Samantha Pierce

Joe at Evangelical Outpost had some interesting posts about the use of ritalin and ADD. Part one Taming Tom Sawyer: Ritalin as a Substitute for Character ; part two, Do You Have Adult ADD?: Ritalin as a Substitute for Character; and part three, Clarifications and Criticisms: Ritalin as a Substitute for Character. I'm of the inclination that ADD and ADHD are over diagnosed and ritalin is certainly over prescribed. Most of the symptoms of ADD/ADHD are also symptoms of autism spectrum disorders. Below is a quote from a description of the traits of one such disorder.

"Asperger Syndrome, which is often abbreviated AS, is a sociological disorder classified as a very unique and misunderstood syndrome in the autism spectrum, which defines all disorders and syndromes related to autism. In the past, people with this syndrome were thought of as having a schizoid personality, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive compulsive disorder, or autistic psychopathy, and it…

Here's a post about the supposed connection between a preservative in vaccines and autism spectrum disorders. It turns out that the 1998 study that had parents agonizing over whether childhood vaccinations gave their children autism was wrong. I wonder how much progress could have been made into understanding the causes of and best treatment for austism spectrum disorders if the scientific world hadn't been side tracked by this flawed research?

I feel obligated to mention that World Magazine blog seems to have instituted some standards for posting comments. I don't know what I expected when I sent World Magazine this email but this looks pretty good:
We yearn for a forum in which participants will be tough-minded in their analysis but respectful toward each other. Debate is a contact sport, so we don't discourage intellectual blocking and tackling within free and open encounters. But obscene, profane, or racist rhetoric - to cite only some obvious examples - shuts down debate. WORLD reserves the right to delete or edit any posting as its editors determine. I'm looking forward to getting back to the interesting discussions on their blog.

Well the kids are pretty much recovered from their colds. The grown-ups are lagging a bit in recovery but we're getting there. Now I have tons of housework to catch up on. The kids have pretty much had their way with the house for nearly a week. And so much has been going on in the blogosphere that just screams for my comments, not. Lots and lots of work to do in any case.

Ralph Nader's going to run for president after all. I'm sure you already knew that though. Parableman thinks it would be fun to get campaign signs for Bush and Nader and put them next to each other on our front lawn. What do you think?

Blogs4God round up of reaction to Mel Gibson's interview with Diane Sawyer on Monday. Personally, I was impressed that it wasn't just another hack job like this one. Gibson did a marvelous job of presenting an intelligent Christian world view. Certainly there were things that one could nit pick about, the "Everyone can get into the Kingdom of Heaven, it's just easier if you're a Christian" remark made me cringe. There are better ways to handle a question about if you believe non-Christians are going to hell.

Parableman is blogging about a blackface incident at his university. A student was caught trying to break into a rival sorority while wearing black face paint (presumably to reduce her chances of being caught). The student is now being investigated by the Team Against Bias. This is the height of stupidity. So are ROTC students racist because they wear dark camouflage paint when they practice their maneuvers? How many real incidents of racial bias will go unaddressed because time and energy are wasted on this kind of foolishness?

It's hard to laugh and hack up a lung at the same time but I managed to pull it off while I took this quizz. Am I David in a good way or a bad way?

Which Old Testament Character are you?
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I'm trying to get my nerve up to start doing our taxes this year. I have all of the paper work I'll need but I'm just not looking forward to it. I did our taxes for the first time last year and while it wasn't as bad as I had been led to believe it wasn't my cup of tea. Ever since that fateful tax encounter last year I've been stewing over a few things in my mind.

First, I felt really sorry for the poor souls who have to write the convoluted instructions that accompany the tax forms that get mailed to us regular people every year. Then I started day dreaming about how nice it would be to have a flat tax in this country. Just think about it for a minute. No more filling out numerous forms in duplicate, no complicated worksheets, no loop holes, no freaky formulas that give even math majors the creeps, no credits, deductions, exemptions, nothing. You set a minimum level of income and everyone who makes over that amount pays X% in income tax. See how easy t…

Eek! World Mag blog has gone and put me in their blogroll. What do I do now? What did I do to deserve that? Now there might be more people paying attention to me complaining, yikes!

Anyway, everyone in the household is sick. I'm even too sick to be a web surfing couch potato. I'll be blogging light or not at all until we start to recover.

This doesn't sound good.

"It has become clear that the guys in Washington are not good at spending money properly. I see all these ICDC and other Iraqis and US military driving around in $50,000 dollar SUVs and $70,000 cars. This really really irritates me. This is probably the reason why it is so hard to get new parts for broken equipment."

I hope you government types are paying attention.

Parableman has some interesting posts up on race. Go take a look.
"Normative Whiteness"
"Liberal views on race"
"White Voyeurism"

I wonder what people will have to say about this.

For whites only
Bake sales with race-based prices were just the beginning. Affirmative action protests are escalating. Now a student group at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island is offering a $250 scholarship for a white student who writes on "why you are proud of your white heritage" and submits a recent picture to "confirm whiteness."Joanne Jacobs

Here's the story she links to. Will people get it? Or will the red haze that seems to over come people whenever race based preferences are challenged rule the day?

Baldilocks has a good post about the homosexual marriage fiasco developing in Massachusetts and California, Beyond the Yuck Factor.
How will government-sanctioned homosexual marriage cause the downfall of American society as we know it? Who really knows if it will? Hey, it might not. Are you surprised reading that output from the keyboard of a professed Christian? I can’t see why you would be. From a Christian perspective, the mainstreaming of homosexuality into society(ies) isn’t exactly a big surpise.

Instapudit calls it "more crushing of dissent". I call it silly people fighting to hold onto a now useless relic of the civil rights era that is dragging black people down.

A cold day and a hot exchange
"The College Republicans are having a bake sale because they think it's funny," said Nicole Houston, President of the Black Student Alliance, at the UMC rally. "It's not...we need to make sure we don't have these racist cookies on our campus."

These kids are so invested in affirmative action that they can't fathom someone would seriously take issue with it. They must either be making a bad joke or racist. When did cookies become capable of being racist by the way? These kids can't even think straight about affirmative action!

Researchers Successfully Clone Human Embryo
WASHINGTON — Researchers in South Korea have become the first to successfully clone a human embryo, and then cull from it master stem cells that many doctors consider key to one day creating customized cures for diabetes, Parkinson's and other diseases.

This is not cloning to make babies, but to create medicine. This sucks. I feel compelled to mention that this is not cloning in the classical sense. This is really taking a perfectly good egg removing all of the genetic material inside of it and replacing it with genetic material from a desired source. The scientists then tinker with the resulting cells as they like. This is so wrong! Every time someone starts carrying on about how much good could come from embryonic stem cell research I look at my children. All of the great advances that people are hoping for will come at the expense of our children. The problem with human "cloning" as we know it is that it completely d…

My email to World Magazine concerning the troll troubles on their blog caught someone's attention. Now there's a raging debate going on there about what to do about the troll problem. Thanks to La Shawn Barber for letting me know what was up.

I understand the desire to let other Christians be a good influence on this Badonicus character but it should be clear by now that this guy is likely beyond the help of mere human beings. It's a poor reflection on the followers of Christ to have someone like this running amok on the blog of a well known Christian publication. I'll continue to keep my distance.

Someone emailed me some questions that a student is asking as part of a survey for a class project about Mel Gibson's "The Passion". Here are my answers. Feel free to add your own answers.

1. Have you actually seen a sneak preview of the film?
All I've seen are short clips from movie trailers.

2. a)First off, some general opinions about the movie - from what you've read/seen, do you think the film is necessary/accurate?
I think the film is as accurate as you can expect a movie to be. There's probably some artistic license taken but probably not to the point that anyone familiar with Christianity wouldn't be able to recognize the key elements of the story. Since when did films have to be necessary?

b) What do you think the motivation for making such a possibly controversial movie be?
I would hope that the motivation was to tell a story that has shaped so much of the world and display excellence in the craft of movie making.

3. Do you agree with many…

I've finally gotten around to adding some new blogs that I've been lurking on for a bit. Here they are in no particular order:

Vision Circle
Certus Veritas
American Black
Joanne Jacobs.com

Joanne Jacobs has a post about some highschool students who did some DNA testing and got some interesting results. The racial categories that they had been taught to identify themselves with didn't stand up to what was in their DNA. I love stories like this. They mess with the notions that people have about "us" and "them".

This is rather disturbing:

Philosophy Professor Punished for Expressing Religious BeliefsKIRTLAND, OH—Lakeland Community College near Cleveland, Ohio, has removed a professor of moral philosophy from his classes as punishment for refusing to hide his religious identity from students. The college threatened Dr. James Tuttle, who espouses traditional Catholic beliefs, with dismissal because he made statements on his syllabi and in class that disclosed his religious faith and how that shaped his personal philosophy.

"Asking a philosophy professor to divorce his deepest philosophic views from his teaching is both outrageous and absurd," said Greg Lukianoff, director of legal and public advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). "To say that a philosophy professor cannot discuss religious ideas is to render him incapable of meaningful discussion of some of the greatest minds in the history of his field. Feminists are not forced to veil their femi…