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Last week, in the writing group I facilitate for homeless people, I suggested a pre-Thanksgiving exercise that got me thinking. Instead of the grade-school-type assignment of writing what you’re thankful for I suggested we come up with some things we are not thankful for and see if we can find bright spots in those, the proverbial silver linings.
I’m not thankful that my three kids have parents who are no longer married, but there are many things I am thankful for as a result of my divorce. Let me say at the outset that I liked being married. The greatest loss was that of our family unit, even though we still go on “family” vacations and gather on holidays.
Three things I miss most about being married are:
Reading the Sunday New York Times with my ex. He would quote to me bits of interesting articles, which doubled my reading pleasure.
Even though my former husband traveled a lot, I never felt lonely the way I sometimes do now. At times I felt disconnected from friends because it takes time to be married, time that I now use to spend with old friends and cultivate new friendships.
Oops, I can’t remember the third thing. If it comes to me, I’ll let you know. Oh, now I remember, he wrote all the checks and dealt with life’s fine print.
As for a sleeping companion, I stopped caring whether someone with hairy legs was sharing my bed. In fact, at some point I began to believe that sharing my bed with my hairy beagle, Casey, was as pleasurable in it’s own way and in other ways a lot less bother. For example, I can blow my nose loudly in the night and Casey could care less. If only Casey could talk politics.
Sex begs to be addressed, even though my children, who will see this, might gag. I’ll spare you details, but yes it’s nice to have a built-in partner. On the other hand it’s nice to have one’s own bedtime routine and to once again have experienced feelings of new romance with an (albeit limited) succession of boyfriends.
The morning routine is my treasure. I go to sleep when I please and wake up when I please and turn on NPR without worrying I’m disturbing someone. And no one disturbs me. Casey simply follows along with my schedule, which often varies from day to day.
After getting dressed, if the weather is 50 degrees or above, I go out to the porch that is off my bedroom and stretch then write, which is what I’m doing now. It’s 12:48 pm. When I finish this, Casey and I will have breakfast and take a short walk. After that, I’ll write some more and then walk with a friend. (In case you missed the diet tip, my theory goes that I eat all day long, so the later I start, the less I eat.)
Often at night I go to dinner, to book club, to a swing dance. Other nights I turn on MSNBC and cook Brussels sprouts and answer mail, often sitting through repeat rounds of Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow. Catching up on mail while listening to jabs at Sarah Palin is a pleasant way for me to spend an evening.
Last night I went ice skating with my ex-so-called boyfriend under a velvety midnight-blue sky with a crisp half moon on the outdoor rink that sits between the Washington Monument and the Capitol. Afterwards we went for frozen yogurt and a stroll.
Don’t get me wrong, the skating was as lovely as it sounds but it’s not perfect. Mr. Ex-So-Called was cranky about my fiddling with my stuff in the car, putting things in my pockets so I wouldn’t have to take my backpack to the ice and then fiddling again after we skated to put back stuff from my pockets into my backpack, all of which proves, of course, that you don’t have to be married to get on someone’s nerves.
Now that it’s just Casey and me at home, the serenity is ideal for my writing. Ah, but there’s the rub. I’m not complaining, but as a free-lance writer, I have no anchor, no office culture. I regret that, as a competent loner, I’ve built more space around myself than I presently need. It helps that I’ve compiled a list of people I like, long enough to form a small village. So when the house gets too quiet, there’s always someone to bike to if I’m desperate to escape the racket of molecules banging together.
Maybe I could do more to attract the company of a suitable man. Instead, I have chosen a path of comfort in my “mom jeans.” By contrast, some women I know have undergone the cosmetic blade to look sexier and younger. Would I ever pay a surgeon to cut open my face open and staple my head and risk making me look like Popeye? Certainly not to attract a guy who’s too vain to use sunscreen like a man I met some years ago on a bike trip.
In sum, divorce has countless silver linings and I have oodles to be thankful for.
Despite the upbeat tone of this, I’m a worrywart. Visit my blog Confessions of a Worrywart.
Also see my simple recipes, tips and other articles on Home Goes Strong.
What silver linings can you find in things you’re not thankful for?

Follow Susan Orlins on Twitter:
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann is irritating, pompous and oafish. Whatever points he attempts to contribute to any political issue get lost in his snarky, Lord-High-Executioner rebuttal against anything that comes from Fox.
Sadly, this is what passes for political discourse today: two clearly partisan “commentary” shows having at each other in the cable equivalent of the Roman Coliseum. Hiring Olbermann, who comes from sports, may have been MSNBC’s game plan all along given the self-absorbed linebackers on the opposing team.
Olbermann wants to be funny, but he also wants to be taken seriously. He’s like the unctuous uncle at a holiday family gathering with a compulsive need to show everyone how smart he is. Sitting in the middle of the living room couch he holds forth on everything from federal subsidies to his hatred of Bill O’Reilly. Eagerly, he works each family member over with his mile-a-minute spiel amid uncomfortable but polite smiles until, one by one, everyone leaves, and he’s left talking to the dog. After two minutes, even the dog leaves.
On July 6, 2010 program, Olbermann cited reports by the Center for American Progress (a liberal think tank, Politifact.com points out) that outlined “nine different subsidies that the U.S. government gives to an industry that makes more money than any other industry, including refunds for drilling costs and refunds to cover the cost of searching for oil. Subsidies for oil and gas companies make up 88 percent of all federal subsidies. Just cutting the oil and gas subsidies out would save the U.S. government $45 billion every year.”
Quoting simple homework done by Politifact, “We tracked down the Center for American Progress paper the statistic was drawn from – ‘Pumping Tax Dollars to Big Oil: Getting Government Priorities Right on Tax Subsidies for Oil Companies,’ published on April 14, 2010, by Sima J. Gandhi, a senior economic policy analyst with the center.
“In the paper, Gandhi wrote, ‘Tax expenditures are government spending through the tax code. They are distributed through deductions, exclusions, credits, exemptions, preferential tax rates, and deferrals. What makes them look different from grants or checks is that they are delivered through the tax code as part of tax expenditure spending programs. These tax expenditures can amount to a significant portion of federal subsidies for oil and gas. The cost of tax expenditure programs for oil and gas companies made up about 88 percent of total federal subsidies in 2006.’
Politifact writes, “When we read that, it sounded to us like Gandhi was saying that 88 percent of all oil and gas subsidies were accomplished through the tax code — not that 88 percent of all federal subsidies went to the oil and gas industry.
“To check that, we contacted Gandhi. She confirmed our suspicion and pointed us to her original source — a 2006 paper published by the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, a state office. The paper includes a detailed table and says that “various taxes represented approximately 87.4 percent of federal government subsidies for oil and gas in 2006.
“So it’s clear to us that Olbermann misstated that statistic.”
On Olbermann’s statement that “Cutting the oil and gas subsidies out would save the U.S. government $45 billion every year,” Politifact found that “This one proved even easier to check. We located a different Center for American Progress paper by Gandhi, ‘Eliminating Tax Subsidies for Oil Companies,’ published on May 13, 2010. In it, she outlines nine different types of subsidies (Olbermann was right about that number) and concludes that “the total government savings from eliminating these subsidies is projected to be $45 billion over 10 years.
“That’s $45 billion over 10 years, not one year, as Olbermann had said.”
When I point this out to a couple of friends well-acquainted with Politifact, they remind me that the Web site rates many of Olbermann’s statements as “Mostly True.”
“If he’s talking to millions on television every night,” I ask, “shouldn’t all his facts be true?”
“At least he’s not as bad as O’Reilly and Beck,” they counter.
Ethicist Michael Josephson calls this one of the most common of ethical rationalizations, The Doctrine of Relative Filth. It goes like this, “I’m not so bad as long as there are others who are worse.”
The ethical reality is, if “commentators” like Olbermann, O’Reilly, et al, are willing to play fast and loose with some of the facts, how can you trust any of the facts that come from them, particularly when that information comes packed with a lot of snarky hyperbole? Further, whether you believe Olbermann to be a credible source, as millions do, how are we to make informed decisions about issues like government subsidies and the budget, when he doesn’t give us the straight dope?
At the end of the day, Olbermann comes off like a double-talking, blustery, sarcastic… wait, they made that movie already – Francis, the talking mule.
Jim Lichtman writes and speaks on ethics. His commentaries can be found at www.ethicsStupid.com

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Last week, over a thousand people turned out to hear Geoffry Canada, the powerhouse behind the Harlem Children’s Zone, give the keynote address at the United Way’s Education Summit at Chicago’s Park Community Church.
The summit was billed as a faith-based, urban school reform revival, and Canada delivered a powerful Sermon on the Mount. “We cannot tolerate another generation of failure,” he told a racially diverse audience of teachers, parents, clergy members, politicians, and community activists. In clear and exacting terms, he implored us to find the courage to stand up for children.
After Canada spoke, I joined a panel of experts to explore how we could channel his inspiration into action. The panel, led by Advance Illinois’ Robin Steans, included some Chicago heavyweights: Etoy Ridgnal, the Chicago Director of Stand for Children; Sarah Duncan, the Community Schools advocate and Board Member of the Ariel Education Initiative; Laura Thrall, the CEO of United Way of Metropolitan Chicago; and Noel Castellanos, the leader of the Christian Community Development Association.
I braced for the worst, knowing that Canada had likely stirred up a hornet’s nest. Although audience members could text questions to the panel anonymously, the ones scrolling across two giant screens (yes, this was some seriously high-tech church) were universally tame, centering on political lobbying, leveraging resources, personal actions, and replicating the neighborhood/community school model. Following-up on a question about our innovative fee-for-service community school, Jane’s Place at Nettelhorst, leave it to an eight-year-old boy to raise his hand the old-fashioned way, and ask the hardest-hitting question of the night: “The guys who come in to teach in the afterschool program all sound really great…Who’s supposed to pay for all that?” Good question, kid.
Now, maybe it was a self-selecting crowd, and maybe we were in church and all, but my town’s in the middle of a heated Mayoral election, and the audience was sprinkled with candidates and media types. Chicagoans aren’t known for pulling-punches, so what gives?
Up until Davis Guggenheim broke ranks in Waiting for ‘Superman,’ it was practically verboten to challenge a recalcitrant teachers’ union. You couldn’t even say there was such a thing as “bad” teachers.
Eight years ago, when our group of mommy reformers first set foot in our neighborhood’s under-performing and under-utilized public elementary school, some teachers walked the hallways muttering obscenities and one even had a restraining order against her for hitting students. We knew who shouldn’t be there, the principal knew it, the students sure knew it, and so did all the other teachers. The stoic union investigators dispatched from central office even seemed to know it, too.
We didn’t have time to sit around waiting for a lumbering, Kafkaesque bureaucracy to self-correct. Our principal gave the curriculum team carte blanche to review curriculum and financial plans, weigh-in on hiring decisions, and most importantly, access to document teaching styles. Funny thing happened: with all those pesky parents roaming the halls and peeking into classrooms, within two years of our reform movement, almost every single ineffective teacher left Nettelhorst, voluntarily.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t take too many toxic teachers to contaminate a staff. When the most negative forces left, the school’s extremely toxic teaching climate improved dramatically. Test scores tripled, across every demographic. My kids, who started at Nettelhorst in preschool, are now in fourth and sixth grade, and I’d put their education–one without any gifted program, selective enrollment, or tracking system–on par with any private school in the country. Our teachers are that good.
While we can all cheer the parental pressures that helped to fix my little neighborhood school, and celebrate the great teaching that’s going on at Melrose and Broadway, the question still remains: in what backwards universe could adults allow this deplorable situation to fester?
Embarrassingly enough, I’ve also been cowed by this massive chilling effect, and I’m not even beholden to the system! In writing How to Walk to School, we labored to describe the school’s toxic teaching climate in the most palatable terms. We shied away from laying blame, and chose to concentrate on how parents and principals could remedy the situation from within the system. No one was “bad” just “ineffective.”
Now, lo and behold, Waiting for ‘Superman’ has given us the freedom to say that yes, some teachers are bad, and that a system that protects them is inexcusable, and that we, as Americans, are not going to tolerate it anymore. Heaven help me, did I really just say that out loud? President Obama has said that education is the civil rights issue of our day. If a generation of civil right activists faced ferocious dogs, water-canons, and Billy clubs, why am I such a ‘fraidy cat to say publicly what everyone says in private?
Before some mean-spirited blogger hurls criticism my way, let’s be clear: I love, love, l-o-v-e teachers. I’d rather eat glass than home-school my two adorable kiddies. I was also weaned on unions; in the seventies, my mom kept us home for months during the teacher strikes rather than cross a picket line (backgammon anyone?). I’m not saying that the handful of disgruntled teachers contaminating Nettelhorst were bad people, or that they didn’t love their craft, or that maybe, once upon a time, they were even decent educators. But, by any reasonable standard, these folks should not have been in any classroom, my kids’, or anybody else’s.
Imagine running a business with tenured employees that only need to demonstrate “competence.” Imagine a system that makes it nearly impossible to remove individuals who fall short of expectations. What quality of product would your company produce? We have decades of research that proves that the single most important factor in student performance and lifetime achievement is the quality of the teacher in the classroom, including super-star economist and fellow Nettelhorst mommy Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach’s ground-breaking study, so how can we possibly defend the status quo?
If we’re going to see school reform, real school reform, we’re going to need to start asking tough questions and demanding real answers–answers that are in the best interest of children, not adults. Kudos to Mr. Canada for leading the charge.
Before catching the red-eye back to NYC, Canada left the crowd with a poem he wrote:
Maybe before we didn’t know, that Corey is afraid to go.
To school, the store, to roller sake, he cries a lot for a boy of eight.
But now we know each day it’s true, that other girls and boys cry, too.
They cry for us to lend a hand, time for us to take a stand.
And little Maria’s window screens, keeps out flies and other things.
But she knows to duck her head, when she prays each night ‘fore bed.
Because in the window comes some things that shatter little children-dreams.
For some, the hourglass is out of sand. Time for us to take a stand.
And Charlie’s deepest, secret wishes, is someone to smother him with kisses.
And squeeze and hug him tight, so tight, while he pretends to put up a fight.
Or at least someone to be at home, who misses him, he’s so alone.
Who allows this child-forsaken land? Look in the mirror and take a stand.
And on the Sabbath, when we pray, to Our God we often say.
“Oh Jesus, Mohammed, Abraham, I come to better understand,
How to learn to love and give, and live the life you taught to live.”
In faith we must join hand in hand. Suffer the children? Take the stand!
And tonight, some child will go to bed, no food, no place to lay their head.
No hand to hold, no lap to sit, to give slobbery kisses, from slobbery lips.
So you and I we must succeed, in this crusade, this holy deed.
To say to the children in this land: Have hope. We’re here. We take a stand!

Follow Jacqueline Edelberg on Twitter:
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The financial crisis that hit Iceland in 2008 revealed many weaknesses inherent in Iceland’s system of governance. The professional political class that had arisen since Iceland’s independence from Denmark in 1944 had become intolerably entwined with its dominant business class, and had acquiesced to (and sometimes actively participated in) the massive fraud that nearly bankrupted the nation.
One fortunate consequence of this most unfortunate revelation has been a movement to draft a new Constitution. National elections to select the twenty-five members of a Constitutional committee will take place later this month, and the committee will commence its work early next year.
Iceland’s current Constitution is essentially a word-for-word translation of the pre-WWII Danish Constitution. It reflects the concerns faced by a 19th century nation making the transition from an absolute monarchy to a liberal democracy. Although it may have sufficed at that time for that nation, it has failed to address the disastrous problems of 21st century Iceland.
The new Constitution must reflect Iceland’s unique history, as well as its democratic values. One way to accomplish these goals is to reinstitute Iceland’s greatest political achievement–the Alingi.
Today, Iceland’s legislature is referred to as the Alingi, but in reality the Alingi–as it was originally conceived in 930 AD–was a much different institution, in which the legislature (or Lgrtta) was only one part. Until Iceland submitted to the authority of the Norwegian king by the terms of the “Old Covenant” (Gamli sttmli) in 1262, Alingi was a general assembly at which the country’s chieftains (goar) met to decide on legislation and dispense justice. Alingi also performed a judicial function and heard legal disputes, and assumed the function of hearing cases left unsettled by the other courts.
All of these functions have now been delegated to separate institutions. In Iceland’s parliamentary system, few of the members of any of these institutions are directly elected by the people. Each is staffed by career professionals primarily interested in retaining their jobs. Each is concerned with only a portion of the nation’s affairs.
In each of the past two years, Iceland has convoked a national assembly of 1,000 randomly selected Icelandic citizens – in 2009 via grassroots efforts of private citizens – to discuss the nation’s values and future following the bank collapse of 2008. This year’s national assembly, held on November 6, was called for in legislation passed by Parliament about a Constitutional Convention. The purpose of that meeting, attended by 950 people, aged 18-91 from all over the country, was to call for ideas that would reflect the emphasis and the will of the general public when it came to the nation’s Constitution.
The meeting was considered to be a huge success. In groups, participants discussed the values that they wanted the Constitution to be built on; those were then broken down into eight categories and discussed in terms of the contents Constitution contents. Participants voted on the categories they considered of most importance and on categories that they believed were “new.” Each discussion table then composed a paragraph that summarized their central ideas and conclusions. Participants then had an opportunity to forward personal messages to the constitutional convention, Alingi, media and others.
What I propose is that we create in our new Constitution a similar institution, with real powers to oversee the actions taken by our government. As things stand now, there is no practical recourse to actions taken by the legislative, executive, and judicial branches that are not in the interest of the people as a whole. Particular segments of society, most notably those who have received the benefit of goods designated as belonging to the public–such as fish quota owners and aluminum companies, have been able to exert undue influence behind closed doors.
In a nutshell, the function of the new Assembly (or jfundur) would be to review all of the government’s actions (legislative enactments, regulations, treaties, court orders, contracts, executive appointments, etc.), identify those that it deems not to be in the nation’s interest (f.ex. aluminum or energy contracts, privatization schemes – such as the disastrous fishing and bank robberies), and submit those to national referendum. It would also suggest an agenda for the next legislative session.
This National Assembly would – like the last two previous assemblies – be randomly selected from National Registry’s pool of eligible voters after the close of the legislative session and meet within two weeks after the session’s end. It would convene for a period of say, two weeks (attendance mandatory, like jury duty), review legislative output and vote on each product. If the National Assembly vetoes something, it goes to a national referendum.
The first couple of Assemblies might be hectic, but over time there would be stability. We already have had two meetings of this kind with very good results. This way we get the best of both worlds – we’ll have a professional class of people with, supposedly, the technical knowledge to create legislation, and we will have the population as a whole represented. Along with this, I suggest we decrease the number of our needlessly numerous MPs from 63 to, say, 37.
To the best of my knowledge, this form of participatory democracy has not been attempted on a national scale in the modern era, but I believe it is the appropriate form of government for Iceland. Given Iceland’s size, this annual people’s congress would represent a very significant percentage of the nation’s voting age population, yet would still be a manageable group. Because it would act on a specific annual schedule, there is little danger that its decisions would create uncertainty in the application of laws. Because it would consist of a large cross-section of the population as a whole, there is little danger of corruption or undue influence over its deliberations.
In the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln referred to “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Although the parliamentary government under which Iceland has functioned for the past 66 years is a better government than the ones that preceded it, it still fails to meet Lincoln’s standard. Too often, it has made decisions that are contrary to the nation’s welfare, that have benefitted only a few at the expense of the many. Only by creating a new structure of government under which the people themselves literally have the final say in all matters will we be able to free ourselves from the nepotism, cronyism, and political patronage that have plagued our nation in recent years.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The name “Homeland Security” speaks for itself. If the homeland wasn’t in danger, perhaps even in jeopardy, the agency known as Homeland Security would not exist. There would be no reason for it. And there would be no sub-group of more than 50,000 agents called the TSA and they would not be spending in excess of $7 billion a year to “protect” commercial air passengers and those living on the ground below some nearly 80,000 aircraft in US skies everyday from terrorists. The attacks of 9/11 generated this type of national hyper-response. The objective was, of course, to prevent another such attack.
A quick reminder. The four hijacked airliners used by terrorists on September 11, 2001 had no bombs on board. None of the terrorists who boarded and commandeered those aircraft violated any air travel regulations. Although they were not US citizens, none came here illegally. Nothing those 18 men did on 9/11 could have or would have been noticed or caught or prevented had the TSA establishment been in place at the time. Had all of them been searched – even using the most invasive methods currently the cause of such hot debate today – each and every one of them would have been sent through with a perfectly legitimate boarding pass. Every item they carried onboard was acceptable and legal at that time. Most important to recall – they brought no explosives on board any of the airplanes and they had not taken any steps to hide explosives in advance. Yes, those planes blew-up. But only when they were flown full speed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon or the ground. The bombs were the airplanes themselves. No terrorist had a bomb hidden in a shoe, in their underwear or anyplace else.
So, what is it we are trying to prevent again? The same thing? Not hardly. Instead, we have become obsessed by explosives, by “bomb making materials” and by our irrational fear of “the bomb.” In our zeal for protection against being blown to smithereens at 30,000 feet we are spending billions of dollars, hiring tens of thousands of “agents” and engaging in a series of mind numbing and unproductive procedures all designed to do what? Supposedly to protect us against “another attack.” But, have we ever stopped to look at the threat of terrorism, especially from the air, with an eye for reasoned analysis and a suggestion, if not a mandate, to follow rational policy guidelines?
Believe it or not, someone has. Ohio State University, under the direction of John Muller of the Department of Political Science, issued a report in February 2009 titled: ESTABLISHING PRINCIPLES FOR EVALUATING MEASURES DESIGNED TO PROTECT THE HOMELAND FROM TERRORISM. Take a moment and read that title again. Isn’t that exactly what we’re looking for? Isn’t that the most sensible approach you’ve ever seen toward understanding and combating terrorism here in the United States with the possibility of preventing it if and when possible?
The Ohio State report begins by bringing us promptly to our senses – jolting us there with the simplicity of its analysis and the shocking truth we have somehow successfully avoided. Here is what it says:
“Since the number of targets is essentially unlimited and the probability that any given target will be attacked is near zero, and since a terrorist is free to redirect attention from a protected target to an unprotected one, of more or less equal consequence, protection seems to be plausible only in a limited number of instances. In many cases protection is a waste of resources and effort.”
If indeed the number of terrorist targets within the enormous confines of the continental United States is “essentially unlimited” then it’s true that the probability that any given target will be attacked must be as near to zero as one can imagine. Millions of potential targets spread across the country from New York to Los Angeles, Miami to Seattle, Minneapolis to Houston and all the millions of miles in between – the very essence of “essentially unlimited.” Thus, the odds of near zero. So, which to protect and which to not? And, if you make the decision to protect, does that not “redirect attention” for the terrorist to those targets left unprotected? Well, of course it does. And we’ve already agreed we cannot protect every target.
Maybe… just maybe, we ought to begin with air travel. Look it up. There has never been an incident of terrorism on a commercial airliner where a terrorist has exploded a bomb and brought down a plane. It simply hasn’t ever happened in the United States. Not once. Not ever. The two “near misses” the shoe-bomber and the underwear-bomber were on airplanes that originated overseas, outside the United States. Yet, everyday we subject more than 2 million domestic air travelers to nonsensical “security checks” to prevent something that’s never happened from… what… happening again? And while we spend the ugly sum of some $7 billion dollars a year in this effort we casually look away as the former head of The Homeland Security Agency, a Bush appointed former judge named Michael Chertoff, becomes fabulously wealthy by selling full-body scanners to – you guessed it – The Homeland Security Agency’s TSA branch. Well, at least somebody is getting something out of all this.
If we had a President with a meaningful agenda on terrorism, and if we had a Congress with a meaningful agenda on anything, we might get a commission to do exactly what the Department of Political Science at Ohio State did – make a rational study of and suggest guidelines for: ESTABLISHING PRINCIPLES FOR EVALUATING MEASURES DESIGNED TO PROTECT THE HOMELAND FROM TERRORISM. That is a worthy cause and deserves appropriate attention. Until that happens we’ll have The Homeland Security Agency and the follies that are the TSA.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

As I sit on the board of Reading for the Blind & Dyslexic, I have been thinking about the different ways people learn. RFB&D gives students the tools to learn by listening. We call that a disability. I think it may soon be seen as an advantage.
A group of Danish academics say we are passing through the other side of what they wonderfully call the Gutenberg Parenthesis, leaving the structured, serial, permanent, authored, controlled era of text and returning, perhaps, to what came before the press: a time when communication and content cross, when process dominates product, when knowledge is distributed by people passing it around, when we remix it along the way, when we are more oral and aural.
That’s what makes me think that RFB&D’s clients may end up with a leg up. They understand better than the textually oriented among us how to learn through hearing. Rather than being seen as the people who need extra help, perhaps they will be in the position to give the rest of us help.
And I thought that as I read Matt Richtel’s piece in the New York Times today: Growing up digital, wired for distraction. It starts off lamenting that a student got only 43 pages through Cat’s Cradle. But as @HowardOwens responded on Twitter: “Gee, a 17-year-old only gets 43 pages into his summer reading assignment. Like, that’s never happened before.”
Richtel and the experts he calls blame technology, of course, for shortening our attention spans, just as Nick Carr and Andrew Keen do, lamenting the change. But the assumption they all make is that the way we used to do it is the right way. What if, as I said in Short Attention Span Theater (aka Twitter), we’re evolving:
“Maybe the issue isn’t that we’re too distracted to read but that reading can finally catch up with how our brains really work.”
Richtel, to his credit, focuses at the end of his piece on a distracted student who can, indeed, focus — not on the books he’s assigned but on the video he’s making. Maybe that’s because he’s creating. Maybe it’s because he’s working with tools that give him feedback. Maybe it’s because he is communicating with an audience.
I spend time on this topic in my next book, Public Parts (when I can concentrate on writing it — that is, when I’m not blogging and tweeting as I am right now): Technology brings change; change brings fear and retrenchment. Gutenberg scholar Elizabeth Eisenstein reminds us that for 50 years after the invention of the press, we continued to put old wine in this new cask, replicating scribal fonts, content, and models. That’s what’s happening now: We are trying to fit our old world into the new one that is emerging. We’re assuming the old way is the right way.
Mind you, one of the joys of writing this book is that I’ve had cause to start reading books again. I’ll confess I’d fallen off the shelf.
Now I’m enjoying reading books as part of the process of creating, sharing, communicating. I’m learning not just by reading and absorbing but by rethinking and remixing. And I’m thinking the result of my next project after this one may not be a book but something else — a talk, for example; a book may be a byproduct rather than the goal.
So is this new generation distracted or advanced? How can they best learn? How can they teach? What tools can we use today besides books? What new opportunities do all their tools present? That’s what educators should be asking. That’s the discussion I’d like to see The Times start.
: @SivaVaid(hyanathan) just said on Twitter: “There are no wires in the human mind. So it can’t be ‘rewired’ Get a grip.” Right. What can be rewired are media and education and that’s what we’re seeing happen — or what we should be seeing happen.

This Blogger’s Books from
What Would Google Do?
by Jeff Jarvis

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Preaching Their Way Into Manhattan’
By Al Norman
Wal-Mart continues its urban warfare campaign, looking to colonize communities of color by co-opting black opinion-makers.
They have done this in Chicago, where the retailer enlisted black Aldermen to embrace their cause, and in New Orleans, where developers actually paid black religious leaders to testify at public hearings about the virtues of chain stores. Now they are mining the black community in New York City.
The most notable recruitment of black talent happened almost five years ago. In February of 2006, Wal-Mart proudly announced that “civil rights pioneer” Andrew Young had signed on as “national Steering Committee Chairman” of a new corporate creation called the Working Families for Wal-Mart, which the retailer described as “a group comprised of individuals and families who understand and appreciate Wal-Mart’s positive impact on the working families of America.”
Less than six months later, Andrew Young’s reputation as a “civil rights pioneer” had crashed and burned in what one newspaper called a “spectacular setback” for Wal-Mart’s PR effort.
The meteoric nosedive of Andrew Young came in one embarrassing quote the former Atlanta Mayor made during an interview with the Los Angeles Sentinel. When asked if he was concerned about Wal-Mart causing smaller, mom and pop stores to close, Young replied, “”Well, I think they should; they ran the `mom and pop’ stores out of my neighborhood. But you see, those are the people who have been overcharging us, selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables. And they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs; very few black people own these stores.”
It didn’t take long for two events to follow: 1) a contrite apology from Young, and 2) an immediate divorce by Wal-Mart from any connection to Andrew Young. The former Ambassador issued an apology to the media: “I apologize for those comments. I retract those comments. And I ask for the forgiveness of those I have offended.” Young added that his remarks about Jews, Koreans and Arabs “in no way reflect on Wal-Mart’s record, progress or role as a diverse employer and community citizen.”
Wal-Mart’s PR creation, the Working Families For Wal-Mart, promptly exited from the stage. The group put the following statement on its website: “Working Families for Wal-Mart is saddened by the resignation of Ambassador Andrew Young as chairman of our national steering committee. We do not condone or support the insensitive statements he recently made, but appreciate his sincere apology. We are hopeful that history will remember the many contributions he has made to the civil rights movement and his tireless efforts on behalf of working families. Our organization consists of over 140,000 members across the country. We have several local advisory boards made up of community leaders and activists committed to our cause. We all believe that Wal-Mart makes significant contributions to America’s working families. Our organization will continue to grow and make a difference in this national debate.”
The Anti-Defamation League responded quickly as well. “Andrew Young’s comments that Jewish, Korean and Arab shopkeepers “ripped off” African-American communities…were offensive, hurtful and shameful,” the ADL noted. “That a leader of the civil rights movement and one who knew discrimination firsthand would make such comments, demonstrates that even people of color are not immune from being bigoted, racist and anti-Semitic.”
This week, Crain’s New York Business reports that Wal-Mart is wooing black leaders again. The retailer invited a handful of black icons in New York City to visit the mothership in Bentonville, Arkansas. The Reverend Al Sharpton made the pilgrimage to Arkansas to attend a 3 day ‘stakeholder summit’ put on by Wal-Mart. Sharpton mingled with black leaders from other major metro areas, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. Sharpton, it turns out, has been a Wal-Mart acolyte for several years, and sits on what Crain’s called “an external advisory board” for the company.
At these stakeholder’s events, Wal-Mart touts its philanthropic record, its hiring of minorities, and other corporate policies relevant to the black community. It is unlikely that Wal-Mart discussed the Dukes V. Wal-Mart case, the largest class action lawsuit in the history of retailing, in which the lead plaintiff suing Wal-Mart is a black woman. “There’s a lot of negative information out there about Wal-Mart, and they were trying to get their side of the story out,” Crain’s quoted one member of 100 Black Men of New York as saying.
The Wal-Mart summit was apparently a sound check for the retailer’s upcoming push into Manhattan, which will be patterned on its work in Chicago, where black churchs and politicians were recruited to carry Wal-Mart’s water. A company spokesman told Crain’s the black leaders were being prepped for “helping us tell the Wal-Mart story.”
Thus far, union and political leaders in the New York boroughs have been telling Wal-Mart’s story too—but theirs is a tale of exploitation, of racial discrimination, and of congenital anti-labor behavior. The Black Power movement of the 1960s, which preached self-empowerment, and local control of business, has been supplanted by Wal-Mart’s pitch for corporate benevolence and southern carpetbagging. Wal-Mart targets minority areas, arguing that only they go into ‘food deserts’ to open up grocery stores where other chain stores have fled. But what happened to the local black entrepreneurs? They now wear a Wal-Mart ID tag on their polo shirt.
Crain’s reports that Wal-Mart has retained the same lobbyist that Ikea used to help push its way into the Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook, a site that drew fire from the anti-big box neighbors. So Wal-Mart invited leaders from the Urban League, the NAACP and other black groups to drink the kool-aid in Bentonville. But not everyone is drinking. The head of one group, The Black Institute, told Crain’s, “I don’t care who they sequester in Bentonville, they’re going to get a fight.”
Some black leaders have been hard to convert to Wal-Mart’s voodoo economics. During the Andrew Young fiasco, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a black church leader in Chicago, criticized Young for taking a paid position as a Wal-Mart spokesman. Wright accused Young of “siding with the filthy rich who are oppressing the poor.” In October of 2006, Jesse Jackson, Sr., president of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, had charged that Wal-Mart was trying to buy off its critics in the black community. “Rainbow/PUSH has criticized Wal-Mart openly and publicly and consistently and they’ve tried to virtually throw money at us,” Jackson told the Louisiana Weekly newspaper. But Jackson refused to take Wal-Mart money. “I think they want to leverage our organization. I think they want to leverage us into silence. And, I’m not being self-righteous, but we feel that we ought to be the last one to stand if it comes to that.”
Wal-Mart apparently feels that opinion leaders in the minority community can be purchased at an everyday low price, and that black stakeholders can become Wal-Mart sign-holders. But community leaders of any color who believe that Wal-Mart creates new jobs, don’t understand what the economic libertarians call creative destructionism–the process of destroying existing jobs in order to create ‘new’ ones. The former employees at Circuit City, for example, understand this dynamic.
No amount of good works or philanthropy can clean the hands of the “filthy rich,” or cover over the global exploitation of human resources that lies at the heart of Wal-Mart’s success.
Reverend Sharpton will find no economic salvation in Bentonville. Instead he will taste the philosophical equivalent of what Andrew Young once called “stale bread and bad meat.”
Al Norman is the founder of Sprawl-Busters, which has helped communities fight big box sprawl for the past 17 years. He is the author of Slam-Dunking Wal-Mart.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

California’s Republican Party is going to lose statewide elections for a long time. And it’s not just because of the leaders and candidates; it’s their electorate that is preserving this fate.
Let’s start with the people who should head the ticket. The Golden State’s Grand Old Party has professional politicians with both charisma and issues that will appeal to many voters. Positions like a stress on individual responsibility and cutting the deficit. Conventional pols advocating these values could easily be winners.
I am exempting from the above statement amateurs like the current governor. Arnie actually helped the Dems defeat Meg Whitman by lacking the credentials of a politician with real world experience in government. Even though his campaigns cited this as a virtue, his job performance was poor, and alienated Californians from every sector of the political spectrum. By the time Ms. Whitman tried a similar appeal, of the gifted novice, voters declared “Been there, done that. It failed.” And voted Democratic, and for someone with experience. If the current governor hadn’t amply demonstrated the flaws in that approach, Whitman might have done a lot better.
The real problem, however, the Republicans face, is not a lack of decent, practiced political leaders. Rather, it is their electorate. It is just too far to the right of this state, and blocks moderate candidates who might win.
Let’s state the obvious: California is a blue state, with a voting population that favors the Democrats. Even in this environment, especially with so many independents, a moderate Republican could get elected to state wide office, possibly quite easily. The problem is that she or he could never get nominated.
California Republicans may be, like so many other ideas from our shores, ahead of national trends. They are powerfully conservative, way to the right of the middle. Long before there was a Tea Party, local Reps were upholding the faith of their fathers. And enforcing it as well.
That may have the virtue of integrity, but it won’t win elections here. To get to Sacramento or Washington, they need moderately conservative candidates. The true believers, meanwhile, will always veto such folks, and turn to an ideologue out of sync with the voters here. That is a losing hand, and will continue to be for a long, long time.
Take a look at Schwarzenegger’s one political masterstroke. Arnie probably realized he was too liberal and far too independent minded to pass muster in a Republican primary. But in 2003, in the midst of a recall election for Grey Davis, the bodybuilder realized he could run before the entire population, not just Republican voters. And for that group, his shortcomings became virtues. His analysis was right; he won that year and again in 2006. He has never run in a competitive Republican primary for the governor’s office.
The Republicans also have one other huge issue that they have to tackle if they want to win. Call it the curse of Pete Wilson.
Back in 1994, Californians voted on Proposition 187, which banned illegal aliens from public sevices like health and education. Lots of anglos supported it–it passed handily, even though the courts later overturned it–but it was anathema to Hispanics.
That changed California politics forever. Republican governor Pete Wilson, who strongly supported the measure, became the symbol of what was–and still is–considered a vehemently anti-immigrant party. This in a state where Hispanics are becoming a critical voting bloc, with more members joining their ranks every day.
A number of years ago I was on a public panel with Gaddi Vasquez, an Hispanic and stalwart of the Orange County Republican Party; no one has ever questioned Gaddi’s conservative credentials.
I don’t remember how or why the conversation turned to the issue’s discussed above, but it did. Gaddi’s observation was that Pete Wilson had destroyed the Republican Party in California among Hispanic voters.
The former head of the Peace Corps was being honest and smart. A Los Angeles Times survey released this week found that only 18% of their respondents vowed to “never vote for a Republican,” or roughly one-sixth. Among nonpartisans the figures were the same, 17%. But among Latinos surveyed, the figure jumped substantially, to 31%, closer to a third. One of the two directors of the poll, Linda DiVall, a Republican, remarked, “I don’t know how any Republican thinks they can win in California after looking at this.”
Most members of her party don’t get it. They figure by throwing out a few sops they can overcome this hostility. Not even close.
Take a look at Meg Whitman’s recent campaign. True, she opened a few offices in Hispanic neighborhoods. But who was her campaign chairman? Pete Wilson. In some parts of the state, she might as well have been endorsed by Satan, while running for the papacy.
How can Republicans reverse this? Well, one way would be to steer clear of Pete Wilson, for starters. But a winning Republican candidate would have to take strong pro-immigration stands, such as firmly endorsing a route for illegals to gain citizenship. Carly Fiorina adamantly opposed this idea, and Meg Whitman waffled badly on it.
Of course, anyone who held that position would never get past the Republican primary.
So if Boxer and Brown, and generations of their successors to come, keep on winning, Republican voters have no one to blame but themselves.

This Blogger’s Books from
Master of the Air: William Tunner and the Success of Military Airlift
by Professor Robert A. Slayton
Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith
by Robert A. Slayton

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

I don’t generally like to brag, but my math yesterday concerning a likely poor weekend multiplier for the seventh Harry Potter film was dead-on. After opening with $24 million in midnight showings, the film pulled in $61 million on its first day, and just $38 million on its second, which was a 40% drop. In other words, it pulled in on Saturday EXACTLY what it pulled in on Friday without those midnight screenings. Said Friday-to-Saturday drop will put it squarely in the top-ten for the biggest such plunges. The actual weekend estimate is $125.1 million, which gives the series both its biggest three-day opening weekend and its lowest weekend-multiplier ever (2.04x). It also makes Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part I the most front-loaded midnight movie ever for its opening weekend, as it did 19% of its weekend business on 12:01am showings (go here for a rundown of notable midnight numbers). The good news is that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part I scored the sixth-biggest opening weekend of all time. The bad news is that it also scored the sixth most front-loaded opening weekends in history as well. Is that a box office equivalent of a palindrome?
What this all means is that, as suspected for awhile, the Harry Potter franchise is playing pretty much identical to the much-compared Twilight Saga. Both franchises had had massively front-loaded sequels. Both franchises play almost exclusively to the fans, with few converts jumping on-board this late in the game. The last three Harry Potter films had grossed $290 million, $292 million, and $301 million respectively. As you can see, when you add in inflation and a random variable or two, the films have basically the same attendance level. There is no reason to expect anything different from this seventh chapter, so factoring in inflation and the added IMAX ticket-price bump, we can expect this penultimate Harry Potter adventure to gross around $310-320 million (the series high is still the original, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, with $317 million). Regardless, you can bet that the eight and final film, which opens on July 15th, will get a big box office boost from being the series finale.
Of course, there is a reasonable concern that this film could play EXACTLY like Twilight Saga: New Moon, which opening on the same weekend last year and had an almost identical weekend pattern (18% in midnight screenings, 1.972x weekend multiplier). That film dropped by 70% over Thanksgiving weekend, actually dropping a full $100 million for its opening weekend gross, and ended up with $296 million. Should Harry Potter 7 follow a similar pattern, expect a $260 million domestic total, which will make it the second-lowest grosser in the franchise. Obviously, the key will be Thanksgiving weekend, where it will have to fend off Disney’s Tangled as well as the (correct) perception that while it’s the best film of the series, it’s not really a family film. If it can hold its own next weekend, it should be just fine and in shipshape to handle The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader on December 10th and Tron: Legacy on December 17th.
The only other new release was the Russell Crowe vehicle, The Next Three Days. The ‘husband breaks his wife out of jail and ruins his son’s life’ thriller grossed just $6.8 million, making it one of Russell Crowe’s lowest opening weekends ever. Lionsgate really screwed the pooch on this one, wrongly thinking that counter-programing against Harry Potter would yield results. The Next Three Days is not Walk the Line, the acclaimed Johnny Cash biopic that opened to $22 million on the same weekend Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire opened with $102 million five years ago this weekend. Had this picture come out in October or even early next year, it would have been a viable adult-thriller option. But the Harry Potter franchise basically appeals to everyone. The only moviegoers who genuinely don’t like the franchise are (let’s be honest…) film snobs who have probably never seen the series (why else would they be so against a character-driven adventure series filled with Britain’s best actors)? Point being, if they went to the movies this weekend, they were probably seeing one of the many Oscar bait films currently available such as Fair Game ($1.5 million weekend, $3.7 million cum) and the terrific 127 Hours ($915,000 this weekend on 108 screens, for a $1.9 million cumulative gross).
Or, if they were just red-blooded moviegoers who just don’t like stories about boy wizards (fair enough), and they wanted a good thriller, they were (smartly) seeing Unstoppable, which dropped 42% for a $13.1 million second weekend. It’s not a great hold, but it’s the smallest second-weekend drop for a Denzel Washington thriller since Man on Fire back in 2004. I still think this movie is going to play for awhile, as it’s just damn good and I can’t imagine anyone not recommending it. If audiences need an all-ages option for a ‘big family goes to the movies’ day over Thanksgiving weekend, this is it. It’s not a G-rated cartoon (Tangled), it’s not an R-rated action picture (Faster) or R-rated romantic comedy (Love and Other Drugs), it’s not a remake of Showgirls (Burlesque), and it’s not part 7 of a long-running franchise (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part I). It’s a ripping PG-13 thriller with no real objectionable content, and several rock-solid movie star performances (Denzel Washington, Chris Pine, Rosario Dawson, etc), and a script that lets nearly every character be at least as smart as those in the audience.
For more box office info, and a peak at the Thanksgiving releases, read the rest of this article at Mendelson’s Memos.

Follow Scott Mendelson on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/ScottMendelson

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

November 17, 2010
Alison Crandall, Ph.D.
Acquisitions Editor
Random House, Inc.
1745 Broadway
New York, NY 10019
acrandall@randomhouse.com
Dear Dr. Crandall:
I found our conversation this morning extremely helpful. I am grateful that you are willing to give me some time to consider my options. While the temptation to sign a contract is great, I am going to take your advice and think about what I want to do with this project. My on-line readership for the “novel” I am calling Sister Mysteries is growing quickly, and the last thing I want to do now is jeopardize the artistic success I’ve achieved.
The fact that you appreciate what I’m attempting to do here is so important. The Internet is having a profound impact on the way we read, and the way we write: the line between “reality” and fiction is dissolving quite nicely. What I found first with Switch!! earlier this year, and what I am finding now, here with the new book, Sister Mysteries, is that readers don’t particularly care whether a story is true or not. My young literature students at SUNY certainly could give a hoot.
All they care about in the end is a good story, and most don’t object to what I call the James Frey syndrome. A Million Little Pieces did a good job of faking things, but so many people (and my students!) just love the story anyway. For the average reader, the fact that Frey delivered a compelling piece of writing that felt true was all that mattered; so what that he never sat in that dentists’ chair enduring oral torture without novocaine?
I promise I will keep you posted on my progress (or you can keep track yourself, here on the internet if you prefer.) I definitely will be back in touch with you after I’ve come to some decision about how I want to proceed. As I explained, the “inner” nun story — a murder mystery– is called Castenata, and it is finished, and oddly enough, has been for 16 years. It could be loaded to the site in a matter of days, but I am still writing the outer story, Sister Mysteries. I have promised myself, and my editor, Lori Cullen, at the Albany Times Union’s blog,Writing in Motion, that I will finish it by the end of the year. That outer story is…well, complicated. Some might call it a healing story. Some might call it a cancer and recovery tale.
What I have been telling my readers is that Sister Mysteries, the “outer” story, is not exactly a novel, or maybe it’s a novel form of a novel, a form of the novel that is inspired, influenced and informed by the way the internet (and television) more and more blur the line between truth and fiction.
With your academic background, and being in the business of publishing literary novels, I’m fairly certain that you know that the novel is a relatively recent invention; it came into being in the mid-1700s, with the expansion of the middle class. Literacy was on the rise, and people had more money to buy books, or so the historians say: Not many people know this, although I bet you do, being the voracious reader you are, that one of the very first English novels, called Pamela, published in 1740 by Samuel Richardson, is written as a series of letters from a frightened young girl who fears that her “virtue” will be destroyed by her lecherous boss. This novel is highly readable and entertaining even today, even to my young students.
Anyway, what I am trying to say here is that it may be time for a new type of novel! Wouldn’t that make sense, considering that the world of publishing is in total upheaval, with people predicting the disappearance altogether of paper books?
Books sitting within paper covers may indeed disappear (my new novel, Seeing Red, is coming out just in time, ha!)
But seriously, don’t you think we all need to be experimenting with alternatives? What will NEVER disappear are good stories. Good stories have been around forever. And stories are central to who we are as human beings.
Consider for a moment how much of our lives are immersed in stories: newspapers, TV news, television sitcoms and soap operas, movies and books. Gossip and rumor are both forms of “story-telling.” We study stories in history books. We read stories in the Bible. If you really think about it, our very sense of our “selves” is tied up with stories – without our memories (i.e. Alzheimer’s patients) we don’t know who we are, and we are virtually helpless creatures.
So we would be lost without stories. That’s why it’s so important that we figure out a way to save them, going forward. We can’t stop reading books, but maybe we need to figure out a different way to present them. Maybe the Ipad or even, the Iphone, will have an app someday soon to handle Sister Mysteries! I understand that people in Japan read tons of novels on their cell phones (I have a former student over there and he tells me it’s wonderful! (He also happens to be a big fan of my new “blog novel.”)
Something rather profound, but rather simple too, hit me one day this summer when I was tending my flower garden. I noticed a rather curious “weed;” I wasn’t certain what it was. I was just about to hack it out of the dirt when I noticed the lovely pink flower growing from the leaves, and I thought, leave it there. It is a flower after all, even if we consider it, and call it, a weed.
So what I am writing here, this new book, the one you are so anxious to look at in “paper” form, it may be a novel, or it may not be. (And yes, I am finally printing out the pages, as you requested.)
What this book is, all depends on your point of view and what position you take on the issue of veracity in writing. Some of us think that no matter how true to life you try to make your writing, it inevitably falls into “fiction,” if for no other reason than it is constructed out of words.
What matters, perhaps, is the emotional truth. Sometimes you can cast the truest things in the falsest words. And vice versa.
So here, on my blogs, I am allowing all manner of flowers to grow. I hope you will understand that I need space and permission to allow a few weeds in the mix.
I will be back to you in a few weeks, just as soon as I have finished the book!
Best regards,
Claudia

Follow Claudia Ricci on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/RicciCJ

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The push-up is a traditional upper body exercise favored by all branches of the military and most sports people as well as fitness enthusiasts. The push-up can be performed anytime and almost anywhere and requires no special equipment. There are many push-up variations that you can perform, some more challenging than others, all of which will condition your chest, shoulders and triceps. All types of push-ups can be made more difficult by elevating your feet or wearing a weighted vest.
Plyo Push-Ups
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Plyo–short for plyometric–push-ups will develop your push-up power. Adopt the regular push-up position with your arms straight and your body aligned. Bend your elbows and lower your chest to the floor. Dynamically extend your arms, and drive your body up and into the air so that your hands leave the floor. On landing, immediately bend your elbows and drop into another rep. Continue until you are no longer able to “get air.” If you have any history of wrist problems, you should avoid this exercise.
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References
“Designing Resistance Training Programs”; Steven Fleck and William Kraemer; 2003
“ACSM’s Resources for the Personal Trainer”; American College of Sports Medicine; 2009
Patrick Dale is an experienced writer who has written for a plethora of international publications. Also a lecturer and trainer of trainers, he is a major contributor for Ultra-FIT magazine and has been involved in fitness for 22 years. Other than a five-year service in the Royal Marines, Dale has always worked in health and fitness and never intends leaving.

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Earlier this week, Barbra Streisand wrote an important reminder of the specific vulnerabilities that bear on the hearts of women and why we need to study this more closely. And as if in answer to this, an important review is about to reach print [1]. This review looked asked the question: Why are women at risk for coronary heart disease? And the answers were very interesting. Depression, anxiety disorders, anger suppression and stress associated with relationships and family responsibilities contributed significantly to coronary heart disease in women but general anxiety, hostility and work-related stress had similar effects on men and women. Definitely disturbing, but what does this mean?
At the most basic level, why do the hearts of women strain when feelings get out of control? And what do these different factors have in common?
They are all about stuckness: People talk about depression as if it is about sadness when at a fundamental level, it is also as much about stuckness. Anxiety leads to “freezing” stuck responses too, and anger suppression is also about something not being able to make its way out. Even stress is about stuckness when it causes memory circuits to become activated so that only old habits of being are recreated. In a sense, these factors, when they strike, are like jamming the brakes. And the heart has to work that much harder to keep things moving and happening.
But these findings are also interesting because it is not general anxiety but anxiety disorders that pose a risk; it is not hostility but the suppression of anger that is also a risk; and not work-related stress but the stress of social relationships that pose the tremendous risk that burden a woman’s heart. It appears that a certain threshold has to be crossed before the heart starts to strain. While anxiety and anger may both be signals of impending heart strain in women, they have to reach proportions of “disorder” or be so high as to need to be suppressed for the risk to reveal itself. The bad news is that this happens at all. The good news is that we an do something about this.
This study would seem to suggest that general anxiety itself does not confer specific risk to coronary heart disease in women, but it may signal the beginning of a disorder. This would suggest that rather than waiting for the anxiety to be out of control, it would probably in the best interest of women to decrease the anxiety at that stage rather than wait for the full-blown disorder to occur. The same for anger. Early constructive expression may prevent the need for suppression, and if expectations about relationships and family responsibilities are managed earlier on, there may be less of a need for the heart to “feel” as though it needs to work harder. The point here is that it seems that much of this is preventable, and that setting up systems to prevent progression of anxiety depression and anger may actually also prevent heart disease. In fact, the study supported this in part because the review also showed that supportive social relationships and positive psychological factors may be associated with reduced risk of coronary heart disease.
Thus, a review like this raises awareness that our brains and hearts are very connected and that our moods can be a real weight that prevents vital body organs from getting blood. And it also emphasizes that heart disease may be modifiable at a more basic level.
To start this journey toward modification of risk factors then, ask yourself first: Are you in the brake-jam phase of life where nothing seems to be moving fast enough? Because if you are, your heart is probably feeling this as well. The heart tells the stories of its well-being in the language of feelings. Listen to your heart when it tells you stories in the languages of depression and anxiety, for if you do, you may be able to change the language of its stories, and in so doing, have the very change of heart you desire — at a very literal level.
Reference
1.Low, C.A., R.C. Thurston, and K.A. Matthews, Psychosocial factors in the development of heart disease in women: current research and future directions. Psychosom Med, 2010. 72(9): p. 842-54.

This Blogger’s Books from
Life Unlocked: 7 Revolutionary Lessons to Overcome Fear
by Srinivasan S. Pillay MD

Follow Srinivasan Pillay on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/srinipillay

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The 4th Thursday of November is definitely the bestest holiday. Food, Family, Friends and Football. 4 of the 5 Fs. I most fondly remember the Thanksgivings of yesteryear. The big old family reunions, which I looked forward to, until about five seconds after I hit the driveway, then it all comes back… why I left home. And they always made me sit at that stupid fold- up cardboard kids table. Never got to graduate to the wooden table because none of them would die. Darn medical advances.
Thanksgiving was my mother’s designated holiday and she thought she was cooking for the Eighth Tank Battalion. Every year she’d seek out a mutant poultry farm and buy a turkey the size of a La-Z-Boy recliner, so it was turkey for weeks. Turkey till YOU trot. Turkey sandwiches, turkey salad, turkey ala king, turkey shakes, until finally, turkey carcass in hot water. Soup? No, Ma, it’s skeleton juice. Gobble till you wobble.
These were potluck occasions, with every family responsible for schlepping their version of a vision of a side dish. Lime Jell-O with olive shreds in it. Because green food is nutritious food. Oyster raisin dressing. Lamb pudding. Creamed rutabaga. Beet pear slaw. Hollowed out pickles filled with ranch dressing and cheese curds. Herring balls.
Thirteen bean salad. No, I wish I were making this up. I had no idea there were 13 different types of edible beans. I had no desire to eat them all at one sitting. I certainly would not have chosen to be in a houseful of 23 other people who had eaten 13 types of edible beans. “Crack a window, Billy. Well, break it then.” Candle flames turning blue all over the house. “Methane is our friend.”
Dinner is delayed because my mother’s sister is late and four assembled families who last ate at breakfast are taunted by the fowl perfume of a roasting turkey for six hours and as frenzied as coyotes suspended over a yard full of wounded bunnies. All of the nuts and chips and some of the throw pillows and smaller children have long since disappeared.
My aunt finally arrives accompanied by her bizarre mystery food. Seems innocent enough; a glass Pyrex dish with tinfoil on top. International symbol for normal food, I believe. But no, it’s a food ruse. A culinary ambush. Lift the foil and this stench shoots straight up. Ceiling tiles curling at the edges. Three rooms away watching football, grown men go “the hell was that?” Children crying uncontrollably, “Daddy, I’m scared.”
A greasy grey mass that appeared to be boiling, but is nowhere near any apparent heat source. Round misshapen objects floating to the surface. Nobody would go near it. Somebody made a feeble attempt and the spoon broke. Mom elbows me in the side: “Billy, try some of Aunt Hoogolah’s Dupamouche.” “Okay, Ma, let me get a separate plate.” The old separate plate trick. We lost more animals that way.
The evening ends with two matriarchs locked in a mortal death clinch, bumping bellies on the back porch with 100 mm. menthols dangling from their mouths while their spouses trade wild drunken blows on the driveway and the kids pelt them with greasy poultry bones from behind raked piles of leaves. Aah, memories. And that was way back in 2009. Some traditions never die. This year, I’m bringing the Dupamouche.
Will Durst is a San Francisco based humor columnist who frequently tells jokes. Out loud. On stage. In front of people. Ideally.
Catch an example Thanksgiving Week all over the Milwaukee area.
The Safe House on November 23, 24 & 28, 414.271.2007, Paolo’s on the 26, 414.727.9332, and the Railroad Station in Saukville, 262.284.3990, on the 27.
Then DC’s Funniest Celebrity at the DC Improv, December 2, and Rancho Nicasio on Sunday, the 5.
His new CD, “Raging Moderate,” now available from Stand Up! Records on iTunes and Amazon.
Early next year: “Where the Rogue Things Go!” From Ulysses Press.

Follow Will Durst on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/willdurst

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Several years ago, parents of a lovely nine-year-old girl, Karen, brought her to see me because she had poor memory. They indicated that she had difficulty in thinking and focusing, and because of these issues she was falling further and further behind in her school work. Interestingly, they stated that at times she was fine, while clearly at other times her brain function seemed to be different. They indicated that she had difficulty keeping her thoughts together and that she became profoundly frustrated when this would occur.
Because of her significant issues with academic performance, her parents elected to home school her. Her academic testing revealed that she was functioning at or below a third grade level in a variety of areas, including math skills, reading fluency, story recall and overall academic skills. Fortunately, she had no significant medical problems in her past and her overall physical, as well as neurological examinations were entirely normal. Routine, typical blood studies were unrevealing, so I was left to reconsider her history to see if there were any clues as to what might be causing this child’s problems.
What caught my attention was the interesting fact that her problems were not constant, indicating that basically her brain was intact but something seemed to be detrimentally influencing her from time to time, causing her to have these significant issues with respect to how her brain functioned. In considering what factors change day to day in terms of someone’s exposure, certainly diet is at the top of the list.
Recognizing that gluten sensitivity (a protein found in wheat, barley and rye) is extremely common, I decided to perform a simple blood test to determine if this child was gluten sensitive. When the laboratory studies were completed, we were surprised to learn that she was profoundly sensitive to gluten. So at that point I instructed her parents to put her on a gluten-free diet. While they considered this diet to be challenging, eliminating all wheat, barley and rye from her diet, nevertheless they complied. Over the next two weeks, her parents observed a remarkable change in her cognitive function. Karen suddenly was able to focus much more readily on her school work and indicated to her parents that she suddenly noticed she was thinking much more clearly. Her parents maintained her on a gluten-free diet and over the next several months continued to notice further improvements in her school work. At the end of the school year, she was tested and her grade level equivalent for math calculation skills was 5.1, reading fluency 5.6 and story recall 8.4, which is to say, functioning at a level considered “normal” midway through the year for an eighth grader.
A brief note from her parents reported:
“Karen is completing third grade this year. Prior to removing gluten from her diet, academics, especially math, were difficult. As you can see, she is now soaring in math. Based upon this test, entering the fourth grade next year, she would be at the top of her class. The teacher indicated that if she skipped fourth grade and went to fifth grade, she would be in the middle of her class. What an accomplishment!”
Louis Pasteur stated, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” I am certainly grateful that chance favored us several years ago when Karen came to be evaluated. Because of this experience, I became deeply involved in research exploring the effects of gluten sensitivity on the brain. I learned that gluten sensitivity, known as celiac disease, is actually an extremely common human affliction. In fact, it has been described as “the most common human disease.” Current studies indicate that about one percent of Americans are gluten sensitive. This is an astounding statistic when you consider that at the time of this writing, there are approximately 297,000,000 Americans. That means, about 3 million Americans are gluten sensitive. When you consider the population from birth to age five years is 23 million children, that means that approximately 230,000 of these children are gluten sensitive.
It seems astounding that a disease that is so common, is nevertheless, fairly obscure. Despite the fact that it was originally described in 1888, we still don’t hear much about it. Standard medical text books typically describe celiac disease (gluten sensitivity) as being primarily a gastrointestinal problem. I recall in medical school being taught that celiac disease was characterized by abdominal pain, abdominal distention with bloating and gas, decreased appetite, diarrhea, nausea, unexplained weight loss and growth delay in children. Newer research indicates that celiac disease can have a profound effect on the nervous system.
Dr. Maios Hadjivassiliou of the United Kingdom, a recognized world authority on gluten sensitivity, has reported in the journal, The Lancet, that “gluten sensitivity can be primarily and at times, exclusively a neurological disease.” That is, people can manifest gluten sensitivity by having issues with brain function without any gastrointestinal problems whatsoever. Dr. Hadjivassiliou indicates that the antibodies that a person has when they are gluten sensitive can be directly and uniquely toxic to the brain.
Since his original investigations in 1996, the recognition that gluten sensitivity can lead to disorders of brain function has led to a virtual explosion of scientific papers describing this relationship. Researchers in Israel have noted neurological problems in 51 percent of children with gluten sensitivity and further, describe a link between gluten sensitivity and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). As authors in a recent issue of the journal, Pediatrics, stated in their research, “This study suggests that the variability of neurologic disorders that occur in celiac disease is broader than previously reported and includes softer and more common neurologic disorders including chronic headache, developmental delay, hypotonia and learning disorders or ADHD.”
The link between gluten sensitivity and problems with brain function, including learning disabilities, difficulty staying on task and even memory dysfunction, is actually not that difficult to understand. Gluten sensitivity is caused by elevated levels of antibodies against a component of gluten, gliadin. This antibody (anti-gliadin antibody) combines with gliadin when a person is exposed to any gluten containing food like wheat, barley or rye. Testing for the antibody can be performed in any doctor’s office. When the antibody combines with this protein, specific genes are turned on in a special type of immune cell in the body.
When these genes are turned on, inflammatory chemicals are created called cytokines, which are directly detrimental to brain function. In fact, elevated cytokines are seen in such devastating conditions as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and even autism. Basically, the brain does not like inflammation and responds quite negatively to the presence of cytokines. Another problem with anti-gliadin antibody is that it can directly combine with specific proteins found in the brain. Specific brain proteins can look like the gliadin protein found in gluten-containing foods and the anti-gliadin antibody just can’t tell the difference. This direct role of anti-gliadin antibody in combining with specific proteins in the brain, has been described for decades and again leads to the formation of cytokines, the chemical mediators of inflammation. This is an example of turning on genes that ultimately function in a negative way in relation to brain health and function.

This Blogger’s Books from
Power Up Your Brain: The Neuroscience of Enlightenment
by David Perlmutter M.D., Alberto Villoldo Ph.D.

Follow David Perlmutter, M.D. on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/DavidPerlmutter

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Welcome to the ongoing discussion about life after 50. As regular readers know, I asked people on Facebook, Twitter, and right here on The Huffington Post to tell me their most top-of-mind questions and concerns about entering this new phase of life. These articles address those questions head on and, hopefully, will help build an even larger audience so that we can all talk together — regularly — about what matters most.
When we talk about being a woman and over 50, menopause is one big, unavoidable topic. So much has been — and continues to be — written about menopause, because no matter how much we study it, research it, and understand it, it’s not going away any time soon.
Menopause is truly one of those things that the vast majority of women eventually goes through, so remember this: you are not alone.
I went through transitional menopause, also called perimenopause, without a great deal of fanfare. There were a few months leading up to the big event during which I tossed and turned, woke up at 4 a.m., kept a fan blowing on me all night, and, according to my kids and husband, acted grumpy. It wasn’t horrible, just uncomfortable, and, thankfully, didn’t last too long. I know I was one of the lucky ones.
Many women experience more torturous aspects of menopause — hot flashes, mood swings, uncomfortable sex — and there are different schools of thought on how best to address them.
When I researched and wrote “The Best of Everything After 50,” the medical experts I interviewed agreed that the optimal plan of action depends upon a woman’s individual physical health, family history, and the degree to which she is suffering from the symptoms. There’s hormone therapy, which comes with its own set of risks, as well as topical treatments to deal with the symptoms, the most common of which are dryness (affecting various parts of the body), difficulty sleeping, sweating, hot flashes, and generally feeling awful a lot of the time.
For anyone who has gone, or is going, through menopause, you know that it’s a very complicated time. Not only are we dealing with the physical changes, but many of us experience the mental anguish, too, like the feeling of being the only one awake at 4 a.m., desperately needing an air conditioner pointed at you, or surfing the web to see the latest research on every possible disease or illness you (or your husband or kids) could get — in other words, the feeling that you are going completely, and irrevocably, mad. Throw into this mix a mother who is suffering from dementia, and concerns about a writing career that seems to be stalling because you’re going insane, and what do you end up with? You get “Marrying George Clooney: Confessions from a Midlife Crisis” by Amy Ferris.
Amy had everything piled on her at one time, it seems: a distant mother surrendering to the horrors of Alzheimer’s, a brother who had decided he was an only child, and what could only be described as severe menopause. Amy went through the full-blown experience of menopause, suffering through every possible physical and emotional aspect.
What kept her sane, and from throwing herself off some bridge during this trying time, was her husband Ken and her powerful ability to put down on paper her every excruciatingly sad, happy — and sometimes twisted and tortured — thought.
The readers and cult followers (me included) of Amy’s book found a soul mate. Here was this delightful, charming, funny woman writing what we were all feeling — to varying degrees — and who had the guts to put in a book what most of us couldn’t even put into words. Over and over again I’ve heard women say, “This was my book,” or, “Amy wrote what I was feeling.”
When going through menopause, Amy would wake up in the middle of the night and fantasize about marrying George Clooney (one of my favorite anecdotes from the book, although I would have chosen Johnny Depp); google old boyfriends to see what had become of them; research every illness or disease that could possibly befall her; exchange bitter emails with her brother and a few formerly close friends; worry endlessly about her husband and her mother; and try desperately not to pick up another cigarette.
It is our great fortune that Amy could not sleep well during this period of her life, because as a result, she chronicled every one of her funny, sad, hysterical, and raw thoughts, feelings and stories in this powerful book. Here’s one of my favorite passages:
For any woman who is going through menopause, or getting close, I would strongly urge you to seek the guidance of a really great doctor who is compassionate and up-to-date on the best way to help women feel better while they are going through this life transition. I offer solid advice and tips on dealing with menopause in my book, gleaned from interviews I had with amazing experts. No woman should ever have to suffer through menopause, when there are proven ways to alleviate many of the more severe symptoms.
But, I would also encourage you — without hesitation — to pick up a copy of “Marrying George Clooney.” Not only will you feel emotions from one end of the spectrum to the other, but you will know, without a single doubt, that if you wake up at 4 a.m., you are most definitely not alone.
If you’re in the NYC area, come to the 92nd St. Y on Wednesday, Dec. 1, when I’ll be talking about living our best lives after 50.

This Blogger’s Books from
The Best of Everything After 50: The Experts’ Guide to Style, Sex, Health, Money, and More
by Barbara Hannah Grufferman

Follow Barbara Hannah Grufferman on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/BGrufferman

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

As much as I hate to say it, the Beatles were wrong when they said, “Love is all you need.” It’s just not that simple.
Love nurtures life, but we need much more. I think Andrew Lloyd Webber got it right when he wrote the lyric, “Love changes everything,” for the musical “Aspects of Love.” Love changes our lives, whether it’s the openhearted, head-over-heels kind of love that makes us obsessed with our lover, or the kind of love we feel for a child. But love also changes our lives when it slowly begins to die in a marriage, or when it’s betrayed by broken promises.
And the nature of love is forever altered when death visits the relationship.
Recently I attended the funeral of a young man in his 40s who died of glioblastoma, a terminal brain cancer that also took my sister’s life 15 years ago. The young man’s parents are dear friends of mine, and I had watched how they took the news when they first learned that he had cancer. Like anyone else, they felt shock, rage, disbelief and desperation. During a dinner I had had with the young man’s father several weeks before his son died, he had told me how his mind darted back and forth constantly from rage at the injustice to love and gratitude for his son.
And while this had been going on, his relationship with his son had changed.
Despite saying that we want what’s best for our children, we do have expectations. More often than not, we expect our children to live lives that are roughly similar to ours. And that often is fine if the child has a similar temperament, personality and worldview as his or her parent. But this was not the case with my friend and his son. My friend is a brilliant and disciplined scholar who loves philosophy, history and religion. Until recently, much of his attention was in the left side of his brain, which is more logical and less emotional. His son was a musician and lived much of his life in the right side of his brain, where creativity and sensitivity predominate.
So as you can imagine, there was both great love and great conflict in their relationship. And this is pretty typical of many parent-child relationships. After all, there is inevitably conflict, disappointment and resistance in most parent-child relationships. And all this conflict starts with parental love and our heartfelt wish that this precious child have an easy and happy life. But sometimes that tenderhearted love gets lost behind the stress of desire and expectations.
But after the diagnosis, things were different between my friend and his son. You see, the specter of death puts life in perspective. Expectations go away and historical baggage disappears. And when the light of life flickers, we open ourselves to the love that was always there.
In “Letters to Sam” I talked about the day my mother died. Although we loved each other, my mother and I also had a strained relationship, as we were constantly trying to change each other into the person we needed each other to be. On the day that she died, I arrived at the emergency room about an hour too late. The nurse escorted me back to the gurney where my mother lay. Because of my position in a wheelchair, I could only see her profile. The nurse asked if I would like her to put my mother’s hand in mine. “Yes, please,” I said. And there I watched those two motionless hands as I reflected back over her life. For the first time, I saw her as a woman and not just as my mother. I saw her as a wife and a daughter. I saw her struggles, the dreams she had realized, and those she had not. That day I felt a love and gratitude for this woman that was always present but rarely felt.
Those feelings recurred to me as I watched my friends love their son so fully, gently, and selflessly. Their love had become the kind that is experienced without expectation or desire for anything other than the opportunity to love him again tomorrow. It’s what is called “altruistic love.” It’s the kind of love we all long for, the kind of love that nurtures one’s soul whether it is being given or received.
In the poem “If You Knew,” Ellen Bass wonders how we would be different if we knew the next person we saw was dying. How would we experience the encounter? Would we be more kind and gentle? What would life look like if we stopped trying to change the people we love and just sat with them and gazed in their eyes knowing that we may not see them tomorrow? What would it be like if we could do the same thing for ourselves?
Just yesterday my friend told me that he has a chance with his 10-year-old grandson to correct all of the mistakes he made with his son, that he had the rest of his life to practice loving this child without expectation or agendas, that he would practice the kind of openhearted love he had felt for his son these past several months.
This is indeed a blessing for my friend and a blessing for his grandson. My fervent wish is that we can all learn the lessons my friend learned.
Indeed, love changes everything.

This Blogger’s Books from
The Wisdom of Sam: Observations on Life from an Uncommon Child
by Daniel Gottlieb Ph.D.
Letters to Sam: A Grandfather’s Lessons on Love, Loss, and the Gifts of Life
by Daniel Gottlieb

Follow Dan Gottlieb, Ph.D. on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/twitter.com/DrD

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Patti Smith won the National Book Award for Nonfiction this past week for her memoir “Just Kids,” which recounts her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe in the ’60s and ’70s. But “Just Kids” is far from her first flirtation with the written word.
Smith has actually published numerous books of poetry. And unlike other successful rock stars who have stumbled awkwardly into verse (Jewel and Billy Corgan come to mind), Smith’s work reflects that she was a poet first, and that her love affair with the art runs deep.
Smith grew up with poetry; her mother gave her a copy of William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” when she was just eight. She fell hard for the visionary Romantic and never seems to have recovered. The title of her most recent book of poetry, “Auguries of Innocence,” is a quote from Blake.
Blake is known to have been somewhat eccentric (it’s said that he and his wife liked to spend time nude in their garden reenacting the Garden of Eden), and Smith’s views on poetry and the creative process, are, it’s safe to say, eccentric as well. She once wrote:
Anyone doubting the veracity of that statement needs only to read Smith’s poetry on Arthur Rimbaud, the ecstatic French Symbolist who became the subject of her poetic fantasies. In an early prose poem she wrote of him:
And she wrote elsewhere:
Oh arthur arthur, we are in Abyssinia Aden making
love smoking cigarettes. we kiss. but its much more.
…exploding. seam of berber tent splitting. openings,
open as a cave, open wider. total surrender.
Smith has also long adored what she calls the “unfailing vision” of the French poet/critic Charles Baudelaire. She sometimes dresses like him and is known to cry out his name during concerts.
But as much as she idolized the Symbolists, her writing is often stylistically closer to the Beats in its stream-of-consciousness style and deliberately shocking content. This snippet from her poem “Rape,” for example, reads more like Kerouac or Ginsberg (whom she actually knew well) than anyone else:
let’s whalebone let’s go
let’s deodorize the night.
And in performance, Smith seems born to read Beat poetry. Watch her reading from Ginsberg’s “Footnote to Howl” here.
When Smith chooses to constrain her ecstatic tendencies, she can still write a very good poem. “Tara,” a quiet, well-paced and mysterious poem that you can read here, first appeared in the May 2007 issue of The New Yorker.
Smith chose to leave the tragedy at the heart of “Tara” unspoken. She only later explained “The Best American Poetry” that the poem deals with the tragic shooting of 32 students and faculty in April 2007 at Virginia Tech. Tara is in fact Smith’s sister, and the poem takes place right after she learns that her daughter, who was attending classes at Virginia Tech, is safe.
All in all, Smith’s poetry is more jewel than Jewel, and it is some of the only rock star poetry that I consistently enjoy reading. Here’s hoping that the success of her memoir brings more attention to her poems.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

How good are you at asking for help? How often do you say, “How can I help you?”
The fact is, there are more Americans than ever who need help, but asking for it is considered impolite, a burden, a sign of weakness or simply poor taste. As we move into the winter, many food banks are 100-percent below the stocks required to feed the burgeoning wave of middle-class citizens who cannot put food on the table. One in six is out of work, and a majority of our staple industries are on the list of imminent extinction.
Millions of Americans are being forced to reexamine their career, lifestyle, finances, and goals. Finishing the kitchen with a Viking stove and granite countertop is no longer a priority, because the house is about to go into foreclosure. Stable jobs of 25 years are gone, and the climate of “every man for himself” just will not cut it anymore. The sooner we stop using our fingers to point at one another and instead extend them in a handshake, the faster we can put our innovative brilliance to work to generate new jobs, revamp the bitter climate of our government, and start getting things done.
The fences we have built around our homes and intimate lives are fundamentally counterintuitive, given the community-driven nature we experience naturally as human beings. In fact, new studies suggest that the best way to reduce stress and anxiety is with the secretion of oxytocin, a largely misunderstood little hormone. However, it does not activate when we are alone. Oxytocin is secreted when we recognize images that trigger caring, engage in nurturing activities, or are around other people. We literally need to be with each other to relieve stress.
Remember the days of just popping into a neighbor’s house for a cup of sugar without thinking twice? We have to get back to that place. It is impossible to rebuild a new life in an uncertain world alone. We have to learn to ask for help, trust each other, and be willing to stick our necks out to give another a hand. There is so much to do, and we can start by asking for help.
I help run a local organization for women business leaders. It seems that women, in particular, are pretty lame in the asking-for-help category. Yet when an environment is created that is professional, casual and deliberately supportive, mountains move! All a woman has to do is be brave enough to throw out a quiver of a request: “Does anyone know someone who understands Twitter?” We all know what happens next. The six degrees of separation swirl into action, and within three minutes flat, she is all set.
This concept of naturally sharing our skills and bartering for services has developed into a system called “time banking” and is flourishing in Portland, Maine. More than 600 people have exchanged over 20,000 hours of time through the Portland Hour Exchange. Anyone can list various skills or services they can provide, such as a ride to the airport, handyman services, massage, or web design consultations. One hour of time is donated to someone who needs it, and then that hour is “deposited” into the system, which then can be exchanged for another service that you may want or need sometime down the road.
Check out this excerpt from a new PBS special called “Fixing the Future” that aired this past Friday:
Literally everyone has some sort of skill or ability that is valuable to someone else. All it takes is the power of asking to put the wheels of true community back into motion. As one of the exchange members said while giving a sailing lesson, “it is like we are remembering how to be in community instead of creating it.”
Most of us share time and services without even realizing it. An acquaintance and I bumped into each other last week, and in the midst of our standard hellos, she said, “Did I ever thank you?” As I blinked at her in complete brain fog, she went on to recap a conversation we had had regarding a challenge she was having with her teenage daughter. She had asked if I had any ideas to help, and I had instantly referred her to a friend of mine who works with adolescents as a therapist.
These types of interactions happen to all of us every single day; they take no time and are second nature. Yet, rarely do we have a chance to glimpse the impact of such a simple act. My friend sent her daughter to this therapist, and she has made a miraculous turnaround. Had she been embarrassed to ask for help, nothing would have changed. How often do you run into someone you know, they ask you how you are, and the answer is always, “Fine.” Why do we say this even when we are far from fine? All around us are people who are available to help us in some way. The challenge is being brave enough to ask.
Rebuilding our nation is not going to happen in Washington, D.C. but in our own backyards, and in the faith we can rebuild in one another as resources and support systems for one another. It is time to break the social pressure to be more and have more, and return to the graciousness of our forefathers, who were always quick and willing to lend a hand, build a barn or barter for goods and services.
As Thanksgiving approaches, many who needn’t be alone will be. The simple question of “what are you doing for Thanksgiving?” can lead to a revelation. If three or four people you know are doing nothing, why not share a table together? Turkey is optional! Instead of being alone and isolated, create a shared meal. It inspires a community feeling and is a symbolic knitting of our underlying fabric. Grab another table, ignore the dust, and invite the neighbors over: bigger is better.
This week, think about creating your own time bank. Is there something you need help with? Whom can you ask, and what would happen if you did? On the flip side, what can you do to help someone who may not be brave enough to ask? “Ask and you shall receive” is the cornerstone of gratitude, and the foundation of Thanksgiving. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment box below.

Follow Kari Henley on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/karihenley

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

After at least a decade of sustained presence, what can we say about the status of journals that promote literature online? We asked editors of some of the oldest online journals, as well as some new ones, these questions: What are online literary journals doing that print journals are failing to do? Have online journals come of age yet? Can you point to specific examples of areas where online literary journals are in a league of their own?
Rebecca Morgan Frank, editor-in-chief, Memorious: A Journal of New Verse and Fiction
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Yes, online journals have “come of age”: we’ve evolved from being the medium that people did not take seriously, and considered ephemeral, to being an enduring medium that models innovation in the important work of keeping literature relevant and accessible to readers. Print journals are following the lead of online journals by going online-only themselves (Triquarterly, Shenandoah), by having a companion online version with different content (Harvard Review, Agni), or by offering limited content and archives online. Online and print journals are essentially doing the same work: bringing together writers and readers. The practices of readers are now closing the assumed gap between these mediums. Online journals offer a way to navigate limitations of time and space, both geographical and material, with the presence of easily accessible archives that keep issues current, and with a more effective distribution model, as well as freedom from the restrictions of the dollar-based page count. Online journals can host longer works, accommodate longer lines, and are freed from the break of the page. They also offer unique opportunities for collaboration with other art forms: Blackbird offers video essays and videos of dance; Born brings together writers and artists in multimedia projects; and here at Memorious, our art song contest brings together composers, chamber musicians, and poets. Such innovations ultimately expand the audience for literature.
Rebecca Morgan Frank is editor-in-chief of Memorious: A Journal of New Verse and Fiction and author of the forthcoming poetry collection Little Murders Everywhere.
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif — Google TV was never intended to replace subscriptions to cable or satellite TV, but to integrate Web video and Apps with television offerings, says Google’s Saluhuddin Choudhary, project manager, in this interview with Beet.TV
Despite the intentions to embrace commercial television, several networks are pushing back, blocking access to the new device.
We visited the Googleplex last week for this interview. We also produced a demo of the device which appears below, on this page.
Andy Plesser
Production Notes: Many thanks to our West Coast producer Jeff Brooks for this report.
You can find this post on Beet.TV

Follow Andy Plesser on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/Beet_TV

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

There are two things we know about enhanced X-ray screening and full-body pat-downs at TSA check points. The first is that if we abolish them and a terrorist blows up a plane as a result of concealed explosives, Congressional hearings will castigate the TSA for failing to protect the public. The second is that if we keep them, Congressional hearings will castigate the TSA for excessive invasion of privacy in protecting the public.
We learned this “damned if you do-damned if you don’t” lesson about government years ago, when media reports of tax cheaters led Congress to demand that the IRS beef up its enforcement through hiring more agents to go after those not paying their fair share. Within a year or so, Congress began getting reports about how the IRS was going after the homes of people who were old or ill or old and ill, and hearings demanded that the IRS improve its customer service.
The same schizophrenic frenzy has turned up in just about every area the government is asked to manage for the protection of the public: food safety (ensure safe food but keep food cheap), oil drilling (protect the environment but keep oil flowing), energy conservation (improve gas mileage but don’t put auto companies out of business), mine safety (keep coal cheap but don’t let miners die), and public health (stop that pandemic but don’t quarantine anyone) – to cite a few examples.
Government is inherently a matter of trade-offs, in values and policies. Safety vs. security, protection vs. cost, justice vs. mercy, short-term gains vs. long-term losses (or short-term losses vs. long-term gains), guns vs. butter, taxes vs. debt. Where to draw the line is, in fact, one of the chief functions of government and one of the chief sources of contention in a free society.
Politicians on both sides will use these trade-offs – and the extremes of government action that usually result until we get the balance right – for their own benefit, as will the media, interest groups on the right and the left, bloggers, and those who seek their fifteen minutes of fame by recording their encounters with government for our viewing pleasure on You-Tube.
This is all as it should be. Were government so constrained as never to push our buttons, and were the public so constrained as to never howl in protest, we would not find the common, sensible ground that is essential for a well-functioning society. What we are watching in the current furor over airport security screenings is democracy at work in the healthy debate of how we manage the trade-offs between two valued ends.
It’s worth remembering this as we watch the passionate, sometimes infuriating, often exaggerated, seldom calm, typically one-sided arguments over the coming weeks. If you love America, love this too. It’s our vibrant, free society at work. It’s a sign of success, not failure. It demonstrates the enduring truth that a society where trade-offs are subject to constant criticism and negotiation is a good society.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Cap that with what Nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen asserts is a fresh start in Nato-Russia relations and you've ticked all the boxes.
This is pretty much what Nato leaders came to Lisbon hoping for and this is what they got.
But how will these declarations fare when stress-tested against reality?
Is that 2014 goal for the handover of security responsibility in Afghanistan really attainable?
Nato spokesmen tell you that this will depend upon conditions on the ground. So what if conditions are not right and Nato allies are lining up to withdraw their troop contingents? What then?
It is noticeable for example that the Americans seem unwilling to declare 2014 the proposed end of combat operations. Indeed most military experts believe that Nato capabilities – even if just special forces and air power – will be needed for some time to come.
On Russia too there must be some uncertainty. Dealing with President Dmitry Medvedev – Nato's guest here – is one thing, but there are many in the Russian military, its parliament and even in government, who remain more sceptical about Nato's intentions.
Indeed some Russian analysts have seen Mr Medvedev's seemingly softer stance towards Nato as a clear sign that he wants to put some distance between himself and the current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The two men could be rivals for the Russian presidency in 2012.
Mr Medvedev may be carving out a position as the man best able to do business with the West, hence his declaration that the “period of cooling relations” between Russia and Nato ” is over”.
Nato seems to have got most of what it wanted from Moscow: expanded transit routes into Afghanistan; stepped up Russian counter-narcotics training for Afghan security forces; and collaboration on countering terrorism and piracy.
Russia's agreement to explore – but not yet join – in deliberations with Nato on missile defence is also a positive sign for the alliance; another sign perhaps that Mr Medvedev wishes to be his own man.

Source:BBC

It’s not easy to wipe out a culture. Huge forces must be brought to bear with such a powerful assault that survival is almost impossible. Sometimes a natural disaster is the culprit.
Approximately 65.5 million years ago, an asteroid collided with the earth in the area of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, creating the Chicxulub Crater and triggering a mass extinction. Although man was not yet present on earth, the impact had a huge effect on the course of evolution and has long been credited with contributing to the disappearance of the dinosaurs.
In 79 A.D., the eruption of Italy’s Mount Vesuvius buried the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum under volcanic ash.
In 2004, the Indian Ocean earthquake and its resulting tsunami had the opposite effect. According to Wikipedia, “The water washed away centuries of sand from some of the ruins of a 1,200-year-old lost city at Mahabalipuram on the south coast of India. The site, containing such notable structures as a half-buried granite lion near a 7th century Mahablipuram temple and a relic depicting an elephant, is part of what archaeologists believe to be an ancient port city that was swallowed by the sea hundreds of years ago.”
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans, forcing many people to evacuate (some never returned) and effectively destroying part of the city’s rich cultural history.
Sometimes a military assault by one nation upon another has a major effect in eliminating the weaker nation’s culture.
During a visit to Alexandria, Egypt in 48 BCE, Caesar’s forces are reputed to have burned the city’s famous library. In 391, on the order of Theodosius, all pagan buildings (including the library) were destroyed. The Serapeum was destroyed by either a crowd of Christians or Roman soldiers.
Spain’s colonization of Mexico in 1521 marked the beginning of the downfall of the Toltec, Aztec, Olmec, Mayan, Zapotec, and Teotihuacan cultures.
When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, the National Museum of Iraq (which contained precious relics from ancient Mesopotamian history) was looted and suffered terrible losses. On April 10 and 12, the Iraq National Library and Archive was burned and looted.
Diseases that attack the immune system can have a surprising effect in wiping out a culture:
The Spanish conquest of Peru by Francisco Pizarro during the 16th century introduced diseases from Europe (most notably smallpox) to the Incan Empire. Within 70 years, 93% of the Incan population had died.
Following the arrival of British explorer James Cook, native Hawaiians were exposed to smallpox, influenza, and measles (nearly 20% of Hawaii’s population succumbed to measles in the 1850s).
The rapid spread of the HIV virus in the 1980s and 1990s resulted in the early deaths of many talented gay men, causing some to wonder if an entire generation of creativity had been lost. By 2007, more than 33 million people worldwide were suffering from the disease.
Sometimes genocide and religion are the culprits:
Many Native American tribes saw their indigenous cultures destroyed by “the Great White Father.”
The religious missionaries who arrived in the Hawaiian Islands during the 19th century had a severely negative impact on native Hawaiian culture.
Starting in 1821, anti-Jewish pogroms took place during the Russian Empire (particularly during the period from 1881-1884). A second, more brutal wave of progroms occurred between 1903-1906.
Beginning in April of 1915, Turkey embarked on the Armenian genocide in an effort to destroy the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire.
In World War II, Hitler’s forces did their best to exterminate the Jews. Book burnings and the mass slaughter of more than six million Jews led to the destruction of a great deal of Yiddish culture (Aaron Lansky’s amazing book — Outwitting History — tells of his struggles to save more than a million Yiddish books, how he established the National Yiddish Book Center and, thanks to emerging digital technology, was able to restore the collections of Yiddish literature to many European libraries, synagogues, and Jewish communities).
Built in 507 and 554, the Buddhas of Bamyan in the Hazarajat region of Afghanistan were dynamited and destroyed by the Taliban in March of 2001.
Two new documentaries show the cultural impact of Communist China’s efforts to suppress and destroy the culture of Tibet. Each is fascinating in its own right. Together, they make a powerful statement about the importance of one’s cultural identity.
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Many people think of Tibet as a small country somewhere in Central Asia. But, in truth, it’s about the size of Western Europe. Often referred to as the roof of the world (Tibet is home to Mt. Everest and the Himalayas), its average elevation is about 16,000 feet or three miles above sea level.
The Tibetan Empire was founded in the 7th century. As an independent nation, Tibet’s laws were completely unrelated to any other country’s. Over a period of 700 years, religion and literature migrated into Tibet as scholars who had been sent to India to master Sanskrit then translated Buddhist texts and works of Indian literature into the Tibetan language.
A British expedition invaded Tibet’s borders in 1904 and, in 1910, China’s Qing government deposed the Dalai Lama. Following the 1959 Tibetan uprising, the government of the 14th Dalai Lama fled to northern India, settling in Dharmsala. From then until the leaders of China’s cultural revolution were ousted from power in 1980, Communist China tried to destroy as much of Tibet’s culture as possible.
Tibet is one of the world’s last ancient civilizations, with a highly developed classical religion, styles of dress, spoken language, written script, poetry, and specialized forms of painting and music. Unlike Chinese, the Tibetan language is alphabetical (rather than pictorial). Because the valleys of the great Tibetan plateau are where most of the country’s population is concentrated (and where China’s population has been migrating), much of Tibet’s culture remains intact only in the high regions above the plateau or in Tibetan enclaves in India (like Dharmsala).
Ngawang Choephel (Photo by: Jayd Cardina)
Directed by former Tibetan political prisoner, Ngawang Choephel (who now lives in New York City), Tibet In Song demonstrates how Tibetan folk music and culture were suppressed by the Chinese government starting in the 1950s. Much of the documentary celebrates the culture’s working songs, songs about family, and songs about the beauty of the land. In 1995 Choephel was arrested, sentenced to 18 years in prison, and branded as a spy simply for trying to record the songs heard in the film (his release from prison became an international cause).
While Choephel’s work concentrated on preserving Tibet’s musical heritage, much more was under attack by the Chinese government. Mao Tse-Tung’s philosophy was that the way to change the loyalty of Tibetans was through song. As a result, public loudspeakers started airing Chinese music. Chinese performers were brought to Tibet to change the music heard by Tibetan children. Today, when asked to sing a song, many adults will sing Chinese music because they no longer know any Tibetan songs.
The contrast between Choephel’s wholesome curiosity about his musical heritage and the brutality many Tibetans suffered for their refusal to sing Chinese songs is appalling. Those who have always been curious about the cultures of foreign civilizations will be shocked to see how seriously Tibetan culture was undermined and corrupted by the Chinese (in one scene, two elderly women are warned by a Chinese policeman to stop singing in the street before they get into trouble).
While there is much sorrow to be found in Choephel’s documentary as Tibetans mourn the loss of their culture, the sheer beauty of the Tibetan landscape quietly asserts itself with a strange kind of geologic defiance throughout Tibet In Song. Here’s the trailer:
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If you’ve already seen Rick Ray’s excellent 2006 documentary, 10 Questions for the Dalai Lama, you probably won’t want to miss Journey From Zanskar. Written and directed by Frederick Marx, and narrated by Richard Gere, the film stars Tibetan monk Geshe Lobsang Dhamchoe and includes a special appearance by the Dalai Lama.
While Tibet in Song deals with vanishing aspects of Tibetan culture, Journey From Zanskar is focused on on a very different mission. Zanskar is the last remaining original Tibetan Buddhist society with a continuous untainted lineage dating back thousands of years.
The Dalai Lama has spoken out about the importance of protecting the remaining Tibetan cultures. Whereas the public schools in Zanskar have taught children how to speak Urdu, Hindi, and English, they have not taught them the Tibetan language, history, or culture.
Geshe Labsong Dhamchoe
In Journey From Zanskar, two monks from the 1,000-year-old Stongde monastery have promised the Dalai Lama they will do whatever they can to provide an education for some of the poorest children in Zanskar. When the school they have built at the monastery is completed, its curriculum will be designed to combine the best of modern Western education with Tibetan Buddhism (the monks have also been building a museum to house relics dating back 8,000 years and a guesthouse to accommodate tourists).
To understand the challenges they face, it’s important to look at Zanskar’s geography. Located in northwest India, Zanskar was once considered a part of Tibet. The Indian government “closed” Zanskar to the world until 1974. When it was reopened, the Zanskaris found themselves living in the Muslim-dominated states of Jammu and Kashmir.
Located only miles from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the sealed Tibetan border, Zanskaris find themselves stuck between the region of Ladakh to the East and China to the West. The only road leading into the 2,000-foot high Zanskar valley is controlled by the embattled northern town of Kargil. The best traveled route out of Zanskar is a trail leading over the 17,500-foot high Shinku Pass.
Journey From Zanskar follows two Tibetan monks as they attempt to take poor children (ages 4-12) from their homes in one of the most isolated places in the world and enroll them in a Buddhist school in Manali, India. The monks carefully select the brightest, most capable children, who must then be separated from their fathers and mothers, grandparents and friends.
Leading the children on foot and horseback, the monks embark on a dangerous five-day trek. When they are less than 300 vertical feet from the Shinku pass, their yaks and horses refuse to go further, forcing them to turn back. One adult suffers from altitude sickness, another from snow blindness as they return to their starting point in Padum. Eventually, the children are transported by bus and jeep to Manali, where their heads are shaved and one of them enjoys the first hot shower he has ever had in his life. Later, they are brought to Dharamsala to meet the Dalai Lama, who joyously welcomes them.
Marx’s documentary is a testament to the struggles of the Zanskari people to survive — and their willingness to part with their children in the hope that the next generation can get an education that will lead to a better life. Americans who have taken their educational system for granted will find Journey from Zanskar a sobering reminder of how lucky they are and how much they have at their fingertips.
In Journey from Zanskar, the frigid beauty of the Tibetan landscape vies with the optimism of Geshe Lobsang Dhamchoe and his fellow monks as they struggle to improve the lives of a dozen Tibetan children. Here’s the trailer.
To read more of George Heymont go to My Cultural Landscape

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com