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As most of you have heard by now, a 7.0 earthquake struck Port-au-Prince, Haiti and has devastated the city. Presently, 140,000 are estimated to be dead. That number may increase over the weekend, as of Friday night at just before 5 p.m. 72 hours had passed. While there is still hope for those trapped, 72 hours is the critical point where people need to be rescued and the rest need to get food, water, medical care and temporary shelter to stay alive.

Many supplies have reached the airport. Now that transport and helicopters are on scene, wide distribution of supplies will be possible as early as overnight tonight. People should begin to see some major relief first thing this morning.

Dead bodies that litter the streets need to be removed much more rapidly, even though that may mean burial in mass graves. Those picking up bodies are now photographing them for later identification and mass graves are beginning to be used. Haiti is a tropical island nation and it is around 80 degrees there. We are at the point where those decaying bodies will begin to cause disease in those who are still alive. Many are dehydrated, hungry and injured. Their immune systems are not strong enough to fight off any illness. We have gotten this far, and we don’t want to begin losing more people to widespread outbreaks of disease.

How can you help?

• Don’t go to Haiti unless you’re a trained worker with one of the response organizations
• Send money to reputable relief organizations
• You can text your donations to these organizations You can text multiple times to as many as you want. The charges will be added to your mobile phone bill.
• Volunteer locally at your Red Cross office, Salvation Army office or other relief organization that is sending trained volunteers and staff. Trained people are needed for ground operations. You may be able to free them up to go by helping here at home.
• Help the families of our deployed military personnel whether they are working in Haiti or deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. These families need your hands and your hearts. Check with local military stations and churches to find families to help. They need help with kids, babysitters, a home-cooked meal delivered to their house, someone to get something in the house fixed, help with kids’ homework, etc.

I sent my donation Tuesday night by text message. It’s fast and easy. Please give what you can. Thank you.

People carry an injured person after an earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2010. The largest earthquake ever recorded in the area rocked Haiti on Tuesday. The earthquake had a preliminary magnitude of 7.0 and was centered about 10 miles (15 kilometers) west of Port-au-Prince. (AP Photo/Radio Tele Ginen)
8:54 p.m. ET, 1/12/10

Technorati Tags: Earthquake 2010, Haiti, Port-au-Prince

I am an occasional listener of NPR’s Fresh Air, and I happened to catch the “Puppies Behind Bars (For A Good Cause)” segment during animal week.

Samba with Paul at the U.S. Capital

Gloria Gilbert Stoga is the founder of Puppies Behind Bars, Nora Moran is a former inmate who participated in the program while in prison and went to work for the organization after serving her sentence. Paul Bang-Knudsen is a former Marine Corps corporal who was wounded in Iraq. The dog in the story is Samba, a small black lab and Bang-Knudsen’s service dog trained through the program. Dave Davies recorded this story for Fresh Air.

Here is the podcast of the 20 minute story. You’ll laugh and cry:

The United States incarcerates about twice as many people as other countries in the developed world. Many argue we send too many people to prison for the wrong reasons, our sentencing laws often do not fit the crimes, and we do little to nothing to truly rehabilitate inmates so they can be productive citizens when they finish their prison sentences. Recidivism is higher in the U.S. than in other developed nations.

We are the last developed nation in the world to use the death penalty, even though we have clear statistics that it does not deter violent crime. Capital punishment cases cost the justice system far more money to prosecute and carry out than life sentences with no possibility of parole.

We need more programs such as Puppies Behind Bars that truly help change an inmate’s mindset and life. By helping inmates to see raising a service dog as giving back to society in a much bigger way than serving time, it teaches them to think of others and their needs. Being aware of the needs of others, that even in prison you can do something to give back to society, and in the process learn responsibility for the care of another life is tantamount to becoming a productive citizen, perhaps for the first time.

I hope to see this program grow to other cities and prisons across the country. I hope to see more effective programs introduced and implemented in every prison in the country.

Technorati Tags: Fresh Air, inmate rehabilitation, NPR, prison inmates, service dogs, Veterans, WHYY radio

Charles Darwin, the author of On the Origin of Species and the man who discovered evolution and wrote the scientific doctrine of it, was extremely torn between his faith and love for his wife and the factual science he learned from his many years of study of the data and samples he collected on his 5 year journey on the HMS Beagle. He didn’t publish his book until after his wife’s death because she believed fundamentally in the Bible stories of creation, and they were the underpinnings of her faith.

We now know that evolution is more than a theory and has been studied thoroughly for more than 150 years. In 150 years, no one has found any defensible evidence that disproves Darwin’s theory of evolution. People have attempted to make up evidence, but none has been found using the scientific method.

No one bought “Creation” to distribute and show in U.S. theaters because they thought there might be right-wing backlash? Schools take backlash for teaching evolution all the time. Theaters can’t risk a little backlash, even in progressive cities like New York, Boston, San Francisco or LA? Wussies. Since when did the art world become noncontroversial?

Rachel’s point is a vitally important one. What does this attitude mean for the U.S. long-term? Has America decided facts are no longer important? The Republicans surely seem to have decided that over the past 8-9 years. By deciding that the study of facts and rational thought are not important, where will that lead the country 20-30 years from now? Will there once again be only 4 elements instead of 118? Will medicine devolve into the study of the humors (blood, bile, phlegm) again? This fact-free attitude scares me, too.

But it doesn’t scare me too much because the people who spout the vitriol about Darwin and evolution being the truth are a very noisy, but rather small minority of Americans. The problem is we have a silent majority. The majority needs to stand up, shout out the facts and drown out the wing-nuts once in a while. The loud minority seems to live within their own little world so much that they don’t know a much bigger world that vastly outnumbers them is out here.

I don’t believe that the majority of mainstream Americans disregard facts. A fair number of Americans either don’t believe evolution is the factual explanation or aren’t sure. If you add those two groups together, the result is larger than the number who believe it is the truth, making them the minority. But most of the people who aren’t sure say so because they haven’t studied biology and admit they aren’t sure because they don’t know the facts.

I don’t believe there will be fewer scientists in the future, there will probably be more. Schools today focus a lot harder on teaching 4 maths and 4 sciences in high school, algebra 1 & 2, geometry, advanced math, physical science, biology, chemistry and physics. Four English classes are also required now. In my generation, 1-2 sciences, 2 maths and 3 English courses were required if you weren’t college bound. Most students today are college bound, even if it’s a 2-year associate degree from a community college. Colleges are still filling up with young minds desiring lots of facts and hard, rational thought.

Even Catholic schools today teach evolution as the facts in biology and leave Biblical creation in religion class. Some southern Baptist preachers have stopped insisting the Bible’s creation stories are facts. They are stories that were told to primitive, semi-nomadic people to explain things they couldn’t understand. What do we do when we don’t understand something? We either ignore it or we make up stories to tell ourselves that make some sort of sense to us.

Understanding the real mechanisms (processes) of how the universe came to be, understanding the human body and modern medicine, and understanding and delving deeper into chemistry and physics in no way means one can’t still have deep faith in God. As a scientist myself, I believe God is much bigger, more complex and much harder to fathom than He was before modern science. It doesn’t mean He doesn’t exist. Personally, I believe God created the big bang and evolution. I never bought the “poof” theory of the Bible creation stories. Nothing on this planet or in the universe that we have studied happens without a process.

But going as far as not showing a movie in the U.S. about the writer of the Theory of Evolution and his dilemma between his faith and the facts he couldn’t ignore? Ridiculous!

Hopefully, “Creation” will be available for rent or purchase on DVD…

Technorati Tags: choosing to ignore facts, Creation the movie, creationism v evolution, Darwin, facts v fact-freedom