bearing blog

bear – ing n 1 the manner in which one comports oneself; 2 the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~]; 4 pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation; 5 the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

Faithfulness in small things.

Jennifer linked to a post today from One-A-Day Gratitude that struck me as an excellent example of a tiny, tiny good habit — although maybe "good" is not the best word, because it's almost a gratuitously unnecessary habit — that supports a much, much larger goal.

What is the habit? Keeping one small kitchen drawer completely empty, all the time:

It stands alone in a sea of possessions. A reminder that there is a way to live without, live with less. Among the myriad of things we own, this lone kitchen drawer helps me keep my sanity and maintain my balance.

While the pull to buy more, pile more, have more, is great, my need to have this island of a drawer is greater. So, I resist. I resist with a lot of force. I battle constantly with the marketers, the advertisers, and the sales people. Temptation is everywhere. At one point, my resistances break and I buy. I buy, yes, but soon after that I discard. For almost every new thing I acquire, I let go of another. I do not have room for more. I do not have a need for more. Life is a continuing circulation, and so is my house. It is the live example of “in with the new, out with the old.”

Growing up in a time and place where "hoarding" was a survival skill meant that I had a long way to go to reach that empty drawer. It meant getting over many internal hurdles and overcoming personality traits, old habits, and societal teachings. Living in a time and a place now where "consumerism" is a way of life means that keeping that empty drawer is an ongoing challenge.

We have 18 more months in this condo. I intend to keep that drawer empty for that time. I will try every day not to use it to pile more things. It will be my practice to save this drawer from a suffocating existence. It will be my meditation. My example to live by.

I called it "gratuitous," and one of the things that I love about this tiny thing is exactly that it is so unnecessary. I mean, if she has the space, there is no "real" reason not to store something in it. If she expected to purchase something that would go in that space, that would be a "reason" to keep it empty, but she explicitly does not have even this reason.

Her identification of this practice as a "meditation" is interesting. The gratuitousness of it does resemble many religious practices, particularly private acts of penance, mortification, and fasting. Such activities almost derive their value purely from the fact that they objectively have no value, or rather, no value other than that they are freely chosen — and in some sense, acts that have no value are the ones that we are most able to choose freely. (Marc Barnes has recently written amusingly that a totally gratuitous act, such as hopping on one foot to the bathroom, being unreasoned and even reasonable, represents an act of free will and thus a statement against determinism.)

But it's also a tangible, if tiny, manifestation of an aspiration — in her case, to be detached from possessions, to clear her space of "the old" in order to have ready room to welcome "the new." Often aspirations are frustratingly intangible. But one way to crystallize them is to create a tiny place (or recurring moment) in which the aspiration is realized, is real.

Once one drawer is emptied, you no longer have to say "One of these days I'm going to get rid of all that extra stuff." You can truly say, "I'm in the process of getting rid of all that extra stuff." *insert sound of drawer being pulled out* "See?"

What "one empty drawer" can you create to nucleate that grand aspiration you have that still remains formless?

Jul 12, 2012

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Cherry tomato gazpacho — no peeling, no seeding.
About once a year I wind up with a bounty of tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers that must be eaten, and of course gazpacho is one way to get them eaten pretty fast.

Except that everyone in my family hates gazpacho ("Cold soup? Cold tomato soup?!?") So gazpacho is one of those recipes (there are several others) that I save to make for lunch when H. is over with the kids for a co-schooling day.

Typically one makes gazpacho with peeled, seeded tomatoes. On Thursday last there were no more big tomatoes, but still many beautiful cherry tomatoes. I asked H. if she minded terribly if the tomatoes were not peeled and seeded, and she said "Of course not. I love tomato seeds. I love cucumber seeds too. I even eat bell pepper seeds." This made the job much easier, and in the end I did not even notice the seeds and peels. I did cut the tops off because I thought maybe the little bit of core would be a problem.

I made one other tweak to the recipe. Gazpacho is normally made with raw everything (except the bread) — raw tomatoes, raw peppers, raw onions. However, H. cannot eat raw onions because they give her heartburn. (As far as I can tell, it's her only major character flaw.) So I didn't use very much onion, and I sauteed it in olive oil first, along with the garlic.

Note that unlike most of my recipes, this only serves 2-3. Start with cold vegetables and juice, you may not have to chill it for very long.
No-Peeling, No-Seeding Cherry Tomato Gazpacho (2-3 servings)

1.3 lbs large ripe cherry tomatoes, with just the very tops cut off (you're shooting for a pound of tomato going into your food processor, so if your tomatoes are small, use more)

1 medium cucumber, peeled (not seeded) and cut into chunks

1 medium green bell pepper, crowns and seeds removed, cut into chunks

1/2 of a large fat jalapeño chile, some seeds and ribs removed according to taste, minced

2 cloves garlic, chopped

1/2 a small onion, chopped

3 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil or more

1 thick slice bread (I used homemade whole wheat)

2 Tbsp red wine vinegar

1 and 1/2 to 2 cups tomato juice (mine was my mother-in-law's home canned juice)

Salt to taste

Chopped ripe avocado for garnish

Sauté the onion and garlic in 1 Tbsp olive oil until translucent and perhaps a little browned.

Soak the bread in a small amount of water or tomato juice to soften.

Working in batches if necessary, puree the tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers, chile, onion and garlic, bread, vinegar, the other 2 Tbsp olive oil, and enough juice to get everything moving in the food processor, a good long time. Puree until it's as smooth as it's going to get. Mix your batches up and chill it till cold (I stuck mine in the freezer for about half an hour). After it's cold, taste and add salt. Divide into bowls and top with the chopped avocado.
Other possible garnishes are sour cream or chopped egg…
Jul 9, 2012

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Time off for good (better anyway) behavior.

Do you ever get really, really tired of the sound of your own voice?

Or of wondering what people are going to say back to it?

Or of obsessively checking all the breadcrumbs you left behind in comboxes/tweets/status updates/blog posts to see if they were… er… eaten by birds perhaps… and then regurgitated or something?

I have definitely hit that point today. Time for a break!

I have scheduled a couple of posts — I meant it to be three, but I apparently haven't got the hang of the scheduling thingy on my iPad blogging app, because one of them already posted — but don't expect much else from me for, oh, about a week.

I will spend it relaxing, thinking about American history, and discussing the 2012–2013 fiscal year with my husband, who just finished making our budget. But I will not spend it writing in comboxes.

Have a great week!

Jul 6, 2012

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Costliness.

The Anchoress has a post on the perennial topic of why Catholics (well, some of us, anyway) think it's okay to keep our costly communion vessels and our big fancy churches instead of selling the money to give to the poor and all that. I know we have been over this before, but a new way of phrasing and framing the issue is never a bad thing.

Sell everything in a church, strip it down and you buy some temporary assistance; then the people who sold all that sinful, frivolous beauty go back home, feeling pretty good about themselves and all the ‘help’ they gave to ‘the poor.’ But when the money runs out — and my cousin says money running out is one of the few things you can bank on — then for the poor who remain, “it’s back to business as usual, but with nothing beautiful for them, anywhere.”

My cousin [a Capuchin priest] is a man with a great deal of common sense and compassion; living where and how he has lived, he needs both; he is by no means anyone’s idea of a “conservative” but he feels strongly that comfortable, wealthy people with generous instincts mostly have no idea what the poor “need” and that the poor have just as much right (and expectation) to enjoy the consolation and spiritual uplift of a beautiful church as anyone else. Moreover, struggling people don’t want everyday things like straw baskets to be used at communion, because they use everyday things, every day. At Mass, Jesus deserves beauty and they want to engage him in beauty.

I suppose it isn't quite right to try to speak for all struggling people. Surely they are just like everyone else in that some, viewing a costly liturgical vessel in use at their own parish, appreciate its beauty and feel that it magnifies the Lord, while others feel indignant at the luxury, thinking "This could have been sold — what could I do with that money? What about the local soup kitchen, or my children's school?" The beautiful vessels are a shared resource, I suppose, and there will ever be disagreements about how to use them.

The Anchoress comments that criticism of this sort could be leveled at other institutions ("the Capitol building") but rarely is. I think that is because it seems like a useful accusation of hypocrisy, because we claim to love the poor. It doesn't really work, of course, if you understand the difference between capital and operating costs; our costly things are among the capital we use to help the poor and rich both, no? Remembering that the main "business" we are in is, after all, spiritual — expressed and enacted in liturgy, which requires people, places, and things.

It's sort of like saying to a nonprofit anti poverty org, "Wow, that community clinic and food shelf downtown is sure sitting on some sweet real estate. Shouldn't you sell the building and give all the money away?" Or like saying to a cash-strapped municipality that it should sell all the books in the city library, or all the artwork in the city museum, to pay down the debt.

Jul 6, 2012

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4 comments on Costliness.
Perhaps I should have titled that post “Grocery store gobbling.”

The commenter on the "Grocery Store Munching" post who is quoted in this update, emails me a link from which I have taken the following photograph.

(I'm being deliberately nondescriptive in my text to protect her from Googling that connects her to her job.)

Those Cheetos-stained fingers on the guy rifling through the grapes don't look so bad now, do they?

Jul 5, 2012

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Frederick Douglass and an inspiration: a rhetoric-based approach to high school history?

First, the Douglass.

Randy Barnett of the Volokh Conspiracy has posted the entire text of Frederick Douglass's speech of 160 years ago today, "What July 4th Means to the Negro."

Since this is a blog of religious practice among other things, I am excerpting (emphasis and some paragraph breaks mine) this part about the Fugitive Slave Act (which, among other things, required all states to enforce within their own boundaries the property "rights" of slaveholders):

I take this law to be one of the grossest infringements of Christian Liberty, and, if the churches and ministers of our country were nor stupidly blind, or most wickedly indifferent, they, too, would so regard it.

…But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters. Many of its most eloquent Divines, who stand as the very lights of the church, have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity.

For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines!

They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done! These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action nor bowels of compassion. They strip the love of God of its beauty and leave the throne of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form. It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs. It is not that “pure and undefiled religion” which is from above, and which is “first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and with out hypocrisy.” But a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man. All this we affirm to be true of the popular church, and the popular worship of our land and nation-a religion, a church, and a worship which, on the authority of inspired wisdom, we pronounce to be an abomination in the sight of God. In the language of Isaiah, the American church might be well addressed, “Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me: the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons, and your appointed feasts my soul hateth. They are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them; and when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea’ when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood; cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve the oppressed; judge for the fatherless; plead for the widow.”

…The sin of which it is guilty is one of omission as well as of commission. Albert Barnes but uttered what the common sense of every man at all observant of the actual state of the case will receive as truth, when he declared that “There is no power out of the church that could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it.”

Let the religious press, the pulpit, the Sunday School, the conference meeting, the great ecclesiastical, missionary, Bible and tract associations of the land array their immense powers against slavery, and slave-holding; and the whole system of crime and blood would be scattered to the winds, and that they do not do this involves them in the most awful responsibility of which the mind can conceive.

In prosecuting the anti-slavery enterprise, we have been asked to spare the church, to spare the ministry; but how, we ask, could such a thing be done? We are met on the threshold of our efforts for the redemption of the slave, by the church and ministry of the country, in battle arrayed against us; and we are compelled to fight or flee. From what quarter, I beg to know, has proceeded a fire so deadly upon our ranks, during the last two years, as from the Northern pulpit? As the champions of oppressors, the chosen men of American theology have appeared-men honored for their so-called piety, and their real learning… [G]reat religious lights of the land have, in utter denial of the authority of Him by whom they professed to be called to the ministry, deliberately taught us, against the example of the Hebrews, and against the remonstrance of the Apostles, that we ought to obey man’s law before the law of God.2

My spirit wearies of such blasphemy; and how such men can be supported, as the “standing types and representatives of Jesus Christ,” is a mystery which I leave others to penetrate. In speaking of the American church, however, let it be distinctly understood that I mean the great mass of the religious organizations of our land. There are exceptions, and I thank God that there are….

…[T]he anti-slavery movement in this country will cease to be an anti-church movement, when the church of this country shall assume a favorable instead of a hostile position towards that movement.

The whole speech is long, covers many more points than this one, and is a wonderful piece of argument.

+ + +

Now, the inspiration.

I am preparing to teach 19th-century American History again this fall with a crop of late-elementary school kids, and Frederick Douglass is one of the personages whose biography we'll highlight; this piece makes me wish it were easier to teach 19th-century American rhetoric directly to kids under eleven or so.

In my vision for homeschool high school, I have generally assumed that a "survey of American history" course would be a necessary evil — you know, pack the entire thing into one school year, anchored by a text that necessarily runs broad but not deep. I thought the best I could hope for would be to find a really well-written text (and that not necessarily a text made for schools).

I wonder now if, especially given the way I taught elementary school history, if I couldn't put together a sufficiently informative U. S. History course based primarily on pieces of rhetoric. I think you would still have to have the history spine to hold it together, provide a time-sequence, and give context, but perhaps I would not have to work so hard to find a wonderful "main text" if the intellect and imagination were fed by primary sources — not meta speech, but speeches. And pamphlets, and laws, and opinion-pieces, and court opinions, even advertisements.

I suspect I would have to cut back a bit on other literary analysis in order to fit it in — or conversely, I could make that the same year that "literature and writing" focuses on persuasion, analysis, satire, and the like — er, rhetoric, I suppose — so that History and Literature/Language Arts dovetail.

Thoughts?

Jul 5, 2012

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Animated scale of the universe.

Speaking of the cosmos, ChristyP pointed me to this very well done, shareable-with-your-geeky-kids interactive Flash animation, and commented, "I learned some new SI prefixes from this." Check it out.

Jul 4, 2012

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Metaphor collisions.
When a NYT journalist collides with a particle physics announcement, some of the resulting emissions are…. interesting.

We’ll let them have “Physics’ Holy Grail” on the grounds that it is a cliché, and thus within journalists’ area of expertise to pinpoint exactly the right spot where the use of a cliché is good word choice.

But then we go on to….
- Confirmation of the boson would be “a rendezvous with destiny” for physicists.
- The Higgs field is “an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses.”
- Particles “wade” through this molasses.
- “Without this Higgs field, as it is known, or something like it, physicists say all the elementary forms of matter would zoom around at the speed of light, flowing through our hands like moonlight. There would be neither atoms nor life.” (Or hands, presumably. Or a moon. Remarkably, none of the physicists who say this would agree to be identified for the article.)
- Proton collisions leave behind “primordial fireballs” and also “debris.”
- The evidence for the Higgs boson is “[l]ike Omar Sharif materializing from a distant blur into a man on horseback in the movie ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’”
- UPDATE! The NYT fact checkers are on the case! Since I wrote the above quote they have changed it to read “a man on a camel.” Good catch, fact checkers!
- Applause greets “data bumps rising like mountains from the sea.”
- Quantum theory “is the language of particle physicists.” Ah, so maybe we are dealing with idiomatic translation here. That would explain a lot.
- Encountering the “cosmic molasses” quote again, I went and googled the phrase. It turns out that the New York Times writer did not originate it. You will see it around in numerous places, such as this bit written by a British A-level student on a Q-and-A site. Come to think of it, the writing sounds familiar. But for all I know the term was originated by an actual physicist attempting to explain the actual Higgs field to laypersons. So I will give the writer a pass… except that he should have identified the source of the neologism.
- But he isn’t lacking in some creativity: the cosmic molasses is “normally invisible and, of course, odorless.” All right, all right, I think the writer is actually making a joke there.
Anyway, there are interesting results there, somewhere, under the flowery language.
Jul 4, 2012

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1 comment on Metaphor collisions.
A homeschool post I can really relate to.

"Five things I hate about homeschooling" at Simple Homeschool.

It's not just a laundry list of gripes. It's an honest look at parts of the job that aren't so fun, and an explanation of how she copes with them.

I can really relate to "Being with my children 24/7" and to "The overwhelming responsibility I feel for their education." I cope in some of the exact same ways.

Besides those two things, I would round out my own "5 things I hate" thusly:

3. I hate that I can never quite get the house clean. I don't mean decluttered, because I am pretty good at keeping the stuff at a manageable level; I mean grime and fingerprints and unmentionable smears and crud in the corners of things.

I cope with this by hiring a cleaning service once a month. Frankly I wish I could justify the expense of twice a month. We spend the evening beforehand thoroughly picking up the things on the floor and clearing the counters so that the cleaner can work quickly and we get our money's worth, and then we stay in one room to do school while the cleaner is here. This has given me so much peace of mind, because I know that however bad it looks now, in less than a month we will be sure to have it all looking great… for a few hours. And at least the grime won't build up more than a month's worth of layers.

4. Homeschooling reinforces one of my worst character flaws: I am a workaholic. I am one of those people who doesn't know how to relax, or rather, who has to be doing SOMETHING all the time. And the nature of homeschooling is that the work is literally never done. Even when the teaching is over for the day, you could always get a head start on dinner, or on planning the next week, month, or year, or on fleshing out your philosophy of higher education, or researching college requirements online, or re-organizing some corner of the schoolroom. Look at me: I am sitting down enjoying some leisure right now while the children unload the dishwasher, and what hobby am I engaged in? Blogging about homeschooling. Hmph.

I haven't learned to cope with this very well, except to go along with my husband when he says, "It's Sunday afternoon and we are going to do something fun whether you like it or not."

5. I get extremely tired of the sound of my own voice. I talk and talk and talk and talk to the children, because that is my job, since I teach them. There is so much I have to tell them today, and so much concentrating I have to do to work out what I am going to tell them tomorrow, that it's hard to take the time to listen to them instead.

No, I haven't figured out how to cope with the sound of my own voice. Maybe I should ask my husband how he does it.

Jul 3, 2012

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Beer for beginners, part III: hefeweizen, altbier, and American pale ale.

(part I, part II)

The first trip to the beer store after I made my plan to learn about versatile beers, I came back with two German weissbiers, one American alt-style beer, and one American pale ale.

I am pretty sure that I had never had a proper wheat beer before in my life. Around here in the Upper Midwest, one of the more popular summer beers is Leinenkugel's Honey Weiss. I have had that more than a few times, especially when I was in graduate school. I am afraid I don't remember much about the taste (you can follow the link to see what Beer Advocate says about it), but what I do remember is that people were always wedging lemon slices in the necks of the bottles, something that (however they do it in Wisconsin) doesn't really function as an advertisement for beery goodness.

To learn about weissbier, I dutifully purchased a six-pack of Paulaner Hefe-Weizen (described in The Brewmaster's Table as "perfectly correct, though perhaps a bit lacking in flair," and as having "a by-the-books corporate literalness"). I also brought home two or three bottles of Erdinger Weissbrau, which was the second weissbier listed in the book. I made a mildly spiced korma for dinner (weissbier being supposed to go well with Indian food) and presented Mark with the bottle of Paulaner.

He observed that it was unlike most of the beers that he drinks, in that it was not an India Pale Ale, and gave it a suspicious sort of "hmmmm."

"The book says it is supposed to be redolent of bananas and cloves," I explained eagerly.

"Bananas and cloves? In beer?"

"Well, yes," I said.

"Hmmmm."

We poured the bottle into two glasses (it's true: I am such a lightweight that we split twelve-ounce beers) and I oohed and aahed approvingly at the fluffy head and the pretty yellow-orange color.

I sniffed it and didn't smell any bananas or cloves — well, maybe a little bit. As for the flavor, it was a little bit surprising. I had been conditioned to expect all yellow-colored beers to be, well, like a pilsner, which was the only yellow sort of beer that generally made it into our house (mostly in the form of Pilsner Urquell or Summit Pils), or perhaps like a Corona. This was… different. Mostly because it had a flavor. "It's… nice," I ventured. "I do think it goes with the food."

Mark said, "It's okay. We can buy it again if you want. I don't really like wheat beers. They aren't hoppy enough."

I wrote expressively in my lab notebook, "Nice. Mark not impressed."

The next night that we had beer, I made salmon patties (weissbier being supposed to go well with fish). I opened the Erdinger and poured it again between two glasses. Sticking my nose into the top of my glass and inhaling, I was met with recognizable banana-and-clove-y odor. "It's true!" I said excitedly to Mark. "It really does smell like bananas and cloves!"

Mark did not think so, although in his defense he does not eat very many bananas or cloves, so perhaps he is desensitized to traces of their presence. Quite possibly I am susceptible to suggestion, in that if a beer-tasting book had told me I could expect dill pickles, raspberry sorbet, or mothballs, I might also have discovered their notes in the weissbier.

I liked it, I remember, but sadly I forgot to write down my impressions. Probably if I had written them down it would have said "Nice. Mark not impressed."

Anyway, I went back to my beerwatching list and checked off "hefeweizen." Over the next few days we finished the beers, and I liked them better and better as the week went by, enough to note that I would not mind keeping them around, perhaps to have when we made curry.

"What do you think? Could we keep weissbier around?"

"I'll buy whatever you tell me to buy."

+ + +

Just a few short words about the other two beers we tried in this round.

First: The American altbier was my introduction to a beer concept that had somehow escaped me: What an American beer calls itself is not necessarily accurately descriptive. I knew from reading THE BOOK (yes, The Brewmaster's Table is starting to acquire all caps in pronunciation around here) that there exists a class known as an "American Amber Ale" (aka "Red Ale") and there is a class known as an "American Amber Lager" (interestingly enough, aka "Red Lager").

You might think, therefore, that a beer called "Alaskan Amber" would, on account of Seward's folly, be one of these two. It is not. It is an Altbier. Why it is not called "Alaskan Altbier" is something to ask their marketing people, I suppose. Anyway, I liked it okay — not so much by itself, but with dinner (bean-ham soup) it was nice. I remember, however, enjoying a local alt quite a lot the last time I had it, and so if I start experimenting more with American Altbier, I will probably return to that one (Schmaltz's Alt, brewed by Schell's in New Ulm, MN).

Second: The definitive American Pale Ale is supposed to be Sierra Nevada's — not that it is the best, but that it is exemplary of the style. I am sure I have had it before without paying attention. Mark likes it, and I don't, because of what I am beginning to think of as the Essential Beer Dichotomy of our family: hoppy enough for him is too hoppy for me. Although as you will see there are some exceptions to this rule.

Next time: Porter and pilsner, but not at the same time.

Jul 3, 2012

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Commenter ChristyP makes an appearance on the blog.

Sometimes I wish we lived in the sort of town that would make our friends say, “Aren’t we lucky we know somebody there? Let’s go visit!” instead of “Yeesh, why would you want to live in a place where, five months out of the year, you have to breathe through your mouth so your nose hairs don’t freeze?”

Fortunately, on occasion an academic conference or some other annual meeting will occur in Minneapolis, and then people remember we live there, and together those two things make it worth coming, at least when the conference is in June and not January.

Jun 30, 2012

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“It’s better naked.”

Marc Barnes, the freakishly young writer of Bad Catholic, has launched his new project aimed at spreading the word about NFP (mainly Creighton) to young people — teens and college kids.

The site, 1flesh.org, is part “what you didn’t know about contraception and condoms” and part “there is a better way.”

Check it out here

Marc’s blog post introducing the project is here:

Birth control has done nothing to reduce the rate of unplanned pregnancies, the Pill increases breast cancer risk, lowers female sex drive, and screws up the environment. We’re talking about how artificial contraception is one of the most falsely advertised products out there. We’re talking about how condoms ruin sex, how they’ve been remarkably ineffective in the fight against HIV, how they’ve done nothing to stop our modern explosion of STDs. We’re talking about the Pill and heart disease, about how the health benefits of oral contraceptives aren’t health benefits at all. We’re talking about the Pill’s potential to be an abortifacent, the bad philosophy behind artificial contraception, how contraception has increased the abortion rate, is linked to an increase in divorce, and how — in general — it’s been making relationships difficult for some time now.

And of course, we’re spotlighting the fact that there’s a much better way, all while having an absurdly good time.

I think there is still some cleaning-up to do, and I haven’t had time to evaluate the evidence marshalled against birth control and condoms on the various arguments pages, but it looks like a really good start towards raising awareness among young people that, no, you don’t have to take hormones or encase yourself in latex, and the benefits you are supposed to get might not even be, you know, real, let alone worth the cost and trouble.

Check it out. What do you think?

Jun 29, 2012

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