I ain’t superstitious but . . . wow. Just wow.

Then it occurred to me: what if her Thermos food jar is BPA lined?

Phew! My FUNtainer Thermos food jar is BPA free.

Good news: it’s not. I just got an email from a Thermos spokesperson I found on their website stating “Our FUNtainer line of food jars and beverage bottles has always been BPA-free, and continues to be as well.”

I’m so glad!

Now I just need to perfect my soup recipe. I’m trying to copy my daughter’s favorite choice from the now-on-my-boycott-list Hain line of Imagine soups: tomato-based broth, meatballs, navy beans, orzo.

My first attempt bears some similarities, she says, but that’s about as far as she was willing to go. Tough customer.

Back to the ol’ cutting board . . .

Here’s a more extensive write-up of the Consumer Reports report.

You may also have heard that organic companies didn’t do any better in the study.

I don’t eat a lot of canned foods, but there’s a couple of organic soups in Hain’s Imagine line that aren’t bad — my daughter’s fond of them, so I’d been keeping some on hand for those times when she needed a quick snack.

I’d just as soon her quick snacks aren’t dosed with endocrine disruptors, however. So I wrote Hain’s to ask if they use BPA-free cans.

Just got my answer.

Thank you for taking the time to contact us regarding our Imagine Soup. We strive to maintain the highest quality products and appreciate your patronage.

Most metal food and beverage packaging has a thin coating of an epoxy containing BPA on the interior surface. Bisphenol A (BPA) is a compound used in most metal food and beverage packaging. The interior surface of the can has a thin coating of an epoxy containing BPA, which protects public health by preventing corrosion of the can and contamination of food and beverage by not coming in contact with the metal. This is one of the very few FDA approved coatings that will provide the safety and shelf life that consumers expect from our products. Tests have indicated that trace amounts of BPA may be present in these can coatings. The minute amounts detected are well below levels deemed to be of concern for public health according to the FDA.

The United States Center for Disease Control and The American Council on Science and Health, along with other Regulatory agencies worldwide, have extensively researched Bisphenol A and concluded there is no risk to human health. All coatings that come in contact with our products undergo stringent testing and comply with US Food and Drug Administration guidelines.

We are currently looking for other alternatives.

As the Atomic News piece linked above notes, it’s not easy for companies to find suppliers of epoxy-lined cans. But Eden has managed to do so:

The Ball Corp. eventually agreed to produce custom runs of cans with oleo-based C-enamel linings for Eden. It’s also doing research to develop BPA-free can coatings that could work for more acidic foods such as fruit, which Eden now markets in glass containers. “It’s costing me 14 percent more for these BPA-free cans, but I said I have to do this because not only do I eat canned foods, but so do my kids and grandkids,” [Eden Foods President and Chairman Michael] Potter says.

Eden’s canned foods, incidentally, still contain traces of BPA, but at far lower levels than Consumer Reports found in other canned foods.

Consumer Reports tested Eden cans, confirming they are BPA free.

So where does the contamination come from? Who knows. The results, CR says, suggest “that food can have multiple sources of exposure.”

Great.

To my environmentalist friends, this is one reason why I have trouble jumping on the global warming bandwagon. Endocrine disrupters are having an effect on the environment right now. Alarming numbers of male freshwater bass are now growing eggs, for instance — their sexual organs are being messed up. That’s scary stuff, because it means something is going on with our water, and ya know, I like to drink water.

I’d rather see us tackling these more immediate problems of environmental contamination than pouring trillions into preventing a problem that is, so far, a figment of a computer model’s imagination.

Propogandists attempt to shape public perception and opinions.

Given the contents of the files leaked from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglica University, it’s pretty clear the global warming community has been led by propogandists.

Their priority was not science.

It was controlling information. It was influencing the public’s perception of issues related to their pet cause.

If you’re looking for more reading on this, may I suggest:

• General background piece by an assistant professor of political science at the  University of Rochester.

• This piece on the CBS News blog is also useful background if you need to catch up on the basics of the story.

• Charlie Martin, who holds an MS in Computer Science from Duke University, takes a look at a so-far under-reported angle on the story: the computer code CRU researchers used to model their data.

• Longtime global warming skeptic Jeff Id (“an aeronautical engineer by training but work as an optical engineer”) published this blog post yesterday. It explains why he’s had longstanding issues with the Global Warming researchers’ use of “proxies” and suspect correlations.

• Here’s a thorough and enlightening reconstruction of CRU’s attempts to evade Freedom of Information requests, developed by Willis Eschenbach, a researcher who got involved when he asked CRU to share its temperature data.

• Greek hydrological engineer Demetris Koutsoyiannis likewise shares his experience in trying to work with leading global warming scientists.”

• Not directly related to the CRU scandal topically, but this 2008 paper by Steve McIntyre describes the work he had done to date in auditing climate data. It provides useful background on why so-called skeptic’s questions have validity.

• UPDATE: one more — the most comprehensive write-up of pro- and anti-global warming arguments on the planet.

I remember years ago reading about the Little Emperor syndrome in China: families forced to limit their offspring to one child ended up raising spoilt little boys. I think we’re seeing a similar effect in the US, albeit through slightly different mechanisms.

We’re trying to correct course, now, some of us. This article in the NY Times discusses how parents are using techniques borrowed from dog training, of all things, to try to recapture some of the authority they’ve ceded in their relationship to their kids.

Let’s hope it’s not too little, too late.

Here’s the thing. Children used to be an unavoidable consequence of sex/marriage. Now they’re something we acquire, one at a time, like art objects, to enhance our lives.

When modern educated women have a child, we’re encouraged to cherish the child and the experience of having that child in our lives. They grow up so quickly, after all! Drop everything and pay attention. Make that child the center of your life.

How unlike 100 years ago when we may well be on our 10th or 15th baby after #1 has already grown up & moved out of the house — 17 or 18 years of straight baby.

Now we savor every second — photograph it, blog it, wonder at it, analyze it. We labor over our parenting styles. And we fall prey, some of us, to being over-awed. I’ve observed parents — my peers — who seem to think their child is as equipped to make decisions as adults are. After all, my son/daughter is so smart, has so many brilliant insights, is so articulate, precocious, mature for his/her age . . .

That’s where the damage is done. Children aren’t equipped to make decisions. They don’t really know very much, and won’t for decades. They aren’t “mature.” Their brilliant insights are not all that special.

And our awe has terrible consequences, because when parents cede so much authority to their children, it puts the children on horribly shaky ground.

Imagine how it feels. You’re small, physically weak, inexperienced, new to everything — but the grown-ups around you, the ones who clearly have uncounted advantages in the world, who de facto control so much — are turning to you for guidance.

So what do you do? Depends on the child. But you must find some sort of coping mechanism.

Perhaps you learn to bluff — you develop a habit of always “knowing the answer,” because after all your parents seem to think you should. This could take the form of being a “little know it all” or of outright lying.

You might become insolent, another mechanism to hide the insecurity that gnaws at you. Better to be on the attack than admit that there’s something terrible wrong — that you don’t really feel the authority with which you’ve been vested.

You will certainly be neurotic. You don’t have the benefit of those few short years, in childhood, when somebody had all the answers: the years that form a kind of experiential bedrock for our personalities, that give us an underlying sense of order and certainty. You will be anxious, fearful — you will have been exposed to a sense of how much is unknown before you were developmentally equipped to handle it.

You will have trouble empathizing with others, because your parents never required you to try to read them. You didn’t have to check their faces to detect how your decisions or opinions might be received — on the contrary, the exchange was all going in the other direction, one way only, as your parents watched you to see what your opinions were and how the things they said/decided were affecting you.

You won’t know how to wield authority or make your peace with it. When you weren’t taught to live under the benign authority of a parent, you can’t internalize its use or learn to cope with it. You will grate at it unnecessarily when you encounter it as an adult. Your ability to recognize true injustice will be crippled. You may well become a compulsive rule-breaker — your knee-jerk defiance of authority might cause you to continually sabotage yourself, your professional standing, your reputation.

If you find yourself in a position of authority, you will use it unevenly. You may become a tyrant. At best, you’ll be unpredictable and inconsistent as a boss/teacher/parent.

I’ve observed that many of these children go on to find themselves “corrected” by their peers — i.e. teased, bullied, or ostracized — because their lack of social skills causes them to run afoul of other emotionally damaged children. Others end up medicated, because their poor impulse control is misdiagnosed as having some sort of physiological component, when the real cause is the family dynamic — and because as they get older, parents find themselves unable to handle with their undisciplined behavior. Drugging the child at least mutes the behavior’s more disruptive manifestations.

What remains to be seen, of course, is what effect these children will have on our social fabric as a whole when they are in their 30s and 40s and 50s.

Personally, I think it’s going to be ugly.

But they won’t listen to their critics — they won’t know how.

We’re just going to have to live with the little, grown up brats, whether we want to or not . . .

Here’s an example that illustrates why I think we need to be careful about this.

Clinton Memorial Hospital (Ohio) purchased an x-ray machine in 1950 for $2800.

Plug that number into an inflation calculator and the same machine, today, would cost $61,043.96.

But as near as I can tell in a few minutes of Google research, standard x-ray machines today cost maybe 3x as much as they did in the 1950s.

In other words, for this piece of equipment at least, “costs” haven’t risen at all. On the contrary: in inflation-adjusted dollars, the cost of standard x-ray machines have actually gone down.

Why does this matter?

Because in a capitalist economy, where people have been relatively free to spend as they wish on healthcare, and where people place enormous values on their health and quality of life, then they will likely choose to purchase more and better services.

Examples might include CT scans instead of x-rays, or digital x-rays instead of film x-rays, or requiring certifications and trainings of the radiographers who conduct imaging exams.

But that’s spending, not costs. That’s the market evolving to offer different, higher-quality services to people who wish to purchase them.

The question is: how can you make policy when you haven’t distinguished between the two?

No, you can’t. You can’t even debate it. To hijack a John Mayer lyric, it’s like punching underwater — you never can hit who you’re trying for. Because promises that “costs” will be lowered are equated conceptually with “we need to spend less.”

And there’s no way to make people spend less except force them to accept fewer or less-high-quality services.

Slate’s got a new piece up about it now.

Allowing these guidelines to take effect would be like giving the government a no-knock warrant to investigate hundreds of thousands of blogs and hundreds of millions of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter users for … saying nice things about goods and services. [FTC spokesman Richard] Cleland tells Ad Age that a restaurant employee who gave his eatery a good review on Yelp would have to disclose. Given the billions of opinionated postings on the Web, there would be no end to FTC’s work.

Because of a pesky thing called the First Amendment, the guidelines don’t apply to news organizations, which receive thousands of free books, CDs, and DVDs each day from media companies hoping for reviews. But if the guidelines don’t apply to established media like the New York Review of Books, which also happens to publish reviews on the Web, why should they apply to Joe Blow’s blog? Regulating bloggers via the FTC while exempting establishment reporters looks like a back-door means of licensing journalists and policing speech.

This is a federal power grab of epic proportions, folks.

One more reason we need to pass the Federalism Amendment.

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.

THAT’s what I’m talkin’ about.

That’s the spirit that animates the American political ideal.

More: it’s the measure against which we should hold up any of these stupid laws our politicians want to pass. I.e., does “healthcare reform” advance our country to its highest political end?

Ha ha ha.

It does NOT.

Wilson goes on to make the point from which he takes his blog post’s title:

Americans regard themselves as citizens, not subjects. They may respect their government, but few feel servile toward it, and most are wary of it.

Exactly.

So here’s the “contrast” bit: how do we explain this move by The Commonwealth of Massachusetts to impose, among other things, forced vaccinations and/or quarantine in the event of a “declared emergency”?

That is NOT liberty.

That’s the government treating us as subjects.

You watch, too. New York will be next.

Horrible. Horrible.