Happy Passover, 2012

From the aish.com website April 4, 2012
To study the Passover story in depth is to recognize that the most difficult task Moses had to perform was not to get the Jews out of Egypt, but to get Egypt out of the Jews. They had become so habituated to their status as slaves, they lost all hope that they could ever improve their lot.

Without hope they would have been lost.
The true miracle of Passover and its relevance for the ages is the message that with God’s help, no difficulty is insurmountable. A tyrant like Pharaoh could be overthrown. A nation as powerful as Egypt could be defeated. Slaves could become freemen. The oppressed could break the shackles of their captivity. Anything is possible, if only we dare to dream the impossible dream.
Passover is celebrated this week by Jews and Christians everywhere. Eating the Seder and reading the Haggadah, will be instrumental in helping individuals "experience" their own exodus from slavery.
"Getting Egypt out of the Jews" is so intimate and complicated since their accommodation to their status as slaves had become accepted as their lot.
And, today, we examine the slaveries that ensnare each of us...the slavery of fixed expectations, binding our minds and our hearts and especially our imaginations to those models and metaphors and obligations that structure our days, our weeks months and years. And if we start to think of different expectations, we immediately hear an inner voice expressing disdain, "Just who do you think you are that you can contemplate being so different from those of us in your family, or those of us in your neighbourhood, or those of us in your town?" So we retreat into our habits and the expectations that others have of us, wondering if we are enacting our acquiescence in Egypt.
We also examine the slavery of fixed ways of relating: having been hurt, wounded and betrayed in our yesterdays, we invoke those wounds as our witness to that pain, declaring, "Never again!" and withdraw into our cocoon, becoming slaves to our very own history, not the mere memory but the parking in that hurt, and in those wounds and in those pictures as we become spectators of some movie we see playing on the screens of the roads we drive, the aisles in the boxstores we walk, and even  the books that we read.
We examine our slavery to fixed ways of conversing with others, deferential, diplomatic, a little sceptical and often more than a little aloof, because that is the mask that has served for decades to protect us from becoming known and identified and thereby elbowed in the corners where we might find our ideas and beliefs and attitudes colliding with those of the other....
And we examine our slavery to fixed gaze on our accomplishments, as if we had become what we have accomplished, when those 'moments' were mere moments, deserving reflection, gratitude and a small measure of confidence, but really are there to demonstrate that because we have been given much blessing, we are, more importantly, still capable of making a substantial contribution to those whose lives would and could be enriched by our participation. And yet, we tell our selves that we do not know how to ask, "How can I help?" when, in past moments, we hardly took the time to ask, the need was so evident and so crying out, it demanded our compassion, our time and our presence.
And we find that our Egypt and our Pharoah's have changed; we have substituted originals for faux Pharoah's, in our passive resignation, flipped often into passive aggression because we resent our putting limits on the power of God, in order to keep us safe, when, if we were truly honest, we would acknowledge that we are not safer because we try to "fence" God into our comfort zone; we are merely deluding ourselves and those we know and those who know us.
Yet we are never deluding God!
In all the moments of the first exodus, there was no road map and there was no guarantee and there was no assurance that the Jews would make it anywhere, with Moses as their guide and leader.
But it was God who was their real leader, and that makes all the difference.
Even today, that is the only difference that matters...at Passover, or at any other time when we take time to reflect on our incarnation of hope and love, in our own lives, and always with God.
May Moses and God lead us out of our many seductive Egypt's, out of the clutches of our self-created Pharoah's, and into a land of promise, with God, whose capacity for both love and courage are limitless, if only we can and will tap into them, as our expression of love and gratitude.
Happy Passover, 2012

Columnist strip searches U.S. Supreme Court: leaves it naked as a political hack

By Maureen Dowd, New York Times, April 3, 2012:
How dare President Obama brush back the Supreme Court like that?
Has this former constitutional law instructor no respect for our venerable system of checks and balances?
Nah. And why should he?
This court, cosseted behind white marble pillars, out of reach of TV, accountable to no one once they give the last word, is well on its way to becoming one of the most divisive in modern American history.
It has squandered even the semi-illusion that it is the unbiased, honest guardian of the Constitution. It is run by hacks dressed up in black robes.
All the fancy diplomas of the conservative majority cannot disguise the fact that its reasoning on the most important decisions affecting Americans seems shaped more by a political handbook than a legal brief.
President Obama never should have waded into the health care thicket back when the economy was teetering. He should have listened to David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel and not Michelle.
His failure from the start to sell his plan or even explain it is bizarre and self-destructive. And certainly he needs a more persuasive solicitor general.
Still, it was stunning to hear Antonin Scalia talking like a Senate whip during oral arguments last week on the constitutionality of the health care law. He mused on how hard it would be to get 60 votes to repeal parts of the act, explaining why the court may just throw out the whole thing. And, sounding like a campaign’s oppo-research guy, he batted around politically charged terms like “Cornhusker Kickback,” referring to a sweetheart deal that isn’t even in the law.
If he’s so brilliant, why is he drawing a risible parallel between buying health care and buying broccoli?
The justices want to be above it all, beyond reproach or criticism. But why should they be?
In 2000, the Republican majority put aside its professed disdain of judicial activism and helped to purloin the election for W., who went on to heedlessly invade Iraq and callously ignore Katrina.
As Anthony Lewis wrote in The Times back then, “Deciding a case of this magnitude with such disregard for reason invites people to treat the court’s aura of reason as an illusion.”
The 2010 House takeover by Republicans and the G.O.P. presidential primary have shown what a fiasco the Citizens United decision is, with self-interested sugar daddies and wealthy cronies overwhelming the democratic process.
On Monday, the court astoundingly ruled — 5 Republican appointees to 4 Democratic appointees — to give police carte blanche on strip-searches, even for minor offenses such as driving without a license or violating a leash law. Justice Stephen Breyer’s warning that wholesale strip-searches were “a serious affront to human dignity and to individual privacy” fell on deaf ears. So much for the conservatives’ obsession with “liberty.”
The Supreme Court mirrors the setup on Fox News: There are liberals who make arguments, but they are weak foils, relegated to the background and trying to get in a few words before the commercials.
Just as in the Senate’s shameful Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, the liberals on the court focus on process and the conservatives focus on results. John Roberts Jr.’s benign beige facade is deceiving; he’s a crimson partisan, simply more cloaked than the ideologically rigid and often venomous Scalia.
Just as Scalia voted to bypass that little thing called democracy and crown W. president, so he expressed ennui at the idea that, even if parts of the health care law are struck down, some provisions could be saved: “You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages?” he asked, adding: “Is this not totally unrealistic?”
Inexplicably mute 20 years after he lied his way onto the court, Clarence Thomas didn’t ask a single question during oral arguments for one of the biggest cases in the court’s history.
When the Supreme Court building across from the Capitol opened in 1935, the architect, Cass Gilbert, played up the pomp, wanting to reflect the court’s role as the national ideal of justice.
With conservatives on that court trying to block F.D.R., and with Roosevelt prepared to pack the court, the New Yorker columnist Howard Brubaker noted that the new citadel had “fine big windows to throw the New Deal out of.”
Now conservative justices may throw Obama’s hard-won law out of those fine big windows. They’ve already been playing Twister, turning precedents into pretzels to achieve their political objective. In 2005, Scalia was endorsing a broad interpretation of the commerce clause and the necessary and proper clause, the clauses now coming under scrutiny from the majority, including the swing vote, Justice Anthony Kennedy. (Could the dream of expanded health care die at the hands of a Kennedy?)
Scalia, Roberts, Thomas and the insufferable Samuel Alito were nurtured in the conservative Federalist Society, which asserts that “it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.”
But it isn’t conservative to overturn a major law passed by Congress in the middle of an election. The majority’s political motives are as naked as a strip-search.

NYTimes Editorial: Obama calls extremism and dishonesty by name

Editorial, New York Times, April 3, 2012
Calling Radicalism by Its Name

President Obama’s fruitless three-year search for compromise with the Republicans ended in a thunderclap of a speech on Tuesday, as he denounced the party and its presidential candidates for cruelty and extremism. He accused his opponents of imposing on the country a “radical vision” that “is antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity.”
Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential front-runner, has embraced a House budget plan that is little more than “thinly veiled social Darwinism,” the president said, a “Trojan horse” disguised as deficit reduction that would hurt middle- and lower-income Americans.
“By gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last — education and training, research and development, our infrastructure — it is a prescription for decline,” he said, speaking to a group of Associated Press editors and reporters in Washington.
Mr. Obama has, in recent months, urged Republicans to put aside their destructive agenda. But, in this speech, he finally conceded that the party has demonstrated no interest in the values of compromise and realism. Even Ronald Reagan, who raised taxes in multiple budget deals, “could not get through a Republican primary today,” Mr. Obama said. While Democrats have repeatedly shown a willingness to cut entitlements and have agreed to trillions in domestic spending cuts, he said, Republicans won’t agree to any tax increases and, in fact, want to shower the rich with even more tax cuts.
The speech was the first time that Mr. Obama linked Mr. Romney, by name, to his party’s dishonest budget and discredited trickle-down policies. As Mr. Obama pointed out, Mr. Romney described as “marvelous” a budget that would drastically cut student financial aid, medical research, Head Start classrooms and environmental protections. Mr. Obama further ridiculed the budget’s deficit-cutting goal as “laughable” because it refuses to acknowledge the need for new revenues.
The speech was immediately attacked by the House speaker, John Boehner, for failing to deal with the debt crisis, but Mr. Obama pointed out how hollow that charge has become. “That argument might have a shred of credibility were it not for their proposal to also spend $4.6 trillion over the next decade on lower tax rates,” he said. The math is, in fact, quite simple: cutting both taxes and the deficit can mean only more sacrifice from the middle class and the poor, ending the promise of Medicare and Medicaid. Over the long term, the deficit can be brought down through a combination of cuts and new revenues; doing so immediately, as Mr. Romney and his party want to do, would reverse the fragile recovery.
Mr. Obama provided a powerful signal on Tuesday that he intends to make this election about the Republican Party’s failure to confront, what he called, “the defining issue of our time”: restoring a sense of economic security while giving everyone a fair shot, rather than enabling only a shrinking number of people to do exceedingly well. His remarks promise a tough-minded campaign that will call extremism and dishonesty by name.

F-35 purchase deferred or aborted?

By Peter Jones and Philip Lagasse, Globe and Mail, April 3, 2012
Despite the hype, however, revelations that the aircraft will be seriously over budget and may not yet meet all of the minimum requirements are not, in themselves, particularly newsworthy. Few defence procurements come in on-budget or meet all requirements out of the box. This is not news, although the government’s refusal to acknowledge these realities until forced to do so is troubling.

No, the real story is that the highly unusual (to put it kindly) F-35 selection process has threatened to put the Royal Canadian Air Force in a bind. By side-stepping a mandated competition between different aircraft types two years ago, and announcing that the F-35 was the only acceptable plane, the government implied that anything short of a fifth-generation fighter is unsatisfactory.
Simply put, the Conservatives oversold the benefits and the necessity of the F-35 and never allowed a proper assessment of the alternatives. We were told that it was the only aircraft capable of meeting the RCAF’s requirements, that no other plane was even worth considering in a proper competition. (highlighting our's)
The Defence Department now faces a daunting task. The F-35 procurement is heading toward a possibly fatal combination of relentlessly rising per-unit costs (how many aircraft will we actually be able to afford?), questions about whether other countries in the F-35 consortium will go ahead, and doubts about the plane’s actual performance. Yet, the government has been adamant that this is the only fighter for Canada. Making the case for any other aircraft to replace the CF-18 will be difficult.
Indeed, therein lies the government’s challenge. If the F-35 purchase does not go ahead now, how does the Defence Department justify spending billions on another aircraft – all of which were, until recently, deemed unacceptable? If a fourth-generation aircraft was incapable of meeting Canada’s defence needs before, why should one be now? Simply saying that the budget situation has changed and that we are now going to buy a cheaper plane may make sense in economic terms, but it flies in the face of years of Conservative declarations that Canada will be left woefully unprepared to protect its sovereignty and fight alongside allies overseas.
To this observer, the phrase "oversold the benefits and the necessity of the F-35"...depicts a core "competency" of this government, ironic as that may be in the light of the train-wreck that is the truth.
They have "oversold the benefits and the necessity of their majority" from the beginning...and we are left, both in the case of the F-35, and in the performance of the government itself, with snake-oil salesmen (and certainly the over-zealous sales pitches have come mostly from male members of the government).
This quality of the government reminds one of the rancher/soldier who meets a young woman while in service, and seduces her on the promise that he has hundreds of acres of ranch where they will eventually live, should she choose him as her husband, only to find that those acres are tied into an estate held by a half-dozen siblings, to which he personally has no hope of access.
Over-selling is another form of deception. It has occurred in the process of mis-informing parliament about the truth of both the purchase price and the repair costs. It has occurred by this government's refusal to come clean on the withdrawal of other potential purchasers, and therefore the rising costs per plane, especially in the light of the information that the U.S. informed the government of the rising costs as early as 2010, and the government continued to stonewall.
It is now very hard to unspeak the words that have already flowed from the government ministers, and reverse public lack of confidence into confidence, on this file, by moving the file to Public Works, under the "oversight" of a new F-35 Secretariat...So much for a "new" approach to gaining public confidence on this purchase.

Quest University: a unique venture into change in post-secondary education in Canada

By Erin Millar, Globe and Mail, March 27, 2012
They gather around tables in groups of four or five, preparing to bid on land that will be auctioned off tomorrow. Some analyze complicated geological maps and manipulate models made of modelling clay, theorizing about ground water patterns. Others sketch on graph paper and scrutinize rock samples in an effort to identify the most promising spots for exploratory oil drilling.

This isn't a room full of oil executives, but an undergraduate class in geology. These first-year students at Quest University, an unusual undergraduate-focused school in Squamish B.C., are learning more than the difference between a quartz and a feldspar; they are also studying how the fundamentals of geology are used in the real world and the political processes involved in exploiting resources.

The classes here are anything but typical. A class on volcanoes includes a ten-day field trip to Hawaii. An international relations class is taught by the Canadian ambassador to Mozambique. Instead of taking five classes during a standard semester, they study only one at a time, intensively, for 3-1/2 weeks in a block system. “It's the opposite of multitasking,” explains Quest president Dr. David J. Helfand.
The Quest model is not about graduating job-ready students with specific skill sets. Rather, the school encourages students to intellectually wander and explore, hoping they come out at the end with a broad understanding of many topics and creative abilities they can apply in many possible careers. According to Dr. Helfand, this unorthodox style of undergrad learning is a valuable solution to a very Canadian mystery. Although Canada ranks highest of OECD countries on the percentage of university-aged people attaining some higher education, we lag behind when it comes to indicators of innovation, such as patents. One theory as to why: We need more creative graduates.
Employers are increasingly looking for applicants who can analyze disparate sources of information, critically analyze data and approach problems from various perspectives, according to Dr. Helfand.
Quest students must take set classes for their first two years, but they aren’t standard fare. For instance, one class, on asymmetry in nature, is taught by a variety of professors from disciplines such as molecular biology, astrophysics, philosophy, psychology and French literature. The theory is that disciplinary mobility is essential for fostering creativity.
Bjorn Munte, who was part of Quest's first graduating class last spring, says he applies his broad education daily to his new job in real estate investment at a Berlin bank. He says the creative skills he gained at Quest make him better at analyzing complicated real estate investments, by giving him a knowledge base to examine potential investments from many perspectives and encourage him to question assumptions. “To me, this is what creativity is about: Adjusting your solution to a problem if the assumptions don't make sense, and being able to respond to a new problem quickly and eloquently,” he says.
Quest's unique approach is not universally admired, however. The university is non-profit, private and expensive (tuition is $28,000 a year, although many scholarships are awarded), and whether it could be adapted into a larger public institution is far from clear. When Dr. Helfand presented about the advantages of the block system at a small undergraduate-focused university in Ontario, he was heckled by faculty. The university also has difficulty getting its courses recognized; Quest has been unable to access membership in the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, which many universities consider de facto accreditation.
Dr. Helfand chalks up this hesitancy to deep conservatism in universities. “There is clearly interest in changing the way we teach undergraduates, but the resistance to change is strong in highly bureaucratic, unionized institutions like universities.”
Dr. Helfand, for his part, was initially skeptical that this style of learning could work in his field of astrophysics, but he is now entirely convinced of its merits. He has taken an extended leave from his role of chair of the department of astronomy at Columbia University to work at Quest. “It is a measure of how excited I am about the educational project that I am willing to live here in Squamish,” he says. “Let's just say that there is no Metropolitan Opera eight minutes away by subway.”
To say that the university system is too conservative to permit Quest to gain accredititation for its courses from the Association of Colleges and Universities in Canada is quite an understatement. In fact, it is a statement with so much freight that one has to wonder how long Quest University's lifeline will last.
The block system of studying one topic, rather than five or six different "subjects" is only one part of the difference. Solving real problems, and acquiring the skills that are needed for that problem provides a unique window into a variety of perspectives, bringing them into focus on a real set of variables.
Doing this work among small groups is another of the differences, and so is adjusting solutions to the problem if the assumptions don't make sense is another of the significant differences.
It is the assumptions under the traditional university undergraduate programs that have become the holy grail of those programs. And many of those assumptions may, in fact, be based on religious adherence to some of the precepts that have come to us from centuries previous, whereas the current conditions are so radically different as to require whole new perspectives and graduates steeped in those new perspectives.
In Canada, unless and until university "experiences" like Quest are integrated into the public university funding programs, the likelihood of a long life, and a generation of graduates and post-graduates seems tenuous at best. Only the very affluent, plus those who earn scholarships will be permitted entry.
However, if Quest is successful in demonstrating the weakness, in fact the fallacies inherent in mere "job training" to other traditional and formerly liberal arts institutions, it will have served an invaluable purpose on the Canadian university landscape
The Quest model is not about graduating job-ready students with specific skill sets. Rather, the school encourages students to intellectually wander and explore, hoping they come out at the end with a broad understanding of many topics and creative abilities they can apply in many possible careers.Our culture and society must move away from multi-tasking by specialists to a more concentrated focus on fewer tasks from a multiplicity of perspectives, if we are to begin to explore the future needs of students expecting to be creatively integrated into the work that will be available in the next three or four decades.
And one of the ways all universities could begin to adapt to that "amorphous" goal would be to integrate "future studies" into the undergraduate curriculum. Future studies would begin to integrate perspectives from a variety of traditional academic disciplines, and those studies, in themselves, would be useful for university visionaries, in their long-range planning sessions, eventually to become part of the long-term curriculum planning of those same institutions.
And in order to make that change feasible, we have to unshackle the universities from a single-minded purpose of producing "job-ready" graduates in professional fields, who might hit the ground running, without the need for additional training by those hiring them.
Quest's ground-breaking existence is worthy of periodic watching, to ascertain if the public system can and will permit their courses to be accredited.

For young girls, is reaching puberty at age 10 the new normal?

By Elizabeth Weil, New York Times, March 30, 2012
(Fort Collins Colorado mother)Tracee and Ainsley (her 9-year-old daughter) visited the office of Jared Allomong, an applied kinesiologist. Applied kinesiology is a “healing art” sort of like chiropractic. Practitioners test muscle strength in order to diagnose health problems; it’s a refuge for those skeptical and weary of mainstream medicine.

“So, what brings you here today?” Allomong asked mother and daughter. Tracee stroked Ainsley’s arm and said, wistfully, “Precocious puberty.”
Allomong nodded. “What are the symptoms?”
“Pubic hair, armpit hair, a few pimples around the nose. Some budding.” Tracee gestured with her hands, implying breasts. “The emotional stuff is getting worse, too. Ainsley’s been getting super upset about little things, crying, and she doesn’t know why. I think she’s cycling with me.”
Ainsley closed her eyes, as if to shut out the embarrassment. The ongoing quest to understand why her young body was turning into a woman’s was not one of Ainsley’s favorite pastimes. She preferred torturing her 6-year-old brother and playing school with the neighborhood kids. (Ainsley was always the teacher, and she was very strict.)
“Have you seen Western doctors for this?” Allomong asked.
Tracee laughed. “Yes, many,” she said. “None suggested any course of action. They left us hanging.” She repeated for Allomong what she told me in the car: “They seem to have changed the definition of ‘normal.’ ”
For many parents of early-developing girls, “normal” is a crazy-making word, especially when uttered by a doctor; it implies that the patient, or patient’s mother, should quit being neurotic and accept that not much can be done. Allomong listened intently. He nodded and took notes, asking Tracee detailed questions about her birth-control history and validating her worst fears by mentioning the “extremely high levels” of estrogen-mimicking chemicals in the food and water supply. After about 20 minutes he asked Ainsley to lie on a table. There he performed a lengthy physical exam that involved testing the strength in Ainsley’s arms and legs while she held small glass vials filled with compounds like cortisol, estrogen and sugar. (Kinesiologists believe that weak muscles indicate illness, and that a patient’s muscles will test as weaker when he or she is holding a substance that contributes to health problems.)
Finally, he asked Ainsley to sit up. “It doesn’t test like it’s her own estrogens,” Allomong reported to Tracee, meaning he didn’t think Ainsley’s ovaries were producing too many hormones on their own. “I think it’s xeno-estrogens, from the environment,” he explained. “And I think it’s stress and insulin and sugar.”

“You can’t be more specific?” Tracee asked, pleading. “Like tell me what crap in my house I can get rid of?” Allomong shook his head.
On the ride back to Fort Collins, Tracee tried to cheer herself up thinking about the teenage suffering that Ainsley would avoid. “You know, I was one of those flat-chested girls at age 14, reading, ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,’ just praying to get my period. Ainsley won’t have to go through that! When she gets her period, we’re going to have a big old party. And then I’m going to go in the bathroom and cry.”
In the late 1980s, Marcia Herman-Giddens, then a physician’s associate in the pediatric department of the Duke University Medical Center, started noticing that an awful lot of 8- and 9-year-olds in her clinic had sprouted pubic hair and breasts. The medical wisdom, at that time, based on a landmark 1960 study of institutionalized British children, was that puberty began, on average, for girls at age 11. But that was not what Herman-Giddens was seeing. So she started collecting data, eventually leading a study with the American Academy of Pediatrics that sampled 17,000 girls, finding that among white girls, the average age of breast budding was 9.96. Among black girls, it was 8.87.
When Herman-Giddens published these numbers, in 1997 in Pediatrics, she set off a social and endocrinological firestorm. “I had no idea it would be so huge,” Herman-Giddens told me recently. “The Lolita syndrome” — the prurient fascination with the sexuality of young girls — “created a lot of emotional interest. As a feminist, I wish it didn’t.” Along with medical professionals, mothers, worried about their daughters, flocked to Herman-Giddens’s slide shows, gasping as she flashed images of possible culprits: obesity, processed foods, plastics.
Meanwhile, doctors wrote letters to journals criticizing the sample in Herman-Giddens’s study. (She collected data from girls at physicians’ offices, leaving her open to the accusation that it wasn’t random.) Was the age of puberty really dropping? Parents said yes. Leading pediatric endocrinologists said no. The stalemate lasted a dozen years. Then in August 2010, the conflict seemed to resolve. Well-respected researchers at three big institutions — Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Kaiser Permanente of Northern California and Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York — published another study in Pediatrics, finding that by age 7, 10 percent of white girls, 23 percent of black girls, 15 percent of Hispanic girls and 2 percent of Asian girls had started developing breasts.
Now most researchers seem to agree on one thing: Breast budding in girls is starting earlier. The debate has shifted to what this means. Puberty, in girls, involves three events: the growth of breasts, the growth of pubic hair and a first period. Typically the changes unfold in that order, and the proc­ess takes about two years. But the data show a confounding pattern. While studies have shown that the average age of breast budding has fallen significantly since the 1970s, the average age of first period, or menarche, has remained fairly constant, dropping to only 12.5 from 12.8 years. Why would puberty be starting earlier yet ending more or less at the same time?
To endocrinologists, girls who go through puberty early fall into two camps: girls with diagnosable disorders like central precocious puberty, and girls who simply develop on the early side of the normal curve. But the line between the groups is blurring. “There used to be a discrete gap between normal and abnormal, and there isn’t anymore,” Louise Green­span, a pediatric endocrinologist and co-author of the August 2010 Pediatrics paper, told me one morning in her office at Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco. Among the few tools available to help distinguish between so-called “normal” and “precocious” puberty are bone-age X-rays. To illustrate how they work, Greenspan pulled out a beautiful old book, Greulich and Pyle’s “Radiographic Atlas of Skeletal Development of the Hand and Wrist,” a standard text for pediatric endocrinologists. Each page showed an X-ray of a hand illustrating “bone age.” The smallest hand was from a newborn baby, the oldest from an adult female. “When a baby is born, there’s all this cartilage,” Greenspan said, pointing to large black gaps surrounding an array of delicate white bones. As the body grows, the pattern of black and white changes. The white bones lengthen, and the black interstices between them, some of which is cartilage, shrink. This process stops at the end of puberty, when the growth plates fuse.
One main risk for girls with true precocious puberty is advanced bone age. Puberty includes a final growth spurt, after which girls mostly stop growing. If that growth spurt starts too early in life, it ends at an early age too, meaning a child will have fewer growing years total. A girl who has her first period at age 10 will stop growing younger and end up shorter than a genetically identical girl who gets her first period at age 13.

That morning one of Greenspan’s patients was a 6½-year-old girl with a bone age of 9. She was the tallest girl in her class at school. She started growing pubic hair at age 4. No one thought her growth curve was normal, not even her doctors. (Eight used to be the age cutoff for normal pubic-hair growth in girls; now it’s as early as 7.) For this girl, Greenspan prescribed a once-a-month shot of the hormone Leuprolide, to halt puberty’s progress. The girl hated the shot. Yet nobody second-guessed the treatment plan. The mismatch between her sexual maturation and her age — and the discomfort that created, for everybody — was just too great.
By contrast, Ainsley was older, and her puberty was progressing more slowly, meaning she wasn’t at much of an increased risk for short stature or breast cancer. (Early periods are associated with breast cancer, though researchers don’t know if the risk stems from greater lifetime exposure to estrogen or a higher lifetime number of menstrual cycles, or perhaps something else, like the age at which a girl has her growth spurt.) In cases of girls Ainsley’s age, Greenspan has been asked by parents to prescribe Leuprolide. But Greenspan says this is a bad idea, because Leuprolide’s possible side effects — including an increased risk of osteoporosis — outweigh the benefits for girls that age. “If you have a normal girl, a girl who’s 8 or 9, there’s a big ethical issue of giving them medicine. Giving them medicine says, ‘Something is wrong with your body,’ as opposed to, ‘This is your body, and let’s all find a way to accept it.’ ”
“I would have a long conversation with her family, show them all the data,” Greenspan continues. Once she has gone through what she calls “the proc­ess of normalizing” — a process intended to replace anxiety with statistics — she has rarely had a family continue to insist on puberty-arresting drugs. Indeed, most parents learn to cope with the changes and help their daughters adjust too. One mother described for me buying a drawer full of football shirts, at her third-grade daughter’s request, to hide her maturing body. Another reminded her daughter that it’s O.K. to act her age. “It’s like when you have a really big toddler and people expect the kid to talk in full sentences. People look at my daughter and say, ‘Look at those cheekbones!’ We have to remind her: ‘You may look 12, but you’re 9. It’s O.K. to lose your cool and stomp your feet.’ ”
“We still have a lot to learn about how early puberty affects girls psychologically,” says Paul Kaplowitz, chief of endocrinology at Children’s National Medical Center. “We do know that some girls who start maturing by age 8 progress rapidly and have their first period before age 10, and many parents prefer that we use medications to slow things down. However, many girls do fine if they are simply monitored and their parents are reassured that they will get through it without major problems.”
In some ways early puberty is most straightforward for families like those of the kindergartner on Leuprolide. She has a diagnosis, a treatment plan. In Greenspan’s office, I asked the girl’s father at what age he might choose to take his child off the drugs and let her puberty proceed. He laughed. Then he spoke for most parents when he said, “Would it be bad to say 22?”

Religion, politics, drugs, prisons and guns....the instruments of government policy?

 One of the conversations on GPS with Fareed Zakaria this morning concerned the question of the separation of church and state, in the U.S. federal politics.
One of the panelists made an interesting observation: that 15-20% of the people in the U.S. believe that President Obama is a Muslim, and the same 15-20% refuse to vote for a Mormon.
There are other blatant uncursions of religious belief into the current flow of U.S. politics...including:

• the deliberate organizing by Roman Catholic bishops against the Obama adminstration's requirement that employers pay for the cost of birth control, for their employees (This is about the non-Catholics who work for Roman Catholic institutions, inspite of the fact that some 95% of all Catholics in the U.S. practice birth control in defiance of the chuch's teaching.
• Republican candidate Rick Santorum has publicly stated that, if president, he would see that states could abolish all public financing of birth control
• Santorum has also declared his overt opposition to a woman's access to therapeutic abortion, and would presumably work to overturn Roe v Wade, should he become president
• There has developed a clear alliance between evangelicals and the Roman Catholic church, in their avowed purpose to reduce Obama to a "one-term" president, by assuring the election of a Republican, presumably Mitt Romney, in November

On the same program, in a different segment, Mr. Zakaria pointed out the gigantic disparity between the number of prisoners in U.S. prisons, compared with most of the countries in the developed world.
Many of these prisoners face incarceration as a consequence of some drug offence, made criminal in the long-standing "war on drugs" which, even according to religious fundamentalist and evangelist, Pat Robertson, has been a disaster. In California, in the last decade, 21 prisons have been built, and only 1 post-secondary eduacation institution. Prisons have also become a giant industry, operated for profit by private business corporations. Furthermore, California, for example, spends some $8000 per year on each student in her schools, yet spends over $50,000 per year on each prisoner in her prisons.
Putting these two sets of data together, I wondered how the U.S. could continue to call itself even "Christian" let alone religious.
I always thought that at the core of Christianity is the belief in God's forgiveness, and, if one were to practice the Christian faith, one espoused a similar faith in the power and ethics of forgiveness. Declaring war on drug users, a condition often brought about by a dangerous combination of poverty, unstable upbringing, academic failure, school leaving whether forced or voluntary and joblessness linked in one of several nefarious ways to the "wrong people" as friends and colleagues. Making drug use and possession criminal offenses, along with trafficking, has resulted in overcrowded prisons and enhanced drug trade, use and abuse.
Ironically, "war," in this case on drugs, just like the "war" on terror, has produced more of the very "enemy" each war was attempting to eradicate. More drug users, more drug traffickers and more criminals in the case of the "war on drugs" and more terrorists in more countries in the case of the "war on terror" which has effectively been perceived as an attack on Muslims and Islam.
Another irony in the juxtaposition of religious issues into the campaign and the failure of the war on drugs is that the same people, often, who espouse the overt insertion of religious positions into the political presidential campaign are the same people who vowed to wage war against the terrorists.
It is neither applying Christian principles nor effective government policy to use the gun, the law and the metaphor of "waging war" against any problem. In fact, such an approach is directly counterintuitive to even thinking about being a Christian.
Underlying this common approach to a perceived enemy is useful, however, for one goal: it recruits more and more soldiers, sailors and aircrew, along with thousands, if not millions of law and security personnel. And that approach to cleaning the streets of unemployed, and to reducing the unemployment numbers is also dysfunctional, but it does serve the political class, when they can point to the numbers of recruits they have engaged, and the economic impact on those communities.
With the church and the insurance companies holding the body politic tightly at both the throat and the sense of guilt that every person carries within, and the military and law enforcement communities growing like topsy, and now both military and law enforcement functions morphing into the great 'god' of capitalism, the private corporation, there are serious questions about the "beacon on the hill" metaphor so joyously proclaimed by President Ronald Reagan only 3 decades ago.
America is not Christian, not a beacon of light, and not a model for the rest of the world, if we are to begin to approach some degree of harmony, forgiveness and humility in our relations with each other.