Who is Jessica Buchanan?

Who is Jessica Buchanan, and what about her caused the President to give the go-ahead for a Super Special Black Ops Navy Seals operation to kill nearly a dozen militant pirates to get her out of Somalia yesterday, just before the State of the Union address?

Maybe she's this Jessica Buchanan.

EDIT: Or maybe not. Later news reports say that she's local, a student at Valley Forge Christian College (CNN). I'd guessed the Buchanan in the LinkedIn profile based on age and work in the Middle East.

Excitotoxins!

"Excitotoxins"? This is my word of the day. My made-up word of the day:

Don't you have to cook grains in order to get their nutritional benefit?

This question presupposes that grains such as rice, wheat, barley, and oats are helpful to the body's nutrition. Actually, they are not. The fact that they must be cooked to be edible is the first clue that something is wrong with them. They are bland to the taste and are virtually inedible without salt, spices, and condiments, the deadly "excitotoxins". Grains are acid forming in a body that needs to be slightly alkaline. Many people have substituted cooked grains in place of meat in their diet, and as a consequence, have shown a marked reduction in cardiovascular disease. However, because cooked grains create a condition known as acid toxemia, these same people will instead, suffer from a higher risk of arthritis and cancer. Cooked grains also contain opioids (which are addictive), cause daily mood swings, and contribute significantly to obesity.

As the joke goes, [citation needed]. Christ, why can't I look up some information about growing bean sprouts at home without being associated with looney-tunes raw foodists? (I recently started up again, after having quit since renouncing my former life as a hippie. All the internet research I can find indicates that the beans I'm sprouting are so old that they shouldn't be sprouting. But three dinner guests and my ravenous daughter found differently this weekend.)

Further on in the FAQ:

Too much fat will thicken the blood

Oh, man, that line brings just one thing to mind:

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry "Hold, hold!"

Crazy-making

I think it bears repeating that being un- or under-employed is incredibly stressful. I have a great undocumented, unofficial safety net of friends, family, and a partner who buys my groceries; but that's all it is, a safety net. I'm not building reserves. And I've had to accumulate debt on my credit card again because last month I had an only somewhat expected, but totally uninsured loss at my home.

A news item the other day mentioned that women are more likely than men to experience mental illness (MSNBC). How is this report surprising? When you jump through the right hoops, you do all you're supposed to do -- I put myself through law school so that I could double or triple my administrative professional's salary and show my daughter a better life -- and you get jack for it. What kind of jack? I serve on a volunteer committee with a guy who graduated below me in my law school class, who can't figure out how to calendar meetings on the iPad his Biglaw job gave him and who can't meet a deadline to save his life, and yet I'm the one who knows that, right now, I have $68.17 in the bank. This guy takes home six figures a year from his office; in my office, I get asked for free advice on how to legally force a grant-making foundation to give money to an organization that hasn't even applied for its determination letter yet.

I applied for dozens of jobs in 2011, landed a half-dozen interviews, and made less money in the past two years than a relative of mine spent in six weeks to finish their basement.

My friend Bee Lavender on American poverty and the lack of will on the part of political leadership to address it:

[E]normous numbers of people are forced into bankruptcy because of the egregious and parasitic [health] insurance industry. Others are trapped in jobs and relationships that restrict their aspirations, usefulness, and profitability, because they need the insurance. Health care reform hasn't happened in a fashion useful to me, and I very much doubt that it will in my lifetime. Not for lack of need, or care, but because the political will does not exist.

But instead of talking about the reality of poverty, and what it means to be poor, we get to hear presidential candidates shit talk our brothers and sisters, wives, husbands, children.

They say we're poor because we're lazy. I say I've never met a lazy poor person, though I have met quite a few rich people who lie and cheat and steal.

The esteemed Republican presidential candidate does not seem to grasp some basic concepts about life, work, or economics. Repealing child labor laws would certainly not have helped me as a child (my absenteeism being the result of cancer, not a bad attitude). My parents were already forced by necessity to take any job on offer, no matter how demeaning or low paid.

My dad is a janitor; Gingrich says we should fire janitors and make kids do the job. I would like to ask him what my father is meant to do? He is sixty-two years old, and has the best job he can find. If he loses it, there is no alternative career path.

This is crazy-making. In the face of ad-hominem attacks from politicians who blame the poor for their condition, and yell "look, Elvis!" to successfully draw the media's attention away from government policies that allow incomprehensibly high corporate profits to go untaxed while social services, public education, and the nation's infrastructure crumble, it's enough to make an un- or under-employed person crazy.

Of course Gingrich's daughters are defending him

The CNN blog headline reads, "Gingrich's daughters defend him ahead of ABC interview with ex-wife." I was going to make a comment along the lines of, well, of course they're defending him. It's perfectly reasonable for a man's children to stick up for him. Parents generally treat their offspring very different from the way they treat a spouse, and no child shares the perspective, knowledge, and experience of a spouse when a marital relationship goes kablooey. So I was going to say, you know, I imagine my daughter would defend her dad ahead of a television interview with me, just as Gingrich's daughters are defending him as against one of his ex-wives; but that statement would seem to equate my ex-husband with Newt Gingrich. And no matter how smelly the dirty laundry is between me and my ex-husband, I would never dream of equating or even comparing him to Newt Gingrich. After all, my ex-husband never asked me to open up our marriage, or cheated on me with someone 23 years younger than he is (as far as I know), or discussed divorce proceedings with me while I was in the hospital, or brought legislation destroying the welfare state to the sitting Democratic President for his signature.

When abortions are illegal, women still get abortions

. . . and they get more of them. A study, published in The Lancet, covered the years 1995 to 2008 found:

Abortion rates were lowest in Western Europe -- 12 per 1,000 -- and highest in Eastern Europe -- 43 per 1,000. The rate in North America was 19 per 1,000. Sedgh said she and colleagues found a link between higher abortion rates and regions with more restrictive legislation, such as in Latin America and Africa. They also found that 95 to 97 percent of abortions in those regions were unsafe[, defined as] any procedure done by people lacking needed skills or in places that don't meet minimal medical standards.

The researchers' conclusion: "It is precisely where abortion is illegal that it must become safer," and providing education and birth control universally will go a long, long way.

The full text of the study is available free with registration at The Lancet's website.

Gruesome, public Center City suicide mostly unreported

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Who signed it?

Looking at the credentials I've hung on my wall -- B.A. diploma, J.D. diploma, certificate admitting me to the bar of Pennsylvania -- I see that every last signature on them is that of an older white man. My other credentials, too; everything going back to my high-school diploma and all the academic awards between is signed by only older white men. It makes me feel that I've earned my credentials not because of those signatures but in spite of them.

Doesn't help that, last night, after I dispensed about $300 worth of legal advice and business counseling to a non-profit organization, an older white man took me aside and gave me spontaneous, unsolicited advice on how to drum up business.

Anyway, as to the anti-SOPA website blackouts -- you know President Obama said two days ago that he won't sign the SOPA bill, right?