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Maybe you missed our free-form follow up to the Cinefantastique Podcast last week. Then again, maybe you have a life. In any case, we didn’t manage to get that episode posted in time, so we’re going to play a little catch-up by offering both last week’s and the latest ep right here & right now. Contain your excitement.
First up, we delve into the immersive cinematic world of James Cameron’s Avatar: The Special Edition, whose re-release in theatres gives audiences a chance to enjoy what 3-D can be, when it’s not slapped on in post-production. Also on the table: the upcoming documentary, 2001: Beyond the Infinite — The Making of a Masterpiece, in which Oscar-winning effects expert Douglas Trumbull, himself a veteran of 2001: A Space Odyssey, will delve behind the scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction masterpiece:
We follow that up with the latest episode, when, after taking an elevator ride with the Devil, we explore the subject of claustrophobic thrillers. Cube, Saw, Demons, The Exterminating Angel all feature hapless victims locked in inescapable situations – a guaranteed formula for suspense that we like to call “shooting fish in a barrel.”
Also up for debate: Spoilers. Are publicity campaigns and reviews giving away too much? Are viewers being told more than they want to know before they get a chance to see a film for themselves? Tune in for this epic debate.
And in case that’s not enough, a brief excursion into the realms of Halloween horror as the CFQ Podcast Crew explores the subject of seasonal haunted house attractions that bring horror movies to life.
The podcast wraps up with a look at some favorite personifications of Satan on screen: The Devil Rides Out, Bedazzled with Peter Cook, and The Devil and Daniel Webster with Walter Huston:

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

If you didn’t catch Christine O’Donnell on “Hannity” this week — in what she says is her last interview with the national media — you missed this:
Which was nice of her to say — promising, if elected, to obey the law. (And not Satan.) But it also runs directly counter to what she promised to do for Catholic Families for America, in exchange for their endorsement in June.
(Catholic Families for America is an organization that calls itself “one of the largest groups of lay Catholics in the country” but seems to meet at a post office box on K Street and inside a guy in Lafayette’s head. It appeared out of nowhere shortly before the elections in 2008, has no apparent membership beyond its two officers, and counts as its greatest political achievements a “nationwide petition” against Elena Kagan that gathered 67 signatures and a fundraising drive for 43 Republican candidates for the House and Senate that raised $70. Obviously, Catholic Families for America speaks for Catholics like the Unabomber speaks for the Union of Concerned Scientists.)
Here’s the thing: To earn that endorsement from the CFA, Christine O’Donnell had to fill out a 51-part “candidate questionnaire” in which half the things she promised to do were just cruel and inane, but the other half were borderline unconstitutional and entirely driven by religion.
So she’s lying to someone.
THE CHRISTINE O’DONNELL / CFA
“USE THE CONSTITUTION TO DETERMINE HOW I VOTE” QUIZ
Are you using the Constitution to determine how you vote if you answer yes to this question:
How about this one?
Do you promise to advocate that judges who attack the First Amendment rights of believers should be removed from office?
This one?
Do you support what we know from natural law, that marriage is strictly for a man and a woman?
This one?
Once again considering the principle of subsidiarity, will you oppose any effort for federal funding or regulation of childcare?
Or this one?
In keeping with Church teaching, do you support legal immigration?
ANSWERS
QUESTION 1: Yes and no. This question has been deliberately written as a slippery hypothetical double reverse-o. The First Amendment says Congress shall make no law respecting establishment of religion, so if a judge suddenly got the power to establish a state religion — which a judge doesn’t have — and if atheism was a religion — which it isn’t — he’d have to go. Also if he transformed himself into a Decepticon. He’d be waaay out of line. On the other hand, Article VI, paragraph 3 of the Constitution reads “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States,” so no, you can write yourself in knots, but you can’t use the Constitution to decide to remove a judge for being an atheist.
QUESTION 2: Yes. Christine O’Donnell would be following the Constitution if she removed a judge for attacking a believer’s First Amendment rights. I hope she checked “yes” to this one last June, because it means she’s in favor of building the Ground Zero Mosque.
QUESTION 3: Yes, but no. I guess a senator could be opposed to gay marriage on “natural law” grounds. He/she could also oppose it based on the law of the jungle or the rules of Monopoly. But that’s not the same as saying it’s in the Constitution.
QUESTION 4: No. Not because the Federal government should or shouldn’t regulate childcare — am I missing something? Is this an issue that comes up a lot? — but because subsidiarity isn’t a Constitutional principle; it’s a Catholic principle. (Oh man, and I just checked Wikipedia… it’s also a guiding principle of the European Union! Europe! Boo! Hiss!)
QUESTION 5: Oh, come on. This question is another reverse-o, and the lead-in to a lot of other immigrant-bashing questions on the CFA quiz, making sure that just because Mexicans are Catholic doesn’t mean you want them around, or even alive. You could use the Constitution to determine how you vote on immigration issues, but that’s sort of the opposite for using “church teaching.” It’s like using subsidiarity to decide how to deal with daycare, or, come to think of it, “sanctity” when making laws about abortion.
I’m just guessing that Christine O’Donnell checked yes to all the statements on the CFA’s questionnaire. They won’t release her answers, and neither will she.
St. Paul said something about not hiding your candle under a bushel, but what did he know?
We do know she passed the test, because she got the endorsement.
So will Christine O’Donnell govern with the convictions of her faith (Catholic/evangelical/Wicca) or won’t she?
She was either lying Tuesday, to Hannity, or in June, to one of the largest groups of lay Catholics in the country.
Which was it?

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

TV, radio and print media are filled with predictions of the possible demise of Democratic control of Congress as a consequence of the November 2010 midterm elections. This is based on various polling numbers of voter sentiments from different geographical parts of the country.
The Obama administration and democratic surrogates appear to be struggling with how to craft a message to respond to Republican and Tea Party attack ads and thereby energize their assumed Democratic Party “base”.
We suggest some pause and reflection should be exercised to carefully reexamine the current characteristics of this so-called party base that has to be motivated and “energized”. Those of us who participated in the Civil Rights and Anti-war Movements over the past forty years or more understood that either of the two major parties or a third party were only political instruments or agents for the changes we sought. In other words, it wasn’t the political party, per se, that defined our ideals or “Movement”. It was the ideals of the Movement and its component participants that defined and determined the political objectives; we sought to get either the Democratic, Republican or a Third Party to incorporate as part of their legislative party platforms.
The “base” of the Democratic Party on the eve of the midterm elections should reflect those voter components most likely to motivate and energize potential Democratic voters to the polls. There have been significant qualitative changes in the base of the party since Obama’s 2008 election. The components to which I am referring are Hispanics, African-Americans, Gay and Lesbian, Independents, 18-25 age group, and labor unions.
During the last half of the 20th Century it was often the progressive leadership of the Civil Rights, Women, Peace and Labor “Movements” that “energized the base “of the Democratic party around specific issues directly affecting their constituencies. There is abundant evidence too numerous to recite in this article that the Movements’ participants mentioned above provided the moral and political backbone and spine to the leadership of the Democratic Party in several past Presidential and Congressional elections.
So, the critical question today is why aren’t the leaders of the African-American, Hispanic, Gay and Lesbian, Anti-War/Peace, Labor Movements, coming together in a coalition with our young brothers and sisters, 18-25, to energize their constituencies most likely to be affected by the assumption of Republican control of Congress?
Yes, Senator Barack Obama asked us to support his election for president to implement “change we could believe in”. And, many of us did. The fundamental strategic political issue or question is not what Obama has or has not done; but, what are those, who comprised the Movements who made his election possible, going to do, today, between now and November?
Failure of Obama to achieve “political perfection” should not blind or paralyze our ability to recognize his pragmatic political achievements of the “good”. Vice-President Biden is reported to have commented that the choice for voters in the mid-terms election is not between the Democratic Party and the “Almighty”; but between the Democrats and the “Alternative”, the Republican or Tea Parties.
In the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, to develop and sustain our coalition of support and participation with the Jewish and white majority communities we had to address and deal with issues of racism and anti-Semitism within our leadership and among our constituents. Today, homophobia and anti-immigration sentiments may be the equivalent principal obstacles to energizing a politically essential coalition among and with the Hispanic, African-American, Independent and Gay and Lesbian components of the potential Democratic voter base.
For example, when the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Bill was essential to implementing the democratic precepts enshrined in our Declaration of Independence the progressive leadership of the African-American, Jewish, Religious and Labor movements came to together to insure its successful enactment. So, now, once again, with one voice, progressives must say, loud and clear: NO MORE, IN OUR NAME, will we continue to permit our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, who volunteered to serve in the armed forces of our nation to protect us, to be summarily dismissed from their military service because of the enforcement of a Defense Department’s policy of “Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell”. This would go a long way toward energizing not only the Gay and lesbian part of the potential voter base of the Democratic Party; but, would send a message of moral relevance and political integrity to Independents and the 18-25 potential voters.
Finally, candidate Obama said repeatedly that we were the change we can believe in. If so, then why don’t progressives stop sitting on their butts, expecting now President Obama to deliver them to the promise land of peace and prosperity. Support for Obama and the Democratic Party is only justified if progressives CAN MAKE THEM become effective agents or instruments of the change “WE SEEK”. It’s not the party; it’s the Movement whose message progressives must organize to get either party to reflect.
Years ago, at the founding dinner of the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington, D.C., the actor, civil rights, peace and labor activist Ossie Davis, in his keynote dinner speech, reminded everyone attending that the future of African-American participation in the political process was not about “the Man, but the Plan”. Progressives should say to the leadership of the Democratic party, their plan, in a high unemployment economy includes an accelerated end of the war in Afghanistan, except for pursuit of Al-Qaeda terrorists, continued withdrawal from Iraq and the redirection of those previously allocated military expenditures to the rebuilding of our schools, a national education plan, neighborhood housing, hospitals and veterans care. That’s the “Plan”. It’s not just about Obama.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Whole Foods will no longer carry Dean Food’s Silk Soy milk–instead goes with organic brands.
Last year, Silk Soy–while continuing to offer a somewhat higher-priced organic option–pushed the majority of its soy milk to “natural” (the beans still weren’t Genetically-modified [GMO], which is great).
It was a blow to the green movement–and one that changed Silk, overnight, from the world’s largest organic brand into, well, not.
Recently, I interviewed my friends at the Dean Foods-owned White Wave/Silk Soy about their decision to go “natural.” To their credit, they were open about the up- and downsides.
Whole Foods dumps Silk Soy.
Silk, started by one of Boulder, Colorado’s natural products titans, Steve Demos, and now owned and controlled by mega-corp Dean Foods, was just dealt what must come as a pretty big blow–they’ve been cleaved from their strongest customer base–the conscious consumers who built Silk, back when it was owned by Mr. Demos, into a major player and first real alternative to milk.
For more, click here or here or here or here. Or here.
Excerpt via Planet Green:
“Saying that its relationship with Dean Foods had ‘chilled,’ Whole Foods indicated it was bringing in a new branded organic soymilk partner, Earth Balance…’Dean Foods has been roundly criticized for taking the organic out of Silk, and now the marketplace and consumers are passing their judgment,’ said Mark Kastel, Cornucopia’s senior farm policy analyst. ‘They took what once was a pioneering 100% organic brand, before they acquired the company in 2003, and cheapened the product at the expense of American farmers and consumers. Now they are paying a price for their naked profiteering,’ Kastel added.”
In addition, Whole Foods wants Earth Balance’s soymilk products to be made strictly from soybeans grown in the U.S. That stipulation likely comes as a direct response to Silk’s initial shift–even before it gave up on organic–away from domestic soybeans when it started sourcing (organic, at first) from China. …for the rest, click here.
Excerpt via elephriend Alica Wallace of Boulder Daily Camera:
Move comes in wake of WhiteWave shifting Silk away from certified organic soybeans
Fourteen years ago, a burgeoning Boulder company — White Wave Inc. — was responsible for launching Silk soymilk, a brand that is now the category leader.
So when Whole Foods Market wanted to boost its organic soymilk options a year after Dean Foods’ WhiteWave Foods shifted most of its Silk products away from certified organic soybeans, the Austin, Texas, grocer turned to a burgeoning Boulder County firm — one stocked with former White Wave employees.
Whole Foods this week announced an agreement with Longmont-based Earth Balance under which the natural foods division of New Jersey-based spreads company Smart Balance Inc. would launch its line of organic soymilks at Whole Foods stores nationwide…for the rest, click here.
I’ll leave you with a remarkable, though tangential factoid:
“The NY Times reports that Silk spent $29.1 million on advertising in major media last year.”
Whew!

Follow Waylon Lewis on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/elephantjournal

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

By John L. Esposito and Sheila B. Lalwani
It is the 10th anniversary of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.
Hold your applause.
The federal bill President Clinton signed into law in 2000 enhanced Justice Department powers to protect planned and existing religious sites; but, in reality, cases of discrimination against Islamic centers and mosques have actually spiked. Earlier this week, the U.S. Justice Department said it is watching 11 cases of potential land-use discrimination against Muslims, a notable increase given that the law is intended to protect religious minorities in zoning disputes and its very existence suggests a growing awareness of religious pluralism and acceptance in America.
Maybe not.
The report, which tracks and monitors discrimination against mosques, synagogues, churches and other religious sites, such as Hindu temples and Sikh gurdwaras, serves as a sad reminder that religious discrimination remains strong in the U.S. and that Muslims struggle for acceptance. According to the report, the department said it is monitoring 18 cases of possible discrimination against Muslims over the last decade.
The report does not mention the controversy surrounding the proposed Islamic Center near Ground Zero. However, eight of the cases have been opened since May right around the time the controversy caused a national uproar. While the controversy in New York grabbed headlines and enflamed tempers, similar controversies have taken place around the country for several years.
According to the Pew Center on Religion & Public Life, 35 proposed mosques and Islamic centers have met with community resistance over the last two years. The report mentioned an effort in Wallingford, Conn., in which Tariq Farid petitioned for a zoning variance to build a mosque on residential property but was rejected after residents voiced concerns about traffic and parking. Another neighbor expressed concerns over the Muslims’ treatment of women. The Islamic Center of North Fulton in Alpharetta, Ga., sued the city alleging religious discrimination after the city council denied a proposed expansion.
Other examples speak to intolerance and misperceptions triumphing over reason. A zoning board in Walkersville, Md. rejected a proposal from the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community to buy 224-acre farm after residents voiced opposition and fear of Islam. The Ahmadiyya community bought newspaper ads, knocked on doors and offered residents use of the gyms as a means to win support. Ultimately, the case was settled in August 2009 when the town agreed to buy the land for $4.7 million. In Amherst, Mass., the Muslim community withdrew its application in June 2010 citing difficulties ensuring the property and negative comments from neighbors.
It is unsurprising that the Justice Department has launched 51 discrimination investigations under the law since 2000. The cases involved seven Muslim, six Jewish, three Buddhist and 31 Christian sites. Seven of those cases went to court and some involved multi-million damage awards.
Let’s note that not every mosque or Islamic center has met with opposition, but the trend of Islamophobia remains strong. There are approximately 1,897 mosques in the U.S., according to Ihsan Bagby, associate professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Kentucky. The Mosque Study Project 2000, which was sponsored by four Muslim organizations, counted 1,209 mosques across the country. This data suggests that about one-third of mosques have opened in the last decade.
Nevertheless, the trend to discourage the construction of mosques and Islamic centers remains real. The public’s understanding of Islam is riddled with misperceptions that endanger our ideals. We’re better than this.
Parking is important, but not that important.
Prof. John L. Esposito, author of The Future of Islam, is University Professor of Religion & International Affairs at Georgetown University and founding director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. Sheila B. Lalwani is a Research Fellow at the Center.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

He came, he lied, he chuckled and he accused the West of fabricating a story about Sakinieh Mohamadi Ashtiani’s death sentence by stoning. “Stoning does not exist in Iran” said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Christiane Amanpour. Was he too embarrassed by the sentence to admit its existence? For it does exist and the Presiding Judge, Imani Seyf Ahmadi Mousavi, and the majority members of the Sixth Branch of the Criminal Court of Eastern Azerbaijan (File number 6/84-92 Provincial Court; Indictment number19/6/1385-38) signed the following majority verdict:
“Her grave moral depravity and other circumstantial evidence point to her commission of the crime of aggravated adultery and have as a whole, convinced the majority members of her guilt in committing the crime of aggravated adultery. Consequently, according to articles 43, 83 and 105 of the penal code, the court condemns her to the punishment of death by stoning.”
Worse, Sakinieh is but one of more than a dozen persons languishing in Iranian prisons threatened by this barbaric and repugnant practice which, contrary to wrongful assertions, is not condoned by the Quran. If official court documents do not suffice to shame President Ahmadinejad what of the desperate cry of Sakinieh’s young son, traumatized by the spectacle of his mother’s lashing 99 times? Convinced of her innocence and determined to risk his life and freedom to save hers he alerted the world to her plight. What of the bevy of Iranian lawyers who have combated intimidation and threats to them and their families as they try to save Sakinieh? A Western conspiracy? Untrue.
Mr. President, stop your antics. If you want the truth to be that “stoning does not exist in Iran” use what power you have to convince Iran’s clerics to remove stoning from the country’s penal code.
The only factual element in President Ahmadinejad’s discussion of Sakinieh Ashtiani was his acknowledgment of world outrage and indignation. People of all ages, of all walks of life, throughout the world have decided that passive resignation towards repression and human rights abuse was not an option. Nor are the frolics of a leader who has denied the Holocaust, the existence of homosexuality in his country, the suffering of his people, and now the existence of stoning in the country’s legal statutes. Prove it Mr. President: If stoning does not exist in Iran, get it off the books.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Israel’s ten-month “freeze” on settlement building, declared under pressure from the Obama administration last November, is set to expire this month. James Cunningham, the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, reportedly warned European envoys that direct talks between Israelis and Palestinians were on the verge of collapse over the settlement freeze. While attention has focused on whether the freeze will continue, few have asked if it was ever truly in force.
In August, the Israeli organization Peace Now revealed that although no new building permits were issued during this period, construction continued, including the completion or ongoing construction of over 2,700 housing units as well as new construction in violation of the freeze. According to some observers, these figures represent a decrease of only 15 percent from 2009 — hardly a freeze or even a light frost. Peace Now warns that if the freeze does not continue, even this minimal achievement will be for naught.
However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stated that he has no intention of continuing the freeze. This was compounded by the recent statements of his foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who declared that in spite of the renewed direct talks between Israelis and Palestinians, peace would not be achieved “next year or the next generation.”
Lieberman’s comments recalled remarks by another Israeli leader who preceded him by a generation. In 1991, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir initially resisted attending the Madrid Peace Conference organized by the United States. However, he relented under American pressure. Shamir later admitted he had a different agenda in agreeing to the talks, explaining after leaving office that “I would have carried on autonomy talks for ten years and meanwhile we would have reached a half million people in Judea and Samaria [i.e., the West Bank].”
Indeed, successive Israeli administrations appear to have adopted this very strategy. Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem are one of the key outstanding issues to be resolved. Although the illegality of these settlements under international law is clear and was reaffirmed by the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Israel continues its construction on confiscated Palestinian land unimpeded by international criticism.
While it may have taken longer than the ten years Shamir predicted, half a million Israelis now populate the more than 130 settlements and over 100 “outposts” in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — nearly double the number of settlers since the Oslo peace accords were first signed in 1993.
What does this mean for Americans? Since Israel occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem in June 1967 and began its settlement program in earnest a decade later, they have been criticized by successive American administrations. Yet Washington has never applied consistent and substantial pressure to stop or reverse construction. Indeed, Israel’s intransigence has been rewarded directly and indirectly.
The United States provides over $3 billion of foreign and military aid to Israel annually, more than all of sub-Saharan Africa combined. This aid has increased even though Israel was recently admitted to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and notwithstanding Israel’s per capita gross domestic product being higher than that of Portugal and South Korea. Aid persists even as the U.S. economy suffers from high unemployment, and record federal and state budget deficits force dramatic cuts in education and social services, most notably in California. Although Washington does not officially allow aid to go directly to the settlements, it often ignores how the funds are spent.
Meanwhile, U.S.-based charities provide direct support to the settlements. In June, the New York Times reported that American organizations donated more than $200 million to Israeli settlements and outposts over the past decade. These tax-exempt funds were used not only to build schools and synagogues but to train militias and purchase military equipment, contrary to the charities’ stated humanitarian intent. Ironically, while Israeli law forbids tax-exempt donations from being directed to the settlements and considers outposts illegal, American charities have no such restrictions.
Israel’s settlement policy perpetuates its occupation of the Palestinian territories and undermines American attempts to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Without American largess, Israel’s occupation could not continue. The United States can either broker a final peace accord or it can continue to subsidize settlements — it cannot do both.
Continuing the settlement “freeze” is a small but important first step in demonstrating to Palestinians the sincerity of the U.S. and Israel in achieving a peace agreement. For too long, Palestinian rights have been ignored by American diplomats seeking politically expedient interim agreements and cynical Israeli politicians attempting to obscure their expansionist policies. A just peace requires that Americans and Israelis recognize that Palestinians have inalienable rights under international law. Otherwise, Washington’s current contradictory approach ensures that Lieberman’s claim of another generation without peace will not only prove prophetic, but optimistic.
Osamah Khalil is co-director of Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

There has been a lot of talk here about how a Democrat can win in 2010.
Here is my answer:
Let me know what you think. I can’t hang around today, but I will read each and every comment.
Truth,
Congressman Alan Grayson
P.S. — Help keep truth on the air. Contribute to our campaign, or make calls now at CallForGrayson.com.

Follow Rep. Alan Grayson on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/alangrayson

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Today’s guest post is from Claudia Cadelo, from her blog, Octavo Cerco.
El Dorado and Left of the 21st Century
by Claudia Cadelo
My only certainty is that I am not a communist, the rest I’m not that sure about. I have trouble defining myself politically. It could be the result of having been born into a system different from the rest of the world — outside its definitions of right and left — into a system based on one man and above all, on his whims. I love listening to people when they explain their political positions to me (including the orthodox, of course), and it disappoints me not to be drawn to any. Beyond the rights and freedoms of man, there is no cause I feel committed to.
But one reads, is informed, and strives to understand the world, especially the ideologies that move it. Rather than get on a plane, the four hundred pages of a book — nearly destroyed by its great many readers — or a documentary on a flash memory, tell me the story of humanity beyond the sea. In general, I have decided to establish margins for a minimum comparison so as not to drive myself crazy. It is not very useful, from my point of view, to try to compare a democracy with a system of State capitalism, or a dictatorship with a developing country. I can compare the United States with Europe, Mexico with Argentina, Chile or Haiti; Cuba with the former countries of the Soviet Union, with Iran, with the Chile of Pinochet, the Spain of Franco, and even North Korea. Any other comparison, Cuba versus Uruguay for example, is tainted by a primary antagonism: Totalitarian Society versus the Rule of Law.
Thus, when a European unionist tries to convince me of “the achievements of the Cuban Revolution,” it makes me want to cry. First, because there are no unions in Cuba, at least not what would historically be known as a workers’ union, whose function is to enforce the rights of the worker versus the boss, the company or the State. It would be healthy to get to the root of the concept, to respect the meanings of nouns so as not to fall into ambiguity; as my friend Reinaldo Escobar says, “Bread means bread and dictatorship means dictatorship.”
On this point, the paths of the left, unfortunately, tend to greatly confuse me. So I find people who condemn all the dictatorships in the universe except for the one in my small country, and who are insulted when they hear Franco spoken of with respect, yet they venerate Fidel Castro. Others hate the western press for its sensationalism, but don’t criticize that a single party controls our newspapers. There are those who are sure that the politics of the United States are interventionist and hegemonic, but they served as soldiers in Nicaragua, Angola and Ethiopia. There are even those who protest on the streets of New York against the war in Iraq with a three-by-three-foot poster of Ernesto Guevara. People, in short, who call the government of my country, “The Revolution.”
Claudia Cadelo
Yoani’s blog, Generation Y, can be read here in English translation.
Translating Cuba is a new compilation blog with Yoani, Claudia, and other Cuban bloggers in English.

Follow Yoani Sanchez on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/yoanisanchez

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

A long time has passed since the sound “d’jew” could be heard in a conversation between characters played by Tony Roberts and Woody Allen in a Woody Allen movie. In his latest romantic tragedy, “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger,” Allen’s Judaism is so distant, it is a presence in absence. In a string of films, magic, chance, the playful machinations of the Greek gods supplant conventional religion, and in Tall Dark Stranger, a character’s fate is in the hands of a fortuneteller. The auteur may be through with God, but suffering, now that’s another story. At a recent press conference, he explained that he’d had a debate with Billy Graham about believing in God and Graham insisted that he would have a better life, even if Graham’s belief were wrong. Allen said, he preferred work as a distraction to morbidity. “I can control work problems like what should I do if Josh Brolin can’t do my movie?” Brolin, seated nearby chuckled loudly.
At ninety-nine, photojournalist Ruth Gruber is sharp as the proverbial tack. At a special screening of a new documentary about her life,Ahead of Time, she told a rapt audience about going below on the Exodus and shooting the squalid conditions of the refugees huddled in the famed embargoed boat hoping to make their way to Israel. At a delicious dinner hosted by the film’s co-producer Patti Kennerat her Park Avenue home, and prepared under the auspices of another producer, Doris Schechter whose cookbook, “My Most Favorite Dessert Company Cookbook” is like a Bible to me, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Tovah Feldshuh, Marie Brenner, and many others celebrated with Gruber and directorBob Richman. Among the most “heimish” of women in New York, Kenner and Schecter can invite me anytime.
Another heimish woman, Gertrude Berg, a pioneer in the world of television sit-coms, is back. After a thrilling year in theatrical release, Aviva Kempner’s excellent documentary, “Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg” is now on DVD with extras: Berg’s guest appearances with Edward R. Murrow and on Ed Sullivan, her recipe for chicken in the pot with kneidlach. Yum!
Gershon David Hundert, editor in chief of the indispensable Yivo Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe has now succeeded in creating a superb all-inclusive website: see www.yivoencyclopedia.org.
Shana tova!
This post also appears on Gossip Central..

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Doctors are trained to identify diseases by where they are located. If you have asthma, it’s considered a lung problem; if you have rheumatoid arthritis, it must be a joint problem; if you have acne, doctors see it as a skin problem; if you are overweight, you must have a metabolism problem; if you have allergies, immune imbalance is blamed. Doctors who understand health this way are both right and wrong. Sometimes the causes of your symptoms do have some relationship to their location, but that’s far from the whole story.
As we come to understand disease in the 21st century, our old ways of defining illness based on symptoms is not very useful. Instead by understanding the origins of disease and the way in which the body operates as one whole, integrated ecosystem we now know that symptoms appearing in one area of the body may be caused by imbalances in an entirely different system.
If your skin is bad or you have allergies, can’t seem to lose weight, suffer from an autoimmune disease or allergies, struggle with fibromyalgia, or have recurring headaches, the real reason may be that your gut is unhealthy. This may be true even if you have NEVER had any digestive complaints.
There are many other possible imbalances in your body’s operating system that may drive illness as well. These include problems with hormones, immune function, detoxification, energy production and more. But for now let’s take a deeper look at the gut and why it may be at the root of your chronic symptoms.
Symptoms Throughout the Body are Resolved by Treating the Gut
Many today do have digestive problems including reflux or heartburn, irritable bowel, bloating, constipation, diarrhea and colitis. In fact, belly problems account for over 200 million doctor’s visits and billions in health care costs annually. But gut problems cause disease far beyond the gut. In medical school I learned that patients with colitis could also have inflamed joints and eyes, and that patients with liver failure could be cured of delirium by taking antibiotics that killed the toxin-producing bacteria in their gut. Could it be that when things are not quite right down below it affects the health of our entire body and many diseases we haven’t linked before to imbalances in the digestive system?
The answer is a resounding yes. Normalizing gut function is one of the most important things I do for patients, and it’s so simple. The “side effects” of treating the gut are quite extraordinary. My patients find relief from allergies, acne, arthritis, headaches, autoimmune disease, depression, attention deficit, and more–often after years or decades of suffering. Here are a few examples of the results I have achieved by addressing imbalances in the function and flora of the gut:
A 58-year-old woman with many years of worsening allergies, asthma, and sinusitis who was on frequent antibiotics and didn’t respond to any of the usual therapies was cured by eliminating a worm she harbored in her gut called Strongyloides.
A 52-year-old woman who suffered with daily headaches and frequent migraines for years, found relief by clearing out the overgrowth of bad bugs in her small intestine with a new non-absorbed antibiotic called Xifaxin.
A six-year-old-girl with severe behavioral problems including violence, disruptive behavior in school, and depression was treated for bacterial yeast overgrowth, and in less than 10 days her behavioral issues and depression were resolved.
A three-year-old boy with autism started talking after treating a parasite called Giardia in his gut.
These are not miracle cures, but common results that occur when you normalize gut function and flora through improved diet, increased fiber intake, daily probiotic supplementation, enzyme therapy, the use of nutrients that repair the gut lining, and the direct treatment of bad bugs in the gut with herbs or medication.
A number of recent studies have made all these seemingly strange reversals in symptoms understandable. Let’s review them.
Research Linking Gut Flora and Inflammation to Chronic Illness
Scientists compared gut flora or bacteria from children in Florence, Italy who ate a diet high in meat, fat, and sugar to children from a West African village in Burkina Faso who ate beans, whole grains, vegetables, and nuts.(i) The bugs in the guts of the African children were healthier, more diverse, better at regulating inflammation and infection, and better at extracting energy from fiber. The bugs in the guts of the Italian children produced by-products that create inflammation; promote allergy, asthma, and autoimmunity; and lead to obesity.
Why is this important?
In the West our increased use of vaccinations and antibiotics and enhancements in hygiene have lead to health improvements for many. Yet these same factors have dramatically changed the ecosystem of bugs in our gut, and this has a broad impact on health that is still largely unrecognized.
There are trillions of bacteria in your gut and they collectively contain at least 100 times as many genes as you do. The bacterial DNA in your gut outnumbers your own DNA by a very large margin. This bacterial DNA controls immune function, regulates digestion and intestinal function, protects against infections, and even produces vitamins and nutrients.
When the balance of bacteria in your gut is optimal this DNA works for you to great effect. For example, some good bacteria produce short chain fatty acids. These healthy fats reduce inflammation and modulate your immune system. Bad bugs, on the other hand, produce fats that promote allergy and asthma, eczema and inflammation throughout your body.(ii)
Another recent study found that the bacterial fingerprint of gut flora of autistic children differs dramatically from healthy children.(iii) Simply by looking at the byproducts of their intestinal bacteria (which are excreted in the urine–a test I do regularly in my practice called organic acids testing), researchers could distinguish between autistic and normal children.
Think about this: Problems with gut flora are linked to autism. Can bacteria in the gut actually affect the brain? They can. Toxins, metabolic by-products, and inflammatory molecules produced by these unfriendly bacteria can all adversely impact the brain. I explore the links between gut function and brain function in much greater detail in my book, The UltraMind Solution.
Autoimmune diseases are also linked to changes in gut flora. A recent study showed that children who use antibiotics for acne may alter normal flora, and this, in turn, can trigger changes that lead to autoimmune disease such as inflammatory bowel disease or colitis.(iv)
The connections between gut flora and system-wide health don’t stop there. A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that you could cure or prevent delirium and brain fog in patients with liver failure by giving them an antibiotic called Xifaxan to clear out bugs that produce toxins their poor livers couldn’t detoxify.(v) Toxins from bacteria were making them insane and foggy. Remove the bacteria that produce the toxins, and their symptoms clear up practically overnight.
Other similar studies have found that clearing out overgrowth of bad bugs with a non-absorbed antibiotic can be an effective treatment for restless leg syndrome (vi) and fibromyalgia. (vii)
Even obesity has been linked to changes in our gut ecosystem that are the result of a high-fat, processed, inflammatory diet. Bad bugs produce toxins called lipopolysaccardies (LPS) that trigger inflammation and insulin resistance or pre-diabetes and thus promote weight gain.(viii)
It seems remarkable, but the little critters living inside of you have been linked to everything from autism to obesity, from allergy to autoimmunity, from fibromyalgia to restless leg syndrome, from delirium to eczema to asthma. In fact the links between chronic illness and gut bacteria keep growing every day.
So what can you do to keep your gut flora balanced, your gut healthy, and thus overcome or avoid these health problems?
Five Steps to a Healthy Gut (and a Healthy Body!)
Follow these five simple steps to begin rebalancing your gut flora.
1.Eat a fiber-rich, whole foods diet–it should be rich in beans, nuts, seeds, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables–all of which feed good bugs.
2.Limit sugar, processed foods, animal fats, and animal protein–these provide food for unhealthy bugs.
3.Avoid the use of antibiotics, acid blockers, and anti-inflammatories–they change gut flora for the worse.
4.Take probiotics daily–these healthy, friendly flora can improve your digestive health and reduce inflammation and allergy.
5.Consider specialized testing–such as organic acid testing, stool testing (new tests can look at the DNA of the bacteria in your gut), and others to help assess your gut function. You will likely have to work with a functional medicine practitioner to effective test and treat imbalances in your gut.
And if you have a chronic illness, even if you don’t have digestive symptoms, you might want to consider what is living inside your gut. Tending to the garden within can be the answer to many seemingly unrelated health problems.
To your good health,
Mark Hyman, MD
Mark Hyman, M.D. practicing physician and founder of The UltraWellness Center is a pioneer in functional medicine. Dr. Hyman is now sharing the 7 ways to tap into your body’s natural ability to heal itself. You can follow him on Twitter, connect with him on LinkedIn, watch his videos on Youtube and become a fan on Facebook.
References
(i) De Filippo, C., Cavalieri, D., Di Paola, M., et al. 2010. Impact of diet in shaping gut microbiota revealed by a comparative study in children from Europe and rural Africa. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 107(33): 14691-6
(ii) Sandin, A., Brbck, L., Norin, E., and B. Bjrkstn. 2009. Faecal short chain fatty acid pattern and allergy in early childhood. Acta Paediatr. 98(5): 823-7.
(iii) Yap, I.K., Angley, M., Veselkov, K.A., et al. 2010. Urinary metabolic phenotyping differentiates children with autism from their unaffected siblings and age-matched controls. J Proteome Res. 9(6): 2996-3004.
(iv) Margolis, D.J., Fanelli, M., Hoffstad, O., and J.D. Lewis. 2010. Potential association between the oral tetracycline class of antimicrobials used to treat acne and inflammatory bowel disease. Am J Gastroenterol. Aug 10 epub in advance of publication.
(v) Bass, N.M., Mullen, K.D., Sanyal, A., et al. 2010. Rifaximin treatment in hepatic encephalopathy. N Engl J Med. 362(12): 1071-81.
(vi) Weinstock, L.B., Fern, S.E., and S.P. Duntley. 2008. Restless legs syndrome in patients with irritable bowel syndrome: response to small intestinal bacterial overgrowth therapy. Dig Dis Sci. 53(5): 1252-6.
(vii) Pimentel, M., Wallace, D., Hallegua, D., et al. 2004. A link between irritable bowel syndrome and fibromyalgia may be related to findings on lactulose breath testing. Ann Rheum Dis. 63(4): 450-2.
(viii) Cani, P.D., Amar, J., Iglesias, M.A., et al. 2007. Metabolic endotoxemia initiates obesity and insulin resistance. Diabetes. 56(7): 1761-72.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

By Amy McGann
Court was back in session this week at Guantanamo Bay, this time for a pre-trial hearing in the case against Noor Uthman Muhammed. Noor, as he is known, is one of the last Sudanese nationals still being held at Guantanamo. He is charged in the military commissions with conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism. Historically, US military commissions have been created to try war crimes. However, despite Obama administration promises to fix the flawed Bush-era military commissions, each of the crimes with which Noor is charged have not traditionally been considered war crimes. In fact, conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism are crimes commonly prosecuted in US federal courts – and much more quickly than in the military commissions. In the past eight years there have been only four convictions in terrorism cases at Guantanamo Bay but more than four hundred convictions in federal courts, including those of high-level suspects such as 9/11 al Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui and Richard Reid, the so-called “shoe bomber.”
Noor shuffled into the courtroom on Tuesday, with soldiers holding his arms. He was wearing the white prison uniform issued to “compliant” detainees. The clothing swamped his slight frame and added to his fragile appearance. As the hearing began, Noor put on headphones to hear a translated version of the proceedings. The defense’s first order of business was to ask for a blanket to protect Noor from the air in the heavily air-conditioned courtroom. Eventually, a guard appeared with a white blanket in which Noor wrapped himself. The hearing then turned to several substantive issues.
As I listened to the arguments I could not help but wonder why so much time and energy was being spent deliberating over issues that either never would have arisen or easily could have been resolved in the time-tested federal court system. Ironically, during the proceedings prosecutors repeatedly invoked federal court rules in support of their arguments — the same rules that some proponents of the military commissions claim would be too lenient on defendants.
For example, one matter before the commission on Tuesday related to defense access to witnesses the government planned to call during a hearing in November. At that hearing the government will need to show that Noor is an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent” – that is, that he fits the definition of someone who can be tried before a military commission. If he does not fit the definition, then the military commission will not be able to hear his case and it will be dismissed.
To prove that Noor is an alien unprivileged enemy belligerent the government plans to call the FBI agents who interrogated Noor to the stand. The defense wanted an opportunity to interview the agents before the hearing but so far, the FBI agents have refused. Thus, defense lawyers asked that the commission require the government to make the agents available and if they continue to refuse, that any evidence they attempt to introduce be excluded.
In support of his position, the prosecutor relied heavily on the practice of federal courts where it would be the agents’ choice whether or not to speak to defense counsel. In federal court, there is no requirement that a witness, whether an agent or not, speak to the defendant or defense counsel prior to taking the witness stand. US military practice actually differs in this area. In a court-martial, the defense does have the opportunity to interview prosecution witnesses before they testify.
Herein lies an example of a significant problem with the military commissions. Without an established set of rules, and with an express statement in the statute that while the military commissions are based on the Uniform Code of Military Justice, court-martial cases are not binding precedent, each side is left to choose its preferred legal system or to argue for an entirely new rule of interpretation.
In Noor’s case before the commission this week, the defense clearly wanted to interview the FBI agents before they took the witness stand. The prosecutor clearly would rather they did not. Because there is no established set of rules for the military commissions on this issue, the prosecutor turned to federal court rules to argue his point. In other instances, however the prosecution preferred the rules of courts-martial.
These courts may try some of the most important cases in years. To hold a fair hearing and come to a just result lawyers should not have the opportunity to pick and choose from varying sets of rules depending upon which ones best suit their clients’ interests. The federal court system, while not perfect, has been in existence for decades and already has an established a set of rules that well balances the concerns of the defense and prosecution.
While the outcome might not be what the defense would want, if Noor were being tried in federal criminal court, this week’s hearing would never even have taken place. There would not have been any question as to whether or not defense counsel had access to prosecution witnesses prior to trial. Writing the rules as you go along is no way to run a trial.
Amy McGann is an intern with Human Rights Watch’s Terrorism and Counterterrorism Program.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The AP did a reductionist story on the Small Business Legislation just passed by the Congress. This has circulated widely and the I will reference a version included in a post by Mish Shedlock, who I follow and generally find informative. On this one he has missed the boat. The Act does have something meaningful to offer, but only to bold and creative financiers and their clients.
There is a refrain taken up by bankers immediately in the wake of the financial crash of 2007-2008. The refrain is this, “It is not our fault that small business lending plunged, there was no loan demand.”
That refrain is basically repeated in Mish’s piece. Only now, we are two years later and in fact there is reduced loan demand. But contrary to his point, that does not make such a program irrelevant and wasteful, it makes it all the more necessary.
You tell me, does this look like insightful economic analysis or political reactivity?
So here we have the tone of the piece. Note the comment, “latest rotten fish offering”. I guess this follows on many previous rotten fish offerings.
From the AP:
Yes, the sluggish economy has chilled expansion plans. For historical context, we should be aware the the sluggish economy is the result of mal-investment by our largest financial institutions, hedge funds, private equity, pension funds, government sponsored enterprises, and individuals. Everyone wanted a quick profit. Banks chose to change their product mix to feed assets into securitized pools from which derivatives, CDOs, CDSs, etc could be created. Generally, this meant pushing standardized consumer loan products. The focus of credit activity shifted massively towards centrally underwritten, scored, mathematically modeled mortgages, home equity loans, and credit card products. These could be made sufficiently uniform to lump them together and sell off the risk to suckers at a quick profit. Customized personal credit and small business lending were de-emphasized. Why? they just did not generate the quick profit and the risk could not be offloaded to an investor or government sponsored enterprise.
The result? Massive over-investment in residential real estate and debt fueled personal consumption. And, massive under-investment in the productive capacity of our industries. The busting of the bubble then had the follow on effect of putting most of our financial institutions on the brink of insolvency. The largest banks were saved by the bailout. Some will deny that they were saved by the bailout, saying they did not need the TARP. But the truth is, without the bailout all their counter-parties, including AIG and many foreign banks, would have wiped out even the strongest of our domestic financial institutions. Everyone was bailed out. Today however, despite what you will read below, many banks are constrained for capital and must limit lending and reduce their overall risk weighted assets. Do not let political posturing or propaganda fool you.Recent unofficial problem bank lists indicate that there are well over 800 problem banks in this country. These banks cannot freely lend. Many other banks are suffering the same conditions even if they have not moved to the point of being “problem banks”. Lending is constrained. I have seen it in the market.
The AP characterizes the situation as unproblematic, relying on the testimony of one banker. (there are others, but the AP article does no serious analysis)
Bank executives say their customers don’t want loans, even at low interest rates, because the sluggish economy has chilled expansion plans. Some say the federal money isn’t worth it because they fear it will come with too much regulatory oversight.
“We have taken a strategic decision not to have our primary regulator, the government, also be a partner in our bank,” said William Chase Jr., CEO of Triumph Bank in Memphis.
Chase said the bank already has enough capital to meet the paltry demand for loans. “Our business customers are mired in uncertainty and are reluctant to invest in their businesses,” Chase said.
This particular banker’s politics are also easily discerned. He does not want government money. Perhaps his little bank does not need it or does not have the creativity to know what to do with it.
The crux of the lending program is this. The balance sheets of banks will be improved by increasing their capital positions with government purchases of preferred stock in banks with under $10 Billion in assets. Depending on their size, the banks can obtain this capital in amounts up to 5% of their assets. That is a huge amount of capital. In some cases it could increase capital ratios by up to 70% and fully support both the increase in loan portfolios and risk. The ask in return is moderate. The cost of capital is 5% at the baseline and can drop to as little as 1% if a bank increases its business loans by 10% or more from today’s lows. That is not hard for a bank with the ability to take on risk and a plan to do so. It is hard for a bank with no plan. But why would we want such to participate anyway?
The loans may be used for these purposes:
(15) SMALL BUSINESS LENDING.
(A) IN GENERAL The term ”small business lending” means small business lending, as defined by and reported in an eligible institution’s quarterly call report, of the following types:
(i) Commercial and industrial loans
(ii) Owner-occupied nonfarm, nonresidential real estate loans
(iii) Loans to finance agricultural production and other loans to farmers.
(iv) Loans secured by farmland.
So these loans are for job creating activity and agriculture. A bank with a plan could seek to develop expertise in businesses related to clean efficient energy. No, a small bank cannot do massive wind farms. But they can support the myriad of small businesses, engineering firms, etc that support clean energy production. Or they could support the new technologies that provide for energy conservation. What would be required is actual expertise, not the mechanized mass-production, judgment free methods that have come to pervade the industry. A bank could also support the development of more healthy local fresh food production and the logistical apparatus to bring it to market. This would serve multi purposes of job creation, improving diet and health, reducing health care expenditures, and increasing quality of life. Such is the role finance used to play.
There may not be massive demand for small business loans now. But should we be ready when the demand comes back? We cannot depend solely on the community banks that remain robust. We cannot depend on the mega-banks with their mechanized processes and lack of local knowledge or support for the subjective analytical processes that allow innovation. We cannot depend on bubble money providers from hedge funds and custodians for the uber rich. So we should have a program to support the development of more capacity for financial innovators in the banking sector, those that can develop a plan, build the expertise, act with purpose and integrity to do what is necessary to support our communities and the job and income growth that is necessary for a return to economic security.
To quote Amar Bhid: “The measure of a financial system ought to be the service it provides the economy as a whole, not the employment or bounties it bestows upon financiers.”
So do not be discouraged by the words of Mish and others like him, works like these:
So what does Congress do?
Why it sets up a convoluted $30 billion program, onerous on small banks, so those small banks (who don’t want the money) can offer loans to small businesses that do not want the money either!
That is simply defeatism and is neither forward looking or backwards aware. This is a nice simple program that will provide benefits if even 5% of financial institutions choose to participate. But do you know what? When they figure out how easy it is, plenty of financial institutions will draw this capital down and then employ it in ways that help get us out of this economic funk.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

When floating in a small, inflatable boat on a paradisiacal pond along the Snake River in Wyoming, my four-year-old nephew (my passenger), turned and said: “It’s like we went into a painting. But where does the painting end?”
Yes, this illuminates that my nephew is amazing. But it also gets at the heart of what rests on my mind as we delve into “National Public Lands Day”–what exactly is the “end” of a public land in nature? How do we define “natural”? And how do human beings psychologically differentiate such boundaries? Where does the painting end?
In 2006, my brother and I created a company to engage kids with nature and the environment. As a promotional effort, at the end of last year we conducted a writing contest called “My Land, Your Land: 2009 public lands writing contest for children and young adults.” We wanted to know how local, state, national parks, wilderness preserves or seashores influenced kids’ lives. (We excluded national monuments for our purposes.)
We received submissions about Bryce Canyon, The Delaware River, Lake George, and the Midwestern Sand Dunes. But what was most fascinating to me was that we also received submissions about family trips to water-slide parks and staying at outdoor hotels in the Bahamas. During classroom visits, I discovered similar answers from kids between 1st and 7th grade when asked about experience in the natural world. The distinction between what was “natural” and what was man-made was not obvious to them.
This could mean a number of things. It could mean that they simply hadn’t experienced enough of the outdoors to make such a distinction. It could mean they associate nature with vacation or something out of the ordinary. It may also simply be a more basic distinction between “inside” (human realm) and “outside” (nature). Or even more deeply, I wondered if, perhaps, there wasn’t such a clear distinction between the “natural” or the “unnatural” for children at all.
My question isn’t about environmental psychology in terms of how our surrounding world affects our behavior (although that is interesting and ultimately plays a role in how we emotionally or viscerally connect to nature as a “space”) it’s more about how we, as humans, actually perceive the natural world.
My friend Bill Cohen, M.D., who is a former wilderness therapy instructor and a psychiatry resident at Albert Einstein Medical Center, theorized that based on Piaget’s Classifications of cognitive development, a basic understanding of “nature” probably emerges during the “The Concrete Operational Stage,” which occurs around ages 7-11. Kids at that age learn to be less egocentric, more logical, and can start to grasp the idea of conservation. But the answer to the question is, they may not have the intellectual constructs to make the distinction between “natural” and “unnatural” in the way that us environmentally conscious adults would like them to. It’s still developing. How interesting, then, to try and teach ideas of nature conservation, even before those boundaries are clearly set.
But even in the adult world, our own definition of natural is like trying to hit a moving target. In the late 19th century, for example, people moved from thinking of nature as scary or needing to be conquered into imagining it as a recreational area (as eloquently articulated in Roderick Nash’s Wilderness & the American Mind). Most of us are familiar with the contrast to Native American practices of land ownership or migratory movement on the land. As an aside, to further illuminate the bizarre connection of humans to the environment (and racism), early proponents of national parks suggested that Native Americans just reside in the parks as part of the natural landscape! (Although frankly, “reservations” conjures up a whole other discussion of the equally strange allotment of land.)
If we can’t define what is natural, then our interaction with the environment becomes quite confusing. Can I take a walk in that park? Can I mine for coal? Can I touch that tree? What happens when millions of people want to touch the same rock? Is that rock any less natural?
On National Public Lands Day, thousands of volunteers convene across the country to plant trees, remove invasive species, and pick up trash. But some of these seemingly simple, positive volunteer efforts, however, remain controversial, precisely because of this inability to define the natural. Invasive species are species not “native” to a habitat that basically come in and take over an area–like the whitebark pine beetle decimating trees in Yellowstone, or pythons literally eating alligators in the Florida Everglades. (Europeans taking over North America?) We designate these things as terrible–and they are. But are they unnatural? There is also a heightened focus on raising awareness about climate change and its affects on the national parks. Surely, whether human caused or not, won’t the climate on earth at some point change, thereby affecting the landscape?
What, exactly, are we preserving?
At a certain point, these natural sanctuaries (unless it’s a “wilderness area”) aren’t actually “natural” anymore. We, as humans, have largely designated them as public lands because, well, we think they’re kinda pretty. As Richard Sellars points out in his book Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History, most of the public lands were not created with environmental interests in mind at all–it was for tourism, plain and simple.
All this maintenance sometimes feels like an old lady getting too much botox in order to maintain what is “natural”–yes, plump lips were once natural, but as you age, they are not. By doing all this maintenance, we are preventing the earth from aging gracefully, or even more accurately, we are just trying to keep nature frozen–looking just like how we want it in that specific area, because we’ve managed to basically destroy so many other beautiful sections of the planet.
We are preserving our own perception of what is natural, not nature itself. We’re imposing our own, human, value judgment on the natural world–and that’s not necessarily bad–it’s just human (and therefore unnatural? Or hypernatural? You see the conundrum)! The sheer diversity of the organizations we have managing these public lands, and the degree to which humans are allowed to meddle in them, is revealing. Some we can barely touch but are highly developed (NPS), and some are quite open but not developed (Bureau of Land Management).
And, sadly, that is why public lands are so important. We’ve come to recognize that we can’t define nature and we do not understand the boundaries of the painting, even as adults. That’s why we’ve artificially created them, to force ourselves from over-consumption. We don’t know how to deal with the passage of time, with the shifting of the world, with the unpredictable. We want to control it and use it. Creating these places delineates what’s special in a way that only our human minds can grasp. Preserving our perception of nature is, perhaps, just as important as nature itself.
Winners of the 2009 “My Land Your Land” writing contest (unaffiliated with National Public Lands Day or the National Environmental Education Foundation):
FIRST PLACE:
Nicole Kazekevich (Grade 5, Staten Island) “Southern Magnolia.”
Elizabeth Skelton (Grade 9, Washington D.C.) “Nature Sanctuary Near the Nation’s Capital.”
SECOND PLACE:
Nadia Vieira Chekan (Grade 4, New Jersey) “Pyramid Mountain Experiences, Montville, New Jersey.”
Matthew Tomassi (Grade 5, Staten Island) “Parrot Island.”

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

By now most people are aware of Proposition 23, called the “California Jobs Initiative” by its oil-slick proponents, despite the fact that it would reduce state revenue and stall the growing clean energy job sector. It has become a lightning rod of debate about the clean energy and air future of not just California, but of the nation. The proposition would suspend California’s landmark greenhouse emission reduction law AB 32 (Global Warming Solutions Act), one of the most ambitious in the world. Proposition 23 would suspend implementing the law until unemployment in the California reaches 5.5 percent for four consecutive quarters.
That’s a pretty good way of saying, “Kill our clean air, clean energy and green jobs.”
Opponents have dubbed it the “Dirty Energy Proposition” because both Texas Oil companies and the billionaire Koch brothers have chipped in most of the millions behind this attempt to kill clean energy investments and green jobs creation in California. According to the New York Times, pro-Prop 23 advocates have given $8.2 million so far, with almost all of it ($7.9 million) of that coming from out-of-state oil companies like Tesoro and Valero.
The New York Times called it a showdown, saying that it has “jolted environmental leaders who are worried that a vote against the law in this state — with its long history of environmental activism — would amount to a powerful setback for emission control efforts in Washington and statehouses across the country.”
Indeed, it is a showdown, one between Big Oil and out-of-state billionaires and almost everybody else, including health experts, community leaders, consumer groups, business leaders, Democrats (including Jerry Brown), Republicans (including Schwarzenegger), Greens (including Laura Wells), seniors groups, city councils, mayors, firefighters, police officers, unions, teachers, students, churches, and regular citizens all across California.
And we all should be jolted. Here are the 5 top reasons why Californians must crush Prop. 23:
1. Prop 23 is a fraud perpetrated on the people of California by out-of-state oil companies and right-wing billionaires who want to line their pockets while they kill our clean energy future. That’s not hyperbole, that’s the game. Texas oil knows what’s at stake so they are pulling no punches and letting the money pour in about as fast as the Deep Horizon leak. It’s no surprise that fossil-fuel industries see efforts to clean up our air and energy supplies as a threat to their bank accounts. Our ballot initiative process was meant to give ordinary citizens a voice in decisions affecting everybody. Are we going to allow out-of-state interests manipulate us?
2. Prop 23 is an insult to the intelligence of the people of California. Every aspect of Prop 23, from its name “Jobs Initiative” to the language in the proposition itself, assumes Californians are simpletons who accept the most basic lie as fact and expects us to accept that they really have our interests at heart. Who among us really thinks that out-of-state oil companies have a real interest in creating jobs for Californians?
Which leads us to reason number 3.
3. Despite its Orwellian name, Prop 23 is a job killer. It has already been shown repeatedly that green jobs and clean tech sector have grown at a significantly higher rate than other jobs and AB 32 is not linked at all to job loss or the unemployment rate. If Prop 23 passes and AB 32 is suspended, investments, loans, and jobs in clean energy will shrink dramatically. Unless you think that building an economy based on oil-spill clean-up and doctors treating asthma is the way of the future, then it’s time to expose this one. The supporters are relying on a climate of fear around jobs to push this through.
4. Prop 23 is a threat to state and national security. Just ask former U.S. Secretary of State during the Reagan administration George Schultz. Schultz came out swinging with an editorial in the Sacramento Bee. He says, “Those who wish to repeal our state’s clean energy laws through postponement to some fictitious future are running up the white flag of surrender to a polluted environment.”
It is not that often a former ranking GOP official and Democrats and Greens sing in harmony. This measure indeed is making for strange bedfellows, with the likes of Van Jones and Schwarzenegger on the same side. But on Prop 23 they have united with the message: clean energy, clean air, emissions reductions, green economy are all paving the path of a more secure future.
5. Finally, Prop 23 would limit Californian’s opportunity to be global leader on emissions reductions, clean energy, and energy conservation. Historically, California has often been visionary in its environmental protections and programs. Sometimes we forget that we live in the 7th largest economy in the world and we forget that other states, indeed, other countries, often take cues from us.
All this leads us to the conclusion: in November we all have to come out in force and vote no on the Dirty Energy Proposition 23. And we must not just beat Prop 23, we must pulverize it like the dust beneath our feet. A mere 51% margin will suffice, but I say let’s beat it by 75% or higher to send the message that Californians are serious about conservation, clean energy, health, and a clean energy economy.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

A friend and I were driving to Fresno yesterday morning when I received a very welcome
message on my blackberry: Meg Whitman has come out against Proposition 23.
Everyone who opposes Proposition 23 had to cheer — and be cheered by — that news.
Now both Whitman and Brown have officially voiced their opposition to this
environmentally harmful proposition.
Obviously, it was a tough political decision for Whitman, whatever her convictions may
be. She’s been under pressure to support Prop 23 from a divisive sect of climate change
skeptics, and at the same time she must want to maintain an image consistent with the
progressive values of the California majority.
But regardless of any complications, I’m thrilled that Whitman has seen past multimillion dollar propaganda and is supporting what’s right for California’s environment
and green economy.
That being said, I don’t agree with her position on AB32, the underlying emission’s law
that Prop. 23 would roll back. In her official statement today, she reiterated her desire for
a one-year moratorium on AB32 and called the law a “job killer.”
I believe this would be a step in the wrong direction. For decades, California’s been a
leader in the fight for a cleaner environment. And right now we’re on the cusp of a green
energy revolution that can create more jobs for Californians. (That’s on top of the
estimated 500,000 green technology jobs already employing citizens of the state.) So to
call AB32 a “job killer” is not just wrong-headed, it’s also dangerous.
Business people often criticize environmental regulation and claim it will cost jobs. They
say it’s “impossible” to comply with. Or they “can’t afford” not to pollute. I would think
that Meg Whitman — who touts herself as a technology entrepreneur and visionary –
would be able to see past this old, false choice.
That’s why I decided to dedicate myself to convincing people to vote “no” on Proposition
23 this November. I got mad that we as Californians were being attacked by this same
defeatist, pessimistic rhetoric: because the clean energy economy is not only about
creating a better living environment, it’s about creating a better economic environment.
The sooner we get past the outdated “jobs vs. the environment” debate the better off we
are going to be on both fronts. We have 40 days till the election. Make sure to tell your
friends — vote No on Prop 23.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Alex Prager (American, born 1979) Despair. 2010. Chromogenic color print, 16 x 20″ (40.6 x 50.8 cm) Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery 2010 Alex Prager, courtesy Yancey Richardson Gallery
This is now; that was then: LEFT: Alex Prager Desiree from the series The Big Valley. 2008. Chromogenic color print, 36 x 48 1/2″ (91.4 x 123.2 cm) RIGHT: Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, 1978, Black and white photograph, 8 x 10 inches, 20.3 x 25.4 cm, Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures, (MP# 11)
There are moments throughout the history of art when, marveling at the latest aesthetic affront, the public, the critics, and even fellow artists have thrown up their hands and asked, “Where can we possibly go from here?”
And, lately, as art has grown ever more referential and every medium, self-referential — when there is nary an image that does not lay claim to a legacy of irony that is now generations deep: well: what can possibly come next?
Answer: Alex Prager.
The colors are saturated, livid, one might say; you might think it’s a still from a movie, or a perhaps a cover torn off the latest JCrew catalog, but it is neither. It is one of the many super sexy trope-portraits that the artist, Alex Pager, has become known for.
Yes, I went ahead and coined ‘trope-portrait’ just for Prager’s work because it otherwise defies category. These are, after all, not pictures of women, nor are they the loaded narratives constructed by Cindy Sherman, whom she references to heavily; instead, Prager’s photos are of tropes. They depict kinds of women in kinds of situations, ones that have already been created and have already been referenced.
And they do it with a no holes barred sexy panache a la David LaChapelle and a shameless balls-out approach to appropriation that snickers at the earnest loyalty of Richard Prince’s pix.
Glamour and defiance: this is a have your cake and bath in it too, generation.
Whereas Cindy Sherman referred to movie tropes — not so much kinds of women as the ways we have told stories about women — Alex Prager refers to the “capture” as they say in photography, the moment of clarity when what the artist sees gels into what she wants you to see. Sometimes that capture is a sly wink at the viewer, where the focus is shifted toward sheer, brightly lit, sex.
Lost Girls at your mercy: LEFT: Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, 1979, black and white photograph, 8 x 10 inches, 20.3 x 25.4 cm, Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures, (MP# 48) RIGHT: Desert, 2007, Alex Prager, C-type print, Robert Berman Gallery
These pictures throw wit and cleverness away like so much tedious homework. And although Prager has also tossed aside the postmodern mantle of irony that protects the serious artist from coming off downright crass — she manages to score big with critics and fans because her references to Hitchcock are flat out endearing, and her David Lynch/Greg Crewdson sense of foreboding keep many of the images on your mind.
LEFT: Alex Pager, Beverly, 2008 Alex Prager, Digital C-Type Print , courtesy Michael Hoppen Contemporary RIGHT: Screen shot of Google Search!
And then there’s super-saturated colors that produce an irresistibly juicy wall power.
It’s hands-down pretty stuff and you can’t help but like it.
Alex Prager, Desiree and Despair: Courtesy, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of the Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art, Linda and Gregory Fischbach, and William S. Susman and Emily Glasser 2010 Alex Prager, courtesy Yancey Richardson Gallery

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

P.T. Barnum would steal this one if he were still around. That’s the claim that more blacks than ever now say they back the Tea Party. This bunkum comes courtesy of Pajama TV’s tracking poll that purportedly found that more than one out of three African-Americans supports the Tea Party. And even more incredibly back the movement strongly. Even more incredibly still, the poll claims that almost forty percent privately say they like the Tea Party.
The poll can be hacked to pieces from just about any angle. It’s too small. There were only 543 “likely voters” who are African-American in the poll. The methodology, What were they asked? How were they asked it? And who asked it? PJTV doesn’t say. The bias, PJTV is a hard line right wing echo chamber. The pool of alleged respondents it chose to make the case that there are untold thousands of blacks that reject President Obama’s policies and person is deeply suspect coming out the gate.
The poll is, of course, pure balderdash. No reputable political analyst or observer who’s even a step removed from comatose would give any credence to. In the November mid-terms, black voters will back Democrats by the same crushing margin they always have. And despite some private grousing that Obama hasn’t said and done enough on black concerns, they will still back his reelection bid by off the chart margins. But that won’t stop PJTV and the right wing attack dogs from using this rump poll as proof that there’s a hidden army of disgruntled blacks who will bail from Obama the first chance and vote for a Tea Party candidate.
This type of raw, in your face, propaganda can’t or shouldn’t be cavalierly shrugged off. The Tea Party has been masterful at trotting out a few show piece, handpicked, blacks to rail against big government, taxes, the constitution, and immigrants. The near textbook example of Tea Party race manipulation came a few months back in the immediate aftermath of the NAACP challenge to the Tea Party to purge racists and racism from its ranks. Palin, Glenn Beck, and a bevy of Tea Party luminaries, loudly protested that the party is not racist, and to prove it shoved their same hired gun black faces in front of TV cameras, and microphones to counter the NAACP claim of racism. This charade is not new. In 2000, the nation watched a bevy of black gospel singers, Christian evangelicals, young professionals on the make, and the one or two black GOP elected officials on stage and in front row seats at the GOP national convention in Philadelphia ooze praise of Bush and the GOP. This template has been used repeatedly whenever the issue of GOP racism crops up. And that’s often, since the GOP can be depended to oblige on that.
Don’t be surprised then to see some black Tea Party hack wave the PJTV poll around on Fox News, some radio gab show, or at a staged rally to prove that legions of blacks are Tea Party converts in waiting. Pt Barnum would love this one.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He hosts a nationally broadcast political affairs radio talk show on Pacifica and KTYM Radio Los Angeles.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter:
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The men and women serving here in Afghanistan are more than simply soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines – they are mentors and catalysts for change. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than the Female Officer Candidate School. Recently I had the opportunity to visit their training with the Minister of Defense Wardak and talk to both the Afghan women going through the course and the American female soldiers training them.
Courses like the Female OCS are examples of the moderate but profound changes that are occurring in Afghan society. Unlike previous years, particularly those under Taliban oppression, Afghan women can hold jobs previously unavailable to them, such as serving in a position of authority as an officer in the Afghan National Army.
To prepare them for jobs within the military, a group of eight female U.S. Army drill sergeants from a basic training unit were sent as mentors. These soldiers have done an amazing job preparing the 29 Afghan women that graduated as ANA officers this week. As I discussed the course with the mentors, it quickly became apparent that they got more out of their mission than their Afghan counterparts. As one mentor told me, “I am humbled that I was asked to be a part of this and how these women came forward in this war-torn country.”
While women serving in the Afghan military is still contentious and the road to an integrated Afghan military is a long one, it is still a road that must be travelled. To one day have a stable society that includes all members of society, from different ethnic groups and genders, they must all be included in their government. The military is no exception.
Even the Afghan Minister of Defense recognizes the importance of including women in his organization. While speaking to the candidates, he stated that his hope for the future is that many females come into the ANA and serve their country. He, like all of us striving to improve the effectiveness of the ANA, was proud to welcome them into the ANA, and proud of the example they were showing their fellow Afghans. Like the female soldiers mentoring Afghan officer candidates, I am proud to be a part of developing our partners as they build a professional force representative of all their people, men and women.
You can find more information on the Female Officer Candidates here.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

What an eventful 24 hours! At least for me.
Last night, I attended the 25th Anniversary screening of the iconic 80′s film Desperately Seeking Susan (you know, “the Madonna movie”). That was followed by a late morning trip to the theatre to see Easy A, the new teen-centered Emma Stone comedy that came in second to The Town at last weekend’s box office. And by the time I arrived home, the internet was exploding with news that Lindsay Lohan had pretty shockingly been sent back to jail for failing a drug test (and by the time of writing this had, much less shockingly, been granted bail).
As I sat back and let these stories and images percolate in my brain, I felt some far-away sense of commonality emerge. But what could these women – traversing fiction and real life, spanning 25 years of mass entertainment, dealing with issues from mistaken identity to teenage sexuality to drug addiction – possibly have in common with each other?
And furthermore, what did they have to do with little ol’ me? The 27-year-old ‘me’ who was just sitting there, trying to figure out what I wanted to eat for lunch? (and what I wanted to wear tonight…and what I wanted to write about this weekend…and what I wanted to do with my life…?)
The common thread that struck me right then and there was that these women were searching for control over their lives. For control amidst the antagonistic forces that, maybe to lesser extents, often seem to be pushing us modern women into becoming weak caricatures of ourselves. The housewife, the slut, the out-of-control child star. No longer forced to choose between wife, nurse or teacher – or even between red dress or blue dress or green dress – we have been living in an era of endless options for some time now. And as a result, we are constantly faced with decisions that seem to have a huge impact on who and what we will become.
Are some decisions better than others? Do we fail to conquer the forces working against us sometimes? Definitely. (Oh, Lindsay…) But it’s a great mark of modern womanhood that we’re so reluctant to sit back and let life just happen to us. When life gives us lemons, we study agricultural dynamics and try to alter their DNA so that we can end up with juicy plums instead.
I’m not saying that this tendency for women to seek control and empowerment happened overnight. Desperately Seeking Susan came out in 1985, and the film – on-screen and off – leant an unmistakable air of feminine strength and agency to the film industry of the time. Written, directed and produced by a team of women, the movie revolves around two female characters. One (Rosanna Arquette’s Roberta) is attempting to figure out who she is and, ultimately, how she can escape her boring life as a suburban housewife. The other (Madonna’s Susan) remains the picture-perfect image of cool self-control, even as her identity is stolen and she is pursued by thugs. There are men in the movie, of course, but they are only involved in as much as they relate to the two women at the center. I can’t help but wonder if this movie would even succeed in getting made today (we’ll leave that question to another blog post).
Regardless, here is a fun and fabulous depiction of two very different women taking control over their lives and refusing to fall prey to the societal expectations and jewelry thieves that are chasing them. The empowering message comes across loud and clear – I even met a woman at the screening who told me that, back in 1985, she saw the movie and subsequently felt inspired to quit law school and become a club kid in New York’s downtown scene. While I won’t argue if that was the right choice for her, it must’ve been a damn gutsy move. Way to write your own story.
Fast forward to today, and how can you not love Emma Stone’s Olive in Easy A? She’s the perfect 2010 protagonist: smart, witty, down-to-earth, self-deprecating and beautiful without resembling, in any way, the Heidi Montags who stare out at us from the tabloids every day. So people (wrongfully) think she’s a slut. Her reaction? To take ownership over her newfound reputation and beat her close-minded classmates at their own game. It’s Lady Gaga-style performance art at its finest!
Wearing a scandalous red “A” on her suddenly exposed chest ala Hawthorne, Olive becomes the best (fake) whore these kids have ever seen. She takes control over the unshakable rumor mill, and consequently her life, by manipulating everyone’s expectations and committing herself to getting the last laugh. In true teen comedy fashion, the high jinks get a little out of hand and revisions need to be made to her plan. But she is no one’s victim, and viewers inevitably leave the film wishing they had been half as strong and determined in their youths.
Which, finally, brings us to Lindsay and her semi-incarceration. In contrast to the fictional heroes above, she is clearly struggling to take control of her life back from her addictions (and also back from the paparazzi, and the enablers that undoubtedly surround her, and the probable delusions of grandeur that have infiltrated her coddled psyche). Once upon a time, she was faced with endless options and she chose poorly. She was given the world after her star turn in Mean Girls – the obvious precursor to Easy A, and an instant classic – and she threw her newfound power and popularity away. She has become a public symbol of what women like myself fear most – the odds that we will make the wrong decisions and, because we do have so much control over our lives, have no one to blame but ourselves when we realize that we messed up.
Is Lindsay truly attempting to take control and change her life for the better, as her friends suggest? I certainly don’t know. But if she – and we – can learn anything from the film heroines that we so love, it should be that we never lose the opportunity to regain control over our lives, our actions, and what people think of us.
You’re not happy with your life? Change it. You don’t like how people treat and talk about you? Show them that there are other ways to perceive you (no, tweeting doesn’t count). Feel like the world is knocking you down? Turn the tables and fight back.
Having the option to steer your life in innumerable directions can be a curse or a blessing. But which one it will be…that’s your call.

Follow Jessica Massa on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/jessmassa

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Part of Dr. Dayton’s Recovery Month Series
Situations that turn our sense of “normal” on its head, put us regularly on emotional overload, and cause us unusual fear and stress can be traumatizing. Living with addiction, let’s face it, falls into this category. For starters, it’s disturbing to our sense of an orderly and predictable life. Normal routines get thrown off, feelings get hurt, doors get slammed, hearts get broken and families get torn apart. Family members are all too often left staring, dazed and disillusioned, as they witness the lives of those they love, in spite of their best efforts to avert catastrophe, fall apart at the seams. Mistrust grows, “normal” feels out of reach and the fabric of faith in an orderly and predictable world becomes frayed and worn.
The Cost of “No Talk” Rules
Because alcoholic family systems are often steeped in defenses such as denial and minimization, they may actively resist talking about the fear and anxiety they are experiencing. Instead intense emotions explode into the container of the family and get acted out rather than talked out. Though acting out brings temporary relief, it does not lead to any real resolution or understanding, so nothing really gets fixed, mended or amended. Walls go up and battle lines get drawn as family members silently collude to keep their ever widening well of pain from surfacing, blaming it on anything but what’s really going on. They avoid talking about their worries, thinking that if they don’t get discussed, they aren’t really all that bad or might just disappear on their own. Perhaps they worry that talking is a tacit “call to action” that they don’t feel ready to take.
Because these families are not finding healthy ways of staying on emotional middle ground, they tend to achieve balance by swinging from one end of the pendulum to the other. Their emotions and behaviors seesaw back and forth from 0-10 and 10-0 with no speed bumps in between. They have trouble staying balanced and living within a range of 4,5 and 6.
The Trauma Extremes: High Intensity vs. Shutting Down
How does the dynamic of seesawing between emotional and behavioral extremes get set up?
Here is one explanation that grows out of trauma theory.
The intense emotions of fear and high states of stress, that so often accompany living with addiction, ignite our natural fight, flight trauma response. They flood the body with adrenaline so that we can prepare to flee for safety or stand and fight. When we can do neither, when fighting seems exhausting and pointless or when children or spouses feel that they are trapped and cannot really get away, which is often the case in pain filled families, we may simply shut down or freeze so that we don’t have to feel our intense, negative emotions. Shutting is our body/mind system trying to preserve itself from overheating, in this case, with too much emotion. Watch any frightened cat, dog or salamander freeze (read: shut down) because it senses danger and you are seeing a natural trauma response.
When these swings from feeling flooded with feeling to shutting down, happen over and over again, they can become central to the way we process emotion.
Following are some ways in which this see sawing from one emotional extreme to the other, may manifest or creep into in the thinking, feeling and behavior of the family:
Impulsivity vs. Rigidity
Impulsive behavior can lead to chaos, wherein a pain filled inner world is surfacing in action. Painful feelings that are too hard to sit with, explode into the container of the family and get acted out. Blame, anger, rage, emotional, physical or sexual abuse, over or under spending and sexual acting out, are some ways of acting out emotional and psychological pain in dysfunctional ways that engender chaos.
Rigidity is an attempt to control or shut down that chaos both inwardly and outwardly. Adults in an addictive/traumatizing family system may tighten up on rules and routines in an attempt to ward off the feeling of falling apart. Or family members may contract in their personal styles becoming both controlled and controlling.
Recovery Option: Self regulation is a basic developmental accomplishment that allows the growing child and eventually the adult to regulate their thinking, feeling and behavior so that it is within an appropriate range for the situation they are engaged in.
Despair vs Denial
Denial is a dysfunctional attempt to ward of ever growing feelings of despair. Reality gets rewritten as family members attempt to bend it to make it less threatening; to cover up their increasing anxiety, guilt, resentment and fear. Denial takes the place of honest self disclosure, worries and anxieties are hidden rather than talked about and as a result, despair deepens.
Recovery Option: Reality orientation or an ability to live with life on life’s terms is an important part of recovering one’s balanced sense of self and a balanced orientation toward the world.
Enmeshment/Disengagement
Enmeshment is a relational style that lacks boundaries and often discourages differences or disagreement, seeing them not as healthy and natural but disloyal or even threatening. Enmeshment can also be a way of coping with the fear that the family is falling apart in which certain family members huddle together for a sense of safety and may develop traumatic bonds. Enmeshed styles of relating formed in childhood tend to repeat themselves in adult relationships.
With disengagement family members are seeing the solution to keeping pain from their inner worlds from erupting as avoiding subjects, people, places and things that might trigger it. They retreat into their own emotional and psychological orbits and they don’t share their inner worlds with each other. They isolate.
Many addicted families cycle back and forth between enmeshment and disengagement, they yearn for closeness but lack the kinds of healthy boundaries that would let them take space, hold different points of view or hang onto a sense of self while in each other’s presence and allow others to do the same.
Recovery Option: Balanced relatedness is neither a withdrawal from another person nor a fusion with them. It allows each person their own identity and to move in and out of close connection in a natural, modulated fashion.
Over functioning vs. Under Functioning
Over functioning can wear many hats; spouses may over function to maintain order and “keep the show on the road” while the addict falls in and out of normal functioning. Children may over function, taking care of siblings when parents drop the ball. Or they may work over time striving to restore order and dignity to a family who is becoming increasingly neglectful, irresponsible or strange.In a maladaptive attempt to maintain family balance, some family members may over function in order to compensate for the under functioning of others. .
Under-functioning may be associated with the learned helplessness that is part of the trauma response, in which one comes to feel that nothing they can do will make a difference or make things better, so they give up. Family members may freeze like deer in the headlights, unable to mobilize, think clearly or make useful choices.
It is also not uncommon, that the addict themselves, along with others in the system, may do both, over functioning to make up for periods of under functioning.
Recovery Option: Balanced functioning is the obvious in between of over and under-functioning. When we do what is appropriate to the circumstance and when we have conscious choice around the degree to which we function.
Caretaking vs. Neglect
Caretaking can be an attempt to attend to, in another person, what needs to be attended to within the self. We project our own unconscious anxiety or pain onto someone else, seeing it as about them rather than understanding it as our own. Then we set about fixing in them what actually may need fixing in us. It is a form of care that is all too often motivated by our own unidentified pain rather than a genuine awareness of another’s. Because this is the case, neglect can be its dark side. We neglect or don’t see what is real need within another person because we can’t identify real need within ourselves.
Neglect can take the form of ignoring or not seeing another’s humanness, withholding care, nurturing and attention or a shutting down of the relational behaviors that reflect attunement and connection.
Neglect can be particularly difficult to address in recovery because there is no obvious parental abuse to point to. Clients are left feeling that they have too many needs for anyone to meet and are often mistrustful of deep connection. Consequently, they may push away the very vehicle that might help them to heal, mainly relationships.
Recovery Option: Balanced care of self and others is part of living a healthy life.
Abuse vs Victimization
When individuals are unable to process personal pain, anger and hurt and talk it out, they are at risk for acting it out instead. Generally these roles are traded back and forth many times within the same interaction as family members bully and hurt each other over and over and over again.
Sometimes the roles become stratified and certain family members become the obvious abuser while others become the obvious victim, certainly small children are sitting ducks for being abused and victimized by out of control parents and older siblings. Both roles can become personality styles or relationship dynamics that get carried along through life.
Abuse and Victimization are roles that often get passed down intergenerationally, the abused child or the victim, is at risk, without recovery, of becoming an abusing parent. Rather than identifying and feeling their own helplessness and rage at being a victim of abuse, for example, they act out their childhood pain by passing it on in the form in which they received it,(e.g. the abused child becomes the abusive parent) or in an opposing form (e.g. the abused child becomes either the over distanced or over controlling parent). At the center of abuse is the inability to sit with and process painful emotions, abuse is acting out pain at another person’s expense.
Recovery Option: Emotional modulation is a skill that we learn literally in our parents arms and within our family systems. When children have extreme emotional responses they are “wooed” back into emotional balance through the nurturing and sustaining actions of parents and caring adults. Over time they absorb the skills of self regulation through these family interactions. As we see in this article the opposite is also true, we can equally learn the skills of emotional disregulation if we live with disregulated patterns for long enough. The good news is that the skills of regulation can be relearned in recovery through regulating activities like twelve step programs, therapy, meditation, yoga, massage, deep breathing and exercise; activities that quiet and soothe the emotional system and teach skills of mind/body regulation.
For more information log onto nacoa.org

Follow Dr. Tian Dayton on Twitter:
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Exactly 50 years ago, on September 26, 1960, John F. Kennedy met Richard Nixon in a Chicago television studio for the nation’s first presidential debate. The powerful aura of that event has infiltrated America’s political consciousness, its legend resonating across the decades.
According to the myth, Kennedy catapulted directly from TV screen to White House by looking debonair and not breaking out into flop-sweat. The reality, of course, is far more nuanced, and the true legacy of Kennedy-Nixon transcends cosmetics. What gets forgotten is that a valuable new institution was established that night in Chicago. America’s first presidential debates set a precedent of public scrutiny that continues to hold sway, not just here but around the world. Voters have come to regard debates as job interviews, with we the people deciding who gets hired. Imperfect as they may be, debates constitute one of the few campaign rituals that belong not primarily to political professionals, but to the electorate.
So what are we to make of the increasing numbers of office-seekers who refuse to meet their opponents face to face on live television? According to the Huffington Post’s Amanda Terkel, nearly a third of this year’s Senate candidates and nearly a quarter of gubernatorial contenders have either repudiated debates or balked at taking part. If we accept the analogy of the job interview, these non-debaters are equivalent to applicants who insist upon being hired without first talking to the boss. What they are demanding, essentially, is that voters take them on blind faith.
In this strangest of campaign seasons, alarming numbers of candidates are thumbing their noses not just at debates, but at any form of public appearance that cannot be foreordained. This tradition stretches back to Richard Nixon in 1968, when Roger Ailes staged the softball infomercials so memorably described by Joe McGinnis in The Selling of the President. And it continues today through Sean Hannity’s sloppy-kiss interviews with politicians seeking an ideological safe harbor on Fox News. Such appearances are the opposite of debates, more akin to Cuban state television than the democratic dialogue that ensues when candidates must defend their positions side by side.
Fifty years ago Kennedy and Nixon handed the American electorate an enormous gift. By appearing together in a contest of ideas, they established a new mechanism for voters to comparison-shop before they head to the polls. The only question relevant to any candidate who refuses to debate his or her opponents: What have you got to hide?

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

In this Week 2 REVIEW and Week 3 PREVIEW, we lament the Giants’ no-show at Indianapolis. In so doing, we lambast the strategy of dressing only two defensive tackles, critique Aaron Ross, wonder why Corey Webster has not been assigned to cover the G-Men opponents’ number one receivers, harp on the impotence of the squad’s offensive line, and comment on Brandon Jacobs’ melodrama. Also, a Plaxico update, a review of surprises from Week 2, discussion about Mike Francesa (as always), complaints about the ESPN Power Rankings (as always), Braylon “Ticking Time Bomb” Edwards gets arrested, and the Titans are on their way to New Meadowlands Stadium. LET’S GO BIG BLUE!!
Listen to The NYGMen Podcast Episode #28 here:
For more, go to www.giantspodcast.com.

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www.twitter.com/NYGMenPodcast

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

While the failure to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell dominated LGBT news this week, there were plenty of other worthy news and opinion posts on Bilerico Project too. Just in case you missed some of them, here’s the best from the past week:
Sunday
Guns Don’t Kill People. People With Guns Kill People Filed by: Terrance Heath
My Life Again in New York Filed by: Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer
Monday
Language, Reality, and my Trans Girlhood Filed by: Tobi Hill-Meyer
How Glee Facebook Status Updates Are Promoting Equality Filed by: Leone Kraus
Tuesday
Gay is not the new Black: Why replicating King’s strategies won’t work for the contemporary queer Filed by: Alex Blaze
Castro triggered the American LGBT rights movement? Filed by: Bil Browning
Wednesday
Dan Savage Tells Bullied Kids “It Gets Better” Filed by: Betty Greene Salwak
A Pox on Both Political Parties: So Where Do We Go From Here? Filed by: Michael Hamar
Thursday
Dressed up like a boy Filed by: Kate Clinton
Recognizing National Gay Men’s HIV Awareness Day – Six Things for Gays to Know About HIV/AIDS Filed by: Dan O’Neill
Friday
Queer Music Friday: LZ Love Filed by: Paige Schilt
Why Marriage Equality Matters Filed by: Gloria Nieto
Don’t forget:
Subscribe to the Bilerico Project Report to get all of the previous day’s posts sent to you every night at midnight Eastern time.
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com