Tag Archives: junk-science

Indifference to the Earth, Our Home

Posted on April 24, 2018 at 5:48 am by John Flannery |

Open field (photo by John P. Flannery)

There is this ridiculous notion that the earth is some magical waste dump that can absorb every harmful thing we do.

Some believe we can spew forth every kind of toxic garbage into the air, water, and earth and, magically and somehow it’s all good.

This happy time worldview is a direct result of a rampant childlike indifference to preserving and protecting our natural resources, and our own lives.

The “need for greed,” to get top dollar, that infects our energy industry “leaders” makes them distort the facts of global warming in the junk science they publish.

Our leaders take the corporate contributions of fossil fuel predators and vote their way, insisting that we not trust our senses that that’s what they are doing, even as they do it at the cost of our health and safety and survival. In the bargain, they stall cleaner, safer renewable energy sources.

Remember those tobacco execs swearing before Congress that they weren’t spiking cigarettes with nicotine, and that no one’s health was at risk. Continue reading →

Pain in America – and our vets

Posted on March 9, 2015 at 6:45 pm by John Flannery |

There’s pain in America — and the government is making it worse.

Our veterans, the men and women who risked their lives in mid-East theaters of war, came home, many of them broken, in need of care, with missing limbs and post traumatic stress, prompting unrelenting pain.

Our government is withholding relief from that pain, forcing them off pain medicine, the opioids that allowed these men and women to function.

I was a federal prosecutor in New York in the war against drugs in the 1970s, along with then AUSA Rudy Giuliani, and we fought the good fight against drugs.

We did, however, chase organized crime drug dealers who were importing hundreds of kilos of heroin that we called the “white death.”

Now the government, state and federal, is chasing pain patients including vets and their doctors for prescribing pain medication.

It’s a lot safer to break down the door of a clinic Rambo-style and to arrest sedentary middle-aged doctors, than those who import, manufacture, and distribute illegal drugs on our streets.

The government should prosecute those who are dealing drugs instead of doctors who are healing patients.

The DEA is insisting that Vets return to a doctor’s office monthly for their “scripts.” They know the vets can’t get VA appointments to get the scripts. They know the VA’s health care system needs a pace-maker. The back logs for VA care are horrific. Vets have died waiting for care. Continue reading →

It’s not perfect but it’s the best judicial system in the world? Really?

Posted on February 27, 2014 at 6:38 am by John Flannery |

When we think of the Salem witch trials or Sacco and Vanzetti, our impulse is to discount that anything like that could ever happen now.

Yet it does.

We have all sorts of things going wrong in our judicial “system.”

We have too many cases because “stats” drive funding rather than policy driving order and peace.

The more sensational the case, the more winning the case trumps doing justice.

The more sensational the case, the more likely that the accused doesn’t have the resources to fight back.

We flood our courts with “drug” cases but not like the ones I handled as a federal prosecutor in New York against large heroin suppliers. Continue reading →

A visit to Patrick Henry College

Posted on January 7, 2013 at 11:16 pm by Epluribusunum |

Patrick Henry College hosts an ongoing “newsmakers interview” series, and the guest Friday afternoon is a woman named Rosaria Butterfield, a resident of Purcellville. Dr. Butterfield “will discuss her new book, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, detailing her conversion to Christianity and her former lesbian lifestyle before marrying a pastor.”

This is the bio offered by World Magazine:

When Rosaria Butterfield was 28 she declared herself a lesbian. Her Ph.D. in English Literature and Cultural Studies led to a tenured position at Syracuse University, where she advanced a leftist agenda. Then God used her desire to write a book on the religious right, and the friendship of a biblically orthodox pastor, to draw her to Christ. She became a voracious Bible reader and gradually saw that her new beliefs required her to upend her former life. It’s a fascinating story—although she interrupts the narrative several times to insert speech text. Her book also shows the power of love and hospitality to soften hearts: Butterfield is now married to a pastor and the mother of four children by adoption.

I have not had a chance to read the book. However, I can say knowing nothing else about it that this is someone’s personal journey, which she cared enough about to put into words for others to read. Although it sounds like another “ex-gay” narrative, and although there is a robust history of “ex-gay” spokespeople being exploited by the anti-gay industry and later renouncing (or quietly abandoning) their “conversion” experience, I think we make a mistake when we fail to seriously listen to a person’s story, and instead act as if we know how it will, or should, end up. However this woman’s story ultimately unfolds, it is hers, and it’s no more kind to insist that her life will conform to that narrative than it is for those promoting an anti-gay agenda to demand that we “change” to suit their narrative.

Continue reading →