Dogged Blog

Oh I've Been So Bad!

Let me start by saying that I've come a long, long way on the issue of weight loss, from being an adolescent in the skinny 70s with a curvy (but healthy) body who was convinced she was fat, to a miserable and very unhealthy young woman with an eating disorder, to a fat woman who was healthy and active and liked herself and went ahead and lived her life, to deciding a little under two years ago that I wanted to lose weight. Since that day I've lost 118 pounds and am happy, enjoying my life, and feeling terrific.

However great I feel and however much peace of mind I have over my decision about my own weight, I still feel extremely uncomfortable, and even outraged, at much of what I see in weight loss support groups and on the weight loss email lists.

There is an epidemic of poisonous thought and language among women concerned about their weight. It ranges from coy declarations of "naughtiness" to calling eating off your chosen plan "cheating" or "illegal," all the way to women who say they stay on plan by looking at themselves "naked in the mirror and grabbing big handfuls of fat" on their thighs and screaming at themselves that they are "disgusting, weak, and revolting." Or advising the motivational strategy of  taking a photo of one's  cellulite or double chin and blowing it up and posting it on the refrigerator door.

I will tell you right now, no one, and I mean NO ONE, has ever made positive, permanent change in their life motivated by self-disgust and self-loathing. I can guarantee that hating your body and trying to use that hate to stop yourself from eating too much is a surefire way to trap yourself forever in self-destruction. If you're so disgusting and revolting, why should you or anyone else care about your health or happiness? This is not just a doomed strategy, it will make things worse. I promise it.

Nor do we become healthy, well-balanced adults by pretending to be "good" or "bad" little girls, offering up our behavior for a gold star or a black mark to other members of our support group or email list. I'm frankly so disgusted by this whole frame of "goodness" and "badness" about how we eat that it's all I can do not to crawl through the computer and scream at some of these women to GROW UP. I mean, being a naughty schoolgirl works for Wonkette pretty well, but I think the rest of us need to try something else.

What you eat is your decision, and if you have gone out and done something you had previously decided not to do, the only useful thing to do is figure out what happened and how to avoid it in the future. Giggling that you've been naughty is simply a way of making it not be your responsibility, because little girls aren't responsible for their actions. The thing is, are you a little girl or are you a woman?

I wish I could get inside the brains of these women and get them to really understand what it means when you create categories of food and call them "forbidden" and "illegal." When you say you've been "good" or "bad." We aren't children or prisoners. We are adults, responsible for our own lives.  Food is not bad, it's not forbidden, it's not illegal. If you want to eat until you explode and live on chips and salsa, NO ONE WILL STOP YOU.

And if you want to step out of that whole way of thinking, and enter into another way of looking at your body, your kitchen, your trips to the market, the very act of taking nourishment into your body.... of seeing eating as a gift and an act of love to yourself.... no one will stop you from doing that either.

Yoda really was right when he said "There is no try, there is only do." You either live how you want to live or you don't. Failing yourself isn't a reason to blow your brains out, but it's also nothing to giggle over.

And Wouldn't THAT Just Be Terrible?

From the very fine blogger Pam Spaulding at Pam's House Blend, news of Maine's attempt to outlaw firing people because they are gay:

"Don't kid yourselves. If enacted, this legislation will ... open the door to civil unions and same-sex marriage," Glyneta Thomson of Surry, a Christian and a social conservative, told the committee.

Yes, indeedy, heaven protect us from, you know, treating people fairly and equally under the law.

In the Land of Make-Believe

Since I began holistically raising my dogs and cats a little over 19 years ago, I've had absolutely no health problems with any of them. None of them has had to go to the vet for anything, and they have all lived to extreme old age - in fact, most of them have not died at all.  Their teeth are always white and shiny, they have no parasites or skin problems, they never have loose stool or gas, and don't even have any behavior problems. I accomplish all this just by giving them fresh raw foods, using classical homeopathy and organically grown herbs, not vaccinating them, and never using any form of western medicine on them. It's really great. It's absolute bliss. It's the promised land.

In fact, the only thing wrong with this is that it's all completely made up.

But you'd never know that if you were a newcomer to the world of holistic pet care.  Because I guarantee you, before you'd spent a lot of time on any number of the myriad of email lists and forums devoted to the subject of the natural care of dogs and cats, you'd be assured by several experts that if you just followed certain steps your dog or cat would be completely healthy, free of parasites, never need any form of surgery or preventative or therapeutic medicine, have no allergies, and be freed even from inherited genetic conditions.

This little bit of delusional thinking is something I had pretty damn well knocked out of me about 12 years ago when a litter of puppies I bred - second generation naturally reared pups - came down with parvo. Until that day I had come to feel (without really having examined or articulated the belief) that I lived inside a magical circle and nothing bad would ever happen to my dogs and cats because I had found The Secret of Perfect Health.

The idea that if you just feed your animals right and get out of Mama Nature's way your animals will never know serious disease is a seductive one. It's  also a big fat lie, for more reasons than one. But the first reason is probably the biggest: Mama Nature is a bitch. She doesn't give a damn if your dog lives or dies.

The idea that nature left to operate unhindered will always result in a positive outcome is  a form of magical thinking. Arguably,  over long periods of time and huge populations, it is true. But on the individual level it's completely false. For one particular animal or one particular species or one particular population or one particular region or one particular time frame, in other words, for THIS dog at THIS moment, literally anything can happen. The Big Picture is real, but you and your dog are just a little piece of the Big Picture, and what's true for a species overall is not necessarily true for every individual member of the species.

It's magical thinking because it gives us that thing we like best... the feeling that we can control everything, that we can outwit the fates and hold off catastrophe if we just do the right things (whatever they are). But whether that is feeding a certain diet, or giving or not giving a certain supplement, or chanting something in a field at midnight, or shoving virgins into volcanoes, it is all false. There are things we cannot control and no matter how "good" we are, the proverbial shit happens. Always has, always will.

Oh, I won't say my dogs and cats aren't, on average, living longer than expected. My raw-fed dogs do outlive their kibble-fed litter mates raised by other people. I am pretty tickled at the fact that nearly all my raw-fed animals have nice white teeth and clean breath. I have noticed improved disease and parasite resistance in my animals, and overall I think the results of my almost-two-decade experiment have demonstrated a net positive result for natural rearing.

But I've also had one dog die at a tragically young age from acute kidney failure of unknown cause,  had two dogs get heartworm, had half a litter of puppies get parvo, had a dog develop a genetic defect of the kidneys known as cystinuria, and experienced a variety of less serious health problems in my animals.

Juliette de Bairacli Levy, the grande dame of natural rearing, said that not until the third generation did she see her dogs become disease resistant, and not until the fifth did they know what she called "unbroken good health." The Pottenger cat studies' conclusions and Dr. Richard Pitcairn's observations have also been that it takes between three and five generations of natural rearing to reach those levels of health. So even if we accept the premise that holistic husbandry will make our animals perfectly healthy, it is not something that is accomplished in a single dog or cat's lifetime, but the work of generations of careful breeding and rearing.

Furthermore, while I do believe we can affect many aspects of our dogs' health with husbandry, our dogs are part of the world. They exist inside a complex environment, much of which we cannot control. Nor can we remove them from the environment; even animals in the remote Arctic have high levels of digoxin in their body fat.  Some things, such as disease resistance, are, in my experience, highly influenceable by diet and lifestyle. This doesn't mean well-fed dogs never get sick. No animal is at peak health every single moment of his life. It's impossible. Disease resistance is something that will ebb and flow for every individual, and even the strongest, best-fed, most dazzlingly healthy animal can succumb to something in a moment of weakness, fatigue, or sleep deprivation. We're only fooling ourselves if we believe otherwise - but worse, we're fooling others if we assure them that they can protect their animals from every harm by diet and lifestyle.

Don't get me wrong.  I want to have total control over the universe as much as the next person. But over the years I've gotten kind of fond of truth and reason, so me and my dogs are just going to keep hanging out here in the reality-based community.

And Your Little Dog, Too: Ethics Always Matter

Gina Spadafori blogged recently about a DVM Magazine article about the new Veterinary News Network, wondering about the ethical implications  of  pharmaceutical company sponsorship of the network. This comment really struck me:

I fully expect that this issue will not seem important to many because it's just "pet news," mere fluff on the journalistic scale of importance.

I wish she were wrong (although I know she isn't). Because even though on the face of it this is about pets, it isn't. It's about ethics. And the ethical quagmire journalism is caught in right now extends from the New York Times to CNN to Fox News to blogs to nationally syndicated columnists to local newspapers to the pages of pet magazines to health reporting to the wall-to-wall consumer programming on the home, garden, and pet cable networks. In other words, it's everywhere and it's everything.

Take for example, back during the halcyon days of the dot com boom, when the Pets.com sock puppet was deemed of such overwhelming importance that it was a guest on a number of TV news programs including Nightline:

Supposedly the wacky dog had tickled America's funnybone enough to rate the attention of reputedly legitimate journalist Diane Sawyer, in spite of the dot.com's looming failure. But, as Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) has noted, "given their evident assessment of pets.com as a significant story, ABC devoted virtually no coverage to the company's November demise."

That same article continues:

Pre-programmed "news" has become a staple of corporations and their pr agencies, often in the form of the video news releases (VNRs), or tapes of favorable "human interest" coverage masquerading as independent reporting.

This goes back to my blog on the death of genuine reporting - but I'm not exactly a voice crying in the wilderness on this issue. You'll hear variations on this theme everywhere, from the recent book Bad News by CBS News senior European correspondent Tom Fenton to the lament of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Laurie Garrett when she recently resigned from Newsday:

(T)he sad arc of greed has finally hit bottom. The leaders of Times Mirror and Tribune have proven to be mirrors of a general trend in the media world: They serve their stockholders first, Wall St. second and somewhere far down the list comes service to newspaper readerships.

Mundane cases like the sock puppet being treated like a news figure and columnists taking money to represent a government position and not disclosing it, and everything that falls in between,  are  "symptomatic of a broader obsession by corporations, not to simply make and market decent stuff, but to control perceptive reality."  The only cure for this is clear and unambiguous disclosure of all potential conflicts of interest, and the refusal of all publishers, editors, and producers to use "prepackaged news" unless all such conflicts are so disclosed.

What we as consumers of media do with that information is up to us, but without that information, we're only getting half the story. We have to demand better from our news providers, whether they are telling us about weapons of mass destruction or a new veterinary drug. The ethical principles don't change just because the subject matter does.

More Media Good Guys

There is no real reason for me to be making an upbeat post about the media, since the Terri Schiavo feeding frenzy has made me sicker than anything I've previously seen.  The only ones making me sicker, in fact, are the legislators in Washington, nearly all of whom appear to have completely lost their minds.

But Democracy for America thinks there are some outposts of light in the media wilderness, so I'm going to play along. In addition to my personal nomination of Mark Morford as one of the "good guys," (actually, I believe I said he was a god), Blog for America  has nominated their 9 heroes of journalism today. Check it out and nominate your own heroes here.

Me, I'm crawling back into bed and spending the day watching Animal Planet. There's only so much a girl can take.

Drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve

It's not like me to start a discussion and then walk away while it rages on without me. But I did just that the other day when a lively thread started in the comments section on my post about the Senate vote to permit drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve.

I posted the news link without much by way of comment, saying I was paralyzed by depression. What depressed me, exactly? To start with, I hated seeing the Democrats take yet another blow and Bush get another notch in his belt.

And yes, I won't apologize that I don't like seeing a pristine area, a wildlife reserve, a national treasure, be developed. By anyone. For anything. Does anyone really like seeing that? I don't think so. I'm quite sure even the oil companies would much rather get their money from a magical pot at the end of the rainbow than have to go drill in the Reserve for it.

Which brings me to my own views on the actual issue of drilling in the Reserve.

My father is a civil engineer who was the earthquake structural analyst on most of the high-profile energy-related projects in the US and many abroad as well, including the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, offshore drilling platforms, and most US, Japanese, and western European nuclear power plants. I grew up with a renegade attitude toward energy issues for a good little progressive girl. I believed, with a child's belief in her father, that technology could make these endeavors safe. (Operative word is "could," because when I was a little girl and quizzed him on Diablo Canyon Nuclear Reactor's ability to withstand an earthquake of a certain magnitude, his response was "If they did what I told them to do, it will.")

So do I think that we COULD drill in the Reserve safely? Yes, I do believe we COULD. The question is - will we? And would it be worth it?

As the Trans-Alaska Pipeline taught us, building in the tundra isn't easy or cheap. The tundra is permanently frozen soil, soil that never thaws. Such soils are extremely fragile. The heat from the oil in the pipeline itself thawed the ground, and caused the pipeline to collapse. They had to go in afterward and put refrigerator coils into the foundation to keep the ground frozen. Think about the level of engineering, of expense, of multi-disciplinary cooperation, research, design, and execution that goes into an endeavor like this in an area with such enormous instability.

Speaking of instability, remember that Alaska is one of the earth's major earthquake centers.

Of course, the free market argument might be that it's not in the oil companies' interests to have another Exxon Valdez-sized environmental disaster, and such disasters are much cheaper to prevent than to clean up. Is there any real doubt that the eventual price tag of an environmental disaster in the Reserve would far exceed the capital value of the entire project? The lawsuits and cleanup costs would go on forever and could destroy any company who touched it. Which might well be why so many oil companies are saying "Thanks, but no thanks" to drilling in the Reserve. And it might mean that no oil company who did take this on would want to do anything but a truly stellar job of design and implementation.

So let's imagine or even assume that there's no real obstacle beyond willingness to foot the bill to getting the oil and natural gas out of the Reserve safely. Let's pretend, or agree, that with appropriate expert oversight,  technology can solve the problems. Let's set aside for the moment the problem that our current administration would reframe "appropriate  expert oversight" as "unwarranted government intrusion in business." My next question is, is it worth it?

The only thing that drilling in the Reserve will accomplish is to stave off the inevitable day when the free market will determine that oil is so expensive that it's become  cost-effective to develop alternative energy sources. Right now, even with oil at $56 a barrel, even with China competing with us for Venezuelan oil for the first time, even with the absolute knowledge that the world supply of oil is not sufficient for our current rate of consumption to continue indefinitely, our petroleum-based economy is cheaper than alternative energy.

Ramping up to actual oil production in the Reserve will take something along the lines of 5 to 10 years. Let's say oil will be, oh, $70 or $80 a barrel then.  (And that's a conservative guess, trust me.) What then? What will we have accomplished, exactly? Is there a Saudi Arabia-sized oil field in the Reserve?  No, there isn't. There's no long term solution to our energy problems in Alaska. Sure, it's our oil. We control it. It's certainly more attractive for that reason than foreign oil could ever be. But ultimately, it's not much. It's not going to fix things or knock that $80 a barrel price tag down in any meaningful way or for any meaningful period of time. All it buys is time.

Time that we can keep living the way we're living now, without the feet of science and industry being held to the fire to create those alternative energy sources and applications.

Now, Americans tend to like that. We have that same trusting faith in technology that I had in my father when I was a little girl. In ten years, we think, anything could happen. We'll just keep going the way we're going for a few more years, and we'll figure something out before it really matters. Before it hurts.

Well, guess what? You think our current gas prices are high? Be prepared because they're going higher. Much higher. Long before we see a drop of oil from the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve, we're going to find our childlike faith sorely tested.  And will those 5 or 10 years be  years of science and industry joining us with their heads in the sand, or will they get to the finish line before us, our best and brightest, coming up with alternative energy solutions before they "have to"?

Or will they be too busy in Alaska designing systems to stave off another Exxon Valdez?

And Then There are the Good Guys

Media, Head SO Not Up Butt Division: Mark Morford. He's a god. Really. This is his commentary on the recent California court decision on marriage equality in the SF Chronicle:

But this is a time of small hopes and semi-desperate clinging. In a sea of nasty GOP agendas and violent warmongering and quasi-religious nutjobs manning the guns, you grab your dream fragments where you can and you ride them like golden bullets to the end of their trajectories and pray you end up somewhere new, and positive, and maybe even earth-shaking -- or, in this case, soaked in that most rare and disrespected and heartbroken of American values: true love. Is it possible? Let's hope.

Read it all here. Smile. Subscribe.

Frank Luntz and the Mean Ol' Bloggers

Well, the mainstream media ignored the playbook and the blog analysis of the playbook, but they're giving some ink to Frank Luntz's response to the analysis. Seems Frank didn't like bloggers calling him out on his Orwellian prescription for shaping American opinions and went off on the subject in the LA Times. From Think Progress:

Luntz defends himself against the bullies in the blogosphere who questioned his quest “to use words to brighten a debate that has been darkened.” Frank, we really didn’t want to have to do this but….

Luntz asks, "What words do people understand? What’s the clear, common-sense way to say what you mean? And how can politicians best educate and express their ideas?" When it comes to the deficit, Luntz gives his simple answer - exploit a tragedy - in his playbook: "September 11 changed everything. So start with 9/11….Without the context of 9/11, you will be blamed for the deficit….The trick then is to contextualize the deficit inside of 9/11."

If this gets the media to remove its uppermost parts from its lowermost body cavities, I'm all for it. You whine all you want, Frank. Did we hit a nerve?

 

The Fresh Taste of Fake News!

I like to laugh while my heart is breaking, which is why I watch the Daily Show and read  Molly Ivins:

No joke, this is seriously creepy: The U.S. government is in the covert propaganda business, and it's not aiming this stuff at potential terrorists, it's aiming it right square at your forehead....

You have probably wondered, "This is news?" when you see a "report" along the lines of: "This is Joe Doaks reporting from the World Headache Remedy Expo on a terrific new advance in headache cures that has everyone here really excited. The product that has the whole Expo buzzing is Megaconglomerate's new remedy No Brain, No Pain. It completely wipes out your headache by wiping out your entire brain, so that you become so stupid you believe this segment is actual news." Or words to that effect.

Read more here.

Journalism 101

I think it's impossible for anyone to imagine the lack of drive or determination that's being encouraged and rewarded in journalism these days, and the extent to which editors and reporters fall, like a starving man on food, on "prepackaged news" that seems, by its language and presentation, to be objective and reasonable.

I went to journalism school, but I got out of newspaper reporting  more than a decade ago, and that was part of the reason why. I was the environmental section editor for a very liberal newspaper, writing a story on an important local land use issue. I was having trouble setting up an interview with one of the main developers involved, and while I was nowhere near my deadline, my editor was pressing me to finish the piece. I explained I hadn't written it yet as I hadn't interviewed this guy, and he said, "Can't you just write the story and plug the quotes in later?"

How on earth, I thought, could I write the story without having done the frigging interview? What if the guy I interviewed had something to say that changed the course of the investigation?

I saw this over and over and over, and other than one brief stint working with a truly fantastic editor at a small, now defunct, newspaper (where not coincidentally I did my best work), found that many  editors absolutely did not encourage or reward genuine investigative reporting. It was too messy, too likely to insult advertisers, too unpredictable, too unruly.

The reason that the right wing noise machine gets away with this crap is that no effective counter-machine  is feeding them stories from a progressive point of view. No one is relentlessly  framing and reframing these stories until the reporters start regurgitating them.  It's the phenomenon that David Brock wrote about, that "our side" tends to be balanced, reluctant to advocate aggressively, and cherishes the appearance of objectivity. It results in us looking weak and our message getting drowned out.

It is also the  problem that linguist George Lakoff talks about, that we have to be assertive and articulate and effective with our message, without being manipulative and conniving and corrupt. We have to be real, honest, and truthful, but still pound our message home. And frankly, most progressives are not comfortable doing that. Yet.

Just a view from my little bit of the kaleidoscope. I mean, what do I know... I mostly just write about dogs now.