When it comes to trade, chimps are far from venture capitalists. Our closest relatives almost always prefer a sure bet, according to a recent study, choosing value in hand over risk for higher returns. The finding brings us closer to understanding chimps’ trading habits and gives us precious insight into how trade, an essential cooperative behavior, works for humans.
To conduct the study, researchers started with two groups of chimps: one with little exposure to social and cognitive testing and no trading experience, and one with extensive bartering practice and language training. The scientists determined which food each chimp liked best. Then they assigned values to the foods. Finally, they taught the inexperienced chimps how to trade with tokens and food.
The results? When chimps possessing items of medium-high value, such as carrots, were offered high-value items, like grapes, they kept the lesser food. This tendency held true for both groups, despite different rearing histories, suggesting that their disinclination to barter is innate, says Sarah Brosnan of Georgia State University, the lead researcher in this study.
The chimps’ risk-averse behavior, Brosnan speculates, is attributable to a lack of language skills. “If one chimp could say to another, ‘OK, you crack nuts while I hunt meat, and then we’ll trade,’ they’d be able to specialize and have a developed economy,” Brosnan says. Because humans can specialize, she adds, we can generate surplus to purchase or barter for better foods from one another.
There's no other major item most of us own that is as confusing, unpredictable and unreliable as our personal computers. Everybody has questions about them, and we aim to help.
Here are a few questions about computers I've received recently from people like you, and my answers. I have edited and restated the questions a bit, for readability.
Q. I have moved from a PC to the iMac. In the Windows environment, I felt a need to run utilities to clean out the registry and defragment the hard disk frequently. Is this also needed on the iMac? If so, what programs are recommended?
A. The Mac operating system, called OS X Leopard, doesn't include a registry, which is a feature of Windows that holds information that programs need to operate properly. So there's no need to clean or maintain any registry on a Mac.
Mac hard disks, like those on Windows computers, can get fragmented -- a condition in which parts of files are so scattered around on the disk that the disk runs slowly. However, the operating system has some under-the-covers features that generally obviate the need to run a defragmentation utility. In fact, Apple, which calls defragmenting a disk "optimizing" it, flatly claims that "You probably won't need to optimize at all if you use Mac OS X." There are some Mac defragmentation utilities, but I don't believe you will need them unless you have large numbers of extremely large files and almost no free disk space.
Q. My son's computer frequently gets infected with adware, pop-ups. Recently it was hit with a continuing pop-up ad called VirusHeat that touted itself as a solution to the computer's problems. When I paid for VirusHeat, the problems went away. Is it legitimate?
A. According to numerous reports on the Web, including some from security companies, VirusHeat is a form of malicious or misleading software. It falls into a category that attempts to scare people into thinking their computers are badly infected, or exaggerates any problems you may have. This is a common tactic now used by creators of malware.
Some of these fake or misleading "security programs" may be designed merely to make you pay. Others may even be designed to install the very kinds of viruses, spyware or adware that they claim to fight.
Q. I have updated to a new PC. My data are on a floppy disc. There is no floppy disc drive on this new computer. How can I transfer my data?
A. For around $25, you can buy an external floppy disk drive that plugs into a new PC using its standard USB port. If you do so, and connect it to the new PC, you should be able to copy your data to the new computer's hard disk.
Ohio AG Marc Dann has resigned amid the scandal of a sexual harassment investigation in his office and his extramarital affair. Dann, 46, led the state on a 10-day odyssey, at first refusing to resign despite demands by Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland and others within his party, a growing number of investigations into conduct at his office, and the filing Tuesday of articles of impeachment against him. (Find past LB coverage of the Dann scandal here and here.)
Two Fridays ago, Dann admitted to a “romantic relationship” with a member of his staff, prompting Democratic leaders such as Governor Ted Strickland to call for his Dann’s head. But despite a letter that Strickland and others sent to Dann, arguing that he’d lost “even the most remote hope” of continuing to serve effectively as AG, Dann told his staff that he was optimistic about plans to stay in office despite an impeachment threat. “I think that there is a great chance that we can continue to do great work for the people of the state.”
The great work that Dann, who was elected to his first term in 2006, referred to may have been his crusade against ratings agencies and his pursuit of mortgage lenders and brokers for allegedly inflating home prices and contributing to the subprime crisis. Click here for a past WSJ profile of Dann, titled “The Mortgage Cop.”
But yesterday, when Ohio democrats sprung into action, filing articles of impeachment against Dann, he appeared to lose his mettle. What followed was 24 hours of speculation that Dann would resign.
How would you like to carry around your entire DVD collection on a single disk? That is the promise of a new holo–graphic digital storage technology being developed by General Electric and coming to a computer near you around 2012. Although not the first commercial holographic storage system—that honor goes to InPhase Technologies’ Tapestry™ 300r holographic drive—GE’s system could be the first one aimed at consumers. (InPhase’s holographic drives, which debuted last year, sell for $18,000 and target broadcasters who need to archive television programs.)
Holographic media can store huge amounts of data because information is encoded in layers throughout the entire disk, not just on a single reflective surface as in today’s optical media. In GE’s system, a single CD-size disk made of plastic will be able to store about 1 terabyte of data, equivalent to 110 typical movie DVDs. http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-jmbPCHg9dLPh1gHoZxLG.GpS
Louis J. Sheehan Esquire
This kind of capacity would make it possible to back up all your music, photos, home movies, and e-mails in one place; it would also allow for totally new, extremely data-intensive applications, such as Micro–soft’s MyLifeBits project, which aims to capture in digital form every–thing that happens in an individual’s life. Besides automatically archiving and indexing things like e-mails and text documents, the project includes a wearable camera that snaps a picture at least once every 30 seconds, creating a visual index of every day.
To store data holographically, a laser beam (1) is split in two (2). One half of the beam passes through an array of hundreds of thousands of gates (3). Each gate can be opened or closed to represent a binary 1 or 0. The gates either block or pass the beam, filtering it into a coded pattern, or signal. The other half of the beam, known as the reference beam, is bounced off a mirror (4), so that the reference beam and the signal beam encoded with digital information intersect somewhere within the plastic storage medium (5). Light waves from the two beams interfere with each other, imprinting into the plastic a hologram—a three-dimensional pattern. By varying the angle of the mirror, millions of holograms can be created in the same piece of plastic. To read data from storage, the reference beam alone is used to illuminate the hologram. The resulting image can be read by a sensor and converted back into 1s and 0s.
Contrary to public opinion, salted nuts aren't necessarily high in sodium. Because salt is present on the surface of the nut, it's tasted immediately. In actuality, a 1-ounce serving (or 49 kernels) of pistachios only contains 5% DV of sodium. As an option, raw pistachios are sodium free.
A good snack can be part of a healthy eating plan by helping stabilize blood sugar, satisfy hunger between meals, supply extra nutrients including fiber, and keep energy levels high and your mind alert.
Naturally trans-fat and cholesterol-free, and one of the lowest calorie, lowest fat nuts, pistachios make an ideal snack choice. Tasty and delicious, pistachios are the most nutrient dense nut, offering a good source of eight important nutrients including thiamin, vitamin B6, copper, manganese, potassium, fiber, phosphorus and magnesium. http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com/
Also, among snack nuts, pistachios contain the highest amounts of polyphenol antioxidants. While the role of antioxidants is still unknown, research suggests that a diet of foods containing antioxidants is smart eating.
Pistachios help your heart in four ways. First, most of the fat found in pistachios is "good" unsaturated fat, which can lower blood cholesterol and the risk of heart disease when replacing saturated fat in the diet. Second, pistachios offer the highest levels of cholesterol-busting phytosterols among snack nuts, and are a good source of fiber, both of which reduce the absorption of cholesterol from the diet. Also, among snack nuts, pistachios are the highest in polyphenols, antioxidants with potential heart health benefits6. Finally, pistachios offer potassium. An inadequate intake of potassium is characterized by increased blood pressure and may increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke.
You'll also find pistachios included in the FDA's first ever qualified health claim for conventional food, which states: "Scientific evidence suggests, but does not prove, that eating 1.5 ounces per day of most nuts, such as pistachios, as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol may reduce the risk of heart disease." http://www.soulcast.com/post/show/117748/move
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Your body needs fat to function. But the wrong kind - saturated fat - can raise cholesterol levels increasing the risk of heart disease. Most of the fat found in pistachios - almost 90% - is "good" unsaturated fat. When unsaturated fats replace saturated fats - those found in meats, baked goods and full fat dairy products - they can help lower blood cholesterol along with the risk of heart disease.
Many nutritionists agree that, when eaten in moderation, good fats, along with protein, helps dieters feel full longer. It's also good to know that because pistachios are dry roasted, they are naturally trans-fat free. According to the American Heart Association, trans-fats raise total blood cholesterol levels and LDL ("bad") cholesterol and lower HDL ("good") cholesterol levels; in turn increasing the risk of coronary heart disease and increases the risk of stroke.
Pistachios make a superior snack choice for dieters. One reason is that they are nutrient dense - good news when every calorie counts. Also, many experts believe that because pistachios have both protein and fiber they help you feel full for longer - so you eat less at your next meal. One such expert is Tanya Zuckerbrot, registered dietitian, mother of three and author of the "F Factor Diet: Discovering the Secret to Permanent Weight Loss," who recommends foods containing fiber, such as pistachios, to help weight loss.
Did you know that most Americans fall short of the recommended daily amount for fiber? Fiber is important because it aids digestion, promotes satiety and helps maintain a healthy body weight. Tanya recommends a handful of delicious pistachios as a morning or afternoon snack as an easy way to add an extra 3 grams or more of natural fiber to your diet along with protein.
You may be surprised to know that nut consumption, in general, is associated with a lower body mass index and has not been shown to cause gain. In fact, many popular diet plans including DASH Diet, Mediterranean Diet, Weight Watchers and the USDA Food Pyramid, highlight nuts in their healthy eating plans. Some even believe that the simple act of shelling a pistachio may have the added benefit of slowing down consumption time.
1 oz serving size of pistachios, about 30 grams shelled, yields about 160 calories. That measures out to be about 49 kernels per ounce - which can make for a very satisfying snack. http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com/2008/03/08/gravity/
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Pistachios are naturally low in carbohydrates and rich in monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFA), making them a perfect snack for diabetics following recommended dietary guidelines. Clinical trials have found that diets following such guidelines help maintain blood sugar and insulin levels and reduce risk factors for heart disease, a consequence that accounts for greater than 65% of diabetic deaths. In fact, a 2007 study conducted at the University of Toronto showed that when pistachios are eaten with other high-carbohydrate foods, they slow absorption of carbohydrates into the body, resulting in lower-than-expected blood sugar levels. MUFA-rich foods of plant origins, such as pistachios, contain fiber, phytosterols and antioxidants, which confer a variety of cardiovascular benefits including glycemic control, improved lipid profiles, and reduced LDL oxidation.
It's important to know that the true prevalence of food allergy in the U.S. is not as great as the public perceives it to be. According to the American Academy of Asthma, Allergy and Immunology (AAAI) estimates for 2006 suggest that food allergy of all types affects about 4% of the total population, with prevalence in children generally higher than that for adults. About 90% of food allergies in the US and in many other parts of the world derive from milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, shellfish, wheat and soy. Diagnosis of food allergy, including allergies to nuts, can be problematic because no single laboratory test available today can conclusively confirm that a person will exhibit clinical symptoms in response to consumption of a suspect food. For most people with food allergies, symptoms that occur after consuming the offending food are merely annoying such as a runny nose or itchy skin.
Tree nut allergies are rare in the general population. The best estimates available suggests that allergy to no single tree nut exceeds about .4% of the U.S. population, whereas separate estimates for peanuts suggest the prevalence is about 0.8 percent. If you're concerned about any food allergies, consult your physician.
A 1-oz serving of in-shell pistachios (about 30 grams or 1⁄2 cup), typically retails for about 30¢, a favorable comparison, price-wise, to popular salted snacks such as ready-to-eat popcorn. More importantly, however, you'll find that a handful of pistachios provides significant nutritional value and helps keep hunger satisfied.
You probably already know that junk snacks provide little nutritional value per calorie and can lead to obesity and a number of related illnesses. http://sheehan.myblogsite.com/
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When you consider food on a dollar per nutrient basis, healthy choices are not necessarily more expensive. In fact, while you may think you're saving money by choosing a processed "junk" snack, in the long run the choice may be more expensive. Consider the following:
Healthy foods such as fruits, vegetables and nuts are more satiating - so you feel fuller, longer. Plus they provide your body with vitamins, minerals, and nutrients needed to stay healthy. Pistachios offer good nutritional value: the most nutrient-dense tree nut*, pistachios are also among the highest fiber nuts, and also offer the highest amounts of phytosterols and antioxidants. One of the lowest calorie, lowest fat nuts, pistachios are also fun to eat.
And for those people with moderately high cholesterol levels, studies show that a snack of pistachios, when used as a replacement for high-fat snacks, can cut both total and "bad" LDL cholesterol while offering cardioprotective nutrients such as magnesium, potassium and copper. http://louis9j9sheehan.blog.com/2841488/
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http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspxGood news for heart health!
Many people are surprised to learn that studies show pistachios actually help lower cholesterol. That's because almost 90% of the fat in pistachios is unsaturated (monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats), which can reduce blood cholesterol levels when they replace saturated fats in the diet. In addition to offering heart healthy unsaturated fats, pistachios provide important antioxidants and amino acids that reduce the risk of heart disease. And among nuts, pistachios have the highest content of phytosterols, a plant sterol shown to reduce cholesterol absorption from other foods.
microkernel family.
Pistachio nuts, dry roasted, w/o salt
Nutritional value per 100 g (3.5 oz)
Energy 570 kcal 2390 kJ
Carbohydrates 27.65 g
- Sugars 7.81 g
- Dietary fiber 10.3 g
Fat 45.97 g
Protein 21.35 g
Thiamin (Vit. B1) 0.84 mg 65%
Riboflavin (Vit. B2) 0.158 mg 11%
Niacin (Vit. B3) 1.425 mg 10%
Pantothenic acid (B5) 0.513 mg 10%
Vitamin B6 1.274 mg 98%
Folate (Vit. B9) 50 μg 13%
Vitamin C 2.3 mg 4%
Calcium 110 mg 11%
Iron 4.2 mg 34%
Magnesium 120 mg 32%
Phosphorus 485 mg 69%
Potassium 1042 mg 22%
Zinc 2.3 mg 23%
Manganese 1.275 mg
Percentages are relative to US
recommendations for adults.
Source: USDA Nutrient database
The pistachio (Pistacia vera L., Anacardiaceae; sometimes placed in Pistaciaceae) is a small tree up to 10 m tall, native to mountainous regions of Iran, Turkmenistan and western Afghanistan. It has deciduous pinnate leaves 10–20 cm long.
The plants are dioecious, with separate male and female trees. The flowers are apetalous and unisexual, and borne in panicles. The fruit is a drupe, containing an elongated seed (a nut in the culinary sense, but not a true botanical nut) with a hard, whitish shell and a striking kernel which has a mauvish skin and light green flesh, with a distinctive flavour. http://blogs.ebay.com/mytymouse1/home/_W0QQentrysyncidZ526811010
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When the fruit ripens, the husk changes from green to an autumnal yellow/red and the shells split partially open (see photo). This is known as dehiscence, and happens with an audible pop.
Each pistachio nut weighs around 1 gram, and each pistachio tree averages around 50 kg of nuts, or around 50,000, every two years. Pistachios (as part of the pistacia genus) have existed for about 80 million years
P. vera) was first cultivated in Western Asia. It reached the Mediterranean world by way of central Iran, where it has long been an important crop. Although known to the Romans, the pistachio nut appears not to have reached the Mediterranean or most of the Near East in any quantity before medieval times.
The kernels are often eaten whole, either fresh or roasted and salted, and are also used in ice cream and confections such as baklava. In July 2003, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first qualified health claim specific to nuts lowering the risk of heart disease: "Scientific evidence suggests but does not prove that eating 1.5 ounces (42.5g) per day of most nuts, such as pistachios, as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol may reduce the risk of heart disease". In research at Pennsylvania State University, pistachios in particular significantly reduced levels of LDL, the 'bad' cholesterol, in the blood of volunteers. Pennsylvania State University's Department of Nutrition and Sciences has also conducted related research on other health benefits of pistachios, including an April 2007 study concluding that pistachios may calm acute stress reaction,and a June 2007 study on the cardiovascular health benefits of eating pistachios. http://web.mac.com/lousheehan/Site/Garage_Before_and_After.html
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On the Greek island of Chios, the husk or flesh of the pistachio fruit surrounding the shell is cooked and preserved in syrup.
The shell of the pistachio is naturally a beige colour, but it is sometimes dyed red or green in commercial pistachios. Originally the dye was applied by importers to hide stains on the shells caused when the nuts were picked by hand. However most pistachios are now picked by machine and the shells remain unstained, making dyeing unnecessary (except that some consumers have been led to expect coloured pistachios). Roasted pistachio nuts can be artificially turned red if they are marinated prior to roasting in a salt and strawberry marinade, or salt and citrus salts.
The trees are planted in orchards, and take approximately seven to ten years to reach significant production. Production is alternate bearing or biennial bearing, meaning the harvest is heavier in alternate years. Peak production is reached at approximately 20 years. Trees are usually pruned to size to make the harvest easier. One male tree produces enough pollen for eight to twelve nut-bearing females. Pistachio orchards can be damaged by the fungal disease Botryosphaeria panicle and shoot blight, which kills the flowers and young shoots.
Pistachio trees are fairly hardy in the right conditions, and can survive temperature ranges between -10°C (14°F) in winter to 40°C (104°F) in summer. They need a sunny position and well-drained soil. Pistachio trees do poorly in conditions of high humidity, and are susceptible to root rot in winter if they get too much water and the soil is not sufficiently free draining. Long hot summers are required for proper ripening of the fruit.
Pistachio nuts are highly flammable when stored in large quantities, and are prone to self heating and spontaneous combustion.
Share of a total 2005 worldwide production of 501 thousand metric tonnes:
Country Production
(tonnes)
Iran 190 000
U.S. 140 000
Turkey 60 000
Syria 60 000
China 34 000
Greece 9 500
Italy 2 400
Uzbekistan 1 000
Tunisia 800
Pakistan 200
Madagascar 160
Kyrgyzstan 100
Morocco 50
Cyprus 15
Mexico 7
Mauritius 5
California produces almost all U.S. pistachios, and about half of these are exported, mainly to China, Japan, Europe and Canada. Almost all California pistachios are of the cultivar 'Kerman'. The tree is grafted to a rootstock when the rootstock is one year old. Only a few years after California growers started growing pistachios, the 1979 crisis in Iran would give stronger commercial impetus to the American-based pistachio nut industry. Previous to that time, most Westerners were familiar with only the slightly smaller, deeply red-hued (dyed) nuts produced mainly in Iran, where it is the second largest export after oil. http://louisajasheehan.blogspot.com/
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So late to be “discovered” by the rest of the world—Henry Stanley made the continent's first crossing only in 1877—Africa, it can be forgotten, is probably the cradle of humanity. Palaeoanthropologists, archaeologists and, more recently, geneticists have all bolstered the “out of Africa” theory, which holds that early man wandered out of the Rift Valley. Yet little is known of pre-colonial African cultures. Some vanished out of history, along with their languages and beliefs, before they ever came to be named. That is one reason why Africa's rock art is so precious. The faintest ochre scratches of prehistoric antelope in a cave open a rare window into Africa's—and humanity's—distant past.
Africa may have 200,000 rock-art sites, more than any other continent. The oldest known site, in Namibia, is between 18,000 and 28,000 years old. Several African universities now have programmes to decipher the paintings and carvings. They are being helped by the Kenya-based Trust for African Rock Art (TARA), which seeks to discover and digitally archive as much of the art as it can for future scholars.
The best is in the Sahara desert, particularly in Niger's Air mountains, in the Tibesti mountains of northern Chad and southern Libya, and in south-east Algeria's Tassili n'Ajjer range. Such desert sites are too remote to be damaged by graffiti, though wars involving the local Tuareg have resulted in some being shot up or smashed apart for sale to foreign collectors. David Coulson, one of TARA's founders, raves about a recent find in the Tassili n'Ajjer range: an anatomically perfect four-metre-long carving of a hippo hunted by an Egyptian-looking figure with a superbly sinuous bow. This in a region that dried up several thousand years ago.
Elsewhere in Africa, rock art often chronicles the hunting magic of Bushmen and Pygmies. Not much rock art survives in western Africa, and in eastern and central parts of the continent more recent but still invaluable paintings have been poorly preserved.
But there is progress. Locals are being encouraged to see the value of showing off their sites to tourists. National museums are being overhauled, with new displays of lost peoples. New history textbooks may follow. New finds are being made. A sensational discovery in a cave in Kenya is being kept under wraps until it can be properly dated.
Some think African rock art should provide a pan-African rallying point, free of politics or religion. A rich rock-art heritage could connect Libya and South Africa, two of the African Union's biggest backers, which sometimes struggle to find anything in common. Kofi Annan, a former UN secretary-general, is a big rock-art fan. He reckons it represents nothing less than the earliest record of the human imagination.
First, ask yourself how hungry you are, on a scale of 1 (ravenous) to 7 (stuffed). http://louiscjcsheehan.blogspot.com/
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Next, take time to appreciate the food on your plate. Notice the colors and textures.
Take a bite. Slowly experience the tastes on your tongue. Put down your fork and savor.
"Most people don't think about what they're eating -- they're focusing on the next bite," says Sasha Loring, a psychotherapist at Duke Integrative Medicine, part of Duke University Health System here. "I've worked with lots of obese people -- you'd think they'd enjoy food. But a lot of them say they haven't really tasted what they've been shoveling down for years."
Over lunch, Ms. Loring is teaching me how to eat mindfully -- paying attention to what you eat and stopping just before you're full, ideally about 51⁄2 on that 7-point scale. Many past diet plans have stressed not overeating. What's different about mindful eating is the paradoxical concept that eating just a few mouthfuls, and savoring the experience, can be far more satisfying than eating an entire cake mindlessly.
• Assess how hungry you are.
• Eat slowly; savor your food.
• Put your fork down and breathe between bites.
• Notice taste satiety.
• Check back on your hunger level.
• Stop when you start to feel full.
Source: Duke Integrative Medicine
For more information on mindful eating
• "Mindless Eating" by Brian Wansink
• "Eating Mindfully" by Susan Albers
• "The Zen of Eating" by Ronna Kabatznick
It sounds so simple, but it takes discipline and practice. It's a far cry from the mindless way many of us eat while walking, working or watching TV, stopping only when the plate is clean or the show is over.
It's also a mind-blowing experience: I'm full and completely satisfied after three mindful bites.
The approach, which has roots in Buddhism, is being studied at several academic medical centers and the National Institutes of Health as a way to combat eating disorders. In a randomized controlled trial at Duke and Indiana State University, binge eaters who participated in a nine-week mindful-eating program went from binging an average of four times a week to once, and reduced their levels of insulin resistance, a precursor to diabetes. More NIH-funded trials are under way to study whether mindful eating is effective for weight loss, and for helping people who have lost weight keep it off.
One key aspect is to approach food nonjudgmentally. Many people bring a host of negative emotions to the table -- from guilt about blowing a diet to childhood fears of deprivation or wastefulness. "I joke with my clients that if I could put a microphone in their heads and broadcast what they're saying to themselves when they eat, the FCC would have to bleep it out," says Megrette Fletcher, executive director of the Center for Mindful Eating, a Web-based forum for health-care professionals. http://louisgjgsheehan.blogspot.com/
Using food as a reward or as solace also interferes with eating mindfully; if you're eating to satisfy emotional hunger, it's hard to ever feel full. "Ask yourself, what do you really need and what else can you do it fulfill it?" says Ms. Loring.
Have you had learned to eat consciously? Has it changed your life? If not, does it sound like something you'd like to try? Share your thoughts.
Chronic dieters in particular have trouble recognizing their internal cues, says Jean Kristeller, a psychologist at Indiana State, who pioneered mindful eating in the 1990s. "Diets set up rules around food and disconnect people even further from their own experiences of hunger and satiety and fullness," she says.
Mindful eaters learn to assess taste satiety. A hunger for something sweet or sour or salty can often be satisfied with a small morsel. In one exercise, Ms. Kristeller has clients mindfully eat a single raisin -- noticing their thoughts and emotions, as well as the taste and texture. "It sounds somewhat silly," she explains, "but it can also be very profound." http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com/
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Mindful eating also means learning to ignore urges to snack that aren't connected to hunger. And it's critical to leave food on your plate once you are full; pack it to go, if possible.
In contrast to other diet programs, the researchers involved with mindful eating avoid making weight-loss claims; that's still being investigated. But some practitioners say it's life-changing.
"I don't think about food anymore. It's totally out of my mind," says Mary Ann Power, age 50, of Pittsboro, N.C., a lifelong dieter who thinks she's lost eight or 10 pounds in two weeks since learning the practice at Duke. "I think you could put a piece of chocolate cake in front of my nose right now, and it wouldn't tempt me. Before, I could eat three pieces."
One mindful meal at Duke made a big impression on me -- I was satisfied with minimal meals for days afterward. But it's hard to sustain. I find myself eating mindlessly again in front of the TV, or at the computer.
"Try to eat one meal or one snack mindfully every day," advises Jeffrey Greeson, a psychologist with the Duke program. "Even eating just the first few bites mindfully can help break the cycle of wolfing it down without paying any attention."
For thirteen centuries, between 1200 B.C. and the second century A.D., the Jews lived in, and often ruled, the land of Israel. The population was clustered mainly in Judaea, Samaria, and Galilee. The Jews’ dominion was long but not eternal. The Romans invaded and, after suppressing revolts in A.D. 66-73 and 132-135, killed or expelled much of the Jewish population and renamed the land Palaestina, for the Philistines who had lived along the southern seacoast. After the conquest, some Jews stayed behind, and the faith of the Hebrews remained a religio licita, a tolerated religion, throughout the Roman Empire.
By the nineteenth century, Palestine had been ruled by Romans, Persians, Byzantines, Arabs, Christian Crusaders, and Ottoman Turks. When Mark Twain visited in 1867, his imagination soaked with the Biblical imagery of milk and honey, he discovered to his surprise “a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land . . . desolate and unlovely.” Jericho was “accursed,” Jerusalem “a pauper village.” Twain’s passages on Palestine in “The Innocents Abroad” have, over the decades, been exploited by propagandists to echo Lord Shaftesbury’s notion that, before the return of the Jews to Zion, Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land. Twain and Shaftesbury, as it turned out, were hardly alone in failing to recognize a substantial Arab population in the Judaean hills and beyond. http://louisjjjsheehan.blogspot.com/
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And yet nineteenth-century Palestine certainly was desolate and impoverished. The population in 1881 consisted of four hundred and fifty thousand Palestinian Arabs and twenty-five thousand Jews, nearly all of them ultra-Orthodox non-nationalists living in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias. Palestine, despite its importance to the three monotheistic religions, was a political backwater. The Ottomans divided the land into sanjaks, or districts, which were ruled from Constantinople, Damascus, and Beirut. It was at this time, however, that European Jews—poor, mainly secular, and feeling the onset of an intensified anti-Semitism in their countries of origin—began to emigrate to Palestine. This was the First Aliyah, or ascent. Most European Jewish emigrants headed to North America and Great Britain, but some, in small numbers at first, sailed to Palestine. The local Ottoman bureaucrats were strapped for cash, and the new arrivals had little problem obtaining entry rights, agricultural plots, and building permits. This was colonialism not by conquering armies but by persistent real-estate transactions—and, when necessary, baksheesh.
The plans of the early Jewish settlers were unambiguous, even if they seemed, at the time, wholly incredible. As one early Zionist, Ze’ev Dubnow, wrote to his brother Simon, “The ultimate goal . . . is, in time, to take over the Land of Israel and to restore to the Jews the political independence they have been deprived of for these two thousand years. . . . The Jews will yet arise and, arms in hand (if need be), declare that they are the masters of their ancient homeland.”
In the midst of this first wave of immigration, Zionism found its chief tribune, dreamer, and theorist in Theodor Herzl. A mediocre playwright and the Paris correspondent for a liberal Viennese daily newspaper, Neue Freie Presse, Herzl witnessed the Dreyfus trial in 1894 and the appalling anti-Jewish demonstrations that followed. In the four-volume “History of Anti-Semitism,” Léon Poliakov writes that in the last decades before the First World War it was “hard to determine whether the French Jews or the German Jews were the more fervently patriotic.” But Herzl concluded that if anti-Semitism was as pervasive in the capitals of the European Enlightenment as it was in tsarist Russia there was no hope for assimilation. He was thoroughly secular and had no real Jewish learning. He spoke neither Yiddish nor Hebrew. (Indeed, the pathos of his conversion to Zionism lay in his devotion both to Vienna and to German culture, and in the degree to which events in Europe would, with the rise of the Third Reich, surpass his darkest predictions.)
When Herzl published “Der Judenstaat” (“The Jewish State”), in 1896, the book seemed to most readers as utopian as Bacon’s “New Atlantis.” As portrayed in Amos Elon’s wonderful 1975 biography, Herzl was an almost comically quixotic figure—the bearded café intellectual with his historical dreams travelling the world, trying (and failing) to win financial support from the Rothschilds and political support from the Kaiser and the Ottoman sultan. And yet the Zionist movement, with Herzl at its center, took hold, and in 1897, at the First Zionist Congress, in Basel, Switzerland, a motley collection of Jewish intellectuals and political activists voted to establish a Heimstätte, a “publicly and legally secured home,” for the Jews in Palestine.
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Although the delegates surely had a sovereign state in mind, they were careful in these early days not to use such terms, so as not to alarm the Gentiles or offend any Jewish grandees who might eventually decide to fund their project.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Palestinian Arabs identified themselves not as a unified people but as subjects of the Ottoman Empire and of the greater community of Islam; their local identities were tied to their villages, clans, and families. Resistance to the earliest wave of Jewish immigration was apparent, but it was polite compared to what came later. In 1899, the mayor of Jerusalem, Yusuf Dia al-Khalidi, wrote to Zadok Kahn, the chief rabbi of France, saying that the Zionist idea was in theory “natural, fine, and just. . . . Who can challenge the rights of the Jews to Palestine? Good lord, historically it is really your country.” But, like other Palestinian notables, he opposed Jewish immigration, because the land was inhabited and resistance would inevitably follow. “In the name of God, let Palestine be left in peace,” Khalidi wrote. Rabbi Kahn passed the letter on to Herzl, who blithely wrote to Khalidi to reassure him that the Zionists, with their wealth, their skills, and their education, would build an economy to benefit both Arab and Jew.
As the flow of immigration increased, so did the resistance, especially with the end of the First World War and the beginning of British control over Palestine, in 1917-18, and culminating in the 1936-39 Arab revolt against the Yishuv, the name for the pre-state Jewish community. The resistance took the form of demonstrations (some of them virulently anti-Semitic), riots, assaults, and bombings. The Palestinian leadership became more and more radicalized, and small clandestine groups were formed. In turn, radical Jewish factions and militias began to win support.
Where the Arabs were concerned, Herzl had been more oblivious than cruel. But the leader of the Yishuv, David Ben-Gurion, recognized the us-or-them nature of the conflict; he sensed the emotional force of his adversary’s position even as he fought for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Between 1931 and 1939, as Jewish emigration mounted, the Arab majority declined from eighty-two per cent to seventy per cent. “What Arab cannot do his math and understand that immigration at the rate of sixty thousand a year means a Jewish state in all of Palestine?” Ben-Gurion stated. As he confessed years later to the Zionist Nahum Goldmann, “Why should the Arabs make peace? . . . We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them?”
Among Arab clerics, kings, and diplomats, the view of the Jews hardened into a maximalist politics, at once threatened and threatening. In 1943, when Franklin Roosevelt sent out feelers to King Ibn Sa’ud of Saudi Arabia to solve the Palestine situation, the King responded that he was “prepared to receive anyone of any religion except (repeat except) a Jew.” In a letter to F.D.R., he wrote, “Palestine . . . has been an Arab country since the dawn of history and . . . was never inhabited by the Jews for more than a period of time, during which their history in the land was full of murder and cruelty.” In 1947, Jordan’s prime minister, Samir Rifa’i, hardly the most radical politician in the region, told reporters, “The Jews are a people to be feared. . . . Give them another twenty-five years and they will be all over the Middle East, in our country and Syria and Lebanon, in Iraq and Egypt. . . . They were responsible for starting two world wars. . . . Yes, I have read and studied, and I know they were behind Hitler at the beginning of his movement.”
What followed was a drama of redemptive, liberating settlement on one side and catastrophic dispossession on the other—all of it taking place on a patch of desert land too small for easy division and too imbued with historical and holy claims for rational negotiation. For the Jews in Palestine, Zionism was a movement of national liberation after untold suffering; for the Arabs, Zionism was an intolerable assault by the colonial West against sacred ground and Islam itself. Even now, more than a century later, politicians and scholars alike quickly betray prejudices, passions, and allegiances in the details they select when relating the saga that led to the U.N. Partition Plan, on November 29, 1947, and the war that began just hours later.
In Soviet-era Russia, honest young men and women of academic inclination knew never to enter the field of modern history. In order to live a scholarly life relatively free of cant and suppression, one studied Byzantine manuscripts, Mayan civilization, medieval Burma—anything that would safely skirt mention of one’s own time and place. In the new society of Israel, however noisily democratic, national history is inescapably political, too. And, like any young nation, especially one born of conflict, Israel did not readily accept scholarly work that challenged its most cherished national myths. Self-doubt, complexity, and reflection are not the modes of infancy; in any country, mythmaking precedes documentary rigor. For nearly forty years, Israeli histories and textbooks, with few exceptions, endorsed the notion that the more than seven hundred thousand Arabs who left Palestine as refugees in the years between 1947 and 1950 did so voluntarily or at the urging of their leaders. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.com/
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This was a view echoed abroad by Leon Uris in his fantastically popular novel “Exodus”; Uris writes of “the absolutely documented fact that the Arab leaders wanted the civilian population to leave Palestine as a political issue and a military weapon.”
In the late eighties, Israel encountered its first revisionist historians, a group of rigorous young scholars intent on seeing clearly the founding and development of the state, come what may. At the head of that small and diverse movement was Benny Morris, a Sabra and a Cambridge-educated leftist, who, like Israel itself, was born in 1948. His latest book on that pivotal year of war and transformation, “1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War” (Yale; $32.50), is a commanding, superbly documented, and fair-minded study of the events that, in the wake of the Holocaust, gave a sovereign home to one people and dispossessed another. Remarkably, the book makes every attempt at depth and balance, even though its author has professed a “cosmic pessimism” about the current situation in the Middle East and has denounced the Palestinian leadership in the harshest terms imaginable.
Benny Morris’s family emigrated from Britain in 1947, and Morris grew up in the heart of a left-wing pioneering atmosphere. As an infant, he lived on Kibbutz Yasur, which had been established in 1949 on the ruins of the Arab village of Al Birwa, where the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish lived before going into exile. His father, Ya’akov Morris, was an Israeli diplomat and a published historian and poet.
In 1982, Morris experienced Mena-chem Begin and Ariel Sharon’s invasion of southern Lebanon, first as a correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, then as a soldier, when his division was called up and took part in the siege in West Beirut. As a reporter, he visited Rashidiye, a Palestinian refugee camp near Tyre, and interviewed refugees who had lived in the town of Al Bassa, in Galilee. When Morris returned home, he examined newly declassified papers in the Israel State Archive, along with documents in archives in the U.S. and Britain and at the United Nations. (Arab governments have made available very little archival material on the period.) His subject was the military conflict between the early Zionists and the Arabs and the subsequent exile of the Palestinians from their cities and towns.
In 1988, Morris published “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949,” which revolutionized Israeli historiography and, to a great extent, a nation’s understanding of its own birth. Relying less on testimony than on the newly available documents, Morris described how and why sixty per cent of the Palestinians were uprooted and their society destroyed. It was a far more complex picture than many Israelis were prepared to accept. The book features a map that shows three hundred and eighty-nine Arab villages, from upper Galilee to the Negev Desert. Morris revealed that in forty-nine of these villages the indigenous Arabs were expelled by the Haganah and other Jewish military forces; in sixty-two villages, the Arabs fled out of fear, having heard rumors of attacks and even massacres; in six, the villagers left at the instruction of Palestinian local leaders. The refugees, who probably expected to return to their homes in a matter of weeks or months, went to Gaza and the West Bank, and also to surrounding Arab countries—Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria—where, to this day, they have never been fully absorbed.
Morris’s aim was not simply to invert the standard Zionist narrative. He provided a stark picture of the anti-Semitism that infected the Arab leadership, including the influential mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Muhammad Amin al-Husseini, who refused any compromise with the Zionists and, in the forties, promoted anti-Jewish propaganda from Berlin and recruited Bosnian Muslims for the S.S. Morris quoted the many leaders among the Palestinians and the Arab countries who vowed to eliminate the nascent state of Israel and force the European Jewish arrivals back to where they came from. But he also wrote at length about acts of wartime cruelty committed by the Jewish victors against the Palestinians. He counted about a dozen documented cases of Israelis raping Palestinian women but concluded that more likely went unrecorded. He said that there were about two dozen acts of massacre, some involving four or five executions but others involving many more, at Saliha, Deir Yassin, Lydda, and Dawayima. http://louis3j3sheehan.blogspot.com/
Morris wrote that, although the leader of the Jewish forces, David Ben-Gurion, did not give explicit orders to expel Palestinians from their villages and urban neighborhoods, he was, from April, 1948, onward, projecting a message of transfer, an “atmosphere” in which, for example, a young commander, Yitzhak Rabin, could sign an order to expel the Arabs from Lydda just after receiving a visit from Ben-Gurion. “He understood there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst,” Morris has said.
“The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949” was the most important text in that first wave of Israeli revisionism. (Other “new historians,” as Morris dubbed his generation of like-minded scholars, included Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, and Tom Segev.) The book was published at the height of the first intifada, a Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip led by young people throwing stones at Israeli troops. Morris supported the intifada as a legitimate expression of outrage against the occupation. When his Army unit was called up for service in the West Bank city of Nablus, he refused to go and spent three weeks in jail.
Morris went unrewarded for his independence. Although his book received serious attention in Israel and abroad, he could not get a university job. In 1996, he announced in the press that he planned to leave the country. http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com/
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When the interview was published, Ezer Weizman, a key military figure in the 1948 war and the President of Israel, summoned Morris to his office and asked if he supported Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. Morris, who considered himself a liberal Zionist, said that he did. Weizman called the president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Be’er Sheva, and, a year later, after passing through the usual academic checkpoints, Morris began his career there as a professor of history.
Between 1993 and 1998, amid the optimism of the Oslo Accords and the possibility that the century-long conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinian Arabs might be coming to a negotiated end, Morris worked on a comprehensive survey of the confrontation. The title, “Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001,” attests to the book’s historical and imaginative sympathy both for the Zionists, who acquired a homeland but never a sense of security, and for the Palestinians, whose demand for a homeland remained unsatisfied. Like all Morris’s work, the book does not pretend to some sort of absolute objectivity—he has been attacked from every side over the years—but its attempt at balance is obvious: where there is anti-Arab racism among the Zionist forefathers, it is quoted; where there is venality among the early Palestinian leadership, it, too, is pointed out. The epitaph to “Righteous Victims” is the famous passage from Auden’s “September 1, 1939” that speaks to the degrading costs of war and persecution: “I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn, / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”
But, just as the Arab world’s rejection of the 1947 partition plan pushed Israeli leaders toward an even harsher view of their adversaries, Yasir Arafat’s rejection of the peace proposals proffered by Ehud Barak in 2000 at Camp David and at Taba, Egypt, coupled with the second intifada, which followed, disillusioned Benny Morris to the point of embitterment.
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Morris, who has always voted for parties on the left, said that Arafat had “defrauded” the Israelis, and he decided that the Palestinians had no intention of forging a compromise. Morris was not at all persuaded by explanations and press reports claiming that Clinton and Barak had offered Arafat an unfair, hastily prepared deal. Even if Israel returned to its pre-1967 borders, Morris concluded, the Palestinians would consider that only a step in a “phased plan” to eliminate a “crusader state” from sacred Arab lands. After 2000, he said in a 2004 interview with Ha’aretz, “I understood that they were unwilling to accept the two-state solution. They want it all. Lod and Acre and Jaffa.” Morris did criticize the Israeli government for continuing to build on occupied territory, but, especially in his role as pundit and polemicist, he was no longer giving equal weight to two “righteous victims.”
In the Ha’aretz interview, Morris took a tone that was in scant evidence in his earlier journalism or scholarly work. He spoke of a “deep problem in Islam,” of a world in which “life doesn’t have the same value it does in the West.” The Arabs belonged to a “tribal culture” in which “revenge” played a “central part,” a society so lacking in “moral inhibitions” that “if it obtains chemical or biological or atomic weapons, it will use them.”
Morris was hardly the only Israeli liberal dispirited by Arafat’s behavior in 2000 and the suicide bombs and re-occupations that followed; nor was he alone in his gloom after September 11th. But his new language came as a shock. He described the Arab world as “barbarian,” and said that the Israeli massacres committed in 1947-48 were “peanuts” compared with those in Bosnia. Then, there was his call to build “something like a cage” for the Palestinians: “I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no other choice. There is a wild animal that has to be locked up in one way or another.” Upon reflection, even Morris was appalled by those words and later apologized.
To some extent, Morris has been writing the same book throughout his scholarly life, and one theme that has been pronounced is that of “transfer.” In all his work, he has explored the thorny question of whether or not Ben-Gurion and his colleagues explicitly endorsed a policy of “transferring”—exiling—the Arab population from Israel.
By the time of the 2004 Ha’aretz interview, Morris had adopted a harsher, more prescriptive tone that was sometimes chilling to the liberal audience that had first welcomed him. Fearing the loss of a Jewish majority and the rise of an Arab fifth column, some right-wing politicians have advocated transferring either the Palestinian Arabs or the Israeli Arabs, or both, to Jordan—a country they refer to as the true Palestinian state. (That was once a theme of Ariel Sharon’s.) Although Morris does not endorse such a policy—“It is neither moral nor realistic”—he does say that, historically speaking, BenGurion “faltered” in 1948. “If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job,” he told Ha’aretz. “I know that this stuns the Arabs and the liberals and the politically correct types. But my feeling is that this place would be quieter and know less suffering if the matter had been resolved once and for all.” Morris acknowledged that ethnic cleansing was “problematic” but later pointed out catastrophic situations in which it could be “beneficial for humanity.” He cited the Turkish expulsion of the Greek minority, Greece’s expulsion of its Turkish minority after the First World War, and the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia after the Second World War. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.blogspot.com/
(His sanguine perspective is unlikely to have been shared by, say, the German survivors of the Brünner Todesmarsch, the Brno death march.)
Four years ago, Morris said that only “apocalyptic” circumstances would demand that Israel carry out a policy of transfer. By January, 2007, writing in the Jerusalem Post, he seemed convinced that apocalypse was around the corner. The United States has been driven to isolationism by its “debacle” in Iraq, Russia and China are “obsessed with Muslim markets,” and Israel, led by a “party hack of a prime minister,” who botched the war with Hezbollah in 2006, will now be “like a rabbit caught in the headlights” as Iran prepares to launch nuclear-tipped Shihab missiles at Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Be’er Sheva. In this scenario, which Morris implied is nearly inevitable, the Israeli leadership knows that it cannot launch a unilateral attack on Iran, for fear of igniting a “world-embracing” terror campaign:
So Israel’s leaders will grit their teeth and hope that somehow things will turn out for the best. Perhaps, after acquiring the Bomb, the Iranians will behave “rationally”?
But the Iranians are driven by a higher logic. And they will launch their rockets. And, as with the first Holocaust, the international community will do nothing. It will all be over, for Israel, in a few minutes—not like in the 1940s, when the world had five long years in which to wring its hands and do nothing.
What is so striking about Morris’s work as a historian is that it does not flatter anyone’s prejudices, least of all his own. The stridency and darkness of some of his public pronouncements is not a feature of “Righteous Victims,” which is the most useful survey of the conflict, or of “1948,” which is the best history of the first Arab-Israeli wars. In “1948,” the assembled compendium of aspiration, folly, aggression, hypocrisy, deception, bigotry, violence, suffering, and achievement is so comprehensive and multilayered that no reader can emerge without a feeling of unease—which is to say, a sense of the moral and historical intricacy of the conflict.
One of the lingering mythologies that Morris set out to confront in “1948” is the iconography of strength and weakness, the competition between Jews and Palestinians for the role of underdog and chief victim. There were two wars following the U.N. partition resolution: first, the immediate Palestinian uprising against the Yishuv, and then, after the Palestinian defeat, the coördinated invasion by the armies of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. Morris concludes that the Arabs were demographically and geopolitically stronger—the Palestinians outnumbered the Jews of the Yishuv two to one, and the surrounding Arab states had a population, all told, of forty million. But in the years leading to the war the Yishuv had organized political and military institutions that were suited to crisis. Troop call-ups, expert foreign military personnel, and weapons-procurement systems were in place. By contrast, very few Palestinians came from the Hebron, Ramallah, and Nablus areas to aid their fellow Palestinian Arabs in Jaffa, Haifa, Jerusalem, and the Jezreel and Jordan Valleys. “The Yishuv had fought not a ‘people,’ ” Morris concludes, “but an assortment of regions, towns, and villages.” http://louis9j9sheehan9esquire.blogspot.com/
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http://louis-j-sheehan.de/When the four Arab armies invaded, on May 15, 1948, they, too, were disorganized and—compared with the Jews, who were fighting for their survival—far less motivated.
About six thousand Jews and twelve thousand Palestinians died in the conflict; the Egyptians lost fourteen hundred men; the Iraqis, Jordanians, and Syrians lost several hundred each. Not long afterward, seven hundred thousand Palestinians were exiled from their homes, and the Jewish minorities in the Islamic world—in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Yemen, and Libya—experienced anti-Semitic demonstrations, pogroms, threats, internments, bomb attacks, synagogue fires. This, too, was a product of the war, and half a million Jews, the Sephardim, eventually left Islamic countries for Israel and, largely because of the circumstances of their exile, formed the Likud rank and file.
In his closing pages, Morris writes with rueful understanding and keen judgment of the consequences of his subject, the rise of a state that gave him a home while displacing so many others:
The war was a humiliation from which that world has yet to recover—the antithesis of the glory days of Arab Islamic dominance of the Middle East and the eastern and southern Mediterranean basins. The sense of humiliation only deepened over the succeeding sixty years as Israel visibly grew and prospered while repeatedly beating the Arabs in new wars, as the Palestinian refugee camps burst at the seams while sinking in the mire of international charity and terrorism, and as the Arab world shuttled between culturally self-effacing Westernization and religious fundamentalism.
Next month, the Israelis mark the sixtieth anniversary of their independence, the Palestinians the sixtieth anniversary of al-nakba, the catastrophe.
The history of the cocaine trade between Andean countries and the United States over the past 30 years shows that no sooner have police and customs officials become adept at spotting one smuggling method than the drug-traffickers come up with a new one. Light planes and commercial flights gave way to shipping containers. Where once cocaine was hidden in shipments of fresh vegetables and flowers, more recently it has been found in specially moulded furniture and concrete fencing posts.
But the latest method is especially cunning: home-made submarines. These first appeared a decade ago, but were considered by officials to be an oddity. Now it seems the traffickers have perfected the design and manufacture of semi-submersible craft (although they look like submarines, they don't fully submerge). In 2006, American officials say they detected only three; now they are spotting an average of ten a month.
Of those, only one in ten is intercepted. Many sail up the Pacific coast, often far out to sea. With enough cargo space to carry two to five tonnes of cocaine, they also carry large fuel tanks, giving them a range of 2,000 miles (3,200km). They are typically made of fibreglass, powered by a 300/350hp diesel engine and manned by a crew of four. http://louis8j8sheehan8.blogspot.com/
They normally unload their cargo onto fast power boats for the final leg to shore. None has been sighted unloading at ports or beaches.
One theory is that the switch to submarines is part of an effort by Colombian cocaine producers to win back from their Mexican rivals-cum-partners a bigger slice of the profits from drugs. In the 1990s most cocaine began to enter the United States across its southern land border, rather than across the Caribbean. That allowed Mexican gangs to oust Colombians from much of the lucrative retail-distribution business in American cities.
The latest innovation may mean that a claimed increase in the retail price of cocaine (up 44% between January and September according to the United States' Drug Enforcement Administration) could prove short-lived. The price rise may have stemmed from a crackdown by Mexico on its drug gangs, which has prompted murderous feuding between them. But many independent analysts reckon that cocaine consumption in the United States has remained more or less constant. John Walsh, of the Washington Office on Latin America, an NGO, says that four similar price increases in the 1980s and 1990s were quickly reversed.
Interdiction of cocaine shipments fell by 20% last year. Stopping the subs requires “wide-area surveillance systems, acoustics and better intelligence,” says Admiral James Stavridis, the head of the United States' Southern Command, based in Miami. Having shot drug planes out of the sky, and used army troops to destroy coca fields and laboratories, it seems that the drug warriors will have to move into anti-submarine warfare.
A disease that carries with it a social stigma causes additional and unnecessary suffering. This has often been so with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), or chronic-fatigue syndrome, as it is also known. Despite debilitating symptoms, patients have been accused of suffering from an imaginary illness: “yuppie flu”. Doctors have struggled to distinguish the ailing from the malingering. Nonetheless, evidence has grown in recent years that the syndrome is real, and now there is news that it has its roots in genetics.
ME manifests as extreme exhaustion, something that may include a range of other symptoms, such as disturbed sleep, difficulties in remembering and concentrating, headaches, and painful muscles and joints. Psychological symptoms, such as anxiety and irritability, can also be present. As the symptoms can vary in severity, the syndrome can be hard to identify, and patients can suffer for months before a diagnosis is made.
However, new hope for ME sufferers arrived this week at a conference in Cambridge, in Britain. The event, organised by ME Research UK and the Irish ME Trust, two charities that help to fund studies and assist sufferers, was attended by researchers investigating what causes the illness and how it could be treated.
Jonathan Kerr of St George's University of London told the meeting that with his colleagues they have identified 88 genes which are expressed differently in the blood of patients who had been diagnosed with ME. http://louis3j3sheehan3.blogspot.com/
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Moreover, in studying the records of 55 patients with ME, they found that they could divide them into seven separate sub-types that consistently pair distinct genetic patterns with a combination and severity of patients' symptoms. This, says Dr Kerr, points to a biological basis for the illness and holds out hope that a blood test could be developed to identify its different forms. His group are now trying to find the biological markers that such a blood test would need to detect.
ME, myself, why?
One tactic for dealing with ME is to treat its symptoms with drugs that are already used against other diseases. Patients with some of the severest symptoms suffer from low blood pressure and have difficulty regulating their heartbeat. Julia Newton, of Newcastle University in Britain, says this is because of problems with their autonomic nervous systems, which is responsible for subconscious activities. In studies using a magnetic-resonance imaging scanner, she found a build-up of acid in the muscles of ME patients when they took exercise. This can cause muscle weakness and pain. Dr Newton believes the build-up could be influenced entirely, or at least in part, by the degree to which the autonomic nervous system fails to properly maintain blood flow. It could also mean that drugs that already exist to help improve blood flow might also help some ME patients.
But what triggers ME? Some estimates put its occurrence at around one in 200 people in America and Britain. Sufferers are often in their 20s and 30s, and more women are affected than men. That it is so widespread suggests to some researchers that there are many causes, including exposure to certain viruses and other infectious diseases.
A long period of fatigue after suffering from an infectious disease is not unusual. At the conference, a team of Australian researchers speculated that many cases of ME are in fact cases of “post-infectious chronic fatigue”. Stephen Graves, of the Australian Rickettsial Reference Laboratory, said they had found a proportion of Australian ME sufferers may have a genetic predisposition to developing ME as a result of exposure to Q Fever or Flinders Island Spotted Fever. These are a pair of relatively uncommon diseases caused by two bacteria which can pass between animals and humans. If their hypothesis is correct, Dr Graves believes the incidence of ME in Australia may be reduced by greater public-health measures.
Although the trigger for most cases of ME may remain a mystery, the discovery of its biological roots and the promise of a test will bring hope of a diagnosis to sufferers. And, perhaps, inspire a sudden recovery in the malingerers.
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Up to twelve luminous UFOs flew over this secure test facility and the region, and at least one F-106A interceptor was scrambled from George AFB at Victorville. All of this action was captured on classified U.S. Air Force audio tapes which have now been declassified and are available to the public along with official documentation.The question in my mind is, what was going on during those 3-4 hours we don't know about? If we were allowed to hear only 6 hours of 40, and read only 17 pages of hard-to-read documents, what is it we were NOT allowed to hear and see? The documents we have make it clear that by the time Alpha Lima Zero One was scrambled at at 1209Z or 5:09 PM PDT, "the activity was just about over." http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.blogspot.com/
Major Struble from an outfit known as LAADS (Los Angeles Air Defense Sector), a division of ARADCOM (Army Air Defense Command) authorized the making of these recordings of voice transmissions made by military personnel to and from Edwards Air Force Base- from base to base communications, phone patches, ground to air radio & tower to air radio. These recordings archived the conversations which documented this event of UFO visitation of a highly secure military base. The audio recordings were made on an extra track of large reels of radar data tapes, which were running all the time in the case of an accident and the need to review the radar tracks.
The event at Edwards Air Force Base took place over about a five hour period and since the voice recordings were made from at least 8 positions, approximately 40 hours of audio recordings had to have been made. Out of the possible 40 hours of these tape recordings only 6 hours were declassified by the Department of the Air Force.
Darryl Clark, Capt. 329th Fighter Interceptor Squadron (FIS), George AFB, Calif., was an alert pilot with Detachment.1 at Edwards AFB. He happened to be on duty this evening and was called upon to observe the activity. His observations were all made from the ground. Captain Clark was one of the important Alert Pilots at Edwards Air Force Base on the night of October 7, 1965. He was entrusted with flying one of the Hot Birds, as planes loaded with Nuclear Weapons were called, that protected the western part of the United States. http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire2.blogspot.com/
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Skilled at target identification, Captain Clark is heard on the original Air Force recordings describing his UFO sighting of that night. (See Darryl Clark actual statement below)
That evening, October 7 (and the following one, October 8), 1965, some 700 engineers and scientists attended the Fourth X-15 Technical Conference at the (then) NASA Flight Research Center at Edwards AFB. This dealt with the research results of the 150 some X-15 flights made since 1959. (Astronautics and Aeronautics 1965 NASA SP-4006, page 464 - Joel Carpenter)
I am a film producer who is a product of the 1950s: the Saucer Scares, the Cold War, and the beginning of the U.S. Government's official denial of ET visitation of Planet Earth. I guess I have always thought our world was being visited by intelligent beings from elsewhere. When I had a UFO sighting in 1961 and was ridiculed for trying to discuss it, I became determinued to probe and study the UFO issue for as long as it took to discover the truth.
As a logical outcome of that longterm goal, I spent years researching and collating data in preparation of the production of a major film documentary on the UFO/ET issue. I finally got to the point of starting production in 1992. However, so strong is our programmed cultural and political denial of ET visitation that even members of my own staff treated me as an object of derision. This only made me more determined than ever to solve the UFO enigma, and I then began going straight to the very institutions which were witholding the truth from us: our own Military and Space agencies. My goal was to somehow obtain legitimate hard data from them that would be virtually impossible to debunk.
Back on the night of October 7, 1965, an event of historic proportions, a true landmark in UFO history, took place - the actual incursion over Edwards Air Force Base in the Palmdale/Lancaster area of California's Mojave Desert of a number of extraterrestrial craft. If this astonishing event is now, finally, gaining any measurable attention, it is a direct result of my efforts. I make that statement in all humility...it is simply the truth. In fact, this unprecedented event is not to be found in any of the major UFO books, and with the exception of a few UFO magazines reviewing my work, and interviews done with me on programs like Jeff Rense's SIGHTINGS, this event still remains virtually unknown.
What makes this historic intrusion and visit so important is that the US Air Force thoroughly documented it and even gave it a code name: "The Incident." During that fall night in 1965, it seems that 12 luminous UFOs came right down low and just over a secure military runway. These craft were all sighted visually by Air Force personnel and by several types of radar. Further, the Air Force scrambled several jet fighters after them and during the event the possible use of nuclear weapons even became an issue. The entire incident was additionally documented with written reports, radar photos, and AUDIO TAPES made by Air Force personnel while they were actually SEEING the objects, FLYING AFTER the objects, and considering taking SERIOUS MILITARY ACTION against what they might imply as a threat. http://louis5j5sheehan5.blogspot.com/
http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.com/
From my calculations at least 40 hours of recordings were made (a five hour event recording from at least 8 locations). However, only six hours of tapes were de-classified many years ago as a mass of noise and unclear voices, which truly defied interpretation. They had SCRAMBLED the tapes into what they felt was a hopeless jumble of random pieces of conversation utterly out of sequence and logical progression. When I realized what had been done, it presented a challenge which made me determined to find out what was hidden within that chaotic mass of sound.
After many months and countless hours of laborious research, cataloging, and editing the snips and pieces of the audio tape, I was able to organize the sound so the conversations could be understood. I had successfully restored the tapes to their original and correct sequencing. I then added carefully researched narration, which explained what was taking place, so that the listener would clearly understand the unfolding event.
As narrator, I sought out Jackson Beck, the true dean of radio announcers and films commentators - the voice of the Paramount Newsreel, countless original Military films, and even the original narrator of the Superman radio program. Mr. Beck is now heard on many important new national radio and TV commercials. His voice is known to millions, even if his name is not. I felt he would add credibility to the narration of this astonishing historical event. In fact, he told me that he has made a life long study of the UFO field and has had several important sightings himself.
The resulting reconstructed tapes are now ironclad documented proof of the existence of extraterrestrial UFO visitation to this planet. I have sent copies of my finished product directly to a number of major Government Agencies and have received NO NEGATIVE COMMENTS! Not a single Official Agency has tried to debunk or discredit the event, or my presentation of the tapes.
Furthermore, The CSETI organization has used my tape presentation in meetings with members of Congress with the aim of having our government tell the public the truth of ET involvement on the Earth. TSgt Charles Sorrels, heard prominently on the original Edwards recordings of October 7, 1965, and in newly-produced segments confirming the event, made the presentation in Washington which featured my documentary version of the Edwards Tapes. And yes, the plane spotters at Edwards KNEW that UFOs or UFOBs, as they called them then, were not our "black" projects, Soviet bombers, or any known aircraft - they were unknown, fabulously high-tech craft with capabilities beyond any known technology. And..as they said on the old Superman series: "far beyond that of Mortal Man!"
In 1961 I saw and photographed an illuminated domed disc over New York City. I was treated with ridicule then and didn't like it. I had three other witnesses to this event. I planned to do a UFO documentary in the 1960's on this subject and use some of the stills and motion picture footage photographed.
At the time I was more interested in going to LA to make dramatic films, which I did. I came back to my old project in 1992. I had to endure the slings and arrows of ridicule from friends, and even business associates working on this film, now called Beyond This Earth.
I decided that I needed hard evidence that the subject was a real one, especially evidence from government agencies (which would add credibility if they had any connection to this subject).
From December 1992 to about June 1994 we filmed interviews, staged reenactments, obtained unique UFO footage, and even sent up a plane to chase and film UFOs from the air. (The plane succeeded in its mission, but that is another story.)
Having that success, I felt we were on a roll and more real events would take place which we would cover, but they did not. Not knowing if what we filmed in Northern California posed a threat to the public, I felt we should make an official report on it. Which we did. http://louis7j7sheehan.blogspot.com/
http://louis6j6sheehan.blogspot.com/
This led to the suggestion that we go to various government agencies through the Freedom of Information Act and otherwise.
This has been a long, tedious process because we found out that we could classify the people we were in contact with into three categories, regarding the UFO phenomenon:
1. They knew nothing and couldn't help at all.
2. They knew nothing but wanted to help and were pro-release and moved us along.
3. They knew something and didn't want to help or encourage us.
Even still, we obtained the following de-classified materials, related to the UFO subject: Over 4000 pages of paper documents and correspondence; still photographs, radar photos, motion picture film, videotapes and audio tapes. Audio tapes?? Who was interested in that? We all wanted to see something.
Well, it turned out that the sounds presented some fantastic images all their own. I reviewed the audio materials last, as I had shelved them for months, I wanted visuals. What a mistake! I listened to six hours of confusing audio recordings from Edwards Air Force Base from the night of October 7, 1965 in which it sounded like a UFO alert was taking place over the base with 12 strange luminous objects coming down over the runway of one of our nation's most secure test facilities. This was/is the place where they fly the black, classified projects. They know what they are and what planes, helicopters, stars, weather balloons, planets and satellites are.
So what were they getting excited about? It was difficult to tell on the six hours of tapes. These tapes were de-classified, but in a form called "scrambled release" - all chopped up out of sequence, so they made no sense at all. I knew there was a story in there somewhere.
Between the chopped up editing and the overlay of noise, something very important lay in waiting. I decided to analyze the tapes for possible use in a segment in Beyond This Earth.
I took eight months in my own audio studio editing 1/4 inch audio tapes, after signal processing them in computer to remove noise. I got to know the tapes so well, I felt I almost knew the people on the tapes, which I would in time.
Now, what were these tapes and why were they made? In 1965 the Air Force ran large reels of recording tapes which recorded all of the signals from Radar. http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com/
Then if an accident or problem took place, the Radar could be re-played like running a video tape to figure out what took place. In the case of special events a track on these radar tapes could be used to record voice transmissions at the air base.
This included all Phone Patches, Base-to-Base Communications and Ground- or Tower-to-Air Radio. Now this is what took place on the night of October 7, 1965 at Edwards Air Force Base. By putting the tapes into chronology and doing further research the story emerged.
At approximately 12:30AM, the Tower Operator at Edwards (a/k/a Edwards Tower) - Tech Sgt. Charles "Chuck" Sorrels saw a group of luminous objects flashing red, white, and blue or green light coming over the field. His job as an air traffic controller taught him to be watchful, so he could identify incoming planes. when these objects started to do unusual maneuvers, he knew this was out of the ordinary and called the Air Defense Command - in this case a unit known as LAADS (The Los Angeles Air Defense Sector).
Major Struble at LAADS ordered the recordings to be made--now we hear all this taking place on the actual tapes. He involved NORAD and the following other air bases- NORTON, HAMILTON, GEORGE and MARCH.
The major wanted to send planes up after the objects but could not do this until a CAPTAIN at Edwards approved sending up the planes. This Captain was the . . . get this . . . UFO officer (pronounced Yoo-fo) officer in charge on the base.
This was apparently more than just a job classification for reporting sightings, but he had to request the plane or planes go up, from the 28th Air Division at Hamilton, or they would not go up. In short the Air Defense Command needed HIS authority.
Well, here we are: the UFO subject, which we have heard does not exist, has its own UFO officers . . . how strange.
There were no officers on base for the other paranormal pursuits - Demon Officers, Ghost Officers or Leprechaun Officers. http://louis4j4sheehan.blogspot.com/
Once I started editing the tapes into some kind of sequence, everybody wanted to hear them. I then started making some cassettes as samples, and everybody wanted them. I gave many away and was encouraged to go further with my research. I did.
I found Chuck Sorrels, who authenticated the event and recorded an audio interview for my tape verifying the details.
I went to about a dozen military agencies, and they helped with the research. Eventually I put this together into a 54-minute audio documentary on audio cassette, along with a copy of Air Force written documentation, in a large vinyl display case and called the final program . . .
"THE EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE ENCOUNTER."
I have had great positive response to this work. Where I have made feature films for theatres for many years, and do have some fans, nothing I ever worked on yielded this response. Apparently many people, like myself, had been researching the UFO subject seriously, and were ridiculed by friends and family.
They, as I, needed some hard evidence to show/play for others, to gain new respect. I have been told that people are getting this tape, inviting their friends over and having a UFO party playing the tape to the amazement of all present.
That is what has been going on. The media caught onto this. I have been interviewed on numerous radio and TV programs on this subject and Paramount flew me out to California to appear in and work on a two-part "Sightings" episode on the Edwards tapes. We filmed in the Mojave Desert near Edwards AFB, where the original event took place.
They were very pleased with how it turned out and got good reaction to it. I have also sent copies of the documentary back to official agencies, with positive reaction, on a person-to-person basis.
I think many people want to get this UFO information out to the public. One well-known airline pilot, who is also a UFO investigator, sent me a nice letter when he finally got our tape and said: "When I first heard of your tape, I said to myself, who needs this? How wrong I was. This is solid evidence in a field where there is precious little (evidence)."
Since this has only been a side issue away from the production of my film, this tape is not yet available in stores, although we have had requests for it. Many people have contacted me who wanted to obtain it and said it was hard to find. So, we set up a mail order division to make the tape available, generally on short turn-around.
The tapes are guaranteed to be authentic. I am still researching the subject for a two-hour TV special on the same topic and an interactive CD-ROM on it. These programs will take this subject and broaden out the events of 10-7-65 and go forward and back in time. On the tapes the UFOs were spotted on Radar, Heightfinder Radar, Weather Radar and Visual Observations from many locations--ground, towers, tops of buildings, and planes. On the tapes we hear one F-106 pilot chasing a UFO up to 40,000 feet. However, my research shows that one plane may have crashed and a third plane also sent up. http://louis2j2sheehan.blogspot.com/
The six hours of tape I received, I believe to have been cut down from over 40 hours of original tapes . . . what could be on the rest of them?? I am seeking further research on this event and connecting events at Edwards and related bases.
I am also seeking to locate Major Struble, Captain John Balent (the UFO officer) and others involved with this event which was given a Code Name: "The Incident." http://louis1j1sheehan.blogspot.com/
There were some civilians near Edwards who also saw something and some stories in local papers, of which I would like to obtain copies. Many other events like this have taken place at other locations, but the information is . . . where?
For nine decades after Bolshevik executioners shot Czar Nicholas II and his family, there were no traces of the remains of Crown Prince Aleksei, the hemophiliac heir to Russia’s throne.
Some said the prince, a delicate 13-year-old, had somehow survived and escaped; others believed he was buried in secret as the country lurched into civil war.
Now an official says DNA tests have solved the mystery by identifying bone shards found in a forest as those of Aleksei and his sister Grand Duchess Maria.
The remains of their parents, Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra, and three siblings, including the czar’s youngest daughter, Anastasia, were unearthed in 1991 and reburied in the imperial resting place in St. Petersburg. The Russian Orthodox Church made all seven of them saints in 2000.
Researchers unearthed the bone shards last summer in a forest near Yekaterinburg, where the royal family was killed, and enlisted laboratories in Russia and the United States to conduct DNA tests.
Eduard Rossel, governor of the region 900 miles east of Moscow, said Wednesday that tests done by an American laboratory had identified the shards as those of Aleksei and Maria.
“This has confirmed that indeed it is the children,” he said. “We have now found the entire family.”
Mr. Rossel did not specify the laboratory, but a genetic research team working at the University of Massachusetts Medical School has been involved in the process. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com/Evgeny Rogaev, who headed the team that tested the remains in Moscow and at the medical school in Worcester, Mass., was called into the case by the Russian Federation Prosecutor’s Office.
He said Wednesday that he had delivered the results to the Russian authorities, but that it was up to the prosecutor’s office to disclose the findings.
“The most difficult work is done, and we have delivered to them our expert analysis, but we are still working,” he said. “Scientifically, we want to make the most complete investigation possible.” Despite the earlier discoveries and ceremonies, the absence of Aleksei’s and Maria’s remains gnawed at descendants of the Romanovs, history buffs and royalists. Even if the announcement is confirmed and widely accepted, many descendants of the royal family are unlikely to be fully assuaged; they seek formal rehabilitation by the government.
“The tragedy of the czar’s family will only end when the family is declared victims of political repression,” said German Lukyanov, a lawyer for royal descendants.
Nicholas abdicated in 1917 as revolutionary fervor swept Russia, and he and his family were detained. They were shot by a firing squad on July 17, 1918, in the basement of a house in Yekaterinburg.
In the introduction to his biography of Boris N. Yeltsin, Timothy J. Colton lists more than 100 of the similes and analogies that have been applied over the years to Yeltsin, among them martyr and jester, Lincoln and Nixon, Alexander the Great and Ivan the Terrible, Hamlet and Hercules, bear, bulldog and boa constrictor. The wry list is an early signal that Mr. Colton knows he is treading into a subject that has inspired rival mythologies.
To some Western academics and more than a few Russians, Yeltsin’s role was almost wholly destructive. Interrupting Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s cautious reforms of the Communist Party and the Soviet state, Yeltsin smashed both institutions. He sold off the country’s resource-rich industrial heritage to a few moguls in a corrupt insider auction. His economic “shock therapy” plunged the country into a period of falling output and runaway inflation that Mr. Colton likens to the Great Depression. He unleashed the army against a mutinous parliament and waged a brutal, scorched-earth war against separatist Chechnya. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/page1.aspx
For years after Yeltsin crashed onto the political scene, the Gorbachev-infatuated West was overwhelmingly dismissive. Mr. Colton, a professor of government and director of Russian studies at Harvard and the author of a grand history of the city of Moscow, cops to being one of those early dismissers. But he declares up front that his research brought him around to the view that Yeltsin, while flawed and enigmatic, was a hero.
“As a democratizer,” Mr. Colton writes, “he is in the company of Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, Mikhail Gorbachev and Vaclav Havel. It is his due even when allowance is made for his blind spots and mistakes.”
Mr. Colton is not the first to undertake Yeltsin’s redemption. Leon Aron’s “Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life” took up the case for Yeltsin in 2000, as his presidency was petering out, and his popularity was at a low ebb. But Mr. Colton has used the extra time to excellent effect. He has mined declassified Kremlin transcripts; fact-checked many memoirs; conducted extensive interviews with participants, including Yeltsin, shortly before his death last year; and synthesized a story that anyone curious about contemporary Russia will find illuminating. And though this is densely researched scholarship, Mr. Colton writes a fluid narrative that only occasionally wanders into the briar patch of academic-speak.
Yeltsin’s grievance against the Communists began before he was born, in an all-too-common history of family heartbreak that Mr. Colton pieces together with a good deal of original reporting. The Yeltsins were dispossessed for the bourgeois crime of having built a farm, mill and blacksmithing business. Yeltsin’s grandfather died a broken man. His father was charged with the catch-all crime of “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” for grousing at his job on a construction site, and sent to a forced-labor camp for three years.
When Yeltsin joined the Communist Party, it was not out of devotion to the professed ideals but because a party card was a requirement for promotion to chief engineer in the construction industry. And when he moved into the hierarchy, he was already a man who chafed at party orthodoxy. No radical, he “nibbled at the edges of what was admissible,” Mr. Colton writes, pushing for market prices in the local farm bazaars, encouraging entrepreneurial initiative in the workplace, complaining that the top-down system smothered self-reliance.
In his moderation he was at first rather like Mr. Gorbachev, Yeltsin’s exact contemporary (the two were born 29 days apart, in 1931), his sponsor for a time, but ultimately his foil and nemesis. Mr. Colton nicely sums up the two men metaphorically: Yeltsin is feline, with an instinct for the great and unexpected leap; Mr. Gorbachev is canine, “trainable, tied to the known and to the previously rewarded.”
Mr. Gorbachev promoted Yeltsin to be Moscow party boss, but soon came to see him as an impetuous showboat. Yeltsin saw Mr. Gorbachev as a vacillating windbag, and made little effort to hide it. He infuriated his party leader by complaining about Mrs. Gorbachev’s meddling in Moscow affairs. They clashed in the Politburo over Yeltsin’s populist jibes at the privileges of party leaders.
The decisive break came in October 1987 when Yeltsin, in a disjointed speech to a (closed) party plenum, declared that people were losing faith in reforms and accused Mr. Gorbachev of tolerating a personality cult. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/page1.aspx
Mr. Gorbachev orchestrated a ritual humiliation and demotion, but half a year later the audacious outcast seized a more public moment — a conference of 5,000 party delegates — to repeat his broadside, assuring both his permanent estrangement from the party and his status as a popular hero.
Shrewdly, Yeltsin recast himself as the champion of the Russian republic — the heart of the Soviet Union — and campaigned for a seat in a new federal Congress of People’s Deputies. Mr. Gorbachev chose to enter the congress in an uncontested seat reserved for party leaders. His unwillingness to subject himself to a popular vote (which, at the time, he probably could have won) was, Mr. Colton recognizes, “a blunder of biblical proportions.” Yeltsin sailed into the parliament despite the Communists’ best efforts, and the tide of credibility had shifted decisively his way.
Mr. Gorbachev’s last gambit, shoring up the Soviet leadership with hard-line appointees, backfired when several tried to overthrow him. That ham-handed coup gave Yeltsin his famous tank-top photo op and his ultimate triumph.
Once he won the Kremlin, Yeltsin began drinking heavily. Mr. Colton concludes that while Yeltsin’s drinking was a distraction and an embarrassment, it did not critically influence his decisions as president.
“No sensible historian would reduce Ataturk’s or Churchill’s career to his drinking escapades,” Mr. Colton writes, generously. The booze did, however, ruin Yeltsin’s health; he had at least four heart attacks before bypass surgery.
The last half of the book has Yeltsin confronting the blank slate of post-Communist Russia. His three highly improvisational terms as Russian president were marked by periods of political gridlock, government by decree and constant intrigues, including a near-impeachment. His crash economic program, which Russians joked was all shock and no therapy, was meant to unleash entrepreneurial energy. But it also unleashed colossal avarice and corruption, along with five years of economic misery.
In defense, Mr. Colton writes, “By the day Yeltsin called it quits in 1999, the cradle of state socialism boasted a market economy of sorts,” inflation had been subdued, economic growth rebounded.
“Reforming the system from within, as Gorbachev meant to do,” he writes, “was a respectable choice. Heading for the exits was a cleaner and better one.”
Within this democratizer — whom Mr. Colton ranks alongside Mr. Mandela — there resided a deeply Russian and sometimes ruthless fear of instability. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
He rebuffed entreaties from his liberal supporters to uproot the K.G.B. Indeed, in his appointments he often reached for young security apparatchiks, men he regarded as possessing “steel backbone.”
Most of these securocrats he discarded when he grew disenchanted or needed a scapegoat. But the last in the line, Vladimir V. Putin, endured and became Yeltsin’s successor because he captured public esteem and loyally stood by Yeltsin through severe tests, including the bloody crushing of Chechnya.
In retirement, Mr. Colton says, Yeltsin confided mounting disapproval as his protégé tightened the screws on the press and political opposition. No doubt — and Yeltsin can’t be entirely blamed for his successor (any more than Mr. Mandela could have foreseen how his hand-picked successor would disappoint South Africa). But Mr. Putin is doubly Yeltsin’s legacy. Yeltsin anointed him, and the persistent popularity of his hard regime owes something to the stomach-churning ride of Yeltsin-style democracy.
Researchers have identified two common genetic mutations that increase the risk of osteoporosis and related bone fractures, according to a study released Tuesday.
These changes were present in 20 percent of the people studied and highlight the potential role of screening for osteoporosis, the bone-thinning disease that mainly affects women after menopause, they said in the journal Lancet.
''Eventually, a panel of genetic markers could be used in addition to environmental risk factors to identify individuals who are most at risk for osteoporotic fractures,'' wrote Tim Spector and Brent Richards, researchers at King's College London.
Osteoporosis is a condition in which bone density thins as more bone cells are lost than replaced when people age.
It affects about one in three women and one in five men around the world, according to the International Osteoporosis Foundation.
Drugs called bisphosphonates are used primarily to increase bone mass and cut the risk of fractures in patients with osteoporosis.
These include Fosamax, produced by Merck & Company, which American researchers on Monday showed could increase the risk of a type of abnormal heartbeat.
In the Lancet study, the team scanned the genes of 2,094 female twins and identified a link between decreased bone mineral density and changes in chromosomes 8 and 11.
In chromosome 11, the change was associated with a 30 percent increased risk of the condition and related fractures, and for chromosome 8, the mutation raised risk by 20 percent.
For people who had both changes, their risk went up by 30 percent.
These two genes are important targets for treatments, and drugs are already under development, the researchers said.
President Jimmy Carter was the first President of the United States of America to have officially reported the UFO he saw to the authorities. He was also the President who said that if elected he would see that UFO-Alien Full Disclosure would take place. That the American public would be told the truth about everything was one of the campaign cries of Jimmy Carter. Carter made a promise he could not or would not be able to keep.
After Carter won the White House, he paid a visit to the then-CIA Director, George Bush. Carter had an interest in UFOs ever since experiencing his first sighting sometime in 1969 while standing outside a Lion's Club in Georgia. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/page1.aspx
His campaign speeches promising to unravel the government's long held cover-up was the "Parting of the Red Sea" for Ufologists not only in America but around the world. Here was the one guy who would open up the "Promised Land" and lead them into Full Disclosure.
Carter wanted the U.S. Government's UFO secret documents declassified. George Bush more or less told Carter that the President of the United States did not have the need to know the information contained in those documents. Can you even begin to imagine that? What lends even more mind-blowing credibility to this alleged event between Carter and Bush is the credibility of the allegation maker: Daniel Sheehan.
Daniel Sheehan was born in1946 and graduated from Harvard Law School. There, he was co-founder of the Harvard Civil Rights and Civil Liberty Law Review. He went on to work for the American Civil Liberties Union and became general counsel for a host of entities including The Disclosure Project-a group dedicated to getting the U.S. Government to allow full and unfettered access to what the Feds know about the UFO-Alien phenomenon.
According to Sheehan, Bush Senior, who was the CIA Director, refused Carter's request for disclosure of the UFO documents, even to the President of the United States, because it was generally believed in the halls and corridors of the secret, black-ops government that Carter would then turn the truth over to the American people.
Director of a California think tank, Sheehan's credentials are impeccable. Sheehan's career is a litany of high-profile cases like, "legal counsel team for the New York Times' Pentagon Papers case, defense of the Berrigan brothers, going after the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant (Karen Silkwood), Three-Mile Island, Iran-Contra. At the Disclosure Conference, Sheehan says the Bush-Carter story was relayed to him in 1977 by Marcia Smith of the Congressional Research Service, part of the Library of Congress."
Sheehan's interest in this phenomenon came about when Sheehan met Marcia Smith through a mutual acquaintance. Smith told Sheehan that she was involved in a research project for the Science and Technology Committee of the Library of Congress that would address the issues of the potential existence of extraterrestrial intelligence and make an evaluation of the data on the phenomena of UFOs. When Sheehan queried Smith as to who exactly wanted this study done, her answer was none other than Jimmy Carter.
This all was with a view to investigate exactly what could or could not be turned over to the general public, according to Daniel Sheehan.
Smith asked Sheehan if he could, since he was the then-General Counsel to United States Jesuit Headquarters at their National Office in Washington D.C., get access to the records on the UFO-Alien issue contained in the Vatican. Though Sheehan made repeated attempts to gain access to the Vatican's documents through official channels, he was refused each time. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
This makes one wonder just why, if all there is to this UFO-Alien issue is weather balloons, flocks of geese, and swamp gas, would the Vatican (or any government on the earth, for that matter) have top-secret, and highly unattainable records pertaining to a nonexistent issue?
After telling Marcia Smith of his roadblock with the Vatican Library, she asked if he could help with a team that was lobbying Congressional leader to reinstate funds for the SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program. Sheehan indicated to Smith that he was glad to help out. Smith also later asked him if he could help out with an investigation into "the potential theological religious implications of potential contact with extraterrestrial civilizations."
This again begs the question that if there's nothing at all to this phenomenon, then why this study?
Sheehan agreed to Smith's request but insisted he have access to the documents pertaining to this issue that she had garnered for an investigation she did for the Science and Technology Committee in Congress. When asked what exactly Sheehan wanted to see, he indicated he wanted access to "the classified sections of the Project Blue Book."
Astoundingly, Daniel was granted access.
He was not allowed to take notes, photos, or carry anything into the room containing the documents or out with him when he left the Library of Congress where the documents were stored. After proceeding through multiple layers of security, he was shown to the room with microfiche machines. Before entering, he was told he could not take his briefcase with him. Almost absent-mindedly, he had a yellow legal pad under his arm that wasn't confiscated before he entered the room. He proceeded through small canisters of film. It didn't take long to find proof.
He discovered photos of what appeared to be a disc-shaped craft. It had crashed.
"It had hit into this field and had dug up, kind of plowed this kind of trough through this field. It was wedged into the side of this bank. There was snow all around the picture. The vehicle was wedged into the side of this mud-like embankment -- kind of up at an angle."
The men taking photos were unmistakably, in Sheehan's mind, American Air Force personnel.
As Sheehan continued to review the film, he discovered a close-up of the craft that revealed symbols or glyphs written on the craft. He thought it was an insignia. He wanted to record what he saw, but remembered he was not allowed to take notes. He knew it was likely his legal pad would be discovered when he left the room and the guards would examine it to see if he had taken notes. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/
However, since he wanted those insignias, he had to find a way to record them. He decided to arrange the cardboard backing of his legal pad in such a way against the microfiche screen so he could trace the symbols. When he left the top-secret document room, he was searched. His pad was taken and flipped through for notes. Finding none, and not noticing the traced symbols on the cardboard backing of the yellow pad, it was returned to him by the guards and Sheehan left.
Sheehan not only revealed to Marcia Smith what he had found but he also revealed the information to his boss at the Jesuit National Headquarters. Meetings and conventions were convened on the issue. Reports were written. President Carter saw at least one of the reports made by Marcia Smith, which included information from Daniel Sheehan's discoveries.
Sheehan still has the yellow notepad with the symbols but says no analysis has been done on the symbols.
Oh, are you wondering about the reports Marcia Smith finished after Daniel Sheehan's discovery and what they said? Well, Sheehan read them and according to Sheehan:
"The one report that Marcia showed me on extraterrestrial phenomena actually stated that it was the conclusion of the Library of Congress, Science and Technology Division, that from two to six, at least, other highly-intelligent, technologically-developed civilizations exist right within our own galaxy." [sources]
"The second report," says Sheehan, "they had drawings of different shapes of UFOs that have been sighted," continued Sheehan. "They didn't site any particular cases, but they said that they believed there was a significant number of instances where the official United States Air Force investigations were unable to discount the possibility that one or more of these vehicles was actually from one of these extraterrestrial civilizations. They put this together, and sent it over to the President. I ended up seeing a copy of it."
The Carter Administration, though not bringing about Full Disclosure, had a very busy four years of UFO phenomena. I can't help but wonder if he had had another term in office, what could have come of all of this?
If there's a skill or process you want to learn or know more about, chances are there's an online video for it. These days you can find a video that will teach you to cook, survive college, build your own headphones or even become a better kisser.
This week, I took a look at just a few Web sites that make finding these videos easy, including Howcast Media Inc.'s Howcast.com1, WonderHowTo.com2 from WonderHowTo Inc. and eHow Inc.'s eHow.com3. Howcast.com, which launched in February, encourages users to make and share good-quality, entertaining videos by providing tools on its site, and has about 5,000 videos so far. WonderHowTo.com, launched in January, used a different strategy by aggregating over 110,000 videos from various sources -- including Howcast, YouTube and Scripps Networks -- rather than publishing its own content. EHow, a site that started in 1999 with text-only content, contains over 100,000 instructional articles submitted by its users or eHow editors, and has a small catalog of videos. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx
Howcast videos can be seen in full-screen mode using a player that illustrates step-by-step text instructions beside video screens.
After testing each of these sites, I found that my favorite how-to videos had steps that were clearly labeled and numbered and the ability to fast forward to or play back specific parts in the video -- tools that Howcast included in almost all of its videos. At least some of the videos on the three sites simply illustrate things you could likely figure out how to do without watching a video, such as "How to Make Green Beer." (Add food coloring.) Howcast.com and WonderHowTo both require users to sign in, which confirms their date of birth, before looking at what they consider "mature" content.
These three free sites are advertisement-supported, and Howcast's ads run alongside videos. WonderHowTo.com runs ads at the top and side of its own site, on which it will play certain videos. But because videos on WonderHowTo come from other sources, those other sites can show video-embedded ads according to their rules. EHow's videos run pop-up text advertisements displaying names and links of other related (and sometimes unrelated) Web sites. But I couldn't get the pop-up ads to stay closed.
Overall, I preferred the look of Howcast's site and its well-organized videos. But its content paled in comparison to WonderHowTo's 110,000 videos and even eHow's 100,000 instructional articles. WonderHowTo.com does a nice job of gathering content from across the Web, though the inconsistencies of other sites (including advertisements, layout and video player) were a bit frustrating. EHow's articles were useful, as were its few videos, but I couldn't get over the site's unyielding video pop-up ads.
Howcast.com's content was informative with an amusing edge, including a video titled "How to Tell If Your Boyfriend's A Psycho."(If he calls 50 times a day, for example.) Other videos on the site are more serious, like "How to Make Sushi" by an executive sushi chef in New York City.
The founders of Howcast Media formerly worked in Google's video department, including during the acquisition of YouTube. All of Howcast's content comes from one of four sources: written and produced by Howcast in its studios; emerging filmmakers who apply and are accepted into the Howcast Directors Program to receive $50 a video and 50% of the advertising revenue generated from videos that generate over 40,000 views on the site; content partners like Popular Science; and Howcast users' personal how-to videos.
In order to make it easier for average users to upload better-looking videos, Howcast provides an Upload and Enhance tool that simply and quickly adds professional-looking graphics and printable steps to go along with how-to videos. This formula makes videos more enjoyable to watch. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/
Videos made in the Howcast Studios include accompanying music, good narratives and actors who add humor to an otherwise humdrum how-to. Among its helpful features is a video player that has smart blue markers to show where facts are sprinkled throughout the video and green markers to illustrate where tips appear. For example, the fact at the end of a video for beginner guitarists called "How to Play a Basic Bar Chord" is "The late Kurt Cobain claimed he was trying to rip off the Pixies when he wrote 'Smells Like Teen Spirit. '" In full-screen view, users can zoom in on any part of a video, and written-out steps and thumbnail stills of the scene appear to the right of the screen.
Howcast tries to run ads alongside videos that relate to the content. A video titled "How To Clean Your Dog's Teeth" has an ad for PetSmart Stores running on its page.
WonderHowTo.com was developed by a former television executive with the intention of using the site to produce its own video, like Howcast.com. Instead, WonderHowTo.com opted to tap the vast selection of how-to videos already available on the Web.
A Browse button pulls down 35 categories from which users can sort content, including Spirituality, Dating & Relationships and Fitness. In the Fashion subcategory under Beauty & Style, I found 290 videos including one on "How to Tie a Windsor Knot" and another titled "How to Turn Old Underpants Into a Bra" -- neither of which I'll be using anytime soon. Other categories include Clip of the Day, Recommendations (for users who are logged in) and Fresh, where new videos are listed. Users can grade videos to help others tell which they think are the best, and a Top Grade category compiles the top-ranked videos.
WonderHowTo's content comes from over 700 sites, according to the company. I used the site to find a video on YouTube about how to do a front-flip, clips on VideoJug.com that provided terrific tennis tips from a coach, and a video from EasyBarTricks.com about how to stick a beer bottle to a wall without glue or gum. (Hint: You'll need a corner and a wall you don't mind marking up.) WonderHowTo made it easier to find these videos than by performing a general search on the Web.
I submitted a non-how-to video to this site by simply entering a URL, without logging in. I never found the video I submitted on the site; WonderHowTo explained that it screens all videos prior to posting them, so it must have found my video.
EHow.com uses its database of articles to encourage people to watch videos, when they're relevant. This site uses calm, pastel colors to give a relaxed feeling -- especially compared with WonderHowTo, where banner ads surround the page. EHow's 26 categories include Parenting, Parties & Entertaining and Weddings. Twelve subcategories within Weddings led to 23 articles about Bridal Party Responsibilities -- a popular topic was "How To Deal With a Bridezilla." Related videos, such as "How To Get Rid of Wedding Day Jitters," ran along the right of the page. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/page1.aspx
Videos can also be found on eHow within a marked tab at the top of the page. But unlike the articles on eHow, these videos weren't well organized or as easily searchable. I watched one of eHow's Featured Videos called "How to Know if Your Toe Is Broken," but after closing a pop-up ad for UPS during Step One of the video, another ad popped up during Step Five. Neither ad had anything to do with broken toes.
But the eHow videos were professional-looking and included quite a few tips that I didn't know. That broken toe video was submitted by the eHow Health Editor, and a link at the top of the page led me to hundreds of other health-related articles. I found another video on "How To Remove Wallpaper," which was posted by the Home & Garden Editor and included a list of things I would need to proceed, along with numbered steps.
It isn't always easy to learn from the information you find online, and how-to videos can be a big help -- especially when they're well-made and easy to find using one of these sites. Howcast.com has well-presented content that was enjoyable to watch, but WonderHowTo.com offers a better variety of instructional videos.
Kim Cattrall has played everything from a Vulcan in "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" to an Egyptian princess in 1987's "Mannequin," but her big break didn't come until 1997, when she was cast in HBO's "Sex and the City." Ms. Cattrall's portrayal of Samantha Jones in the series earned her five Emmy nominations and a Golden Globe award. This month, Ms. Cattrall, 51 years old, reprises the role in the new movie, "Sex and the City." She says her comic timing can be traced to her love of black-and-white screwball comedies. "I'm inspired by actresses like Lucille Ball and Marilyn Monroe," she says. "You can't teach what they do." She spoke with us about her favorite romantic comedies.
'My Man Godfrey,' 1936
In this comedy, Carole Lombard plays a daffy socialite who discovers a vagrant (William Powell) in the city dump and hires him as her butler. Before long, she is in love with him. "Carole Lombard is so glamorous," says Ms. Cattrall. "Every day she wakes up looking fabulous and somebody brings her breakfast. I haven't had breakfast in bed recently enough."
'His Girl Friday,' 1940
Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell star in Howard Hawks's remake of the 1931 newsroom comedy "The Front Page." Ms. Russell's character, Hildy Johnson, originally was written for a man. "She looked like a little guy, the way she would sit on the desk," Ms. Cattrall says of the performance.
'Sullivan's Travels,' 1941
Preston Sturges wrote and directed this film about a privileged Hollywood director, played by Joel McCrea, who decides the only way he can understand the poor is to pretend to be one of them. "Joel McCrea was such an underrated actor," says Ms. Cattrall. "I could watch that movie over and over just for his delivery."
'I Married a Witch,' 1942
René Clair directed this film about a witch who is burned in 17th-century Salem and returns in the guise of a 20th-century woman (Veronica Lake), only to fall in love with a descendant of the man who killed her. "It's supposed to be a comedy about love between a witch and a mortal, but really it's about accepting people as they are," says Ms. Cattrall. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/
'Woman of the Year,' 1942
Katharine Hepburn was nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of a self-absorbed newspaper columnist who falls in love with Spencer Tracy's rumpled sportswriter. "My favorite scene is when Spencer Tracy comes to the office to ask her to marry him," Ms. Cattrall says. "The timing on that is impeccable."
Every winter, hordes of divers head to the congested, overdeveloped scuba-diving destinations of the Caribbean and the Red Sea. But there's a less-traversed option: Fly to Moscow, take the railroad 27 hours north, and drive two hours along snow-covered dirt roads to a village almost on the Arctic Circle, along an inlet of the White Sea. Then, take a snowmobile to a small black triangle cut into the ice.
Ice diving is one of the last great scuba adventures. WSJ's Mark Schoofs ice dives in the White Sea in Northern Russia and gives a peek into an underwater world full of sea creatures.
Ice diving is one of the last grand scuba adventures. Popular destinations include Antarctica, Newfoundland and certain lakes in the Austrian Alps. One of the best -- and least known -- is Russia's White Sea.
There, diaphanous, rainbow-tinged comb jellies (like jellyfish without the tentacles) float by. On rocks lie starfish and related brittle stars of every description. There are ophiuras, whose thin, spidery legs are striped wine-red and cream-white, and there are glittering, ruby-red crossasters with stubby legs, each tipped with delicate, filament tentacles. Luxuriant forests of large round anemones, each one ivory or pink-orange, look like some 1960s hallucinogenic art installation. Among them live multicolored sponges and algae, colonies of barnacles and tiny neon-lavender skeleton crabs. Wolf fish hide in crevasses. On the sea bed billow acres of low-growing kelp, whose undulation is as mesmerizing as a Bach fugue.
Above it all is the ice, almost alive, filtering sunlight into varying shades of emerald and gold. When one finally ascends back up through the ice hole, or maina, one literally ascends into light.
Marine life in the White Sea is so rich partly because cold water holds more oxygen than warm water, and in winter, the water is below freezing, about 30 degrees Fahrenheit. That means divers need gear -- lots of it. A dry suit, unlike the more common wet suit, is mandatory. With a zipper derived from a NASA design, and a seal on the neck, it keeps the body perfectly dry.
On my recent seven-day diving trip here with a Russian company, I wore three layers under a dry suit: a union suit made of polypropylene to wick away sweat, thick fleece long johns, and an even thicker Thinsulate-insulated undergarment that looks like a snowsuit. I wore two pairs of socks and Thinsulate booties, plus chemical toe warmers that react with air to generate heat. I used them on my hands, too, where I wore three layers of gloves under rubber outer gloves.
My head was in two neoprene hoods, a thin one underneath a thick one that tucked into a collar to protect my neck. A mask covered the skin around my nose and eyes. Only my lips, which held the mouthpiece connecting me to the air supply, were exposed directly to the cold water. Lips have such good blood flow that they don't go numb but merely tingle upon entry. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx
Donning all this gear, plus fins, tank, and the lead weights that help a diver sink, takes about half an hour. We suited up in mobile huts on skis, where gas heaters made me feel like a mummy working out in a sauna. Slipping into the cold water was a relief.
How to Get There: Aeroflot flies to Moscow nonstop from Los Angeles for around $900. Delta flies nonstop from New York for around $1,000.Then it's a flight to Murmansk, or a train ride to Chupa.
Book a Trip: Peak ice-diving season is February to April. In summer, there's no ice, but the scenery and 24-hour daylight are draws. RuDive starts taking reservations a year in advance (www.dive.ru/pages/page/show_lang/25.en.htm2). Early booking is advised, especially for groups. Standard tours go from Sunday to Friday. Custom trips can last longer or, as some Russians and Finns prefer, for a weekend.
Price: A week of ice-diving at the White Sea with RuDive -- including lessons, a room with private bath and train travel to and from Moscow -- is about $1,750 per person.
But the cold harbors danger. Valves can freeze, either blasting a diver with free-flowing air or shutting off the air supply altogether. Every air tank for ice diving has two valves, not the standard one for warm-water diving, and the mouthpiece valve has a freeze-resistant design. Even so, I encountered an emergency. I wore a vest that inflated and deflated to control buoyancy, and a valve on it froze open, ballooning the vest and sending me straight up. I was pinned against the ice, unable to swim freely, with the air in my tank rapidly flowing out. The safety of the terrestrial world was less than a foot away but walled off by impenetrable ice.
This is the second danger of ice diving: To ascend to the surface, one must return to the ice hole. Out of air and wearing close to 100 pounds of gear, even 25 yards underwater can be a long, even lethal distance. Each diver is secured to a rope connected to two other people: a buddy in the water and a tender on the surface. My buddy saw my trouble and gave the emergency signal: Four yanks of the rope, and our tender hauled us in. We skated along the ice's underside, a sensation so fun and beautiful that I forgot the danger. Up on top, our tender doused the valve with hot water from a thermos, and we resumed our dive.
Living so intimately with ice, one realizes it is anything but static. A brilliant sun shone during the first two days. But then a heavy snow fell, and when we went to the maina, the water seemed to have risen, forming a puddle on the ice. The weight of the snow had pushed the ice down, forcing water up through the hole. On another day, we were diving when a storm roared in. Our guides, concerned that large waves on the open sea would create surges capable of cracking the ice, decided we would leave.
Even without storms, the tides rise and fall more than six feet, so the ice at the shore continually cracks, refreezes and cracks again. Underneath, the constant friction sculpts the ice into breathtaking forms through which light streams as if through a kaleidoscope.
Topside, the muted light of a snowstorm or a sunset brings forth the full range of color in arctic ice: every conceivable variation of white and grey and a softly iridescent blue that seems to emanate from deep within. At night, the wind sweeps stretches of ice clean of snow, and they gleam obsidian black. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/page1.aspx
The underside of the ice is bubbled like a sponge, and in many of the holes live tiny crustaceans. Blow scuba bubbles, and they fall out like living rain.
Two former marine biologists, Dmitri Orlov and Mikhail Safonov, founded the outfit that organized this expedition, the RuDive Group, which offers world-wide scuba tours. In 1996, after the Soviet Union crumbled and science funding dried up, Mr. Safonov and Mr. Orlov began offering diving lessons, and in 1998 they began taking customers to the White Sea.
Five years ago, they opened their own diving center there, with comfortable wooden chalets offering accommodations from hostel-style dorms with shared baths to private rooms. Meals are hearty, often featuring local smoked fish, fresh vegetables and fruit and preserves made from local berries.
About seven years ago, Mr. Safonov recalls, a woman ice-diving with a predecessor company he and his partner founded and ran died in a Moscow lake at a depth of about 10 feet. The exact circumstances weren't clear, but spurred largely by the event, RuDive now requires all customers to have ice-diving certification from the Professional Association of Diving Instructors. Customers can get ice-diving certification at the start of their trip. RuDive has added to the standard training to enhance safety.
In 1999, Mr. Safonov participated in what is believed to be the first successful scuba expedition to the North Pole. The ice there forms underwater "castles," he says, and the water is as clear as air. Last month, he returned from RuDive's fifth successful polar diving trip. The cost: $40,000 per person.
RuDive's White Sea center has two captive beluga whales, owned by a Russian aquarium and held in a netted sea pen. The one-ton males circled in swift arabesques, then came straight at me, playfully biting my leg and fins the way a dog would. It was amazing fun, but the experience had traces of the amusement park. It was an escape from reality, not an immersion in it.
By contrast, the maina, its black water a portal between worlds, feels exhilaratingly real. When a snowstorm transforms the topside into a swirl of white, it's the perfect moment to slip into a winter of anemones and comb jellies and luminous green-gold ice.
If you were asked to list literary classics, it is unlikely that "Little Red Riding Hood" would be the first to come to mind. You might think of the Bible or Shakespeare, since they are the two most widely owned masterworks of Western literature. But, as novelist A.S. Byatt notes, "Grimms' Fairy Tales," which contains the popular "Little Red Riding Hood," is probably third. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected tales from folk sources, and published their "Children's and Household Tales" in 1812. To make the stories more literary and more appropriate for children, they made revisions throughout their seven editions, the last published in 1857.
These fairy tales deal with the same issues, such as love and death, as all great literature. They do so without hiding violence, hate, or even lust, making them quite different from most children's books of today. They set a standard for literary works -- Vladimir Nabokov was right when he said that all great novels are great fairy tales.
The stories are presented both concretely and magically, matching the child's manner of thinking. With their great emotional and moral power, and with their being first heard at an early age, they are more than literary. They suggest a model of living for the child.
"Little Red Riding Hood" is about a beautiful girl leaving home to visit her sick grandmother. The heroine starts down a path, carrying cakes and wine to make Grandma feel better. Along the way, she meets a friendly wolf who asks her where she is going. The charming Red Riding Hood all but invites him to meet her at Grandma's by pinpointing the location of her house. The wolf thinks, "What a tender young creature! What a nice plump mouthful."
The wolf persuades Little Red Riding Hood to wander off into the woods to see the beautiful flowers, to hear the birds singing and to enjoy the merry woods. This ploy allows the wolf to rush off to eat Grandma, disguise himself as her, and wait in bed for the girl. When she arrives, she questions the wolf about his appearance. And when she finally asks about his big teeth, he famously replies "The better to eat you with" and devours her.
Sated, the wolf falls asleep. Luckily, a hunter walks by, checks on Grandma, and discovers what has happened. He cuts open the wolf's belly, releasing Grandma and Little Red Riding Hood, both unharmed. Then Red Riding Hood springs into action herself and kills the wolf by piling rocks in his belly. http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.blogspot.com/
The fairy tale is fantastic, but that is necessary because of children's magical thinking. Their thought is illogical, impulsive and omnipotent. They are not surprised that a wolf talks or that two people can be retrieved whole from his belly. The little girl hearing the story does not simply identify with the little girl in the tale, as an adult might -- she becomes Little Red Riding Hood. Some parents argue that there is too much unreality in fairy tales. On the contrary, the narrative resonates with a child's notion of reality. These tales speak directly to children in their own language; by doing so, they exert their influence.
Another device in "Grimms'" is the use of absolutes. In "Snow White," Mother is divided into the entirely good queen who died and the unremittingly cruel stepmother who wishes to kill the girl. In "Little Red Riding Hood," fatherly attributes are split between the good protective hunter and the sinful, animalistic wolf. Since children themselves think in absolutes, a clean division of attributes makes it easier for the child to consider opposite qualities.
Violence and sexuality are, as the Grimm scholar Maria Tatar says, "the major thematic concern of the tales . . . at least in their unedited form." Rumpelstiltskin tears himself in two, Snow White's stepmother dances herself to death in red-hot iron shoes, and Hansel and Gretel are left in the forest to die. (If these scenes are unfamiliar, you have read a bowdlerized version. These "retellings" are to the Grimms what Cliffs Notes are to Shakespeare.)
But the Brothers Grimm cannot be blamed for introducing alien thoughts into the child's mind. The child has his own fears of and desires for violence before encountering the fairy tales. He will never experience the precise situations that occur in "Grimms'," but he does fear death and abandonment. He also has his own monstrous and destructive wishes. All this is obvious from even the most cursory observation of preschoolers' play. The genius of these tales is that they intuitively address such wishes and fears -- and allow the child to use the narrative to master them. Little Red Riding Hood not only survives the wolf's cannibalism but she kills him -- she has become a more assertive person.
Sexuality is subtle in the Grimms' telling of that story, but not in earlier versions. In one, a werewolf demands that the girl strip and get in bed with him, but she escapes. In the Perrault version of 1797, Little Red Riding Hood takes off her clothes and climbs into bed with "Father Wolf." In the Grimms' story, she virtually invites him to Grandma's house, where she is bringing treats that are ideal for a party. The "old sinner" delights in conversing with her, gets rid of Grandma, and waits for her in bed. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
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Why is sexuality present? One answer is that the stories are derived from bawdy folktales. A more compelling explanation is that the tales include it because children are sexual beings. Psychoanalysts have long held this view, which became popular through Bruno Bettelheim's tendentiously brilliant analyses in "The Uses of Enchantment."
Little Red Riding Hood is unconsciously working through her attraction to her own father, who is never mentioned in the story; instead, she becomes involved with the rapacious "father wolf" and is later saved by the protective fatherly hunter. In the end, she kills the wolf, thus renouncing her oedipal desires for her father. The child who hears the story has learned about the dangers of loving unwisely.
The dilemma for Little Red Riding Hood is the extent to which she must keep to the straight path. Thanks to her dallying in the woods, Grandma and she are eaten, but there is no overt moralizing. By the time the story ends, Little Red Riding Hood has not only taken action against the wolf but also makes a promise to herself to heed her mother's warnings, and thus is better prepared to avoid the wrong partner in the future. The Grimms allow the child to consider such issues unconsciously, without being subjected to a heavy dose of didacticism.
"Little Red Riding Hood," like the other great fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, ends happily -- but not with "they lived happily ever after." Red Riding Hood has more work to do; she is not yet ready for her prince.
For adults, telling the story to a child is the richest of pleasures. The storyteller revisits a classic and the vital issues it raises. He can marvel at the fascination of the child. But most important, the child's enchantment becomes the teller's too, and parent and child join to share that enchantment. It is one of those rare moments in adult life when one can recapture the magic of one's own early youth. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/
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Louis J. Sheehan Esquire
At a time when the Cassandras of finance are looking like realists, there is no gloomier prophet than Kevin Phillips. The author of 13 previous books including at least one classic, “The Emerging Republican Majority,” Mr. Phillips sees a perfect economic storm coming. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
The final pages of his bleak new book, “Bad Money,” tell of an “unprecedented” number of Americans planning to leave the country or thinking about it. Readers of “Bad Money” may come away with a similar impulse to flee.
Mr. Phillips begins with an overview of the current debt debacle. The 1980s were the start of “three profligate decades,” when the expansion of mortgage credit and the invention of financial instruments like collateralized debt obligations (C.D.O.’s) led to an orgy of leveraging and irresponsible speculation. The Federal Reserve kept the bubble afloat with easy money, while regulators and ratings agencies looked the other way.
By 2007 total indebtedness was three times the size of the gross domestic product, a ratio that surpassed the record set in the years of the Great Depression. From 2001 to 2007 alone, domestic financial debt grew to $14.5 trillion from $8.5 trillion, and home mortgage debt ballooned to almost $10 trillion from $4.9 trillion, an increase of 102 percent. A crisis in the mortgage market in August 2007 brought the party to an end. Since then we have been living in a twilight zone of what a security analyst quoted in the book calls “one of the slowest-moving train wrecks we’ve seen.”
The second component of the perfect storm is the upheaval in the oil industry. Domestic production peaked in 1971, and there are signs that production worldwide is also peaking. (Mr. Phillips cites experts who believe it already has.) http://louis-j-sheehan.net/page1.aspx
Louis J. Sheehan Esquire
And with the emergence of new economic powers like China and India, demand has risen dramatically and prices have been climbing steadily; by 2004 a rapidly growing China had become the second largest oil consumer, after the United States. Despite the bad news at the gas pump, however, America has actually been getting a cost break, because the major suppliers price their oil in dollars. But with the dollar falling, OPEC has been talking about moving into other currencies. Were that to happen, “the effects,” Mr. Phillips says tersely, “could be painful.”
Finally, Mr. Phillips turns to what he terms America’s “calcified” political system. We may need new regulations to deal with the debt mess, along with an energy policy to address the changing world of oil, but Washington, he says, has become dedicated to “the politics of evasion,” reluctant to pass dramatic reforms or to call for sacrifice from the public. Democrats and Republicans alike are so entrenched, so dependent on campaign money and special interests, that “the notion of a breath of fresh air has become almost a contradiction in terms.” Instead of a “vital center” in Washington, we now have a “venal center.” Mr. Phillips holds out little hope of improvement from a new president; he doubts that any administration could do much, even though “the crisis is no longer in the future, but upon us.”
Is such pessimism justified? Mr. Phillips says he is making no predictions, but that’s not quite true. Throughout his book he tends to lean on the darkest analyses, though others might be less grim. And as readers of his earlier books know, he has a penchant for seeing parallels between the current situation in the United States and the declines of 17th-century Spain, the 18th-century Dutch Republic and early-20th-century Britain.
But historical comparisons are always dangerous playthings (remember all those foreign-policy analogies to Munich?): you necessarily have to cherry-pick eras and evidence from history’s panorama. Perhaps there are similarities in the financial arrangements of monarchical Spain and democratic America, as Mr. Phillips says, but the differences between the two societies are far greater. It’s hard not to feel that Mr. Phillips’s argument has been shaped not only by his facts but also by his temperament.
Still, even if his pessimism doesn’t seem wholly warranted, a sense of foreboding surely is, which is why his warnings have to be taken seriously. Mr. Phillips writes that the inventors and marketers of the new financial instruments didn’t entirely understand them. An executive of Fidelity International says a panicky feeling has set in on Wall Street because no one knows where the risks really are. The finance minister of France observes that investments may have reached such a level of complexity that no one can assess them. And Charles R. Morris, in his own gloomy book, “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown,” reports that even Citigroup’s chief financial officer “did not know how to value his holdings.”
The screenwriter William Goldman once declared that in Hollywood “nobody knows anything.” When Wall Street begins to resemble the American Dream Factory, it’s a safe bet that something has gone terribly wrong.
Roberto Clemente, the superb right fielder of the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1955 to 1972, the year he died in a plane crash, exists in a baseball Eden of the mind. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/page1.aspx
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Cut down just past his prime and just before the free-agency era, he avoided the embarrassments the sport hands out to its greatest stars: mercenary team-hopping, years of declining performance, drug scandals, card shows. For those who can remember, he’s forever winding up for another monstrous throw to home plate.
“Roberto Clemente,” an “American Experience” documentary on most PBS stations Monday night, is not out to disturb this picture. If anything, it wants to put the halo more firmly in place, concentrating on his pride in his Puerto Rican heritage and his roles as a racial trailblazer and humanitarian. (He was taking supplies to earthquake victims when he died.)
But this absorbing account of his life also reminds us that the picture was more complicated. Clemente faced discrimination, suspicion and ridicule through much of his career; he was a moody, private and sensitive man who had a tense relationship with the press. “I can’t say I enjoyed talking with him,” the Pittsburgh sportswriter Roy McHugh recalls.
It seems likely that if Clemente were playing baseball today, he’d join Alex Rodriguez and Barry Bonds in the ranks of baseball’s tabloid antiheroes, worshiped when hitting well and vilified the rest of the time. The film’s reference to his early adoption of protein shakes and other “odd concoctions” even makes you wonder what he would have done if told that the occasional shot of human-growth hormone would help his injuries heal faster.
The attractions of “Roberto Clemente” include interviews with Pirates teammates like Al Oliver and Manny Sanguillen and fascinating film of the Puerto Rican winter league when it was a haven for African-American players unwelcome in the majors. One complaint: the emphasis on Clemente’s life outside baseball cuts into the time spent on the field. And no matter how admirable his sentiments, the true poetry of Roberto Clemente lies in the uninterrupted flight of a baseball from the warning track to the catcher’s mitt. You can’t watch that too many times.
A woman convicted two weeks ago of running a Washington call-girl ring that catered to the capital’s power elite was found dead here Thursday, and the authorities said she had apparently hanged herself.
The body of the woman, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, 52, was found in a shed at her mother’s home here about 20 miles northwest of Tampa. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/page1.aspx
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The police said Ms. Palfrey had left a notebook containing at least two suicide notes and other messages to her family, but they did not give additional details.
Ms. Palfrey, who had quickly become known as the D.C. Madam when the case against her began unfolding, apparently hanged herself from the shed’s ceiling with nylon rope, the police said. Her mother, Blanche Palfrey, discovered the body.
Blanche Palfrey had no sign that her daughter was suicidal, and there was no immediate indication that alcohol or drugs were involved, Capt. Jeffrey Young of the Tarpon Springs Police Department said.
A man who answered a phone listed for the elder Ms. Palfrey declined to comment.
Preston Burton, a lawyer who represented Deborah Jeane Palfrey at her trial, said, “This is tragic news, and my heart goes out to her mother.”
A federal jury in Washington found Ms. Palfrey guilty on April 15 of running a prostitution service that catered to powerful figures including Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana. She was convicted of money laundering, using the mail for illegal purposes and racketeering.
Ms. Palfrey had denied that her escort service had been involved in prostitution, saying that if any of the women had engaged in sexual acts for money, they had done so without her knowledge.
In the aftermath of her conviction, she remained free while awaiting sentencing on July 24. Under sentencing guidelines, she faced about five or six years in prison, Channing Phillips, the spokesman for the United States attorney in the District of Columbia, said Thursday.
But Ms. Palfrey had vowed that she would never go to prison. When she disclosed telephone records last year that revealed the identity of some of her clients, she told ABC: “I’m sure as heck not going to be going to federal prison for one day, let alone four to eight years, because I’m shy about bringing in the deputy secretary of whatever. Not for a second. I’ll bring every last one of them in if necessary.”
Despite that threat, Ms. Palfrey’s trial concluded without the testimony of either Mr. Vitter or another particularly prominent client, Randall L. Tobias. Mr. Tobias resigned as a senior State Department official last year after he had been linked to the escort service, though he said he had used it only for massages. Mr. Vitter, who is married and has four children, remains a first-term member of the Senate.
Dan Moldea, a Washington writer who befriended Ms. Palfrey while considering writing a book about her, said she had been cautiously optimistic about her trial.
After the conviction, however, Mr. Moldea sent her two messages but did not hear back, he said.
After hearing of her death Thursday, he recalled a conversation over dinner last year when the subject of prison came up. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/
“I will commit suicide first,” he remembered her saying.
One of the escort service’s employees was Brandy Britton, a former professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who was arrested on prostitution charges in 2006. Ms. Britton committed suicide in January before she could go to trial.
As other cities look to replace their blighted downtowns with new development, Las Vegas, known for its extravagant facsimiles of European and American landmarks, has come up with an unusual approach: Build another downtown, right next to the decaying one.
On Thursday, the city will formally inaugurate a new urban core on a 61-acre, undeveloped parcel of land — a project that some experts say is unprecedented in city planning. Called Union Park, its supporters hope it will revive the historic downtown just to the east, where the region’s courthouses, government offices and oldest casinos are clustered.
More than $6 billion in mostly private money has been announced for five ambitious projects: an Alzheimer’s research center, designed by Frank Gehry; a 60-story international center for jewelry trading; a hotel by the celebrity chef Charlie Palmer; a casino-resort; thousands of residential units and square feet of office space, and, as its centerpiece, a $360 million performing arts center.
Construction on the rippled Gehry building and utility lines is under way on this former brownfield, once a chemical dumping ground for the Union Pacific Railroad.
“It’s quite unusual that there’s a big swath of downtown ground just sitting there without having to go through a whole rigmarole to acquire,” said Bill Hudnut, a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute in Washington. Mr. Hudnut, the former mayor of Indianapolis, recalled that acquiring just three blocks of that city “involved some legal fights and eminent domain, the demolition of buildings, numerous deals with numerous owners.” In Las Vegas, he added, “they’re just building new stuff.”
It is an approach recommended to the mayor of Las Vegas, Oscar Goodman, a criminal defense lawyer famed for defending mafia figures, by major developers brought in to tutor him in redevelopment after his election in 1999. The mayor, who admits he ran “almost as a game” to win, said he quickly realized that reversing the downtown area’s decline could become his most important legacy. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx
(Downtown Las Vegas is immediately north of the Strip.)
“They all told me I couldn’t do anything because I didn’t have what I needed,” which was land, recalled Mr. Goodman, now in his third and final term. “I despaired. Then I looked out my window and saw this fallow 61 acres of brownfield.”
The city acquired it by swapping other land with the holding company that owned the parcel. But it would take five years and several failed deals with developers before the city signed with Newland Communities to manage and design the site.
In the meantime, the city’s acquisition spurred other developers to snap up vacant land nearby. Union Park is now surrounded by an outlet mall and 3 of 10 buildings planned for the $3 billion World Market Center, a furniture-industry exposition space. The city’s plans “created the credibility of a Las Vegas that’s open for business outside of the Strip,” said Robert J. Maricich, chief executive and president of World Market Center.
But the national economic downturn may play a role in how soon all of Union Park is realized. Already, the opening date for the $700 million World Jewelry Center has been pushed back one year, and questions abound as to whether the more than 3,000 residential units planned to be built will sell in a state with one of the highest foreclosure rates in the United States.
“There’s no question that the Union Park property is going be developed,” said Matt Ward, editor of the weekly Las Vegas Business Press. “The question is whether some of these projects that were supposed to break ground this year will do so. We’re mainly talking about delays, I think. Are you going to see business leaders in town talking openly about that? Probably not.”
Mr. Goodman has brought his boisterous personality and decades of friendships in the community to bear, persuading the region’s top liquor distributor, Larry Ruvo, to build the Lou Ruvo Brain Institute. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/
The research center, named for Mr. Ruvo’s father, who died of Alzheimer’s disease, is a partnership with the University of Nevada School of Medicine.
The linchpin, though, is the Smith Center for the Performing Arts, Las Vegas’s first stab at a Lincoln Center-style facility that can be home for ballet and philharmonic companies. It will break ground in August.
“We don’t have a cultural hub right now,” said Rita Brandin, the vice president and development director for Newland. “This provides that community gathering place.”
Union Park does have skeptics, including Dave Hickey, culture critic for Vanity Fair, who is baffled by how the development will interconnect with the older downtown area and help in its resurgence. Mr. Hickey’s wife, Libby Lumpkin, is executive director of the Las Vegas Art Museum, and Mr. Hickey noted that Ms. Lumpkin rejected efforts to move that museum to Union Park.
“The idea is that they’re going to put in these public buildings and this is going to make a respectful downtown for Las Vegas without all the glitz and glamour, I guess, but I think it’ll be a ghost town,” Mr. Hickey said. “I don’t see how the comings and goings will be facilitated. And those open spaces that landscape architects so love are not really conducive to the desert climate.”
It also leaves the question of whether the city is abandoning the historic downtown, where all of Las Vegas was born 100 years ago.
Defenders like Ms. Brandin counter: “We’ve got an existing downtown. This is an urban core. It’s complementary.”
And Mr. Goodman said the Union Park effort had helped kick off a decade of redevelopment in the older downtown region, which he expects to connect to Union Park via pedestrian bridges over the railroad tracks that run along the site’s eastern edge. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/page1.aspx
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http://louis1j1sheehan.us/Several casinos have new owners spending millions to upgrade, a bar district is starting to blossom and an old post office is being restored for use as a museum focused on mafia history, complete with interactive wiretapping exhibits. Most important, the mayor noted, are the half-dozen condominium towers nearing completion there.
At a time when the world’s top climate experts agree that carbon emissions must be rapidly reduced to hold down global warming, Italy’s major electricity producer, Enel, is converting its massive power plant here from oil to coal, generally the dirtiest fuel on earth.
Over the next five years, Italy will increase its reliance on coal to 33 percent from 14 percent. Power generated by Enel from coal will rise to 50 percent.
And Italy is not alone in its return to coal. Driven by rising demand, record high oil and natural gas prices, concerns over energy security and an aversion to nuclear energy, European countries are expected to put into operation about 50 coal-fired plants over the next five years, plants that will be in use for the next five decades.
In the United States, fewer new coal plants are likely to begin operations, in part because it is becoming harder to get regulatory permits and in part because nuclear power remains an alternative. Of 151 proposals in early 2007, more than 60 had been dropped by the year’s end, many blocked by state governments. Dozens of other are stuck in court challenges.
The fast-expanding developing economies of India and China, where coal remains a major fuel source for more than two billion people, have long been regarded as among the biggest challenges to reducing carbon emissions. But the return now to coal even in eco-conscious Europe is sowing real alarm among environmentalists who warn that it is setting the world on a disastrous trajectory that will make controlling global warming impossible.
They are aghast at the renaissance of coal, a fuel more commonly associated with the sooty factories of Dickens novels, and one that was on its way out just a decade ago.
There have been protests here in Civitavecchia, at a new coal plant in Germany, and at one in the Czech Republic, as well as at the Kingsnorth power station in Kent, which is slated to become Britain’s first new coal-fired plant in more than a decade.
Europe’s power station owners emphasize that they are making the new coal plants as clean as possible. But critics say that “clean coal” is a pipe dream, an oxymoron in terms of the carbon emissions that count most toward climate change. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx
They call the building spurt shortsighted.
“Building new coal-fired power plants is ill conceived,” said James E. Hansen, a leading climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “Given our knowledge about what needs to be done to stabilize climate, this plan is like barging into a war without having a plan for how it should be conducted, even though information is available.
“We need a moratorium on coal now,” he added, “with phase-out of existing plants over the next two decades.”
Enel and many other electricity companies say they have little choice but to build coal plants to replace aging infrastructure, particularly in countries like Italy and Germany that have banned the building of nuclear power plants. Fuel costs have risen 151 percent since 1996, and Italians pay the highest electricity costs in Europe.
In terms of cost and energy security, coal has all the advantages, its proponents argue. Coal reserves will last for 200 years, rather than 50 years for gas and oil. Coal is relatively cheap compared with oil and natural gas, although coal prices have tripled in the past few years. More important, dozens of countries export coal — there is not a coal cartel — so there is more room to negotiate prices.
“In order to get over oil, which is getting more and more expensive, our plan is to convert all oil plants to coal using clean-coal technologies,” said Gianfilippo Mancini, Enel’s chief of generation and energy management. “This will be the cleanest coal plant in Europe. We are hoping to prove that it will be possible to make sustainable and environmentally friendly use of coal.”
“Clean coal” is a term coined by the industry decades ago, referring to its efforts to reduce local pollution. Using new technology, clean coal plants sharply reduced the number of sooty particles spewed into the air, as well as gases like sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide. The technology has minimal effect on carbon emissions.
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In fact, the technology that the industry is counting on to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions that add to global warning — carbon capture and storage — is not now commercially available. No one knows if it is feasible on a large, cost-effective scale.
The task — in which carbon emissions are pumped into underground reservoirs rather than released — is challenging for any fuel source, but particularly so for coal, which produces more carbon dioxide than oil or natural gas.
Under optimal current conditions, coal produces more than twice as much carbon dioxide per unit of electricity as natural gas, the second most common fuel used for electricity generation, according to the Electric Power Research Institute. In the developing world, where even new coal plants use lower grade coal and less efficient machinery, the equation is even worse.
Without carbon capture and storage, coal cannot be green. But solving that problem will take global coordination and billions of dollars in investment, which no one country or company seems inclined to spend, said Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
“Figuring out carbon capture is really critical — it may not work in the end — and if it is not viable, the situation, with respect to climate change, is far more dire,” Mr. Sachs said.
There are a few dozen small demonstration projects in Europe and in the United States, most in the early stages. But progress has not been promising.
At the end of January, the Bush administration canceled what was previously by far the United States’ biggest carbon-capture demonstration project, at a coal-fired plant in Illinois, because of huge cost overruns. The costs of the project, undertaken in 2003 with a budget of $950 million, had spiraled to $1.5 billion this year, and it was far from complete.
The European Union had pledged to develop 12 pilot carbon-capture projects for Europe, but says that is not enough.
Many have likened carbon capture’s road from the demonstration lab to a safe, cheap, available reality as a challenge equivalent to putting a man on the moon. Norway, which is investing heavily to test the technology, calls carbon capture its “moon landing.”
It may be even harder than that. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspx It is a moon landing that must be replicated daily at thousands of coal plants in hundreds of countries — many of them poor. There is a new coal-fired plant going up in India or China almost every week, and most of those are not constructed in a way that is amenable to carbon capture, even if it were developed.
Plants that could someday be adapted to carbon capture cost 10 to 20 percent more to build, and only a handful exist today. For most coal power plants the costs of converting would be “phenomenal,” concluded a report by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
Then there is the problem of storing the carbon dioxide, which is at some level an inherently local issue. Geologists have to determine if there is a suitable underground site, calculate how much carbon dioxide it can hold and then equip it in a way that prevents leaks and ensures safety. A large leak of underground carbon dioxide could be as dangerous as a leak of nuclear fuel, critics say.
As for its plant here, Enel says it will start experimenting with carbon-capture technology in 2015, in the hopes of “a solution” by 2020.
“That’s too late,” Mr. Sachs said.
In the meantime, it and other new coal plants will be spewing more greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere than ever before, meaning that current climate predictions — dire as they are — may still be “too optimistic,” Mr. Sachs said. “They assume the old energy mix, even though coal will be a larger and larger part.”
On many other fronts, the new Enel plant is a model of efficiency and recycling. The nitrous oxide is chemically altered to generate ammonia, which is then sold. The resulting coal ash and gypsum are sold to the cement industry.
An on-site desalination plant means that the operation generates its own water for cooling. Even the heated water that comes out of the plant is not wasted: it heats a fish farm, one of Italy’s largest.
But Enel’s plan to deal with the new plant’s carbon emissions consists mostly of a map of Italy with several huge white ovals superimposed — subterranean cavities where carbon dioxide potentially could be stored.
The sites have not been fully studied by geologists as yet to make sure they are safe storage sites and well sealed. There is no infrastructure or equipment that could move carbon into them.
The new Enel plant here opens its first boiler in two months. It will immediately produce fewer carbon emissions than the ancient oil boiler it replaces, but only because it will produce less electricity, officials here admit. http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.blogspot.com/
In the towns surrounding Civitavecchia, the impending arrival of a huge coal plant, with its three silvery domes, is being greeted with a hefty dose of dread.
“They call it clean coal because they use some filters, but it is really nonsense,” said Marza Marzioli of the No Coal citizens group in the nearby ancient Etruscan town of Tarquinia. “If you compare it to old plants, yes it’s better, but it’s not ‘clean’ in any way.”
The group says that Enel has won approval for a dangerous new coal plant by buying machines for a local hospital and by carrying out a public relations campaign. Enel advertisements for the project show a young girl erasing a plant’s smokestack.
Most people who took part in a 2007 local referendum voted no, but the plant went ahead anyway, the group said.
The European Union, through its emissions trading scheme, has tried to make power plants consider the costs of carbon, forcing them to buy “permits” for emissions. But with the price of oil so high, coal is far cheaper, even with the cost of permits to pollute factored in, Enel has calculated.
Stephan Singer, who runs the European energy and climate office of WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund, in Brussels, said that math was shortsighted: the cost of coal and permits will almost certainly rise over the next decade.
“If they want coal to be part of the energy solution, they have to show us that carbon capture can be done now, that they can really reduce emissions” to an acceptable level, Mr. Singer said.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
“They wouldn’t have given you a plugged nickel eight years ago that there would ever be a high-rise residential building in downtown Las Vegas,” Mr. Goodman said with a laugh. “It was unheard of.”
And Union Park is now desirable enough to be a bargaining chip. Next month, the City Council is expected to finalize a plan in which a developer will build a new $150 million City Hall in the older downtown area in exchange for a parcel in Union Park where a casino-hotel can be built.
Still, the enduring down-at-the-heels reputation of the old downtown was a factor in Mr. Palmer’s decision to build in Union Park instead of the old downtown. “I call it the new Las Vegas,” said Richard Femenella, chief financial officer of the Charlie Palmer Group. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
“They say they’re revitalizing downtown, but truthfully, everything west of the railroad tracks is all brand new. It was dirt.”
Whether the old downtown is left behind is a concern of Linda Lera-Randle El, an activist for homeless people, who said that none of the residential units in Union Park were designated as affordable housing and that she worried that homeless people who squat on the vacant land would be displaced.
Not all of the mayor’s dreams have come to fruition. Several attempts to get a developer to build a sports arena, first at Union Park and then elsewhere, appear to have stalled. Mr. Goodman aggressively courted the Cleveland Clinic to take up residence, only to have the respected hospital pass. But the results of Union Park nonetheless stand to rewrite the national impression of Mr. Goodman as a Vegas caricature given to outlandish acts like suggesting that graffiti artists be de-thumbed or running a seminar on making martinis.
“I don’t always agree with Oscar, but I do think that Union Park is going to make it,” said a councilwoman, Lois Tarkanian, one of Mr. Goodman’s most vocal detractors.
“Even if you disagree with him on this or that,” Ms. Tarkanian said, “you have to give him credit for the part of his personality that can get this done.”
Joe Zealberg, a psychiatrist in Charleston, S.C., prescribed generic dOne day last week, David Jacobs took out two measuring cups, put a pot on the stove at his home here and demonstrated how he used to turn raw powder into steroids.
For more than a year, Jacobs operated a makeshift pharmaceutical lab out of his kitchen in his one-story suburban home. Each month, he said, he sold about a thousand of his own bottles of steroids and another thousand kits of human growth hormone smuggled from China to dealers across the United States. Among the dealers he supplied were two N.F.L. players, Jacobs said, who would then supply a handful of other N.F.L. players with the banned substances.
Jacobs’s business as one of the largest steroid producers in Texas came to a halt in April 2007 when federal agents raided his home and confiscated thousands of units of steroids. Later, as part of Operation Raw Deal, a nationwide investigation of the importation and distribution of performance-enhancing drugs, he pleaded guilty to conspiring to distribute anabolic steroids. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx
On Thursday in Sherman, Tex., Jacobs was sentenced to three years of probation.
Jacobs, a former body builder, said he advised about 10 N.F.L. players on how to exploit loopholes in the league’s drug-testing program. One way, he said, was to have team doctors write them prescriptions for drugs that would mask steroid use.
Jacobs’s case received national attention because a Web site for his supplements store boasted of providing counseling to several players on the Dallas Cowboys and the Atlanta Falcons.
The New York Times reported last month that information from the government’s investigation of Jacobs had led federal prosecutors to investigate Matt Lehr, an offensive lineman for the New Orleans Saints, on the suspicion he distributed performance-enhancing drugs. In recent years, investigators have focused largely on the distributors of drugs, not athletes or other users.
Lehr’s lawyer has denied that his client ever sold steroids or H.G.H. and said Jacobs fabricated information about Lehr after he refused to pay Jacobs’s legal fees. Jacobs said he never asked Lehr to give him money for legal expenses.
In interviews here last week, Jacobs said he sold hundreds of bottles of steroids and H.G.H. to Lehr and another N.F.L. player. Those players, Jacobs said, sold the substances to other players in 2006 and 2007.
“I thought the fewer the people I was selling to, the safer it would be,” Jacobs said. “There were many players who wanted drugs, but I didn’t want to have direct transactions with a bunch of people.”
Lehr tested positive and was suspended for four games in 2006 for testing positive for steroids, but he has not been charged in this case.
Jacobs said he advised players, including Lehr, to ask their team doctors to write them prescriptions for finasteride, a drug used to treat balding in young men. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/
Jacobs said a Falcons team doctor wrote Lehr a prescription for the substance. He said a bottle of finasteride labeled as prescribed for Lehr was seized from his own house in April 2007.
“The excuse they did it under was that the players were losing their hair because they were taking their helmets on and off,” Jacobs said, echoing similar statements that were published Sunday in The Dallas Morning News.
The N.F.L. does not test for the substance, and it is not on its list of banned substances.
“We do not comment on any medical procedures or information about any of our players,” Reggie Roberts, a spokesman for the Falcons, said in a telephone interview.
Greg Aiello, a spokesman for the N.F.L., said the league’s independent scientific and medical advisers reviewed finasteride before and after it was banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency in 2005, but recommended that it not be banned.
Don Catlin, the head of the independent organization Anti-Doping Research, said in a telephone interview that finasteride could mask the use of some substances normally detected through urine testing.
Jacobs, who said he stopped using steroids in April 2007, said he also advised players to use steroids only in the off-season.
“The players know the testing is tougher in-season, so they use human growth hormone year round and only use steroids in the off-season,” he said.
The N.F.L. tests its players year round for steroids but does not test players for H.G.H. Of the 12,000 tests the league performs, 4,000 are in the off-season.
Jacobs said he suggested that players say they were out of town or on vacation with their wives when they received phone calls about pending drug tests.
He also said he would then provide the player with an herbal supplement intended to cleanse the system of steroids without being detected.
“A week later, they would be tested and they would pass,” Jacobs said.
Under the World Anti-Doping Agency rules, which apply to Olympic athletes, three missed tests by one athlete within 18 months can result in a suspension for the athlete.
Aiello said players had to provide the league’s drug tester with their off-season locations and a number where they could be reached at all times.
“The program’s independent adviser has the full authority to determine if a player is evading testing in violation of the program and makes a determination on a case-by-case basis,” Aiello said.
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After his sentencing Thursday, Jacobs said he was willing to cooperate with N.F.L. officials, who had reached out to him several months ago to learn more about his dealings with league players.
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“I plan to travel to New York in the next month to meet with them and tell them about the loopholes in their program,” Jacobs said.
As for whether he intends to share names with the league, Jacobs said, “Only if the N.F.L. guarantees their lives won’t be destroyed like mine.” http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page.aspx
rugs to patients for years and rarely had problems -- until last year. A number of patients who had done very well on brand-name medications "crashed and burned" when they switched to generics, he says.
One woman "went from being perfectly fine to crying inconsolably 24 hours a day" after she switched from one generic antidepressant to another, Dr. Zealberg says. Another patient was sold a generic version of his attention-deficit drug that contained no identifying markings whatsoever -- a violation of federal rules.
Ten of his patients switched to a new generic version of the antidepressant Wellbutrin, but eight of them changed back, saying they felt anxious or shaky or their depression had returned. Several complained that the generic drug had a bad smell, he says.
Generic medications have been a boon to consumers around the world, allowing millions to buy lifesaving drugs for pennies a day. http://louis2j2sheehan.blogspot.com/
Some 65% of all prescriptions dispensed in the U.S. are for generics, though they account for only 20% of the dollars spent, according to the Generic Pharmaceutical Association.
While there is no hard evidence of growing problems from generics, consumers and physicians are increasingly concerned as cost pressures push more patients away from brand-name drugs. At the same time, the globalization of pharmaceutical manufacturing has revealed regulatory lapses.
By law, generics must have the same active ingredient and the same action as the brand-name version, which allows them to piggyback on the original safety and efficacy trials. But generics do have different inactive ingredients, which can affect how they are absorbed into the body. Generics can produce blood levels as much as 20% below or 25% above that of the original drug and still be considered "bioequivalent," according to Food and Drug Administration guidelines.
Some patients are more sensitive to those differences than others, and people who experience problems with medications are advised to contact their doctors, the drug manufacturer and the FDA's MedWatch.
Wellbutrin, made by Biovail Corp. of Canada and marketed by GlaxoSmithKline PLC, is one of the best-selling antidepressants in the U.S., with sales of $1.8 billion in 2006. The FDA approved a generic version of Wellbutrin XL 300, a long-acting once-daily version, in December 2006. The generic, named Budeprion XL 300, soon accounted for roughly 40% of the one million monthly prescriptions for the antidepressant.
But patients soon started logging complaints about Budeprion at PeoplesPharmacy.com, a Web site that has become a clearinghouse for medication gripes. "We've received hundreds of complaints about generic drugs in general. But with this one drug, all of a sudden -- kaboom -- right after it was approved," says Joe Graedon, a pharmacologist who runs People's Pharmacy with his wife. Readers' postings cite side effects such as tremors, headaches, anxiety and sleep disturbances. Some consumers said their depression had returned, in some cases bringing thoughts of suicide. Many reported that their adverse effects stopped when they returned to the brand-name drug.
Mr. Graedon alerted the FDA. He also asked ConsumerLab.com, which normally runs tests for dietary supplement manufacturers, to compare Budeprion and Wellbutrin. Using a test-tube test that some industry experts question, ConsumerLab found that Budeprion dissolves faster, releasing 34% of the drug within the first two hours, compared with 8% for Wellbutrin.
"If you get four times the drug in the first two hours, that's too much drug in the beginning and not enough for the rest of the day," says Mr. Graedon, who worries that what he calls "dose dumping" could cause seizures, a concern with the brand-name drug as well.
Complaints about Budeprion also were coming into the FDA -- at least 130 from December 2006 to January 2008, according to Andy Georgiades of Dow Jones News Service, who filed a Freedom of Information Act request. http://louis1j1sheehan.blogspot.com/
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Only four complaints were filed about two rival generic versions of Wellbutrin XL 300 that went on the market in June 2007.
The FDA conducted an investigation and reported last week that although there were "small differences" between the two formulations, "they are not outside the established boundaries for equivalence." The generic did reach its maximum blood concentration in two to three hours, compared to five to six hours for Wellbutrin, but the FDA said those differences "were not considered clinically significant."
What accounted for the consumer complaints? The FDA cited "the natural history of depression," in which some patients have a recurrence of symptoms even while on medication.
HOW TO REPORT DRUG PROBLEMS
• If you have a bad reaction to a drug or concerns about quality, your first stop should be your doctor, who can file a medical report with the FDA.
• You can also submit a consumer report to the FDA's MedWatch program at www.fda.gov/MedWatch3. You will be asked to describe the medication, the adverse event and some brief medical history. Your identity isn't requested. If you supply an email address, you will receive confirmation that your report was received. You can also speak to an FDA representative at 1-888-INFO-FDA .
• Contact the manufacturer or distributor. The FDA requires prescription and over-the-counter drugs to list contact information on the packaging.
• Return the medication to the pharmacist; use one you know and trust.
• www.PeoplesPharmacy.com4 also logs complaints about generic drugs, but these aren't counted as official FDA adverse-event reports.
Some critics say the FDA, in effect, was saying, "it's all in their heads." But they were more alarmed to read in the report that the FDA relied on tests comparing a lower dose of Wellbutrin and Budeprion -- 150 mg -- when it first approved the 300 mg version in 2006, and didn't have specific bioequivalence data on the 300 mg dose that had generated the complaints.
"Everybody involved in this whole chain -- pharmacists, physicians, insurance companies, drug-store buyers -- assumes the FDA approves every single generic formulation to prove that it isn't harmful," says Mr. Graedon. http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise
"We learned last week that that's not the case."
The FDA explained that it didn't want to expose test subjects to the risk of seizures with the 300 mg dose. Bioequivalence tests are conducted on healthy people, not those who need the medication, and each gets just a single dose, so there is no chance to work up to 300 mg slowly, as actual patients are advised to do. Sandy Walsh, an FDA spokeswoman, says this is common procedure for testing antidepressants and antipsychotics.
"If we see scientific evidence that a product is not performing as expected, we will take action," Ms. Walsh says. "The FDA cannot offer examples where generics have not performed as expected because there have been none for the agency to report."
Deborah Jaskot, vice president for regulatory affairs at Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, which distributes Budeprion, says the ConsumerLab dissolution test was an invalid comparison, and that on all the accepted tests, Budeprion performed within the range of bioequivalence with Wellbutrin. Teva itself has received 101 reports of problems with Budeprion -- out of 4.5 million prescriptions written -- and hasn't heard reports of unusual smells, a spokeswoman says.
Ms. Jaskot also says Web sites that collect complaints about drugs "are doing the public a disservice." If consumers have problems with their medications they should "tell their physician, tell the manufacturer, tell the pharmacists, tell the FDA -- that's the only way these can get acted on and evaluated for veracity," she says.
But what if you complain to the FDA and are told, in effect, that your concerns are insignificant? As with so many other areas in health care, consumers have to be their own regulator and their own chief advocate.
"Consumers need to know that there are variations between generic drugs and brand-name drugs, and from one generic drug to another," says Wayne Pines, a former FDA spokesman who now consults for drug companies. "This is an area in which the patient has to be really self-protective, to be sure that they are getting the therapeutic effect that is best for them."
If you are taking a medication for a long-term condition, Mr. Pines advises staying with the version you are stabilized on. Some pharmacies sell generic versions interchangeably; tell your pharmacist you want to stay with the same one.
If you need to switch to a generic from a brand name for cost reasons, monitor your symptoms and review them with your doctor. Assess whether it's worth it to you to pay more. (There are some medications, particularly for thyroid and blood conditions, in which substitutions are never advised.)
The Graedons also recommend asking for copies of your lab reports, so you can help your doctor monitor any changes in your condition.
Be alert to changes in smell or appearance of your medications. Tell your doctor, pharmacist and the manufacturer if you notice anything odd.
Dr. Zealberg, however, is still waiting to hear back from the pharmacy that sold his patient blank pills.
The robot will see you now. At least in the operating room, where more and more often robots stand between doctor and patient, the New York Times reports. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
At many hospitals robots, under the control of doctors, are performing some of the precision work of prostate and gynecological surgery. In their favor, robots’ “hands” don’t shake, don’t tire and can make precise cuts in tiny places. Robots don’t care about X-ray exposure or need days off either.
But how well are medical robots complying with the Three Laws of Robotics as codified by the late sci-fi author and Health Blog hero Isaac Asimov? Let’s take a look at Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci robot, featured prominently in the NYT’s piece.
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Robots aren’t perfect, but, let’s face it, neither are humans. A quick check of the FDA’s database of problems reported for medical devices turns up a few, but not a ton, of complaints about the da Vinci. Among the recent ones, the robotic scissors in a prostate surgery case malfunctioned, filling the O.R. with the smell of garlic, but the patient wasn’t harmed.
Some fatalities were reported to the FDA recently, but it wasn’t clear they were related to the robot, such as the death of a hysterectomy patient from sepsis four days after surgery.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Again, the FDA database shows a few cases of an obstinate or malfunctioning robot, but not a revolution of machines against their masters. One user reported to the FDA that a flurry of error codes led a surgeon to abort a robot-assisted prostate procedure and continue the old-fashioned way last year–no harm to the patient. Intuitive Surgical, maker of the robot, later fixed the device, the report said.
Another report says one of the robot’s arms stopped working during a cardiac procedure. The surgeon made another incision to insert another instrument to complete the operation, but a re-boot of the machine by a company rep revived the robotic arm. The surgeon completed the operation without the robot balking again.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Robots are thriving, and their survival instincts appear strong. Despite the da Vinci price tag of about $1.3 million, on average, “it is rapidly becoming unusual for a urologist to operate without using one,” the Times reports.
Rather than conflicting with the first two laws, the robots may be bumping into the iron law of hospital profitability. Health technology consultant Winifred Hayes tells the Times that most hospitals and clinics are losing money or not making much on their investments in robots. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
“The real story is that this is a technology that has been disseminated fairly widely prematurely,” she adds.
It was like a college mixer, a classroom full of young men and women seeking a recipe for romance.
They had assembled for the first class of “Love Relations for Life: A Journey of Romance, Love and Sexuality.”
There was giggling and banter among the students, but that was all part of the course as their teacher, Suki Tong, led them into the basics of dating, falling in love and staying together.
The course, in its second year at two polytechnic institutes, is the latest of many, mostly futile, campaigns by Singapore’s government to get its citizens to mate and multiply. Its popularity last year has led to talk of its expansion through the higher education system.
“We want to tell students, ‘Don’t wait until you have built up your career,’ ” said Yu-Foo Yee Shoon, the minister of state for community development, youth and sports, at a news conference in March. “Sometimes, it is too late, especially for girls.”
The courses are an extension of government matchmaking programs that try to address the twin challenges embodied in a falling birthrate: too few people are having babies, and too few of those who are belong to what Singapore considers the genetically desirable educated elite.
Over the past 25 years, the mating rituals organized by the government — tea dances, wine tastings, cooking classes, cruises, screenings of romantic movies — have been among the country’s least successful social engineering programs.
Last year Singapore’s fertility rate fell to a record low of 1.24 children per woman of childbearing age, one of the lowest in the world. It was the 28th year in a row Singapore had stayed below the rate of 2.5 children needed to maintain the population.
But even a replacement-level rate would not be enough for today’s planners. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/page1.aspx
The government recently announced that it was aiming to increase the population by more than 40 percent over the next half-century, to 6.5 million from the current 4.5 million.
“Teaching our youth in school how to fall in love” is a good solution, wrote Andy Ho, a senior writer at The Straits Times, a government-friendly newspaper that does its best to help out in Singapore’s many campaigns.
In 1991, for example, when the government began offering cash bonuses to couples with more than two children, the newspaper printed tips for having sex in the back seat of a car, including directions to some of the “darkest, most secluded and most romantic spots” for parking.
It suggested covering the windows with newspapers for privacy.
Singapore is known for its campaigns of self-improvement, including efforts to get residents to be polite, to smile, to be tidy, to speak proper English and to not chew gum.
In 1984, the country’s master planner, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, declared that too few of the country’s most eligible women, those with college degrees, were marrying and having children. He set up the Social Development Unit to address the problem, and since then the government has been the country’s principal matchmaker.
In addition to its tea dances and moonlight cruises, the agency acts as a lonely hearts adviser, with an online counselor named Dr. Love and a menu of boy-meets-girl suggestions on its Web site, www.lovebyte.org.sg.
“Guys, girls notice everything!” the Web site offers in one of its dating tips. “Comb your hair differently and they notice. Change your watch and they notice! Skipped your morning shower and sprayed on deodorant to cover the smell — they notice! What does this mean? Well, bathe regularly, change something about yourself, be observant, and compliment the lady.”
Mr. Lee himself acknowledged how silly some of this may seem.
“Never mind the hullabaloo in the press, all the foreign correspondents writing that a crackpot government is trying to interfere in people’s lives,” he said when he inaugurated the Social Development Unit. “If we continue to reproduce ourselves in this lopsided way, we will be unable to maintain our present standards.”
In other words, said Annie Chan, director of a matchmaking agency, “Our government wants smart ladies to meet smart guys to get smart children.”
But in Singapore it is impossible to get very far from thoughts of money and the workplace. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/page1.aspx
These guys may have other things on their minds besides romance and babies.
“Some people say if you’re a smart guy you should marry a smart woman who can help you with your finances and career,” said Ms. Chan, whose agency is called Club2040 and who has worked under contract for the Social Development Unit.
Singaporeans quite seriously describe their society as being driven by a local concept called kiasu, a desire not so much to get ahead as to not lose out. That concept might be applied, for example, to a person who pushes ahead of everybody else to get into an elevator.
This single-mindedness, in life as in elevators, seems to leave little room for social graces or for romance or procreation.
“The E.Q. here,” said Ms. Chan, referring to an emotional quotient of social skills, “can be appalling.”
But even while working on the solution, Ms. Chan seems to be part of the problem. She is 39 and has been married for four years, but said she did not have the time or energy to have children.
It is a lot to ask of a college course to break attitudes like this. Three 20-year-old graduates of last year’s inaugural course at Singapore Polytechnic still seemed imbued more with kiasu than romance.
Despite everything their teachers had told them about multitasking work and love, none was in a relationship. And nothing they had heard in class seemed to have dented their stereotypes about the opposite sex.
“I’m not open to relationships in school,” said Wei Shan Koh, a former student who works as a teacher’s aide. “Boys in school are not my cup of tea. They are male chauvinist pigs. They’re annoying and childish. And they won’t give in to you. They’re just not mature.”
Another former student, Tian Xi Tang, was quick to respond.
“I think girls’ ideas are a bit childish, or you might say girlie,” said Mr. Tian, who hopes to become an engineer. “It’s a matter of pride. Guys are more outspoken. We don’t like a girl to be more outspoken.”
Kamal Prakash, who hopes to be a lecturer in mathematics, gave voice to what appears to be the common theme here, among both young people and their elders.
“I am not interested now in love relations because I want to continue my studies,” he said. “If I concentrate on love relations, I won’t be able to concentrate on my studies.”
With his Mercedes-Benz and his fine clothes, Josef Fritzl looked every inch a property owner, neighbors in this tidy Austrian town said Monday. Even when running errands, they said, he wore a natty jacket, crisp shirt and tie.
Mr. Fritzl’s apartment house, its back garden obscured by a tall hedge, was his kingdom, one neighbor said, and interlopers were not welcome. On Monday, investigators in white jumpsuits combed the house and garden for clues. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
The authorities said Sunday that Mr. Fritzl, 73, had kept one of his daughters imprisoned for 24 years in a basement dungeon, where she bore him seven children.
The daughter, Elisabeth, now 42, is in psychiatric care, along with two of her children. Her eldest daughter, Kerstin, 19, who was also kept in the basement and whose illness pulled apart Mr. Fritzl’s secret after he had her taken to a local hospital, was in a medically induced coma and was in critical condition, the authorities said.
The authorities said Mr. Fritzl confessed Monday to imprisonment, sexual abuse and incest. The case has left this town of 22,000 people, 80 miles west of Vienna, in stunned disbelief. Neighbors milled around the three-story apartment building on Monday, watching the investigation unfold and asking how such an atrocity could have occurred in their midst.
“One cannot comprehend the dimension of this,” said Doris Bichler, 34, a neighbor who was walking with her daughter. “Natascha Kampusch was bad, but this is of a totally different scale.” Ms. Bichler was referring to the notorious kidnapping of an Austrian schoolgirl, who was hidden in a windowless cellar for eight years until she escaped in August 2006. Until now, the Kampusch case was considered by many as the epitome of depravity in the post-World War II history of this country.
But as details of this latest case filter out, it seems even harder to fathom than Ms. Kampusch’s abduction, involving nearly a quarter-century of confinement and sexual abuse, and the birth of seven children, three of whom never emerged from the cellar into daylight until last week.
It also raises a troubling question: Why did two such horrifying crimes occur in the same period in Austria, known as a tranquil, picture-book land?
There seems no easy answer — and Austrian officials, while insisting that similar crimes had occurred in other countries, said they were struggling to make sense of Mr. Fritzl’s singular misdeeds.
“He was man of stature,” Franz Polzer, the chief of the criminal investigations unit for the Province of Lower Austria, said at a news conference here, holding up a photograph of Mr. Fritzl, a heavyset, gray-haired man dressed in black.
“He led a double life,” Mr. Polzer continued, “with one family of seven children, with his wife, and a second family of seven children, with his daughter.”
The police described Mr. Fritzl as an authoritarian figure who had brooked no dissent.
Trained as an electrician and an engineer, Mr. Fritzl owns the small apartment building, renting out a few apartments and living on the top floor. Over many years, he built an underground world for his captives in a warren of cramped, windowless rooms. He provided them with food and clothing, bought outside town to avoid suspicion.
Photographs show a miniature bathroom, finished with tile and wood trim on the ceiling. A claustrophobic passageway leads to a bedroom. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/page1.aspx
The chamber was accessible through a four-foot-high door that opened with a remote-control device, for which only Mr. Fritzl held the code.
The police said his wife, Rosemarie, 68, had no inkling of his secret life, believing that their daughter had fled the family for a cult and was unable to take care of her children. Mr. Fritzl forced Elisabeth to give up three of the children as babies, and he and his wife raised them. A seventh child, a twin boy, died soon after being born; Mr. Fritzl told the police he threw the body in an incinerator, the authorities said.
“You have to imagine that this woman’s world fell apart,” a local official, Hans-Heinz Lenze, said of Rosemarie.
At the news conference, officials came under sharp questioning about how the situation could have remained unknown to the authorities. After Mr. Fritzl and his wife began taking care of Elisabeth’s children, social workers visited their home several times.
Officials defended themselves hotly, saying that if Mr. Fritzl was able to keep his wife ignorant of his crimes when she lived upstairs from the cellar, how could outsiders have guessed?
Neighbors expressed similar bafflement
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
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