This is why maternal request C-sections are important

From the Huffington Post in the UK, a blog post on How I Lost My Vagina.

Short summary: A woman and her gynecologist decide based on her mental health situation that she should give birth via C-section.  The gynecologist also observes that she has a narrow vagina and likely would have trouble delivering vaginally anyway.  The woman's care provider changes towards the end of pregnancy, and that care provider decides she should pursue a vaginal delivery.  The vaginal delivery results in a fourth-degree tear that is either impossible to repair or repaired incorrectly.  As a result, her vagina and rectum are one hole, she has significant scarring, she can't use tampons, she can't enjoy sex, she feels psychologically like a freak show monster, etc.

But she wasn't on the list of socially approved indications for C-section, so too bad for her.

Fuckwit Anti-Vax Cousin Chronicles, Part 1

This actually happened.

Really, Ben and Jerry's?

After this sad business with Kevin Folta, I went to console myself with a pint of ice cream.  Ben and Jerry's Chubby Hubby, to be exact.

What did I see on the container?  Ben and Jerry's uses only fair trade and non-GMO ingredients. That seems a little bit silly to me.  It's like saying, "We don't believe in taking economic advantage of people in impoverished countries, but we'd be really upset if they used biotechnology to improve their standard of living."

But is it kosher?

From the great folks at The Questionist:

I'm assuming this homeopathic remedy does not use kosher Muscovy duck liver.  Batel b'shishim, the principal that an unkosher contaminant does not render a kosher substrate unkosher if it is less than 1/60 of the total volume of the mixture, shouldn't apply because the Muscovy duck liver was added intentionally.  On the other hand, there's no actual duck liver in this anymore, so it would be more accurate to say that any molecules from the duck liver are there by accident than it would be to say that it intentionally contains duck liver.

On the third hand, the rules for medications are different than those for food.  But is something considered medication because the doctor administering it says it is, or because the patient believes it's medicinal?  In other words, do the leniencies for medicine apply?

Yes, this is what religious Jews do for fun.  There's a reason Jesus complained about this in the gospels.

RIP free speech and academic freedom

Sad news - Kevin M. Folta is no longer going to be doing public science outreach due to the relentless harassment from the anti-GMO crowd.  The folks in the know seem to believe that his employer has asked him to stop.

Folta announced yesterday on Facebook, "Hi Everybody. I'll keep it short. The attacks are relentless, I'm under a lot of pressure on many fronts. I'm taking the opportunity to disappear from public visibility and focus on my lab and my students. It has been a challenging time. I appreciate the support, I'm grateful for your wishes, but this battle is vicious and one-sided, and I think I'm well served bowing out of the public science conversation for the foreseeable future. Thank you."

Just to re-cap, Folta is a professor in biotechnology at the University of Florida. As part of his work, he conducts (or, rather, conducted) public outreach to explain advanced in biotech, including genetic modification. The anti-GMO crowd, fans of global starvation and malnutrition that they are, realized that U. of Florida is a public university, which means that Folta is technically an employee, which means that they can use the Freedom of Information Act to dig up dirt on him. And so they filed an FOIA request for all of his e-mails.

The only "juicy" tidbit they found was that he that he was repaid by a biotech firm for expenses incurred in coming to speak at an event.  This is hardly shocking.  Public university's like Folta's were founded under the 1865 Merrill Act for the express purpose of conducting agricultural research and educating the country's farmers in order to improve the American economy.  So not only did Folta not actually earn any money from speaking, but coming to speak was part of his freaking job.

The truly chilling part is that Folta's entire e-mail correspondence - conversations with students, chitchat with family, all of it - is now in the hands of people who believe he's the devil incarnate because he's doing science they don't like.  Ironically, this are the same kinds of people who freely invoke Galileo when they want to defend the fact that everything they say is in complete contradiction to the scientific consensus.

Folta is the main target, but no academic at a public institution is immune.  In agricultural science, that's quite a lot of them.  No wonder U of Florida is feeling touchy.  Of course, this model can be expanded to any field.  Want to get women or minorities out of the public sphere?  Just issue an FOIA request against them.  Think that the bias in academia against conservatives hasn't done a good enough job in ensuring ideological purity?  FOIA any conservative professor who says things you don't like.

Of course, let us not forget the main losers in the entire debacle - the rhetorical starving children in Africa.

New feature: Recipes! Beef ragu sauce thing.

Cooking blogs are popular, right?  So here's what I'm going to do.  I've decided to start including recipes on this blog.  The only rule is that the foods must be healthy, affordable, easy to prepare, and use at least 90% ingredients that stay usable for at least a month in the pantry, fridge, or freezer.

Maybe at some point, I'll even do videos!

Today's recipe is ground beef in a tomato sauce.  This recipe is great served over just about any starch, including rice, pasta, mashed potatoes, or bread.  You could probably also use it as a lasagna filling.


Serves: 3-4 adults
Cooking time: 20-30 minutes

Ingredients:
oil of your choice
3 cloves of garlic (optional)
1 small onion (optional)
2 lbs ground beef
1 small can crushed tomatoes
1 heaping tbsp tomato paste (optional)
1 can of carrots and/or peas
spices of your choice

Steps:
1. Heat oil in a medium sauce pan.  You just need enough that the beef won't stick, so use less if you are using a fattier mix.  If you want to use fresh garlic or onion, sautee it now until golden but not burnt.
2. Add the beef, stirring until all signs of pink are gone.
3. Add the tomato stuff and the spices.  For my spices, I like to add a bay leaf, oregano, black pepper, and a small amount of chili powder.  You can also use garlic and/or onion powder instead of adding garlic and/or onion at the beginning.
4. Drain the water from the canned vegetables.  You may also want to give them a rinse to get rid of any salt or sugar added in the canning liquid (I buy with only salt added and then don't add salt with the other spices).
5. Let simmer for 5-15 minutes (the cooking time really is that flexible at this point) while you get your starch ready.
6. Serve over starch and enjoy!

Want to do a good deed?

The pro-science, anti-abusing-children-in-the-name-of-pseudoscience crowd is atwitter after a naturopathic quack/childbirth "educator" named Heather Dexter bragged about letting her three children, including a freaking infant FFS, suffer through whooping cough without even once consulting an actual doctor or a hospital or anyone qualified to treat the disease.

The original post she wrote has been taken down, but you can read snippets of it here, here, and here.  The entire post is a sickening display of egocentrism ("Oh, it was so hard for *me* to watch my children cough until they turned blue and vomited!") and a willingness to let innocent kids suffer unnecessarily for the sake of pseudoscience.

A few facts that can come in use for sensible people:

1. Her children wouldn't have gotten sick at all, or would have been less severely ill, had she vaccinated them;
2. If she had sought medical attention quickly enough, the first child to get sick could have received antibiotics, which would have prevented transmission of the disease;
3. Even if the window for prophylactic antibiotics had passed (one the whooping starts, it's too late), the other children could have taken antibiotics for the few weeks the first kid was contagious in order to prevent catching the disease;
4. There are all sorts of therapies the children could have received in the hospital that would have eased their suffering and perhaps shortened the duration of the disease.

Now, what about this good deed I mentioned?  It turns out that this woman has a business page on Facebook.  See, it turns out that, while her children were deathly ill, she continued to see pregnant women and fragile babies.  I think her clients deserve to know that she will knowingly expose them and their newborns to deadly diseases.  If you do, too, hop on by to Earth Mother's Natural Health & Birth Services and give her a 1-star review.  The best part is, she can't delete negative reviews!