Monthly Archives: June 2007

‘Harry Potter’ and the Gospel of J.K. Rowling

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By Jeff Diamant

Religion News Service

Saturday, June 30, 2007; Page B09

I had never read a “Harry Potter” book until three months ago, when a hopeful editor buttonholed me with a plea: Would I, a religion reporter, write about religious imagery in
the series?

We reporters don’t freely turn down editors’ assignments, so a force-feeding of all six books ensued. After 3,362 pages and 12 weeks of very late nights, I can say I liked the series. I
get the hype.

I even understand the intrigue that’s leading real people to bet real dollars on the ending — specifically, on whether the young wizard Harry lives or dies in the last volume, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” which comes out July 21.

It’s true, Agence France-Presse has reported: Gamblers wealthy or odd enough to wager on
fiction have put down money with bookies. The prevailing bet? Potter to die.

His death will be a noble one, it is prophesied in the blogs, a death both sacrificial and necessary to save the world from the satanic Lord Voldemort. I agree with this line. I also expect Harry’s death to show that his character’s path is modeled on the Gospel accounts of Jesus, and, more significantly, that the link between him and wizardry-school headmaster
Albus Dumbledore is patterned on the most essential relationship in the Christian Bible — that between Jesus the Son and God the Father.

>>More

PTSD misdiagnoses cheat vets — Army Times

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The chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee plans a summer
attack on the military’s disability review system, hoping that
congressional hearings focusing on what he called the “terrible scandal
of deliberate misdiagnosis” of mental health problems could lead to an
overhaul of government policies.

Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif., said
he expects to have veterans testify they were improperly diagnosed as
having pre-existing personality disorders rather than post-traumatic
stress disorder, a move that denies service members military disability
benefits and could, under some circumstances, even leave them with no
post-service veterans’ benefits if their mental health problems have
led to misconduct, such as abuse of alcohol or drugs.

“This is a
real scandal, in my opinion, to save a few dollars … that wrecks
lives,” Filner said Thursday in a meeting with reporters to talk about
committee plans.

Dates for the hearings have not been set, but he
mentioned August — when Congress generally takes a break — as a
possibility in order to draw extra attention to the testimony.

Filner
accused the military of “purposeful misdiagnosis” and of misleading
service members into believing that accepting a pre-service personality
disorder as the root of their problems would still leave them with
government help.

Filner says PTSD misdiagnoses cheat vets – Military News, Army News, opinions, editorials, news from Iraq, photos, reports – Army Times

Will the Progressive Majority Please Stand Up and Be Counted?

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Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987-2007, a
massive twenty-year roundup of public opinion from the Pew Research
Center for the People and the Press, tells the story. Is it the
responsibility of government to care for those who can’t take care of
themselves? In 1994, the year conservative Republicans captured
Congress, 57 percent of those polled thought so. Now, says Pew, it’s 69
percent. (Even 58 percent of Republicans agree. Would that some of them
were in Congress.) The proportion of Americans who believe government
should guarantee every citizen enough to eat and a place to sleep is 69
percent, too–the highest since 1991. Even 69 percent of
self-identified Republicans–and 75 percent of small-business
owners!–favor raising the minimum wage by more than $2.

The Pew study was not just asking about do-good, something-for-nothing
abstractions. It asked about trade-offs. A majority, 54 percent, think
“government should help the needy even if it means greater debt” (it
was only 41 percent in 1994). Two-thirds want the government to
guarantee health insurance for all citizens. Even among those who
otherwise say they would prefer a smaller government, it’s 57
percent–the same as the percentage of Americans making more than
$75,000 a year who believe “labor unions are necessary to protect the
working person.”

It’s not just Pew. … MORE>>>


So, if the majority of Americans feel that way, who’s running the country, and how did it happen?

Marriages Down in UK

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Gay couples find that life begins at 40, and often after marriage – Times Online

A quarter of women forming same-sex civil partnerships have previously been married, and weddings are at their lowest level in a hundred years.

The number of marriages in England and Wales fell in 2005 to 244,710, a decline of 10 per cent on the previous year and the lowest figure since 1896.

For the first time, fewer marriages were held in churches or other places of worship than were held in secular buildings other than register offices, such as stately homes.

See…ah knowed it.  Them gay folks is ruirning marriage!

Changing One Species to Another

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Now we know we can boot up a chromosome system. It doesn’t matter if the DNA is chemically made in a cell or made in a test tube. Until this development, if you made a synthetic chomosome you had the question of what do you do with it. Replacing the chomosome with existing cells, if it works, seems the most effective to way to replace one already in an existing cell systems. We didn’t know if it would work or not. Now we do. This is a major advance in the field of synthetic genomics. We now know we can create a synthetic organism. It’s not a question of ‘if’, or ‘how’, but ‘when’, and in this regard, think weeks and months, not years.

Edge 215

Medical News from MedPage Today

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ADA: For Diabetes Screening, Simpler and Cheaper Is Just as Good (CME/CE)

CHICAGO
– For diabetes and prediabetes screening, random plasma glucose
testing alone appears to be at least as good as the full gamut of
metabolic syndrome tests, and is easier and cheaper to boot,
researchers found. [more]

http://www.medpagetoday.com/MeetingCoverage/ADAMeeting/dh/6051

ADA: Self Glucose Monitoring Found Unneeded Ritual for Many Type 2 Diabetes (CME/CE)

CHICAGO
– Those daily glucose-monitoring finger sticks may be overkill for
many patients with type 2 diabetes, reported investigators here.
[more]

http://www.medpagetoday.com/MeetingCoverage/ADAMeeting/dh/6056

More Proof of Harm from Second-Hand Smoke in Bars (CME/CE)

PORTLAND,
Ore. — Non-smokers who worked in bars and restaurants where smoking
was allowed had significantly higher levels of a tobacco-specific
carcinogen than those who worked where the air wasn’t tainted. [more]

http://www.medpagetoday.com/PrimaryCare/Smoking/dh/6054

A Few Words About Paris Hilton

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Ms. Hilton has gotten out of jail.  She says she’d like to do something worthwhile with her life. 

She’s gotten nothing but ridicule.

Maybe she’s serious and maybe she isn’t — but if she is, shouldn’t we give her a chance?  What if all the naysaying and snotty remarks push her in a different direction?  Aren’t all those who did it then at least partially at fault for any further waste?

What kind of cruel, envious animals have we become?

In ‘Jungle Girl,’ engaging Bindi keeps the Irwin name alive

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Bindi seems, on camera at least, to be happy — or, perhaps, to be happy as long as she’s on camera. It’s clear, at any rate, that she has long lived in a fantasy world of her parents’ making, based on the values of affection for wildlife, love for publicity, and fabulous denial. Between the series and its website, we learn that Bindi is home-schooled, sleeps with a snake, and has spent her youth traveling the world, used as a prop from her earliest days in TV shows and promotional shoots. And in “My Daddy the Crocodile Hunter,” a related Animal Planet special that airs again tomorrow, we learn precisely how much her father liked — and anticipated — being filmed.

The special tacitly — if gently — acknowledges Irwin’s death, daring to use the past tense: “What a time we had, me and dad,” Bindi sings a couple of times. But really, it’s a tribute to the calculated use of (professionally filmed) home movies. “Thank goodness we have stacks of video from my early years,” an upbeat Bindi tells the cameras, as if it’s some sort of happy accident, but the fingerprints of design are everywhere.

In ‘Jungle Girl,’ engaging Bindi keeps the Irwin name alive – The Boston Globe

For Progressives, Gore’s the One in 2008

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I have been working on Democratic political campaigns, international policy analysis, and anti-nuclear advocacy for a couple of decades now — usually finding myself on the left side of the room. So, although I was somehow left off the invitation list for the event at Mr. Chernin’s, I have met a great many rank-and-file Democratic voters over the years. And — like other political junkies — I have been talking with them a lot recently about the 2008 presidential contest.

The majority of my Democratic friends have devoted most of their attentions to the three avowed front-runners — Clinton, Obama, and John Edwards. Yet during the last six months or so, whenever I’ve asked them whom they would choose if they were choosing between four candidates — Clinton, Obama, Edwards, and Al Gore — probably 90 percent have told me, in a heartbeat, that they’d go for Gore. …

AlterNet: For Progressives, Gore’s the One in 2008