabout came. We will protect you, she said. If he tries to grab you, scream.

Days went by. Maybe weeks.

Then Coli's marabout arrived.

In 2005, Senegal made it a crime punishable by five years in prison to force a child to beg. But the same law makes an exception for children begging for religious reasons. Few dare to cross marabouts for fear of supernatural retaliation.

Coli's marabout entered the shelter flanked by a column of religious leaders in cascading robes that tumbled onto the ground. One of them stabbed his finger at the clouds and yelled out, "The sky will fall down on you if you don't hand over our children."

The shelter is used to such threats. But this time the marabouts had discovered the center's legal paperwork was not complete. They threatened to close the shelter if it did not hand over 11 boys.

To save more than 40 others, the shelter handed over the 11. Coli was on the list.

Back at the school, they beat the 9-year-old until he thought he was going to faint. At night, they dragged him off the floor, doused him in water and beat him again.

Three days later, he ran away again. When he arrived at the shelter, he said: "I want to go home to my mom."

___

To find Coli's mother, aid workers broadcast his name on the radio in Guinea-Bissau. The names of over a dozen children also from Guinea-Bissau played in a continuous loop, like sonic homing pigeons trying to find their target.

No response. Some boys worried their parents might be dead.

"I'm sure my mother is still alive," Coli reasoned. "When I left her she was well, so why wouldn't she be well now?" Underneath his bright eyes is another worry. Will she be angry that he disobeyed his teacher?

Over the past two years, the International Organization for Migration has returned over 600 child beggars to their homes. Several had been hit by cars. Some had scars on their backs. One 10-year-old was so hungry he ate out of the trash. Soon after he returned home, he vomited worms and died.

Almost all the boys had begged on behalf of Quranic instructors in Senegal.

"Cultural habits have been manipulated for the sake of exploitation," said the IOM's Laurent de Boeck, deputy regional representative for West and Central Africa.

Two months went by before a shelter worker pulled Coli aside. His parents were alive.

___

The 13 boys from Guinea-Bissau pile into a bus. Coli screams with glee as it takes off for the airport.

"Is this Guinea-Bissau?" one of them asks as they descend onto the cracked runway and enter the small airport of the nation's capital. "Senegal looks better," says another.

Though Senegal is among the world's poorest nations, it's visibly more developed than Guinea-Bissau, listed 160th out of 177 countries on the U.N.'s human development index. The capital they left had streets clogged with taxis and flashy 4-by-4s. The buildings were tall. The capital they returned to has squat, low buildings and crumbling colonial villas.

"I'm not sure I like it," Coli confides.

As the bus leaves the capital, they pass villages of cone-shaped huts and fields where boys herd bulls. They sing songs, clapping their hands. As they pull into the shelter where their parents were told to expect them, the boys fall silent.

Timidly, they file off the bus. A few of the 12- and 13-year-olds recognize their families. They approach them respectfully, shaking hands.

Coli's mother is not there.

___

A judge tells the parents they will be jailed if they send their children away to beg again. They have to sign a statement promising to protect their boys from traffickers. Most are illiterate, so they leave a thumbprint in blue ink next to their names.

"You sent your kids to hell," the judge says. "You can't say that because you are poor you're going to allow your kids to be abused."

His booming voice ricochets off the cracked walls of the building. The parents stare straight ahead.

But the conditions that made these families send their children to hell still persist.

Many of the villages do not have enough food. Few have schools. In one, the schoolhouse is a bamboo enclosure that doubles as an animal corral. "We haven't had classes here in over a year," an elderly man says as he ducks into the classroom and skirts a pile of bull manure.

The aid group pays for school fees and supplies. But the stipend cannot cover the economic worth of a child. Some of the children returned in previous months now work as bricklayers and goatherds. Others have already been sent back to the marabouts by their parents. The idea of child trafficking as a crime is so new in the region that no African language has a word for it, experts say.

With each passing day, more parents and relatives come, but not Coli's.

On the third day, the shelter pays for another radio address.

By the fourth, half the 13 children are gone.

The others become increasingly agitated. Maybe the radio is broken, Coli muses. His wet eyes fill with the invisible color of worry.

___

Early on the fifth morning, a woman in a pressed peach robe walks up to the shelter.

Coli rushes outside. He stands a few feet away as tears topple down his cheeks. She covers her face with her veil and weeps.

The two sit side-by-side in plastic chairs. Coli's mother looks at her feet. Her family is poor, she says, and she wanted Coli to get an education. It took her several days to reach the shelter because she didn't have $2 for the bus fare.

For more than an hour, Coli cries. Tears run down either side of his cheeks, forming two watery garlands. They meet at his chin and plop down on his collar bone, pooling above his shirt.

She stands up and wipes his chin. They leave, crossing the dusty boulevard.

Her arm reaches around his shoulder and the long sleeve of her robe falls around the little boy. It hides him from the remaining children, who silently watch Coli go home.

___

EPILOGUE:

Soon after Coli left, his marabout traveled to Guinea-Bissau. He angrily demanded to know why Coli had run away.

Ashamed, Coli's father promised to make up for the boy's bad behavior.

He is sending the marabout two more sons.

Album you need to check out: Eardrum

Somebody introduced me to Talib Kweli three years ago, and I am ever so grateful. If you like the intelligent hip hop of The Roots or Mos Def, you will love Talib Kweli. I've been listening to Eardrum, his 2007 album, and it is AMAZING. A lot of the songs contain political, religious, or social commentary, which is a big relief from the "get crunk" soulja boy crap that's flooded the media outlets these days.

Check out "Give Em' Hell" (Caught up in the rapture of the first chapter and the second verse/If we all God's children then what's the word of the reverend worth) and "Soon the New Day" (The alcohol got you sexually advanced/The truth so boring you gotta pretend a little). Seriously, great album, and a must-listen to for anyone willing to give hip-hop a decent chance.

Win Ben Stein's...... Integrity?

Oops, you can't, because it's already lost. When a mutual colleague told me he was planning to host a movie night for Ben Stein's new Intelligent Design movie "Expelled," I inwardly groaned. Not because I'm against intelligent design, which I'm not, but because I am SO FUCKIN' SICK OF PROPAGANDIST MOVIES (from both sides)!

My personal feelings about intelligent design aside, it is utterly shameful of Ben Stein to exploit his status as an educated celebrity to make a movie that will give fodder to the paranoid, "oppressed" Christians and that will mislead those who genuinely want to know what's up with scientific investigation in the 21st century. I take Scientific America's viewpoint: Ben Stein is as bad as Michael Moore. If you're truly interested in stimulating debate about something, you should probably present the situation honestly and objectively, instead of telling lies to gullible people.

The selfish need to push our viewpoint, at the expense of truth, is usually why we (1) can't solve any problems in the world, and (2) can't convince opponents to think of us as anything but assholes.

Ben Stein, shame on you.

**Sidenote: Look at that picture above. Is that... a Harry Potter crest on Ben Stein's shirt??? If so, what a great way to send the message that "Magic rocks, science sucks!"**

And the real question is....

... why in Heavens (sorry for the bad pun) would you want to join a no-fun, fundamentalist community where you basically MUST interbreed with each other, and neither the men or women are hot??


Travesty!

This is provocative

A former alum sent this to me and some other people, and the main response was one of disgust. I have to disagree. I suspect the reason for all the disapproval she's receiving is because Americans are so used to thinking of the abortion debate as fundamentally about fetuses, and not about our relationships to our bodies. This is a girl who is less interested in exploring her reproductive potential than about exploring the extent of control she has over her body. How many times can I get pregnant, and how can I reject the conceptus without the intervention of the medical establishment? When and how does my right to control my body collide with the interests of a civil society? What does it mean to possess something in modern society?

These are important questions for anyone at all interested in the other side of the abortion debate, that is, the side of the pregnant woman herself.

Yale Senior Art Project Involves Multiple Self-Induced Abortions

Addendum: Apparently, the abortion part was a hoax. Statement from Yale here. However, it certainly did spark the debate she wanted.

...

I bloody hate wet dreams.

somebody else understands med school!

it's not always this bad, but sometimes, boy, it sure feels like it...

"Break the Ice"

Britney should've performed this song at the Grammy's last year. It's so much catchier, and would've been more appropriate for the show anyways....


Break The Ice Video

Inspired by someone else's blog

I don't mind having shallow reasons for the things I do, so long as the actions themselves are GOOD ones and I'm DOING them. Here is my list of "Things To Do" for the next couple of months, along with (possibly? I never look that deeply into myself) the reasons for why I'm doing them. My hope is that having this post will keep me motivated and accountable for my many, but seldom completed, aspirations.

1) Get into shape - look hot for summer, get ready for MedWAR next year with Lydia
2) Actually start studying for boards, at least 2 hrs a day - get into a good residency, bring honor and not shame to the family, feel comfortable with my course in life as a self-choosen one
3) Watch portion sizes - because I know I won't avoid eating delicious food
4) Learn one new skill, even if it's a stupid one - so I don't become dull

love, me.