Instead, this week’s cover features Jamie Lynne Grumet, upright and staring at the camera as she nurses her nearly 4-year-old son while he stands on a chair. The title: “Are you mom enough?”

Naturally, the duo quickly dominated parenting websites, discussion boards and Twitter on Thursday, fuelling the eternally combustible debate over how long is too long to breastfeed, what makes a good mother and whether attachment parenting oppresses women.

The discussion’s tiring enough to put a baby to sleep.

Sears’ approach, developed with his physician wife, Martha, encourages parents to be responsive to a child’s emotional and biological needs through such practices as breastfeeding on demand, sling-wearing, co-sleeping and natural childbirth.

While plenty of commenters were outraged by the image, some parents saw it as a clever publicity stunt that didn’t reflect the subject of the story inside.

“Everything is getting lost in this except for the cover,” said Dee Brun, a mother of four from Kitchener, who questioned how a stylist could come up with the bizarre setup.

It is everyone else that has an issue with toddlers still feeding at the breast. Chances are that if you are still breastfeeding your 3 year old you will be gently or sharply ridiculed by friends and family as well as society. If you take it to heart you run the risk of becoming a closet feeder to avoid the negative innuendos and comments. This is sad because there is no harm in breastfeeding a young toddler. In fact many different philosophies on the matter are held. Le Leche League actually supports later feeding for a variety of reasons for moms who have the leisure to choose late breastfeeding.

The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that the world average for breastfeeding is 4.2 years and they recommend that all children be breastfed for at least two years. More often than not an older child will suddenly stop wanting feeds without too much bother or discussion. In reality would it better to give your 3 year old a cheese burger and milk shake? Many mothers find that a sick child that still nurses at her breast can be comforted and soothed more readily.

The emotional benefits alone, of breastfeeding your 3 year old are reason enough for some mothers to continue. The argument on the other hand is that those children breastfed for longer may develop an overly dependent attachment for their mothers. Research amazingly enough has found the opposite to true. In fact such children are more likely to be independent and not show needy behaviors around their mothers.

Time managing editor Rick Stengel, meanwhile, called it an “arresting image” that was aimed at making a splash and noted breastfeeding is one part of the story.

“Judging by the reaction on Twitter this morning, some people think it’s great, and some people are revolted by it,” Stengel said in an interview with the Washington Post style blog.

“That’s what you want. You want people talking . . . Do I expect some people to be outraged? Sure.”

The cover mom, Grumet, is a 26-year-old mother of two from Los Angeles who follows Sears’ approach and practises extended breastfeeding.

I honestly don’t think Sam Walton wanted Wal-Mart to become what it has become! It’s really a pathetic joke to the American people! “Let’s all shop at Wal-Mart, where 80-90% of the items are made in China, who owns our debt”! “Let Wal-Mart (Devout) customers become the face of America”! Yeah right, a bunch of brainwashed idiots who act like zombies in that store. And I shop at Wal-Mart too, but my god, so many people who shop there are complete idiots! Mindless zombies wondering around!

People of Wal-Mart

I don’t mean the website, I mean the actual people that shop at Wal-Mart. Not only are they hardcore deal-finders, but they all seem to have some sort of an issue they feel it absolutely necessary to share with the world. Some of them have an issue with dressing – wearing clothing that is entirely inappropriate, and even unnecessary, for shopping at the big box retailer. Some of them have significant other issues that they feel it necessary to blather around the store on their cell phones, screaming at each other, or even sharing with the Wal-Mart employees. No matter what the issue may be, it seems like every person that shops at Wal-Mart seems to feel that it is their duty to turn the Wal-Mart experience into a therapy session/hillbilly fashion show. I just want to get my discounted goods and get the shit out of here. Why must I stand here and endure your issues?

A lot of people hate Wal-Mart for a lot of different reasons. In addition to these I have listed, I hate Wal-Mart and refuse to shop there because for years they have systematically broken down the notion of loyalty to a company. Big box retail took over small, locally owned businesses and the people of this world fell for it in the name of getting a good deal. In the end, though, there is no deal that is worth what Wal-Mart represents.

The Three Markets: Contract, Spot and Futures

Both oil and gas are traded on three markets: the contract market, the spot market, and the futures market. Each is influenced by different factors and impacts the price of gas at different stages of production. Unlike the futures market, the contract and spot markets are not the kind of markets found on Wall Street; they are informal networks of businesspeople.

The Contract Market
Though it seems like oil companies spend most of their time ruining your day by raising the price of gas, their primary business is exploration. Once an oil company finds a field and coaxes it into producing crude, it takes that unrefined oil and sells to refiners. The vast majority of oil is sold by contracts. A veritable orgy of contracts signed between oil companies and dealers, oil companies and refiners, refiners and independent dealers predetermine the fate of most oil and gas.

Refiners plan their purchasing and refining activity to ensure that these contracts are fulfilled. In exchanged for this privileged standing, refiners charge contract customers a premium.

The Spot Market

Need some extra oil? Got a spare barrel you need to sell today? The spot market is for you. The spot market fills the gap left by the contracts market. When a refiner needs extra oil to meet its contracts, they find people with surplus oil on the spot market. Unlike the contract and futures markets, which trade pieces of paper, the spot market involves the trade of actual barrels.

The best deals are often found on the spot market. Since neither the buyer or seller is locked into a prearranged deal, the laws of supply, demand, and free market are mostly in effect.

The Futures Market
Crude oil is the bees knees of the American Mercantile Exchange. A futures contract might stand for 1,000 barrels of West Texas Intermediate to be delivered at Cushing, Oklahoma. The futures market represents that collective state of the oil market at any particular moment. When you hear reporters talk about the price of oil reaching $100 per barrel, they’re talking about the futures market. Because fluctuations on the futures market are driven by information, its prices guide the contract and spot markets.

The people buying and selling futures rarely, if ever, collect on their contracts; a seven year period saw 5 billion barrels traded, of which only 31,000 were ever delivered.

Refineries

Refineries are the temples where crude oil gets Bar Mitzvah’d into gas. Shifts in the refining world over the past two decades have helped ratchet up the price of gas. In the early 80′s, there were over 350 refineries, mostly owned by the oil companies. The oil companies didn’t see refining as a place to generate profit, but as an integral part of a larger operation.

If a refiner’s rack price is consistently too high, dealers will take their business elsewhere when their contracts expire. If the rack price is too low, buyers might swamp the refiner, leaving it unable to meet its contractual obligations.

To ensure pricing continuity, refiners used to call each other and share pricing information. Activist judges on the Supreme Court called this “collusion.” The refiners, unfazed by the justices, came up with a crafty alternative: publicly posting their rack prices. Somehow, the Ninth Circuit Court found this to be illegal, too. Nobody knows how refiners discuss their pricing arrangements nowadays, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it involved a members-only group on Facebook.

Despite multiple warnings, the American political system is so dysfunctional that very little has changed since a president named Jimmy Carter tried to get us to get serious about reducing our dependence on gasoline. Oh, cars and trucks get better gas mileage than they did back then. But the nation still lacks a coherent policy for radically reducing consumption.

The frustration over prices at the pump is likely a major contributor to Obama’s sagging approval ratings.

Earlier this month, Gallup’s daily tracking poll showed that the president’s favorability rating had slipped to 41 percent, tied with his lowest ever. Voters tend to blame the person in the Oval Office when gas prices soar.

I understand the frustration. Families struggling in the post-recession economic landscape — some still jobless, many earning less than they used to — are hard-pressed to fork over more and more money at the gas pump.

And for many of those families, driving has become a necessity. They’re not taking leisurely spring-break road trips. They’re trying to get to work, to the doctor’s office, to the grocery store.

Over the last 30 years, suburban and exurban development, especially in fast-growing Sunbelt cities, have produced sprawling mega-lopolises, wherein workers may live an hour’s drive (or more) from the workplace. Those suburbs aren’t exclusive enclaves of the affluent, either. Many suburbs are economically and racially diverse, so more families of modest means live far from work. A dime a gallon can break the budget.
]]> http://my-complaint.com/gas-prices-never-down/feed/ 1 http://my-complaint.com/world-without-religion-better-or-worse/ http://my-complaint.com/world-without-religion-better-or-worse/#comments Tue, 10 Jan 2012 01:39:19 +0000 admin http://my-complaint.com/?p=15800 Continue reading →]]> Obviously, given how totally dominant religion has been throughout human history, up to about 250 years ago, that means that every human institution or idea that’s more than 250 years old was originated by religious people. So science, the hatred of science, war, peace, tyranny, rights, racism, the opposition to racism, slavery, the movement to abolish slavery, all were originated by religious people and in that sense you can say that all of them are “products of religion” or “launched from religious roots”. This isn’t evidence for whether any of these ideas or institutions are essentially compatible with or opposed to religion.

n the case of science, specifically, the reason it has “been perfectly able to stand on its own” is that it is essentially incompatible with religion. Religion requires that you accept certain truths on faith, with no backing in evidence and logic or in contradiction to the evidence and logic; science requires that you make evidence and logic your only criterion for the truth. That is why progress in science required that it be separated from the influence of religion

Religion is akin to physics in that each adheres to metaphysical laws: laws that are outside of the natural system itself. The university itself was originally a product of the church, and science a product of those universities, developed by religious scholars who postulated that, since the universe had a legislator, it must follow laws, and then set out to discover what those laws might be. Galileo himself was a religious scholar, and he continued to regard himself a good Catholic for his entire life, writing “the book of nature is a book written by the hand of God in the language of mathematics.” His problems mostly resulted from his arrogance in defying the pope who had urged him to make it clear that his work was based in science, not theology. There’s a good account of the affair in Rodney Stark’s For the Glory of God. Thus were the disciplines of math, science, ethics and economics first developed. To the extent that science requires a continued belief (“faith”) that nature follows laws, I suppose one could say it is religious, but that is not what I was saying. Since its launching from its religious roots, science has been perfectly able to stand on its own. I was simply saying that both adhere to laws and that those laws can be discovered.

The pages of history are filled with violence orchestrated by various religious groups seeking to impose their beliefs on others. Violence remains with us today on a world wide scale as religious organizers continue to make claims that their religion represents the absolute truth over all others. The recent gathering in Assisi hosted by Pope Benedict XVI included some 300 representatives of world religions as well as a small group of agnostics gives rise to the hope that maybe someday we will find common ground albeit probably without the support of organized religions.

The idea that such meetings could prove to be cathartic was vividly illustrated when Benedict used this occasion to finally apologize for events such as the Crusades or the use of force to spread the faith in the New World. Pope John Paul apologized in 2000 for Christianity’s historical failures. In recent years an increasing number of awakened and informed people have rightfully become suspicious and alarmed about the real aims of some institutional religions.

While in Assisi Benedict suggested that these suspicions may have caused people to doubt in God’s existence. But this argument, if it was intended to support the institutional hierarchy, may be rather ill founded. It is far more likely that more people today believe in a loving God but do not see the need for a heavily politicised and dogmatic religion that does not serve their particular needs or sympathies. This rejection or disappointment is clearly reflected in the number of Catholics who have left their beloved church in droves in the last two decades. Sadly the Church hierarchy continues to avoid meaningful dialogue with the people they serve.

Acts of violence in all its forms carried out in the name of God can never be justified. God does not make demands, punish, or reward or ask us to act as his soldiers or martyrs. Our common deity does not need our help to accomplish his work. We merely need to treat each other as we would like to be treated ourselves. God simply loves us unconditionally regardless of our beliefs. We need to embrace a new way of understanding one another. We must free ourselves from rigid beliefs and rid ourselves from some of the trappings which institutional religion has brought us.

We now share the planet with more than 7 billion inhabitants all with unique and separate qualities or abilities. More significantly our technological advances continue to bring us closer and closer together resulting in the inevitable clash of differing cultures. While we may celebrate our individual cultural differences they must never be used as means of establishing a cult of superiority. Such displays and attitudes will only hasten conflict and hatred. Exterior religious signs and symbols cannot serve as a substitute for the much more needed interior expression of the heart.

In the meantime world peace will remain elusive perhaps until the divisions and separation between the world’s religions are finally resolved. In God’s realm there are no institutional religions, or separate levels of equality. Man or woman, In the eyes of God we are all equal and holy creations. This Creator desires to save all, not some, not just Catholics, but all!

Not a storm from the rainy season bearing down, but a storm over why so many are still in dire straits a full four months after the earthquake.

Why so many are facing the ravages of the rainy season without safe shelter to protect them?A storm over how that could be the case when so much international aid has been committed to help the people of Haiti.

A CBS News investigation examines the total aid committed to Haiti and explores how much has been spent so far.

Critics such as Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic Policy and Research say more money should have been spent up front making sure the population’s emergency needs were met. He argues that many donors who dug deep during their own tough times to give, thought they were putting immediate food in people’s mouths, giving immediate medical help, and putting a roof over victims’ heads now.

Just how much money has been collected so far? Within days of the earthquake, the United States and the

World Bank each made commitments of $100 million in aid. According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Americans sent private donations worth another $150 million — more than they gave after the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. A recent international telethon raised another $57 million.

To put these amounts in perspective, consider that the annual value of all the goods and services produced by Haiti’s economy is about $7 billion. Pledges of aid from around the world already total about 10 percent of that figure, if not more. And so far, aid has been collected based on people’s willingness to give, not on the size of the need. There has been a tacit assumption that the amount donated cannot possibly be excessive.

That may indeed be true, but it does not mean that so much money can be put to immediate use. As aid groups on the ground in Haiti have found, the country’s infrastructure — roads, the power grid, etc. — are not very well developed, and it has few businesses capable of taking on big logistics and construction projects. In this environment, it is not easy to spend a lot of money productively in a short period of time.

This problem is similar to the “resource curse” facing poor countries that discover major reserves of fuels and minerals. When they begin extracting those natural riches (or selling the rights to do so), their economies receive sudden inflows of hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. But they can’t always use all of that money right away; even if you have good intentions, you can’t double the size of an education or public health system overnight. Nor can you simply distribute the money to your people; if the economy doesn’t produce more goods and services, all that extra cash sloshing around will just raise prices. Left to sit, the money has a way of disappearing; for decades in Nigeria, billions in oil money were siphoned away annually by elites and corrupt bureaucrats.

Even saving the money for the future, as East Timor has done with its newfound oil wealth, can be dangerous. Several years ago, the Timorese knew that their government was starting to build up billions of dollars in saved funds — the process was actually quite transparent — but they wanted to see the money spent sooner, to create jobs and improve their quality of life. Riots and a change of government ensued.

If Haiti wants to spend its aid money now, it will clearly need help from overseas. But doing so will create an additional danger: that given Haiti’s lack of infrastructure and capacity, it will be dominated by foreign contractors in the same way as Iraq or Afghanistan. Foreign donors will undoubtedly employ their compatriots for big rebuilding projects — doing so makes giving aid that much easier — and they’ll risk falling into the same old traps of cronyism and unaccountability, as evidenced by no-bid contracts, shoddy work, and lack of buy-in from local people.

]]> http://my-complaint.com/how-is-the-aid-money-haiti-spent/feed/ 0 http://my-complaint.com/priest-removed-after-sex-abuse-complaint/ http://my-complaint.com/priest-removed-after-sex-abuse-complaint/#comments Mon, 12 Apr 2010 16:00:50 +0000 admin http://my-complaint.com/?p=15581 Continue reading →]]> A Centennial priest has been removed from active ministry after the archbishop of Denver received complaints the priest abused a minor in the 1970s.

In a statement Sunday, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput said Father Mel Thompson has been removed from his priestly duties and has withdrawn from active ministry.

Thompson has served at St. Thomas More church in Centennial for about nine years

The removal comes after an April 7 complaint against Thompson for “past sexual misconduct with a minor that reportedly occurred in the early 1970s,” Chaput said.

A spokeswoman for the archdiocese, Jeanette DeMelo, said Sunday the abuse complaint came from a grown male.

The church would not be more specific about when the alleged misconduct occurred, and a timeline provided by the church does not say where Thompson served from 1970 to 1973. After that, Thompson was assigned to Good Shepherd Parish in Denver, formerly named St. John the Evangelist.

The church has reported the alleged abuse to local law enforcement, Chaput said. Denver police spokesman Matt Murray said the officer in charge of leading such investigations has not been notified about this particular case. However, Murray said that doesn’t mean the case could be in the department’s system waiting to be investigated on Monday.

The announcement comes as sex abuse allegations have swept across Europe and the U.S. in recent weeks. The pope himself has come under fire for the handling of cases that date to his tenure as archbishop of Munich and as a Vatican cardinal in charge of the office dealing with abuse cases.

Last week Pope Benedict XVI said he is willing to meet with more victims of clerical sexual abuse.

Benedict has already met with abuse victims during trips to the United States and Australia and with Canadians at the Vatican.

Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said many victims are looking not for financial compensation but for moral help.

He said proper selection and training of prospective priests will be crucial in preventing further abuse, and he insisted that the church keep carrying out canon trials “with decisiveness and truthfulness” and cooperate with civil authorities.

“Anyone who was paying attention had to know, at least 20 years ago, that there’s a right way to manage this and a wrong way,” said Sister Nuala Kenny, professor emeritus of bioethics at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

In 1990, Kenny was a member of the Winter Commission set up by the Catholic church to investigate the sexual abuse of boys by members of the Christian Brothers religious order at the notorious Mount Cashel orphanage in St. John’s, Nfld., in the 1970s and 1980s.

Two years later, she became a member of the Ad Hoc Committee on Child Sexual Abuse, set up by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. Its report, From Pain to Hope, was issued after the church and the Ontario government agreed to a $40 million compensation package for 1,600 men abused as children at two Catholic training schools near Ottawa and Toronto. Provincial police laid more than 200 assault and sex-related charges, which ended in 15 convictions.

Allegations of child abuse, the reports insisted, must be treated as potential crimes, rather than internal church matters, and reported to civil authorities. The primary obligation, they stressed, is protection of the child.

Yet in subsequent scandals that erupted in Boston and Ireland, priests accused of sex abuse were simply moved to other parishes, while church authorities turned a blind eye to allegations, if not flatly tried to cover them up.

Last month, it was revealed that the head of the Irish Catholic church, Cardinal Sean Brady, was present during meetings in 1975 when children signed vows of silence about complaints against a pedophile priest. Brady has so far resisted calls to resign.

The latest scandal is swirling around the pontiff himself. A psychiatrist who treated a priest accused of sexually abusing boys in the early 1980s says a German archdiocese, headed at the time by the future pope, neglected repeated warnings that the priest should not be allowed to work with children.

The priest was convicted of sexual abuse in Bavaria in 1986.

Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, as the Pope was then known, approved a decision to send the priest for therapy in 1980. But the psychiatrist told The New York Times he doesn’t know if Ratzinger knew of repeated warnings about the man.

Kenny says Canada’s Catholic churches have extensively improved the reporting and handling of sex abuse cases, and the screening and education of student priests.

But she says Canada’s bishops have failed to deal with the underlying issues in abuse scandals – the power of priests over parishioners, their lack of accountability to bishops or parishioners, and the church’s attitude toward sexuality in general, and the celibacy of priests in particular.

“In general, the approach that I see is not in the tradition of brave action for justice that I’ve come to respect the Canadian bishops for. I think it’s: `Head down, if it didn’t happen here, if it’s not happening now, if we took care of that, let’s move on.’ We’re not taking the opportunity for this larger conversation,” Kenny said.

Too many priests are isolated from their parishioners, she says, lacking in the kind of a support that can keep them out of trouble

The invitation came only a week ago, and Cote admits she was surprised by it. But with deep ties to Haiti’s women’s movement, she felt it was important to travel to the Caribbean nation.

Sexual aggression and violence against girls and women often go hand in hand with the breakdown of social order during a catastrophe such as the Jan. 12 earthquake that pulverized parts of Haiti.

“We’ve heard a lot of architects and urban planners but they don’t think about these things. They don’t necessarily think about how to build a city that would be women friendly or family friendly, where schools are close to homes” for instance, she said.

But leaders must move forward on women’s issues even during disasters so that greater equality gaps don’t result in the aftermath of the catastrophe, she said. Cote acted as the Canadian delegate to a roundtable on women’s issues that Jean was to attend Monday in Port-au-Prince.

Rob Johnstone said he has battled alcoholism for 40 years and can’t find a treatment program that doesn’t rely on religion or spirituality as part of the recovery process.

“I should not be forced to participate in someone else’s religious beliefs. I shouldn’t have to add to mine,” said Johnstone, who added he has been an alcoholic for 40 years.

“We get involved in mood-altering substances and mind-altering substances,” Johnstone said. “That means the person is very vulnerable when they come in and that person should not be subjected to someone else’s religion.”

He’s hoping his human rights complaint pushes the province to create a treatment program that’s free of spiritual or religious elements. The commission wouldn’t comment on the status of his complaint.

“Spirituality … is part and parcel of everyone’s life. For some people, their spirituality is more important than others, but it’s a dimension of all of our lives as human beings,” Goossen said.

“When they’re in … programming, we do want them to go look for a grain of something that will be helpful for them and disregard the rest,” Goossen added.

Other people who work with addicts agree.
“If you talk to the concept of spirituality, most social recovery models have a level of spirituality,” Hoeft said. “Really, spirituality is getting in touch with who you are.”

“Some degree of a spiritual component is common as these types of programs are believed to be more effective,” the spokeswoman said.

“It is important to recognize that spirituality is not the same as religion. People in recovery tend to benefit from self-reflection, examining their lives, where they’ve come from, who they are and where they’re going.”

The editor of the magazine, Andreas Lebert, even admitted that the models on Brigitte used to be so thin that they often had to “fatten them up” using Photoshop. However, the magazine announced that it would snap “normal women” on its pages in future.
“It is not a question of them suddenly becoming models. They simply step out of their normal lives for a moment and present fashion for us as personalities,” the Independent quoted Lebert as saying.

A total of 20,000 women put themselves forward after the “normal women as models” campaign was announced.

Sybille Zschaber, history teacher at a Hamburg grammar school, is one of the few who have made it. Zschaber has been made to look like late German actress Marlene Dietrich in the January issue.