Just enough Gores and Gateses; too many Africans

In the interest of environmental responsibility, Al Gore suggests that all African women should bear four children.

This is, at least, what Al Gore surely anticipates when he speaks of “making fertility management ubiquitously available” to African women.  He says that “If you get the health improved, if you get the availability of contraceptives, then families will voluntarily choose to have less children.”  Surely he and Tipper had good health and access to contraception when they bore their four children.

Following Gore’s example, African women should also, presumably, voluntarily choose to live in a 20-room, 10,000 square foot mansion that uses approximately four times more energy than the typical home in the neighborhood.  In addition, each African mother should maintain a luxury apartment in San Francisco. In order to save the environment, Mr. Gore encourages all African women to take several plane trips every year, and only to charter a private jet “when necessary.”

PIC African woman carrying baby and firewood “And don’t forget to buy some carbon offsets to make up for that cooking fire you’re planning, missy.”

Oh, pish tush, you will say. Al Gore’s racist hypocrisy is old news, low-hanging fruit, as it were.  It’s easy to pick on a bloated lout like him; but his point still stands, yes?  Even if the first world did their fair share to reduce environmental costs, rather than palming it off on impoverished villages on the other side of the world, those third world women would be better off if they’d just put a cork in their outrageous, unthinking fertility.  They’d be healthier, wealthier.  They’d be happier.  Why not flood them with contraception?

Here’s why, according to Obianuju Ekeocha, a Nigerian woman who actually lived in one of those impoverished African villages —  and who actually knows what it’s like to see the kind of aid that Westerners want them to have.  Her open letter to Melinda Gates is from 2012, but it deserves to be read over and over again.  She says:

I see this $4.6 billion [in contraceptive aid] buying us misery. I see it buying us unfaithful husbands. I see it buying us streets devoid of the innocent chatter of children. I see it buying us disease and untimely death. I see it buying us a retirement without the tender loving care of our children.

Please Melinda, listen to the heart-felt cry of an African woman and mercifully channel your funds to pay for what we REALLY need.

She then goes on to describe the true needs of African families.  And here is Ekoeocha’s follow-up from August of 2013.  She explains:

[M]ore educated African women almost always choose to have fewer children (but mostly by natural methods rather than artificial contraceptives). So rather than fill our defenceless under-aged brides with Depo-Provera — which is more like a general anaesthesia that will numb them to the brutality of their reality — we can better empower them by giving them an education, which becomes the lifeline by which they can climb out of poverty one girl at a time.

Is that what the likes of Gore and Melinda Gates really want — truly educated girls?  Do they respect African women and African culture enough to help them make their own choices?  Or is that too much trouble to go to for a bunch of dark-skinned global parasites?  Do Gates and Gore and their ilk show any interest in listening to the true concerns of actual African families?  Or is all their wealth just funding another chapter in Western imperialism, where, rather than exterminating Africans directly, we brainwash them into exterminating themselves?

 

At the Register: Are You Raising Your Kids?

Take a squint at how you’re raising your kids.  The general impression should be “up, up, up.”

I generally don’t like the term “anti-life”

I don’t think it describes everyone who accepts abortion, even those who accept it enthusiastically.  People and their motives are more complicated than that.  But I don’t know how else to describe people like this.

For their sake, I’m hoping they suffer from some kind of mental illness, because otherwise, damn.

 

BUY MY BOOK NOW!

Because all of a sudden, it’s in stock!!!!!!!!!!!!

Buy The Sinner’s Guide to Natural Family Planning straight from the publisher, Our Sunday Visitor

or from Amazon.  I just happened to go the page and realized it was in stock! It says there are only 19 copies left!

If you were darling enough to pre-order my book a month ago, it should be winging its way to you very soon!

Good heavens!

Seven Quick Takes: Tab Dump

WordPress is being extra special today and won’t let me upload any images, so you will just have to imagine that peppy yellow 7 Quick Takes logo here.

 

When I banned reading at the table, my kids used to do dramatic readings of condiment labels.  The mustard was the best.

Sadly, the length of a mustard label is about as long as I am able to sustain my attention while I’m reading, lately.  If you have but attention the size of a mustard label, then that is not very good.  It means that you have all these tabs open all the time, and you are totally going to go back and read more carefully because you can see this is good stuff.  If you leave the tab open long enough, you may actually finally get around to reading the thing, and then you’re like, “Wow, that was great.  I should write about it.”  And then you have to leave the tab open for another day . . .

Anyway, here are the things I read and liked but never did write about this week:

 

–1–

Via John Herreid, a huge, fascinating collection of short first-hand accounts of things that happened during the Civil War.

 

–2–

From Eve Tushnet (DID YOU KNOW SHE IS WRITING A BOOK?), some “Snow Day Thoughts” that I loved, especially this:

 The Dutch portraits were a striking contrast to all the Spanish stuff we saw in other parts of our trip. I’m not sure I’ll ever love Rembrandt, but I did find his cloudy, lumpy-faced people very beautiful and relatable. There’s a gentleness to his work, at least in the paintings we saw in New York. The Dutch people also often looked worried or questioning. They lacked that “mask of command” intensity which the Spaniards typically had. The Spaniards were basically either in ecstasy, or staring right at you like, “AD MAIOREM DEI GLORIAM. *drops mic*”

 

–3–

Good stuff:  Let your husband love you.

[G]uys are weird. Once they fall in love with you, there’s nothing you can wear, no amount of weight you can gain, and no lack of make up that will make them see you any differently. You are their love, their bride, and after he’s been at work all day, you are a sight for sore eyes.

So instead of rolling your eyes, huffing and puffing, throwing out gut kicking comments about how he has it easy, doesn’t understand, is lazy, a jerk, whatever comes to your beautiful stressed out brain… BREATHE. Look away from your day and see the man that won your heart.

Let your husband love you.

Because he needs to love you. As much as you need to receive the love he has for you, he needs to be received. He needs to be welcomed, embraced, and loved. Even if the last thing you want is to be touched or to hear how amazing you look when you feel insecure and disgusting. Let him love you. Don’t push him away. If you do, I can guarantee there will come a day when your cold shoulders and eye rolling will have trained him to stay away. There will be a day when you will need to be hugged and need to be reminded of how amazing you are and he won’t know how to tell you.

 

–4–

Not one but two new free resources for art online:

the Virtual Library: An open, online repository of more than 250 Getty publications from our 45-year publishing history, available as high-quality scans to read online, or to download in their entirety, for free. 

and

As part of an increasingly common trend (the British Library did a similar thing at the end of last year) Wellcome Images has released tens of thousands of images from its archive into the public domain.

 

 –5–

This is driving me crazy, because I can’t find it anywhere. I heard a story on the radio about a young oceanographer who wanted to record sound in the Mariana Trench.  So he came up with a glass sphere, half the size of a basketball, with recording equipment attached to it.  You just drop it overboard, and down, down, down it goes.  It sits there, recording, for six weeks.  Then, when it’s all done, it’s preset to jettison some weight, and slowly rises to the surface, and a strobe light starts to blink, to let you know where it is.

Isn’t that lovely?  The fellow let it go, and thought, “I may never see it again.” He had spent $50,000 developing it, and nobody really thought it would work.  He sweated out the six weeks, and when it was time to fetch it, he went out on a bridge and looked out across the dark, dark ocean.  Just a wall of black, with nothing but darkness to be seen.  He looked and looked, and there was nothing but darkness, and then the guy next to him casually says, “Ah, there it is.”

And so he got his glass ball back, full of sounds from the darkest, coldest, heaviest bottom of the sea. He went home and plugged it in to download all the sound, and went to bed. And when he woke up in the morning, it was like Christmas:  he knew that, waiting for him, was a sound that nobody on earth had ever heard before.  And he had fetched it with his glass ball.

I didn’t make this up!  I heard it! But I can’t find it anywhere.

 

 –6–

Wow, this is turning into a long post.  Here is something I never ever considered writing about, but it made me laugh, especially after all these Real Beauty campaigns and “OMG this model didn’t have her armpit fold airbrushed out, OMG OMG this will change the world.”  Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a good trend, but I still liked Nine Unretouched Photos of Disney Princesses That Disney Doesn’t Want You to See

 

–7–

And finally the real reason Pope Francis said that the internet is a gift from God.

 

Phew!  Happy weekend. May all your tabs be closed.

Terrible craft my little kids absolutely love

A nice way to add some color to a house full of people who are pretty much tired of brown, white, brownish white, and black.  This is one of those crafts that is easy, but you have to not give a crap about your furniture or clothes.

Step 1:  sit on a bunch of coffee filters to flatten them.  Irene, 4, notes that this step is important, “although it’s a little bit vulgar.”

Step 2:  drip some water on them.

Step 3:  drip food coloring on them.  You may also do food coloring first, and then water.

Step 4:  let it dry. The end.

These dry fast and make nice marbled, stained glass effect, very cheery hanging in windows.  They look like planets.  You can experiment with different amounts and combinations of water and food coloring.  I know you can get this same effect with decent watercolors, but the kids really love squeezing the food coloring droppers.

Bonus:  you get Hulk Hands for a good week or so!

At the Register: Benedict’s Peculiar Record on Pedophile Priests

As long as old lies keep circulating, we have to keep the truth circulating.

Temporary womb transplants?

Wow – not sure what to think about this:

Nine women in Sweden have successfully received transplanted wombs donated from relatives and will soon try to become pregnant, the doctor in charge of the pioneering project has revealed.

The women were born without a uterus or had it removed because of cervical cancer. Most are in their 30s and are part of the first major experiment to test whether it’s possible to transplant wombs into women so they can give birth to their own children.

The intended procedure, as it stands now, is not ethical by Catholic standards:

The transplant operations did not connect the women’s uteruses to their fallopian tubes, so they are unable to get pregnant naturally. But all who received a womb have their own ovaries and can make eggs. Before the operation, they had some removed to create embryos through in-vitro fertilization. The embryos were then frozen and doctors plan to transfer them into the new wombs, allowing the women to carry their own biological children.

But what if doctors eventually learn how to connect a transplanted uterus to fallopian tubes, to permit for natural conception?  Could the procedure then be ethical?  It’s not surrogacy.

At first I thought, “Well, a uterus is just an organ, and other organs can be transplanted ethically.”  But it’s not really just another organ, because its purpose is to support another human being; whereas if you undergo a risky heart transplant, it’s only your own life you have to consider.  So far, no one with a transplanted womb has brought a baby to term. Is it ethical to get pregnant when you have reason to believe the baby may not survive? If so, is that different from a woman with the womb she was born with, knowingly getting pregnant even if she’s had several miscarriages before?

Also, who could ethically donate a womb, according to Catholic bioethics?  I’m pretty sure it would not be ethical for a married woman of childbearing age to donate her womb, even if she considered herself “done” having children.  What about someone who made a vow of celibacy? A purely medical question:  would a post-menopausal woman’s womb even be useful to a young woman with younger eggs who was trying to conceive?

Does it make a difference that these are intended to be temporary transplants?  The idea is that women try to have as many as two children, and then the uterus is removed so they can stop taking anti-rejection drugs, which have bad side effects.

I don’t want to automatically shy away from science. Just because something sounds creepy doesn’t mean it’s wrong.  But this is an especially complicated situation.  What do you think?

Is there something wrong with me

. . . that I do not find this irritating at all?

It sounds like a cross between one of those nutty medieval instruments — what is it called, a flageoblat or something —  and those straw kazoos we used to make.  You know how to do that, right?  Just bite down on the end of a plastic drinking straw to flatten it, cut the corners off to make a “reed” to vibrate against itself, and blow hard.  Yeah, like this:

With some experimentation, you can figure out where to cut holes to play an octave.

You can also make a straw trombone — just slightly crush the end of one straw until it fits inside another.  Cut a mouthpiece in the end of the outer straw, and slide the other straw in and out the other end as you blow.  IT IS FUN, okay?

First day on my new treadmill

I was like this:

But I went 1.45 miles at an average of 3 MPH, watched 2.4 episodes of Wonder Pets, and burned enough calories to make up for, like, an egg or something.  Before you know it, I’ll be like Detective Greg Medavoy: I turn sideways, and people question where I went.

But seriously, I am feeling much better, physically and emotionally.  Thanks for your prayers, you guys, and back atcha.