When poets attack

Wow, backdoor e-mails over sexual harassment charges and more in the contest to be elected Britain’s top poet. Never get in an argument with someone who prints sonnets by the barrelful, eh?

Praying mom convicted of daughter’s homicide

Leilani Neumann knew her daughter had child-onset diabetes.

So, when Madeline went into a diabetic coma, she did what?

She kept praying, that’s what. Only after Madeline stopped breathing, did Leilani and her prayer partners call 911.

The state of Wisconsin rightly charged her with something much more serious than “child endangerment.” And, yesterday, needing just four hours’ deliberation, a jury agreed, finding her guilty of second-degree reckless homicide.

Contra her attorney and her stepfather, Leilani Neumann is a religious extremist, with beliefs countered by reported words of Jesus himself.

Her husband, Dale, goes to trial on the same charge in July; no word on when Leilani gets sentenced.

Assuming her husband is also convicted, I hope the state of Wisconsin also has the smarts to fight her stepfather (and mother?) becoming the custodian of her three still-living children.

Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who have need of a doctor, but the sick.” (Luke 5:31 and parallels.) He clearly was endorsing the idea for proper medical care.

I hope other states, with similar cases, have district attorneys who get serious about filing serious charges.

Biggest NFL drug problem

It’s called alcohol, just as it is in society in general. The NFL is working with Mothers Against Drunk Drivers.

Of course, MADD in recent years has done what about any national advocacy group of large and growing size does. To raise additional funds from the public, it’s expanded its range. In MADD’s case, that means getting close to becoming neo-prohibitionist.

And, the NFL ain’t gonna do that. As the story notes, in 2005, Coors paid the league $500 million to remain the NFL’s official beer through 2010. That alone would pay the salary of 100 Donté Stallworths over that time.

I recommend instead that the NFL work with a non-12 step recovery organization called Lifering Secular Recovery.

THE COLORADO PLATEAU AT 30,000 FEET

Red rock hardpan
Sliced and slashed by canyons innumerate,
Dissected while desiccate —
A pulsing, beating, sun-engorged and throbbing
Red rock expanse,
Seen from six miles up.
Home to vacations, hikes and escapes,
Is far more sterile and lifeless in appearance,
Than when booted feet
Threading trails through cryptobiotic soil
Tread circular routes to nowhere, everywhere,
And all points in between,
Then back to nowhere again.

Steve Snyder
May 17, 2009

THE TRUE ORIGINAL SIN

Eat, sleep, defecate.
If you’re lucky, have a little fornicate.
In times between, do a little work
For a little bit of money
To afford the food to eat,
And the place to sleep,
And a spot to defecate the food you eat,
And a room for a lucky little fornicate.
Maybe develop some hobbies, and interests,
Work harder, make some money for “fun.”
If you fornicate long enough and often enough,
And luckily, or unluckily, enough,
Have some kids.
Work harder to earn money for them.
Lather, rinse, and repeast.
As your hair gets gray, your face wrinkles, and your muscles sag,
While rich people with more and better shampoo try to hide this,
Life moves on.
Then, one day, go to a poetic “sleep eternal,”
Even though there’s no “you” to know it’s “eternal.”
Finally, the true original sin, the curse of consciousness,
Is removed.

Steve Snyder
May 17, 2009

Monkey do bad, monkey do different

Monkeys, not even non-human primates, can learn from their mistakes.

Time to further adjust the bar on learning and other issues that do NOT differentiate H. sapiens from “mere animals.”

George Vaillant 42 years later

George Vaillant, a psychology professor at Harvard, inherited what was then the Grant Project. Under Vaillant’s hands, it became the largest- and longest-ever longitudinal study of human psychology.

Atlantic Monthly has an update on Vaillant’s work after 42 years.

Although not planned as such, the survey has many invaluable spinoffs, including seeing how manic-depressive or bipolar illness was eventually distinguished from schizophrenia, the state of development in psychology in general, information on human happiness and its whys, and more.

The more includes it becoming an invaluable longitudinal source on drug and alcohol addiction and recovery.

Apropos of that and other things, the Atlantic story has a couple of good rhetorical questions:

Can the good life be accounted for with a set of rules? Can we even say who has a “good life” in any broad way?

Probably not, unless, riffing on Thomas Szasz, we rely on groupthink societal definitions of what the “good life” is. Or, what “happiness” is, for that matter.

That said, Vaillant himself developed some intriguing findings about “positive” emotions:

In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

To illustrate his point, he told a story about one of his “prize” Grant Study men, a doctor and well-loved husband. “On his 70th birthday,” Vaillant said, “when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, ‘Would you write a letter of appreciation?’ And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters—often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him.” Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. “George, I don’t know what you’re going to make of this,” the man said, as he began to cry, “but I’ve never read it.” “It’s very hard,” Vaillant said, “for most of us to tolerate being loved.”

I will vouch for that indeed.

Of course, so could Vaillant.

He got married three times, and after six years with Wife No. 3, went back to Wife No. 2.