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Canada's Shame.

2012-01-25T01:03:00.000-08:00

Seal Slaughter’s Days May Be Numbered

It's not over yet, but Iggy Pop, Perez Hilton, Kelly Osbourne, Pamela Anderson, Sarah McLachlan, Diane Warren, and all the people who have spoken out, worn the PETA shirts, and appeared in our ads in the last year have brought us closer to the end of the Canadian seal slaughter. Just weeks before the annual slaughter is set to resume, Ryan Cleary, a member of the Canadian Parliament who represents one of the regions in which the seal slaughter takes place, has acknowledged that the tremendous outcry against beating and shooting babyseals has him questioning the future of the bloody massacre.

Says Mr. Cleary: "Part of our history is also whaling, for example, and the day came when the whaling industry stopped. Now, is that day coming with the seal hunt? It just may be."

Cleary's statement comes just weeks after Russia announced that it was taking steps to ban the import of Canadian harp-seal fur, a move that came after Pamela Anderson led an international appeal on PETA's behalf.

Polls have consistently shown that most Canadians oppose the seal slaughter, and as Cleary noted, the industry is an increasing liability for Canada that the country is having more and more difficulty defending.

What You Can Do to Help Stop the Seal Slaughter

Please click here to tell Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper that yes, the time has come to send the seal slaughter the way of whale slaughter and ban it before the next massacre commences this spring.

http://www.peta.org/b/thepetafiles/archive/2012/01/24/mp-says-seal-slaughter-s-days-may-be-numbered.aspx

GOP: You Have A Disaster On Your Hands

2012-01-21T17:09:00.000-08:00

(CNN) -- Memo to Republican Establishment:I would send this memo to each of you individually, but I'm not sure exactly who you are. I've been told that you exist and that people like my colleagues Bill Bennett, Karl Rove, and Bill Kristol are charter members of it.

James Carville says the Republican field is vulnerable.

I am assuming you are out there and I assume there are more than three of you. At any rate, I thought I'd take a moment to catch up with you and make some observations on how things are going for your party.

James Carville

Let me break it to you gently -- you've got a first-class disaster on your hands. I know you boys thought this thing would work out and you would be able to whip the Republicans in line to fall in behind Mitt (I assume you are all males but if there is a female in the establishment, I apologize.) Not going too good, is it fellows?
It's been a terrible time to be a Republican. There have been many moments during this process that have caused me great joy. Certainly the events of Thursday, ending with the CNN debate, and even the Fox debate Monday night, have helped ease the pain of my beloved Tigers' and Saints' recent defeats.
I mean, most people thought it was kind of a watermark when your Tea Party gang booed the golden rule. You know, I've spent some time in Philly and they have always thought they were pretty radical because they actually booed Santa Claus and Willie Mays. Philly, I've got news for you -- you ain't got nothing on South Carolina Republicans. They just aren't buying any of that do-unto-others garbage.
I actually thought my favorite moment of this delightful process was when one of your eight front-runners, Herm Cain, (as Sarah Palin calls him) actually ran an ad with his campaign manager endorsing him. (Rove, why didn't you think of that in 2000? Imagine the headline: "Rove endorses Bush.")
The climax of that delicious ad is when he actually takes a drag on a cigarette. But my favorite thing about Herm's campaign manager is that he is the only person in the history of the world that was actually barred from political consulting. Let me tell you, I've been in this business for quite a while and I've never known of anyone other than Mark Block to be suspended from practicing this profession.
At any rate, let's talk a minute about Mitt. He was your guy -- he was methodical, meticulous, married once. He has completely blown himself up over an issue that everyone knew was coming. Have you had a chance to look at John McCain's research operation on Mitt? Wow. And let me assure you, that thing has been supplemented, expanded, and annotated. God only knows about the Obama people -- they've got a billion dollars! And how about my friends over at American Bridge (the Democrat-leaning political action committee)? Clearly Mitt is merely in the beginning of this tax-return, financial-disclosure, Cayman Island (and God only knows what else) fiasco.
Your new front-runner is one of your old front runners, Newt Gingrich. I would like to take a moment to revel: I cannot personally tell you how pleased I am to see old Newt rise to the top after listening to all of your nauseating, sickening lectures on the evils of government and the importance of family values.
Now, you guys have to deal with a $1.6 million Freddie Mac consultant (who says he wasn't a lobbyist) who has been married three times. Hope you, at least, enjoy the Super Bowl. It could be your last hurrah for a while.
PS -- As my former boss once said, I feel your pain. That's why I didn't mention Rick Perry.

Editor's note: James Carville is a Democratic strategist who serves as a political contributor for CNN, appearing frequently on CNN's "The Situation Room" as well as other programs on all CNN networks. Carville remains active in Democratic politics and is a party fundraiser.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/21/opinion/carville-republican-disaster/index.html?hpt=hp_bn9

Memory: and Our 'Self'

2012-01-15T15:29:00.000-08:00

Our ability to remember forms the basis of who we are and is a psychological trick that fascinates cognitive scientists. But how reliable are our memories?

Memory is our past and future. To know who you are as a person, you need to have some idea of who you have been. And, for better or worse, your remembered life story is a pretty good guide to what you will do tomorrow. "Our memory is our coherence," wrote the surrealist Spanish-born film-maker, Luis Buñuel, "our reason, our feeling, even our action." Lose your memory and you lose a basic connection with who you are.

It's no surprise, then, that there is fascination with this quintessentially human ability. When I cast back to an event from my past – let's say the first time I ever swam backstroke unaided in the sea – I don't just conjure up dates and times and places (what psychologists call "semantic memory"). I do much more than that. I am somehow able to reconstruct the moment in some of its sensory detail, and relive it, as it were, from the inside. I am back there, amid the sights and sounds and seaside smells. I become a time traveller who can return to the present as soon as the demands of "now" intervene.

This is quite a trick, psychologically speaking, and it has made cognitive scientists determined to find out how it is done. The sort of memory I have described is known as "autobiographical memory", because it is about the narrative we make from the happenings of our own lives. It is distinguished from semantic memory, which is memory for facts, and other kinds of implicit long-term memory, such as your memory for complex actions such as riding a bike or playing a saxophone.

When you ask people about their memories, they often talk as though they were material possessions, enduring representations of the past to be carefully guarded and deeply cherished. But this view of memory is quite wrong. Memories are not filed away in the brain like so many video cassettes, to be slotted in and played when it's time to recall the past. Sci-fi and fantasy fictions might try to persuade us otherwise, but memories are not discrete entities that can be taken out of one person's head, Dumbledore-style, and distilled for someone else's viewing. They are mental reconstructions, nifty multimedia collages of how things were, that are shaped by how things are now. Autobiographical memories are stitched together as and when they are needed from information stored in many different neural systems. That makes them curiously susceptible to distortion, and often not nearly as reliable as we would like.

We know this from many different sources of evidence. Psychologists have conducted studies on eyewitness testimony, for example, showing how easy it is to change someone's memories by asking misleading questions. If the experimental conditions are set up correctly, it turns out to be rather simple to give people memories for events that never actually happened. These recollections can often be very vivid, as in the case of a study by Kim Wade at the University of Warwick. She colluded with the parents of her student participants to get photos from the undergraduates' childhoods, and to ascertain whether certain events, such as a ride in a hot-air balloon, had ever happened. She then doctored some of the images to show the participant's childhood face in one of these never-experienced contexts, such as the basket of a hot-air balloon in flight. Two weeks after they were shown the pictures, about half of the participants "remembered" the childhood balloon ride, producing some strikingly vivid descriptions, and many showed surprise when they heard that the event had never occurred. In the realms of memory, the fact that it is vivid doesn't guarantee that it really happened.

Even highly emotional memories are susceptible to distortion. The term "flashbulb memory" describes those exceptionally vivid memories of momentous events that seem burned in by the fierce emotions they invoke. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, a consortium of researchers mobilised to gather people's stories about how they heard the news. When followed up three years later, almost half of the testimonies had changed in at least one key detail. For example, people would remember hearing the news from the TV, when actually they initially told the researchers that they had heard it through word of mouth.

What accounts for this unreliability? One factor must be that remembering is always re-remembering. If I think back to how I heard the awful news about 9/11 (climbing out of a swimming pool in Spain), I know that I am not remembering the event so much as my last act of remembering it. Like a game of Chinese whispers, any small error is likely to be propagated along the chain of remembering. The sensory impressions that I took from the event are likely to be stored quite accurately. It is the assembly – the resulting edit – that might not bear much resemblance to how things actually were.

When we look at how memories are constructed by the brain, the unreliability of memory makes perfect sense. In storyboarding an autobiographical memory, the brain combines fragments of sensory memory with a more abstract knowledge about events, and reassembles them according to the demands of the present. The memory researcher Martin Conway has described how two forces go head to head in remembering. The force of correspondence tries to keep memory true to what actually happened, while the force of coherence ensures that the emerging story fits in with the needs of the self, which often involves portraying the ego in the best possible light.

One of the most interesting writers on memory, Virginia Woolf, shows this process in action. In her autobiographical essay, A Sketch of the Past, she tells us that one of her earliest memories is of the pattern of flowers on her mother's dress, seen close-up as she rested on her lap during a train journey to St Ives. She initially links the memory to the outward journey to Cornwall, noting that it is convenient to do so because it points to what was actually her earliest memory: lying in bed in her St Ives nursery listening to the sound of the sea. But Woolf also acknowledges an inconvenient fact. The quality of the light in the carriage suggests that it is evening, making it more likely that the event happened on the journey back from St Ives to London. The force of correspondence makes her want to stick to the facts; the force of coherence wants to tell a good story.

How many more of our memories are a story to suit the self? There can be no doubt that our current emotions and beliefs shape the memories that we create. It is hard to remember the political beliefs of our pasts, for example, when so much has changed in the world and in ourselves. How many of us can accurately recall the euphoria at Tony Blair's election in 1997? When our present-day emotions change, so do our memories. Julian Barnes describes this beautifully in his Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending, when a shift in his protagonist Tony's feelings towards his former lover's parents unlocks new memories of their relationship. "But what if, even at a late stage, your emotions relating to those long-ago events and people change? … I don't know if there's a scientific explanation for this … All I can say is that it happened, and that it astonished me."

Of all the memories we cherish, those from childhood are possibly the most special. Few of us will have reliable memories from before three or four years of age, and recollections from before that time need to be treated with scepticism. When you think about the special cognitive tricks involved in autobiographical memory, it's perhaps no surprise that it takes a while for children to start doing it right. Many factors seem to be critical in children's emergence from childhood amnesia, including language and narrative abilities. When we are able to encode our experience in words, it becomes much easier to put it together into a memory. Intriguingly, though, the boundary of childhood amnesia shifts as you get closer to it. As a couple of recent studies have shown, if you ask children about what they remember from infancy, they remember quite a bit further back than they are likely to do as adults.

There are implications to the unreliability of childhood memories. A recent report commissioned by the British Psychological Society warned professionals working in the legal system not to accept early memories (dating from before the age of three) without corroborating evidence. One particular difficulty with early memories is their susceptibility to contamination by visual images, such as photographs and video. I'm sure that several of my childhood memories are actually memories of seeing myself in photos. When we look back into the past, we are always doing so through a prism of intervening selves. That makes it all the more important for psychologists studying memory to look for confirming evidence when asking people to recall their pasts.

And yet these untrustworthy memories are among the most cherished we have. Memories of childhood are often made out to have a particular kind of authenticity; we think they must be pure because we were cognitively so simple back then. We don't associate the slipperiness of memory with the guilelessness of youth. When you read descriptions of people's very early memories, you see that they often function as myths of creation. Your first memory is special because it represents the point when you started being who you are. In Woolf's case, that moment in her bed in the St Ives nursery was the moment she became a conscious being. "If life has a base that it stands upon," she wrote, "if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills – then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory."

What should we do about this troublesome mental function? For one thing, I don't think we should stop valuing it. Memory can lead us astray, but then it is a machine with many moving parts, and consequently many things that can go awry. Perhaps even that is the wrong way of looking at it. The great pioneer of memory research, Daniel Schacter, has argued that, even when it is failing, memory is doing exactly the thing it is supposed to do. And that purpose is as much about looking into the future as it is about looking into the past. There is only a limited evolutionary advantage in being able to reminisce about what happened to you, but there is a huge payoff in being able to use that information to work out what is going to happen next. Similar neural systems seem to underpin past-related and future-related thinking. Memory is endlessly creative, and at one level it functions just as imagination does.

That's how I think we should value memory: as a means for endlessly rewriting the self. It's important not to push the analogy with storytelling too far, but it's a valuable one. Writing about her novel, Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel has explained how she brought the protagonist Thomas Cromwell alive for the reader by giving him vivid memories. When writers create imaginary memories for their characters, they do a similar kind of thing to what we all do when we make a memory. They weave together bits of their own personal experience, emotions and sensory impressions and the minutiae of specific contexts, and tailor them into a story by hanging them on to a framework of historical fact. They do all that while making them fit the needs of the narrative, serving the story as much as they serve truth.

To emphasise its narrative nature is not to undermine memory's value. It is simply to be realistic about this everyday psychological miracle. If we can be more honest about memory's quirks, we can get along with it better. When I think back to my first attempt at solo swimming, it doesn't bother me that I have probably got some of the details wrong. It might be a fiction, but it's my fiction, and I treasure it. Memory is like that. It makes storytellers of us all.

• Charles Fernyhough is a writer and psychologist. His book on autobiographical memory, Pieces of Light: How we Imagine the Past and Remember the Future, is published by Profile Books in July. You can pre-order it here. He is the author of The Baby in the Mirror (Granta), a reader in psychology at Durham University and a faculty member of the School of Life. You can follow him on Twitter at @cfernyhough

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/13/our-memories-tell-our-story

U.S. Meat Banned In Europe----WHY???

2012-01-14T12:20:00.000-08:00

Instead of forcing Europe to open its markets to U.S. beef, why not just quit implanting hormones in American cattle? When U.S. and Canadian beef cattle go to feedlots, hormone pellets are implanted under the ear skin, a process that is repeated at the midpoint of their 100-day fattening period. The hormones increase the weight of the cattle, adding to profits by about $80 per animal.

The most common hormone in current use is estradiol, a potent cancer-causing and gene-damaging estrogen. The FDA maintains that residues of estradiol and other hormones in meat are within "normal" levels, and has waived any requirements for monitoring and chemical testing.

Europe, however, has rightly eyed U.S. claims with great skepticism and since 1989 the European Union has forbidden the sale of beef from hormone-treated cattle. The opening of global markets has placed that ban under attack.

On Feb. 17, a panel of World Trade Organization judges began closed hearings on a U.S. and Canadian challenge charging that the European ban is merely protectionist and is costing North America $100 million a year in lost exports.

The FDA's claims of safety were endorsed by a 1987 report of two U.N. bodies, the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization, an endorsement that is the main basis of the U.S. and Canadian action against Europe. The joint committee that prepared the report, however, has minimal expertise in public health and high representation of veterinary scientists and senior FDA and U.S. Department of Agriculture officials. Relying heavily on unpublished industry information and outdated scientific citations, the committee claimed that hormone residues in legally implanted cattle are so low that eating treated meat could not possibly induce any hormonal or carcinogenic effects.

However, confidential industry reports to the FDA, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal high hormone residues in meat products even under ideal test conditions. Following a single ear implant in steers of Synovex-S, a combination of estradiol and progesterone, estradiol levels in different meat products were up to 20-fold higher than normal. The amount of estradiol in two hamburgers eaten in one day by an 8-year-old boy could increase his total hormone levels by as much as 10%, based on conservative assumptions, because young children have very low natural hormone levels.

In real life, the situation may be much worse. An unpublicized random USDA survey of 32 large feedlots found that as many as half the cattle had visible illegal "misplaced implants" in muscle, rather than under ear skin. This would result in very high local concentrations of hormones, and also elevated levels in muscle meat at distant sites. Such abuse is very hard to detect.

Responding to European concerns, the USDA recently claimed that, based on standard residue monitoring programs, drug levels in violation of regulations have not been detected in meat products. However, of 130 million livestock commercially slaughtered in 1993, not one was tested for estradiol or any related hormone.

The question we ought to be asking is not why Europe won't buy our hormone-treated meat, but why we allow beef from hormone-treated cattle to be sold to American and Canadian consumers. Untreated meat is currently hard to find and expensive; if it were widely produced and available, the price would come down. At the least, meat produced from hormone-treated animals should be explicitly labeled.

These hormones are linked ever more closely to the escalating incidence of reproductive cancers in the U.S. since 1950-55% for breast cancer, 120% for testicular cancer and 190% for prostate cancer. The endocrine-disruptive effects of estrogenic pesticides and other industrial food contaminants known as xenoestrogens are now under intensive investigation by federal regulatory and health agencies. But the contamination of meat with residues of the far-more-potent estradiol remains ignored.

The world trade judges ought to listen to one of the top FDA officials involved in meat safety, David Livingston. In Orville Schell's 1984 meat industry expose, "Modern Meat," Livingston is quoted as saying, "Well, if you're going to have enough inexpensive meat for everyone, you're going to have to use some of these drugs. But personally, I'd rather eat meat that was raised without them." In other words, what's good enough for the rest of us is not something he wants to eat.

http://articles.latimes.com/1997-03-24/local/me-41521_1_hormone-levels

Losing Weight The Hard Way

2012-01-11T04:31:00.000-08:00

Consumers ought to put up their guard when they spot ads that use the words "weight loss" and "free trial" – especially when those phrases are used in combination.

Weight loss is rarely as easy as taking a pill, and "free trials" are not, as some ads imply, physician-managed drug trials.

As for "free," don't bet on it.

In the latest Federal Trade Commission strike against inflated weight loss claims and bogus free trials, the agency announced this week that a marketer of acai berry supplements and colon cleansers will repay $1.5 million to consumers to settle charges over its ads and billing practices.

The case is worth reviewing, considering this is the time of year many consumers resolve – at least briefly -- to shed a few pounds.

The $1.5 million settlement stems from a suit the FTC filed last year against Phoenix-based Central Coast Nutraceuticals. The suit accused the marketer of Acai Pure supplements and ColoPure and Colotox colon cleanser of misleading consumers into believing the products had been endorsed by Oprah Winfrey and Rachel Ray.

Central Coast and four related companies claimed that Acai Pure supplements could "flush out excess pounds" and that people who wanted to lose significant amounts fast might "qualify" for the supplement by answering a series of questions.

Regardless of how people answered these questions, they qualified for the free trial, FTC said.

The catch with any free trial – whether it's a diet product or tooth whitener -- is that a consumer has to cancel by a certain date to avoid additional shipments and the hefty charges that go with them.

Canceling, though, isn't always easy.

In Central Coast's case, consumers were told they could try the product "risk free" as long as they returned the product within 14 days if they decided they didn't want it.

According to the FTC's suit:

•The company didn't tell consumers until after they received the product that to return it, they must first get a return authorization from the company.

• Consumers who asked for a return authorization complained their requests were ignored.

• Consumers who shipped the product back without the authorization found that the company charged them anyway – and sometimes threw in a restocking fee.

The practices, the FTC said, "made it all but impossible (for consumers) to avoid paying full price for the products, typically $39.95 to $59.95."

The defendants are banned from offering free trials to consumers as part of the settlement.

If the practices of Central Coast sound familiar, it's because pitches like this are all over the Internet and air waves.

Last fall, the FTC convinced a court to temporarily halt free trials for weight loss products, free credit reports and tooth whiteners by a Canadian marketer, Jesse Willms, and his affiliates. In that suit, the FTC contended consumers lost $450 million to free trials they couldn't cancel.

Last spring, the agency cracked down on sites that advertised weight loss products with fabricated "news" reports that used the names of real media outlets.

If you're tempted by a "free trial" offer, protect yourself by:

• Researching the seller. The Better Business Bureau (www.bbb.org/us) provides company reports.

• Reading terms carefully. Find out exactly what you'll need to do to cancel – and the date by which you must act. Uncheck prechecked order boxes that might obligate you to pay for additional items.

• Paying safely. If you order with a credit card, you'll have the right to dispute if terms change. If you use another method of payment, you won't. You only have 60 days to file a credit dispute – so don't let bogus refund promises lull you into missing that deadline.

• Complaining if things go wrong. If a company doesn't do what it promises –or if it springs new terms on you after you order, complain to the FTC at ftc.gov or 1-877-382-4357.

Better yet, try this risk-free trial instead: Head to your local library and check out materials that will help you improve your diet and begin a sensible exercise program.

http://www.cleveland.com/consumeraffairs/index.ssf/2012/01/losing_weight_the_hard_way_pla.html

Meatless in the Midwest: A Tale of Survival

2012-01-10T16:05:00.000-08:00

IN an ideal world, vegetarians would be built like camels. Not humpbacked, of course, but able to sustain themselves through long stretches by tapping stored energy reserves, like previously consumed soy products.
But after the first three dinners in my new hometown, where I moved from New York to cover the Midwest for this newspaper, even this veteran vegetarian was flagging.

This city, after all, is celebrated as a Mecca of meat. And any newcomer should expect to start with a tour of the most venerable purveyors of cows, pigs and chickens in what I’ve been told are their most delicious forms.
So, yes, I’ve “eaten” at some of these famous restaurants. There was the meal at the Golden Ox steakhouse (baked potato), Stroud’s fried chicken (rolls) and Arthur Bryant’s barbecue, where, searching for vegetarian options on the menu, skipping over the lard-bathed French fries, pausing to consider the coleslaw, I ordered the safest option (a mug of Budweiser).

After three days of this, starving, I went alone to the nearest Chinese restaurant I could find, where I feasted on a steaming plate of meatless mapo tofu.
It should be stated right up front that the Midwest, with its rich culture, stark natural beauty and superlative decency, quickly defies stereotypes. Living in the middle of the country is very different from living in the middle of nowhere.
But make no mistake: meat-loving is one stereotype that the region wears with pride. Lard still plays a starring role in many kitchens, bacon comes standard in salads, and perhaps the most important event on Kansas City social calendars is a barbecue contest.
Even though the region boasts some of the finest farmland in the world, there is a startling lack of fresh produce here. This is a part of the country — and there’s no polite way to put this — where the most common vegetable you’ll see on dinner plates is iceberg lettuce.

“The mentality of the Midwest is, green is garnish,” explained Heidi Van Pelt-Belle, who runs Füd, a vegetarian restaurant in Kansas City.

As a result, many heartland vegetarians say that eating, that most essential activity, can be a constant struggle. Longtime members of the club recall the days when doctors and family members alike warned that forgoing meat would result in serious malnutrition. This was not hyperbole to those who, lacking other options, subsisted on pizza.
Over the years, many have learned tricks, like calling ahead to a restaurant to negotiate a special entree. Dinner party? Best to eat first, knowing that side dishes might be the only options. Some say they have learned to cook for themselves more, to avoid the inevitable barrage of questions, if not outright mockery, that comes with eating in public.

Just outside Iowa City, Sparti’s Gyros taunts vegetarians even as it caters to them. The menu includes the Greek Veggie Wheat Pita, but adds a punch line: “For people who just don’t like eating. Put some meat on it!”

In Nebraska, a place where cattle outnumber people, vegetarians are sometimes accused of undermining the state economy. The owner of what was billed as the lone vegetarian restaurant in Omaha said it had several pounds of ground beef thrown at its doors shortly after opening. After a short run, it closed last year.
“Being a vegetarian in Nebraska is like being a Republican in Brooklyn — less of an outcast than a novelty,” said David Rosen, who became a vegetarian as a teenager in Omaha and is now a writer in Brooklyn. “Except that you don’t have to prepare special meals for Republicans.”

But around the Midwest, the situation has improved, vegetarians acknowledge, not least because hummus inexplicably has joined Tater Tots as standard bar fare. There are two fully vegetarian restaurants in Kansas City, and most restaurants in the bigger cities of the region offer at least one vegetarian-friendly option.
There are all sorts of compelling reasons people become vegetarian. Health. Discomfort with the killing of animals. Environmental concerns.

My own reason requires no soapbox. I never liked meat. And when I learned, while eating a burger at the cafeteria of the American Museum of Natural History at age 5, that “meat” was actually a euphemism for — and even dedicated carnivores hate being reminded of this — muscle, I felt my preference had received a hearty endorsement from common sense. Over time, even chicken stock disappeared from my diet.

Some patrons, unlike the reporter, line up for brisket at Arthur Bryant’s barbecue, in Kansas City, Mo.

Friends and family members have regarded my status as a vegetarian with curiosity and amusement over the years. But even with that practice I was unprepared for the barrage of jokes that followed the announcement of my assignment covering the Midwest — some playing on the theme of squandered opportunity (how could someone turn down all that delicious barbecue?) and others hinting at concerns about survival (are you sure you know what you’re getting yourself into?).

There is, both here and elsewhere, something about being a vegetarian in Kansas City that simply strikes people as funny.

In truth, it is less satisfying to be a vegetarian here. Those on the coasts have it better. Like many of my brethren, I have instinctively gravitated to cuisine from faraway places where meat is a luxury not all can afford. In New York this meant frequenting terrific Indian, Thai, Ethiopian, Lebanese and Venezuelan restaurants. But here — with a notable few exceptions like the Aladdin (the best lentil soup I’ve ever had), Blue Koi (expert dumplings and noodle dishes) and Lill’s (terrific Spanish tapas) — the best options are better described as good enough.

To be fair, that is probably more than can be said for my cooking, which typically consists of simple batches of rice and beans large enough to sustain a week of protein-rich lunches. And my attempts to teach myself to make my favorite Indian dishes have had the unintended effect of making the local Indian restaurants that I had thought lacking suddenly appear more palatable.

But most difficulty comes on the road during reporting trips in an area that stretches from Oklahoma to North Dakota. And though many meals, particularly in small towns, are of the bread-and-water variety, I have stumbled upon some decent restaurants as well: Japanese in Tulsa, Okla.; Indian in Lincoln, Neb.; Ethiopian in Sioux Falls, S.D.; Italian in Minot, N.D.; and, my favorite place to stop on a reporting trip, Thai Spice, just outside Joplin, Mo.

Along the way I’ve also picked up a few valuable lessons for vegetarians roaming these wide open spaces. In no particular order: check out Web sites detailing the vegetarian options at fast-food chains; look for Chinese restaurants, which consistently turn up in the most unexpected places; carry a jar of peanut butter everywhere; and never underestimate the potato — what it lacks in flavor it makes up for in ubiquity.

And, finally, it is important to not forget that hunger is the price a picky eater must be willing to pay without becoming insufferable.

During a recent visit to the Ranchito Tex-Mex Cafe in Hugoton, Kan., a small community encircled by feedlots packed with cattle and the plants that process them, I inquired if the beans at the restaurant were prepared with meat.

“There’s no meat,” the waitress replied helpfully. “It’s just pinto beans smashed up with lard.”

Lard, of course, is rendered pork fat.

A day later and a day hungrier, a waitress at the Down-Town Restaurant in nearby Ulysses was more understanding and forthcoming about ingredients. The beans had lard. The rice had chicken stock. And on it went.

“You want a salad,” she finally declared.

This, for the record, is one of the great misconceptions of vegetarians. Most do not, in fact want a salad. We want something with a bit more substance.

But a salad it was. And yes, iceberg lettuce. Thankfully, no bacon.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/dining/a-vegetarians-struggle-for-sustenance-in-the-midwest.html?hp

Nurse reveals the top 5 regrets people make on their deathbed

2012-01-09T01:57:00.000-08:00

For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives. People grow a lot when they are faced with their own mortality.

I learned never to underestimate someone’s capacity for growth. Some changes were phenomenal. Each experienced a variety of emotions, as expected, denial, fear, anger, remorse, more denial and eventually acceptance. Every single patient found their peace before they departed though, every one of them.

When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. Here are the most common five:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
This was the most common regret of all. When people realize that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.

It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way. From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.

2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.
This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.

By simplifying your lifestyle and making conscious choices along the way, it is possible to not need the income that you think you do. And by creating more space in your life, you become happier and more open to new opportunities, ones more suited to your new lifestyle.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.

We cannot control the reactions of others. However, although people may initially react when you change the way you are by speaking honestly, in the end it raises the relationship to a whole new and healthier level. Either that or it releases the unhealthy relationship from your life. Either way, you win.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.

It is common for anyone in a busy lifestyle to let friendships slip. But when you are faced with your approaching death, the physical details of life fall away. People do want to get their financial affairs in order if possible. But it is not money or status that holds the true importance for them. They want to get things in order more for the benefit of those they love. Usually though, they are too ill and weary to ever manage this task. It is all comes down to love and relationships in the end. That is all that remains in the final weeks, love and relationships.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realize until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again. When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. How wonderful to be able to let go and smile again, long before you are dying.

Life is a choice. It is YOUR life. Choose consciously, choose wisely, choose honestly. Choose happiness.

http://www.ariseindiaforum.org/nurse-reveals-the-top-5-regrets-people-make-on-their-deathbed/

The Iowa Caucuses & Extremism (from the NY Times)

2012-01-04T04:56:00.000-08:00

The Iowa caucuses, in which a nation awaits the verdict of a handful of some of its least representative citizens, are not going to settle the race for the Republican nomination for president. But they did put on display the choice the Republicans present to voters: right, far right or the far, far right.

The caucuses Tuesday night were headed to an astonishing draw between Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney, followed by Ron Paul. More than anything, the tight finish suggested that Mr. Romney has had a hard time selling his recently minted conservatism to hard-core Republican conservatives; two-thirds of caucusgoers identified themselves as Tea Party supporters.

The Republican caucuses only do a middling job of predicting who will win the presidency in November. But, this year, perhaps more than others, they were an important event to watch for any American voter.

The errors, absurd misstatements and unrelenting extremism were not the result of some “gotcha” moment in which a candidate was cornered in an interview or debate by a tricky (or maybe not so tricky) question. The Republicans have had months, millions of dollars and the advantage of there being no competing Democratic contest, to present the images of their own choosing — and they are dark and disturbing.

The candidates were all nasty to each other; Newt Gingrich called Mr. Romney a “liar” on Tuesday. But when it came to President Obama, they were off the charts with baseless charges that would be laughable if they were not so insulting to the president and to the intelligence of voters.

Iowa’s economy is not as bad as that in many parts of the country, so the candidates mainly tried to outbid each other in pandering to its socially conservative Republicans. Mr. Gingrich served up a right-wing theology that would dismantle every social advance since the institution of child labor laws and eviscerate the judiciary that has protected civil rights for a half-century.

Mr. Santorum talked endlessly about his opposition to a woman’s right to choose an abortion and gay Americans’ right to marry, while insisting that he would protect Americans’ right to carry guns anywhere at anytime.

Even then, he had a hard time keeping up with Representative Michele Bachmann, founder of the House Tea Party caucus, who said she was the only Republican who would defend “faith, marriage and the protection of life from conception to natural death.”

Representative Paul delighted young crowds with his libertarian slogans — no war, no Federal Reserve, basically no government — but seemed to have no real ideas other than to follow the literal words of the Constitution. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas based virtually his entire appeal on his religious faith — a desperation play that failed and led him to retreat to Texas to decide whether to continue his obviously pointless candidacy.

In the middle of all this, of course, was Mr. Romney, no real conservative trying to be all forms of conservative — forswearing his belief in abortion rights and global warming while insisting the health care reform he championed in Massachusetts isn’t right for the rest of the country. He rivaled Mr. Gingrich in his false attacks on Mr. Obama, including claiming that the president travels the world apologizing for America.

As the Republican competition moves to New Hampshire next week, it is likely to focus less on social issues and more on economic issues. But that means even more of the slash-and-burn economics and class warfare that were also on display here.

Primaries bring out the extremism in candidates, but this year seems much worse because the “center” of the Republican Party has lurched so far to the right. The only good news in this primary season is that the more Americans listen to the Republican hopefuls, the more the voters will realize how out of touch these candidates are with the majority of Americans.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/opinion/the-iowa-caucuses.html?_r=2&src=tp&smid=fb-share

Will 'Semi-Vegan' Work For You???

2011-12-29T19:55:00.000-08:00

Among your other resolutions — do more good? make more money? — you’ve probably made the annual pledge to eat better, although this concept may be more often reduced simply to “lose some weight.” The weight-loss obsession is both a national need and a neurotic urge (those last five pounds really don’t matter, either cosmetically or medically). But most of us do need to eat “better.”

If defining this betterness has become increasingly more difficult (half the diet books that spilled over my desk in December focused on going gluten-free), the core of the answer is known to everyone: eat more plants. And if the diet that most starkly represents this — veganism — is no longer considered bizarre or unreasonably spartan, neither is it exactly mainstream. (For the record, vegans don’t simply avoid meat; they eschew all animal products, including dairy, eggs and even honey.)

Many vegan dishes, however, are already beloved: we eat fruit salad, peanut butter and jelly, beans and rice, eggplant in garlic sauce. The problem faced by many of us — brought up as we were with plates whose center was filled with a piece of an animal — is in imagining less-traditional vegan dishes that are creative, filling, interesting and not especially challenging to either put together or enjoy.

My point here is to make semi-veganism work for you. Once a week, let bean burgers stand in for hamburgers, leave the meat out of your pasta sauce, make a risotto the likes of which you’ve probably never had — and you may just find yourself eating “better.”

These recipes serve about four, and in all, the addition of salt and pepper is taken for granted. This is not a gimmick or even a diet. It’s a path, and the smart resolution might be to get on it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/mark-bittman-going-semi-vegan.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1325214998-j2kp1Np5tNOndQgNDe/1tA

Stylin' & Drivin' In The Rose Parade

2011-12-27T19:03:00.000-08:00

HOW hard can it be to travel five and half miles at 2.5 m.p.h.?

Difficult enough: if you’re the pilot of a 22-wheel, 120-foot-long vehicle that weighs 110,000 pounds, even a simple right turn can have profound consequences.

Yet a small cadre of drivers finds the experience of blind-driving a balky Rose Parade float so satisfying that they come back new year after new year.

Wes Hupp, for example, has driven (or served as an observer, acting as the eyes for the driver tucked under the platform) in 34 Rose Parades. A resident of Weston, Vt., he is paying his own airfare to take part in the 123rd annual parade on Jan. 2 — to be held on Monday in keeping with the Pasadena Tournament of Roses’ never-on-Sunday rule.

PARADE DRESS Natural Balance's Rose Parade float in 2011 weighed 84,300 pounds.

This time, Mr. Hupp, a 51-year-old pharmaceutical chemicals buyer, will serve as observer for Greg Hill, a 46-year-old health care technology project manager from Huntington Beach, Calif., who will be at the wheel. It will be their 17th consecutive year as teammates, and their assignment is literally the biggest challenge yet for Rose Parade drivers: they will maneuver the longest and heaviest single float ever to follow the parade’s 5.5-mile route.

The float, called Surf’s Up, was conceived by Dick Van Patten’s Natural Balance Pet Foods to fit the 2012 parade theme of “Just Imagine.” What the float imagines is a canine surfing paradise: an onboard wave machine will send seven actual dogs, riding eight-foot surfboards, down a 66-foot-long pool filled with 6,600 gallons of heated water.

Powering the massive Surf’s Up float is a gasoline-burning Ford V-10 truck engine mated to a 6-speed automatic transmission. A transfer case further increases the gear ratio for continuous low-speed travel in first gear.

The first significant landmark on the parade route is the Tournament House on Orange Grove Boulevard, and just beyond that is the first big challenge, a 107-degree right-hand turn onto Colorado Boulevard that makes drivers sweat. Known as “camera corner,” this is the prime viewing spot for broadcast crews and thousands of grandstand spectators. To Mr. Hupp, who grew up in nearby Monrovia, the turn is “wicked.”

In his observer role, Mr. Hupp will sit in the lifeguard tower on the float’s nose. He will relay instructions by intercom to Mr. Hill in the driver’s compartment, nestled beside the engine bay underneath the front end of the pool.

“Greg doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing unless I tell him,” Mr. Hupp said recently by telephone from Vermont. “A wrong decision can get you some real excitement.” The two men endure this pressure and discomfort neither for glory nor a fat paycheck. Each receives $250 from Fiesta Parade Floats, the company that Natural Balance hired to build and operate Surf’s Up. Construction began in October.

The depressed economy has forced some longtime participants like the City of Long Beach and the Budweiser Clydesdales out of the 2012 parade; one float-building operation has shut down. But the president of Natural Balance, Joey Herrick, says his company will have around $300,000 “at least” wrapped up in its record-breaking effort.

Since first entering a float in 2009, the company has made its Rose Parade participation a centerpiece of its marketing and promotion efforts. “We work it like nobody’s ever worked it,” Mr. Herrick said.

While Mr. Herrick’s eyes are on the company’s target of six billion media impressions, Mr. Hupp could be said to see things through the other end of the telescope. Part of his motivation to return each year, he says, is the camaraderie of the crews on the nights before the parades, when drivers stay with their floats, tell tales and get little sleep.

“There’s only a hundred and some-odd people that do this every year,” he said. “Out of the billions of people that are alive and walking this earth, only a small handful can say they’ve driven in the Rose Parade.”

The appeal certainly doesn’t lie in plush accommodations within the driver’s compartment. Despite the advanced design and engineering of the elaborate, moving displays, the floats are in some respects nearly as primitive as their very earliest predecessors.

For example, on Jan. 2, 1905, The Pasadena Daily News reported: “Harry Zier’s automobile was a dream of beauty. The scheme was a barge and the striking effect was made by covering the big touring car entirely with a frame, boat-shaped, so that not a bit of running gear was visible.”

Three years later, the Redondo Beach Chamber of Commerce entered a 41-foot automotive whale that wagged its tail and flapped its flippers.

If anyone could be called the Harley Earl of parade floats, it would be Isabella Coleman, a local woman who, over six decades, made the motorized displays not only lower, longer and sleeker, but also more ornate, with well-integrated floral designs.

While the aesthetics improved markedly throughout the 20th century, the mechanical underpinnings evolved relatively little. The chassis of today’s float typically has no suspension whatsoever. In the austere driver’s compartment, there is a single seat of bare plywood.

“We usually bring a stadium seat cushion, or we bring hemorrhoid donuts,” Mr. Hupp said. “The problem with those is, they always end up getting punctured or ripped. It’s like going to San Francisco, blindfolded, on a piece of wood.”

In close proximity to the big engine, the driver can also expect temperatures of up to 120 degrees. A small electric fan is provided, but it does not offer much relief.

Decorating the floats with flowers, seeds and other natural elements leaves debris in odd places. “Every time you turn the fan on, you get a face full of seeds,” Mr. Hupp said. “I don’t care if you’ve been driving an hour. You turn on the fan again, you’re always going to get something in the face.”

It was ever thus. In the official 1949 parade program, an essay addressed the plight of “the forgotten man” who drives the float:

“He breathes in dust and fumes which are impossible for him to avoid. On a hot day he is drenched with perspiration. On un-California-like days he enjoys his own series of chills. Doing a fine job, lacking any applause, appreciated by but a few, he works for varying amounts and a ticket to the Rose Bowl game. The line for those who want to drive floats next year forms to the right, and please don’t crowd.”

But Mr. Hupp may not line up for 2013. Last week, he phoned the president of Fiesta Parade Floats and announced his intention to retire. “The stress is almost too much,” he said, referring to the challenge of negotiating the course in ever-larger floats. “They’re pushing the limits, and this is as far as I really want to go with it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/automobiles/with-22-wheels-its-tricky-on-the-turns.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

The Pope Needs An Eye Exam

2011-12-27T00:22:00.000-08:00

During the Christmas Eve Mass, Pope Benedict XVI urged the faithful to:

"Let us ask the Lord to help us see through the superficial glitter of this season"…

All well and good, except that he did this while wearing gold brocade, sitting on a golden throne surrounded by golden trappings, holding up a book festooned in golden decorations. Not to mention the Vatican’s vast wealth in cash and treasures.

“How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?”
–Jesus

http://pamshouseblend.firedoglake.com/2011/12/26/someone-has-a-golden-plank-in-his-eye-2/

Shimmering Nostalgia: The Aluminum Christmas Tree

2011-12-18T15:21:00.000-08:00

They entice and satisfy. They shimmer and spin. And these days, after years of near extinction, aluminum Christmas trees are back in the limelight, beloved by mid-century modern aficionados as the ultimate in holiday décor.

Once derisively called 'tin Tannenbaums,' aluminum Christmas trees provoked or infuriated many people when they first hit the market in 1959—but entranced so many others.

Jerry Waak, a sales manager for the Aluminum Specialty Company, the outfit that first mass-produced the silver-needled tinsel trees, recalls typical reactions. "People would laugh," recalls Waak. "Some people would say, 'You're kidding!' A lot of people said they would never sell. Some people would just about throw you out of their store."

But that wasn't what young Bill Yaryan thought about the aluminum tree his parents set up in their furniture store in the early 1960s. He'd sit on the floor and watch the silver tree rotate on its stand while the color wheel revolved as well in a kind of crazy dance.

"When the color wheel and tree were rotating, the effect was so wonderful and so totally artificial," says Yaryan, who lives in a modern Alexander home in the San Fernando Valley. "Tree, 'snow,' and ornaments would change in blazing unison to red, green, and blue, as the tree and wheel spun endlessly. It was completely unhinged from any other Christmas decorations in use then. Its space-age novelty was great."

Over the past few years, aluminum trees have made a comeback, and nowhere more so than in mid-century modern homes, where they just seem so—at home. What could be more eye-on-the-future, after all, or—dare we say it?—greener, than an aluminum Christmas tree?

"Aluminum," Gary Gand observes, "was the material that was going to save the earth back in the '50s. When we were kids, aluminum foil was just the greatest stuff. And aluminum cars."

"They are one of the great icons of the time," says Gand, who lives in an Alexander tract home in Palm Springs and in a Keck-and-Keck modernist home near Chicago, "like the boomerang, the Formica kitchen table top, and the TV dinner."

Unlike 'real' trees—but really, how is wood any 'realer' than aluminum?—the aluminum sort never drop their needles. "All the kitsch but no sticky pitch," is how Scot Nicholls, who lives in a San Jose Eichler, puts it. "There's no mess involved. Christmas goes up—and Christmas goes down and into a box, and it's gone. It's pretty easy."

And Gand, who insists against some evidence to the contrary that mid-century modern homes "are incredible green-friendly" thanks to passive solar design and compact plans, says that aluminum trees complete the environmentally friendly package.

"There's some astronomical number of Christmas trees that get thrown out every year. It's like 100 million trees every year. But people don't pay attention to it—because it's Christmas," he says. "The beauty of the aluminum tree, if you're a green person, it's the same tree over and over again for 50 years."

"The aluminum tree seemed to symbolize a new birth in technology, a better, more rational way of living," Julie Lindemann and John Shimon wrote in 'Season's Gleamings: The Art of the Aluminum Christmas Tree' (Melcher Media, 2004), their book that ignited the aluminum tree craze. They concluded: "The modernist Christmas had arrived."

Dave Peterson, who owns a San Jose Eichler home, sensed the modernist appeal of aluminum trees even when he was a boy living in his parents' 1870s Victorian home in Wisconsin—not far, coincidentally, from Manitowoc, where Aluminum Specialty manufactured its trees. Peterson's mother filled their home with precious antiques, and their Christmas was highly traditional.

But young Dave coveted his neighbor's Christmas. "The lady across the street from us had an aluminum tree in her picture window, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever."

"It's the rotating lights along with the chrome," he says. "Think about Cadillac bumpers—the chrome '50s."

But if 1950s modernism was all about rational planning and efficiency, then the aluminum tree transcends its genre—just as that other icon of the '50s, the flying saucer, transcends the U-2, not to mention anything flown by Pan Am. Lindemann and Shimon, who began their foray into aluminum mania by collecting as many Aluminum Specialty trees as they could find and arraying them, forest-like, in their art studio, picked up on this early.

"As we looked more and more closely at the trees in our studio," they wrote, "we became increasingly aware of their psychic presence. We wondered if their antenna-like forms attracted some kind of unknown magnetic energy and absorbed the vibrations into the wooden trunk?"
Their fellow Wisconsonite, Joe Kapler, takes a more hardheaded look, as befitting his position as a no-nonsense historian and curator at the Wisconsin Historical Museum, whose displays of historic aluminum trees have become legendary.
"I doubt that the good folks at Aluminum Specialty were thinking of modern aesthetics when they created this product," he observes. "They were doing aluminum toys, aluminum doggies, things that were classic.
"I'm sure they were not thinking, 'These would be great for all those new homes they're building in California.'"
As Waak recalls it, the mass-produced aluminum tree got its start when Tom Gannon, Aluminum Specialty's vice president in charge of toys, "took a gamble." The company had come upon a much costlier aluminum tree—selling for $75 to $100—invented in Chicago by a firm called Modern Coatings in 1957. "Gannon thought, if we could retail it for $25, and the customer could carry it out of the store in a box, we've got a hit."
Richard Thomsen, who ran Aluminum Specialty's engineering department, called on fellow engineer Wes Martin. Good choice. "If we had a product that we wanted to figure out," Waak says, "we'd give it to Wes. He'd come up with some weird things."
"Aluminum Specialty Co. took a good idea," Kapler says, "and made it great. They made it efficient and saleable."

Soon housewives laboring in converted naval barracks in Manitowoc—a blue-collar town on Lake Michigan that manufactured submarines during World War II—were inserting aluminum branches tipped with aluminum-foil needles into a wooden trunk.
They built the trees two, four, six, and seven feet high, sold them for $20 to $25, and did well when large tire showrooms—which don't sell many tires during the snowy Wisconsin winters—turned their glass-walled showrooms into glowing forests of aluminum trees.
Aluminum Specialty's first Evergleam-brand tree design made its debut at a toy show in spring 1959, pointing ahead to a very, very merry Christmas for the Waak family. "It became an instant hit," Waak says. The company produced between 200,000 and 300,000 Evergleams the first year alone, Waak estimates. "It was a salesman's dream to have this happen. Suddenly the guy who wouldn't give you the time of day is your best friend."
"Aluminum for lasting beauty," the company proclaimed. Aluminum Speciality also provided the Evergleam Color Wheel, the Santa-Light, and Turbo Color Projector to provide "a glorious panorama of slowly revolving colors."

"The thing you have to understand, these were seasonal products," Waak says. "Every season people want something new. These were new, and it catches the eye."
"Within a few years," Kapler says, "they were cranking them out by the millions."
Competition arrived within weeks. Dozens of firms, including Duralite Aluminum, Morris Novelties, Holiday Industries, Regal Electronics, Renown, and Astralite Ltd., were churning out their own aluminum trees. Some came out with budget models, others with luxury trees. Aluminum Specialty played it down the middle—and remained the market leader, with 65 percent of the market share in North America, Kapler says.
As Charles Darwin could have predicted, aluminum trees mutated and evolved over the years. "We tried putting ribbons on the ends of the branches, in different colors," Waak recalls. "Decorative balls. The revolving stand and lights."
Soon silver trees were joined in the forest by trees of pink, gold, and, unbelievably enough, green. By the third year, branches on Aluminum Specialty erupted in 'pom-poms.'

"By crinkling each needle on splitting machines, and curling it, it formed what we called a pom-pom," Waak says. "That was the biggest hit. You got a reflection of every needle because of the crimping, so you had the maximum amount of light being reflected. There was a real brilliance to it."

Full story at : www .eichlernetwork. com/article/shimmering-nostalgia-aluminum-christmas-tree

Face To Face Talking Is Soooo........Yesterday.

2011-12-17T12:00:00.000-08:00

We look askance at those young adults in a swivet of tech-enabled multifriending, endlessly texting, tracking one another’s movements — always distracted from what they are doing by what they are not doing, always connecting to people they are not with rather than people right in front of them.

But being neither here nor there has real upsides. It’s less strenuous. And it can be more uplifting. Or, at least, safer, which has a lot going for it these days.

Face time — or what used to be known as spending time with friends and family — is exhausting. Maybe that’s why we’re all so quick to abandon it. From grandfathers to tweenies, we’re all taking advantage of the ways in which we can avoid actually talking, much less seeing, one another — but still stay connected.

The last time I had face time with my mother, it started out fine. “What a lovely blouse,” she said, plucking lovingly (as I chose to think) at my velvet sleeve. I smiled, pleased that she was noticing that I had made an effort. “Too bad it doesn’t go with your skirt.” Had we been on Skype, she would never have noticed my (stylishly intentional, I might add, just ask Marni) intriguing mix of textures. And I would have been spared another bout of regressive face time freak-out.

Face time means you can’t search for intriguing recipes while you are listening to a fresh round of news about a friend’s search for a soul mate. You can’t mute yourself out of an endless meeting, or listen to 10 people tangled up in planning while you vacuum the living room. You can’t get “cut off” — Whoops! Sorry! Tunnel! — in the middle of a tedious litany of tax problems your accountant has spotted.

My move away from face time started with my children; they are generally the ones who lead us into the future. It happened gradually. First, they left home. That did it for face time. Then I stopped getting return phone calls to voice mails. That did it for voice time, which I’d used to wean myself from face time. What happened?

“Text, Mom.”

I don’t text. Rather, I didn’t text. Because before too long, it wasn’t just the kids who were no longer listening to voice messages. No one was. Neither was I. A quick glance at the record of who had called was enough. This is mainly because people no longer leave voice messages while they are curled up on a sofa, in the quiet comfort of their living rooms, ready to chat. Instead, they catch up while they are outside, on the way somewhere, so that their message is drowned out by sirens, honking trucks and whistling winds. Why bother to listen?

Texting didn’t last long with me; it is difficult to switch to reading glasses while negotiating sidewalk traffic. Now I simply ignore my phone — though I’m filled with admiration at the adroitness of codgers who are able to text and shop, or text and drink, or text and talk.

Now I’m even finding voice time an ordeal. After having had a career of offices to show up in every morning, I went into shock when I woke one morning to realize I had nowhere to go — and no more colleagues to see. No more meetings, no more hallway conversations, no more business lunches. No more face time, when you get down to it. I was upset about this, for months. After all, 30 years of doing work that depended on that chance conversation, that closed-door pep talk when something was wrong, that shared play of delight when something was right — these are difficult work habits to shake.

But now I spend a great deal of time at a computer on my kitchen table. I’m in comfortable sweaters and sweatpants — when I’ve managed to ditch the pajamas. When I attend meetings, it is via earbud.

At this point, Skype seems impossibly intimate — the worst of both worlds. Imagine having to see the person you are talking to, without being with them. Except with one’s mother, why would anyone want to do that?

Apple is now promoting an amiable new feature called, laughably, FaceTime — which, it claims, is remarkable: “talk, smile and laugh with anyone on an iPad 2, iPhone 4,” etc. “Catch up, hang out, joke around and stay in touch with just a click. Sure, it’s great to hear a voice. But it’s even better to see the face that goes with it.”

I’m not so sure. Seeing faces burdens us with responsibilities we may be too weary to shoulder. I’ve gotten used to not having to deal with everything that gets dragged in behind those voices, smiles and laughs. Things like the wince in the forehead, when you’ve been too sharp. Or the shadow across the eyes when you’ve hurt a feeling.

Face time conversation is very different from faceless conversation. Silence, for example, is meaningless in the faceless realm. Whereas, in face time, silences are resonant, often resplendent, moments of connection. Face-to-face silence means, I’m thinking, I’m listening, I’m searching, I’m feeling your pain. Not, I’ve hung up.

Recently I was talking to my 23-year-old son, Theo, about my nostalgia for LP record albums. Theo thought a moment and conceded that he, too, was feeling nostalgic ...for dial-up modem. (He had nice memories of pleasant beeping sounds.) I suppose the point is that we all start to pine for the way things were, once they’ve been gone long enough for us to forget how annoying they used to be.

Which means we will soon enough feel nostalgia for face time. I’m not quite there yet. But I’m hoping someone is working on an app that replicates the sensation of snuffling a freshly bathed child. I remember how lovely it used to be, not so very long ago, before they grew out of face time, before I tired of face time, how delicious it was when both boys were little, to wrap my arms around them, listen to the day’s woes, rub noses and kiss goodnight. We clicked. And we didn’t even need “just a click.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/opinion/sunday/actual-conversation-so-yesterday.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2

See What George Clooney Will Star In Next March!

2011-12-15T18:57:00.000-08:00

George Clooney is throwing his considerable star power behind the fight against Prop. 8 by signing on to appear in a reading of the play "8" in Los Angeles. The play, by Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, is scheduled to have a staged reading at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre on March 3.

The play "8" is based on research and transcripts from Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the 2010 federal court battle that dealt with the legality of Prop. 8, the controversial ballot initiative that outlawed same-sex marriage in California. The judge in the case ruled that Prop. 8 was unconstitutional, but the decision has been appealed.

The reading of "8" will serve as a fundraiser for the American Foundation for Equal Rights, an advocacy organization that has fought to overturn the initiative. Clooney is the first actor to be announced for the L.A. reading.

A spokesman for Clooney said the actor was traveling in Australia this week and was unavailable for comment. But in a release sent by the foundation, Clooney said: "It is astonishing that gay and lesbian Americans are still treated as second-class citizens. I am confident that, very soon, the laws of this nation will reflect the basic truth that gay and lesbian people -- like all human beings -- are born equal in dignity and rights."

Rob Reiner will direct the reading at the Wilshire Ebell. A spokeswoman for the foundation said that Reiner called Clooney to ask if the actor would be interested in being involved in the production.

Tickets for the one-night benefit reading can be purchased online.

The play received a staged reading in September at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre in New York. The New York and L.A. readings are co-organized by Broadway Impact, an activist group of theater professionals.

Black, who along with Reiner is a founding board member of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, has made revisions to the play since its New York reading.

Clooney, who currently is starring in the movie "The Descendants," has lent his support to political and humanitarian causes including the crisis in Darfur and last year's earthquake in Haiti.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2011/12/george-clooney-joins-cast-of-prop-8-play-reading-in-la.html

Walt Disney: The Maverick

2011-12-13T17:10:00.000-08:00

Walt Disney was born 110 years ago this week and, if someone decided to build a Mount Rushmore for Hollywood next to Griffith Observatory, we all take it for granted that he would be in granite. Disney the brand is among the strongest in the world but Disney the man has a more elusive legacy. We invited filmmaker Jon Favreau (the “Iron Man” movies, “Elf,” “Cowboys & Aliens”) to share his thoughts on that legacy. Favreau has been in a Disney state of mind recently — he’s doing research for a project called ”Magic Kingdom,” a fantasy set within the confines of the Anaheim theme park – but, as he writes, Disney has been in his dreams since he was a child.

Disneyland, opening day, 1955. (Los Angeles Times archive)

I was born in 1966, the year Walt Disney passed away. He would’ve been 110 this week. I’m too young to have had a first-hand memory of him. In fact, I didn’t even know Disney was a man until late in my childhood. Disney was a place (Disneyland) and it made cartoons (Mickey Mouse) and it made movies (Snow White). I later learned that Disney was a person and not a swirling entity defined by Disneyland, Mickey Mouse and Snow White. Or so I thought.

As childhood slipped away, I clung to it through the discovery of Walt’s entire catalog of animated content. Even the earliest nightmare I can remember having was my family’s Toyota driving past me on a New York city street with Mowgli from “The Jungle Book” sitting where I belonged behind my parents. As I got older I became enamored with Fantasia and all of its psychadelia in the revival houses of Greenwich Village. Even as an adult, I am caught in the guts whenever I see Dumbo cradled in the trunk of his caged mother, no doubt accessing repressed pain through emotional back channels to when I lost my own mother as a kid.

And I’m not alone. In some families this emotional connection spans four and five generations. We have incorporated these myths into our own psychological makeup, like a tree growing through a chain link fence. In our secular and pluralistic society, the Wonderful World of Disney has emerged as a de facto least common denominator of shared cultural archetypes.

How did this happen? Was it some conspiracy of corporate America? An overachieving marketing exercise? I don’t think so. I’ve been on both sides of the curtain, having climbed from outsider to insider over several decades, and I believe the answer lies in a man who dreamed for an entire generation.

"Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (Disney)

The avuncular television personality we all have grown to know and embrace (and occasionally pastiche, cf. John Slattery in “Iron Man 2″) was a cultivated persona that echoed the most accessible version of himself. In the autumn of his years, Walt had become an international cultural ambassador and the frontman for a giant media company. At his heart, however, Walt Disney was a maverick.

Walt started off, as the legend goes, as a small town hayseed from Marceline, Mo., who had an extra helping of gumption and sought to bring small town sensibilities to a growing and impersonal world. Like a modern day Paul Bunyan, he would single-handedly fight off the final clutches of the Industrial Revolution with elbow grease and good old-fashioned American values. I suppose this is all true (at least as true as a sound-bite snapshot couldbe), but it leaves out the part I most connect with and respect him for. Walt the maverick.

Walt flirted with bankruptcy his whole life. He took every success and let it ride. Both financially and creatively. And the secret sauce was always technology. We think of “Steamboat Willie” as an old timey black-and-white cartoon but, at the time, it was bleeding-edge tech. It was the first cartoon to marry music to picture, creating perfectly choreographed movement. It was far more expensive than they could’ve ever imagined going into the endeavor (a recurring Walt refrain), but they innovated something completely new and it was devoured by the public. And Mickey Mouse, that monetizable confection of I.P., surfed in on that wave and has been with us ever since. He bet the farm, almost lost it all, and then hit the longshot. He paid his debts and cleared a little more than he spent.

"Steamboat Willie" (Walt Disney Co.)

It was this business model that Walt rode his entire career, like a lumberjack dancing on a spinning log down the river. And when most people say Walt, they really mean Walt and Roy. His big brother was the yin to Walt’s yang. Walt was “Show,” Roy was “Business.” Walt dreamed it and his pragmatic older brother and business partner made it come true. It was the loving tension between these two brothers that so succinctly embodies Hollywood’s dichotomy of art and commerce. Not Cain and Abel, but Jacob and Esau jockeying for preeminence and their father’s blessing and legacy.

Walt hit the longshot again with “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” another first. It was the world’s first full-length animated feature. This project was ridiculed as an investment. Who would accept the tone? Why spend so many man-hours on quality? But, after suffering the slings and arrows of the status quo and running through the coffers several times over, the movie was a huge success. It was a financial and critical victory. Sadly, Walt would never top this experience as a filmmaker. Although we all think of his entire library of animated films a pantheon of excellence, at the time the experience was not so rosy.

Each project delivered diminishing returns both critically and financially. Despite passion and innovation, the films were each more heavily scrutinized and the financial realpolitik of the movie business had to be considered more and more as overhead grew and profits dwindled. Then there was the shadow of the World War, which also diverted the river of fate.

The advent of Fantasound for Fantasia, the use of color in cartoons and television, the pioneering of the medium of television itself as a marketing tool, as a platform for content and as a driver of the creation of content were all bold and prescient moves on the part of the growing media giant. Few of them paid off in the short term and only in retrospect is their importance truly appreciated.

Walt found himself drawn into the current of something larger. He was the face of Walt Disney Inc. The tide had turned and he abandoned the young man’s game of swimming against it. He sat by Roy’s side as his older brother helped mold the company into the giant that it is today. Then something woke up inside of him.

This, to me, is my favorite chapter of Walt’s life. The truly inspiring one. The anointed king and namesake of Walt Disney Studios quietly slipped out the back door. He cashed in and took a handful of talented artists and, with Roy’s blessing, started over. He dreamed of a place. A place where families could come together and experience something unique yet familiar. A place to share an experience that offered comfort in a changing and scary world that seemed dead set on thumbing its nose at tradition and shredding families apart. A place where cutting edge technology and animatronics could create an immersive virtual reality of an idealized past and future, relying on each family to provide the present

The first ticket to Disneyland was bought by Roy O. Disney, who for decades kept it in the top desk drawer of his office. It's shown here as a preserved artifact in the Disney Archive. (Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

Disneyland was Walt’s third act. It was a success on every level and continues to be. Some of my earliest memories are of the park, my eyes pinched closed as my father described everything we passed in the Haunted Mansion doom buggy. My 1988 cross-country trip on motorcycle culminated with my Sportster padlocked in front of the happiest place on Earth. It was this month-long adventure that ultimately inspired me to leave New York and try to make it in show biz. My first screenplay, “Swingers,” was rife with Disneyland references. Even now, with my own three children, I make the pilgrimage several times a year.

There were three shining moments in Walt’s creative career when everything went right: “Steamboat Willie,” “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and Disneyland. Maybe I understood more about Walt Disney when I was a little kid than I did when I grew up. I understood him not as the man, but what he was able to achieve. What touched me. And that is the genius of Walt Disney. Happy birthday, Walt.

– Jon Favreau

http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2011/12/09/walt-disney-the-maverick-a-guest-essay-by-jon-favreau/#/0

Writer From 'Family Guy' Recounts Occupy L.A. Arrest

2011-12-12T20:50:00.000-08:00

A writer for “Family Guy” has garnered attention from a blog he wrote detailing, what he described as the forceful actions of police on demonstrators during LAPD’s raid on the Occupy Los Angeles encampment.

In contrast to the officers he said entered the scene with weapons, Patrick Meighan claims he was among a group of protestors during the early morning raid sitting Indian-style with their hands interlocked chanting words of peace.

“The LAPD officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while we chanted ‘We Are Peaceful’ and ‘We Are Nonviolent” and “Join Us,” he wrote. Meighan described officers ransacking the encampment one tent at a time.

“As we sat there encircled, a separate team of LAPD officers used knives to slice open every personal tent in the park,” he blogged. “They forcibilby removed anyone sleeping inside, and then yanked out and destroyed any personal property inside those tents, scattering the contents across the park.”

Photos and Videos

Comedy Writer Speaks
out About Occupy LA...

Meighan described in detail the physical tactics he said were used by police to get those who were peacefully resisting arrest to unlink from one another.

“It was horrible to watch,” he wrote, “and apparently designed to terrorize the rest of us.”

He said he ultimately decided to voluntarily unlink his arms, yet was not spared an arrest that would later produce bruising, and nerve damage in his thumb and palm.

Still, Meighan does not believe the arrests made that morning were, as he wrote it, “uniquely-brutal.”

“The LAPD officers were just doing their jobs, as they understood them,” he blogged.

Meighan says he wrote the blog to call attention to a differently injustice.

"We as a society, including the city of Los Angeles and the LAPD treat peaceful non-violent protesters one particular way, sort of give them the full force of the law. Whereas at the same time, there are folks who have defrauded our nation out of hundreds of billions of dollars, and those folks walk free."

NBC4 forwarded the blog to the LAPD. A spokesperson declined to make a public response, saying then they'd have to respond to every arrest.

But they say, all complaints can be made formally to the department and internal affairs will look into it.

http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Family-Guy-Writer-Patrick-Meighan-Occupy-LA-Arrest-135363078.html

OMG This Man Wants To Be PRESIDENT?!! (yes, Perry)

2011-12-10T10:26:00.000-08:00

Numbers. They're the darnedest things. Just ask Rick Perry.

GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry campaigns in Charleston, S.C., on Thursday. (Alice Keeney / Associated Press)

The GOP presidential contender, whose misfires have become part of the legend of the 2012 race, appears to have made another flub or two Friday in an interview with the Des Moines Register editorial board, getting wrong the number of justices on the Supreme Court and blanking out on the name of one justice altogether.

According to reports by the Register and the Associated Press, Perry was all set to call out Justice Sonia Sotomayor, an Obama nominee, as a "activist judge" -- except he couldn't recall her name. He struggled for six seconds before saying "Not Montemayor?"

"Sotomayor," one of the editorial board members helpfully said.

Perry then went on to condemn "eight unelected and, frankly, unaccountable judges" in a discussion of prayer in schools.

Nine justices serve on the high court, not eight.

Numbers, of course, famously tripped up the Texas governor in a debate in November when he pledged that, as president, he would eliminate three Cabinet agencies -- but then could only summon the names of two agencies in some of the most painful-to-watch political moments in recent history.

The candidate is in the midst of a large-scale push to garner support in Iowa in advance of the Jan. 3 caucuses. He's bought a wealth of TV advertising time and next week plans to begin to campaign by bus across the state.

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-perry-scotus-20111209,0,780790.story?track=rss

2011-12-03T20:26:00.000-08:00

The REAL American Airlines Story

2011-12-01T20:25:00.000-08:00

American Airlines files Chapter 11

Video on msnbc.com: Workers lose as American Airlines puts profits over people. Ed shares his thoughts.

New Earth-Sized Planet Discovered

2011-12-01T01:15:00.000-08:00

Kepler-21b: Near Earth-Sized Planet Discovered 352 Light-Years Away

The National Optical Astronomy Observatory announced on Wednesday the discovery of Kepler-21b, a new planet that's close to the size of earth and is only about 352 light years away.

"By astronomical standards, that's right next door," Katy Garmany, the Deputy Press Officer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, told HuffPost.

Astronomers frequently discover new planets (according to Time magazine, we're up to over 2,000), but Garmany said that what's exciting about Kepler 21-b is that the planet is relatively Earth-sized. While its mass is about 10 times the size of our planet, its radius is only 1.6 times the size of Earth's.

"Until a few years ago, the smallest extra-solar planet that we had discovered was the size of Jupiter or Saturn, which are about ten times bigger than the Earth," Garmany said. "Now we're getting down to something almost the size of the Earth, showing that we have the technology to find the earth-size planets."

The new planet has a star that's just a bit bigger and hotter than Earth's sun, although it's substantially younger. But because the planet is so close to its star, it's far too hot to have liquid water, the base for life as we know it. At only 6 million kilometers (about 3.7 million miles) away from the star, Kepler-21b's temperature is a blistering 2,960 degrees Fahrenheit, according to scientists' estimates.

By contrast, Earth is about 150,000,000 km (93 million miles) from its own sun.

The discovery of Kepler-21b was a collaboration of both sky (the Kepler observatory) and ground-based telescopes at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.

Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, writes in Discover Magazine that researchers examined the planet for 15 months. The results of the study will be published in Astrophysical Journal.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/30/kepler-21b-new-planet-discovered_n_1121938.html#s509344&title=Space_Shuttle_Discoverys

Did You 'Stuff' Yourself On Black Friday???

2011-11-28T21:28:00.000-08:00

On the biggest shopping day of the year, think for a moment about the demands our consumption makes on the planet's resources and ask yourself: Does our family need more stuff?

Shoppers, including one who appears to be in her pajamas, line up in the electronics department at Target in Burbank shortly after 4 a.m. on Black Friday 2010. (Los Angeles Times)

Today is Black Friday, when holiday shopping hordes descend on malls across the country, and retailers hope to turn a profit as their accounting books transition from red ink to black. This year, Black Friday comes two months after Global Overshoot Day, when our planet's accounts — the ones that measure human demand on the planet's services that support our economies — transitioned the other direction, from black to red.

Each year our planet can produce a certain amount of resources and absorb a certain amount of use — nature's budget for the year. One group of scientists that keeps an eye on this is the Global Footprint Network, and by its calculations, in 2011 we exhausted the annual budget on Sept. 27, less than 10 months into the year.

That means we are currently 135% above the capacity of our planet to replace essential "services" like clean water, clean air, arable land, healthy fisheries and stable climate. Our overconsumption is eating into the very ecological systems that all the world's economies — and indeed, all life — depend on. If that is troublesome, consider that the Global Footprint folks project that in 2050 we'll be 500% above capacity unless we change how we make, use and throw away stuff.

What to do? That gets us back to today, Black Friday. The biggest ingredient in these frightening predictions — even bigger than the growth in our planet's population — is the growth in consumption of that expanding population. So one response — and one we believe will perhaps have the biggest impact — is for those of us in the overconsuming parts of the world to learn to get by with less stuff, and to ensure the stuff we do get lasts a good long time.

That's why the two of us writing this essay are collaborating. At the Story of Stuff Project we ask you to question whether you need ever more stuff — faster, cooler, bigger stuff — than you had last year. We ask you to question whether new stuff will, as the marketers want you to think, secure you love, status, entertainment and security. Or is it instead time to question the toll all that stuff is taking on your household budget, not to mention your planet's health? Is it worth it to be weighed down with consumer debt, overstuffed garages and a constant, stressful need to have the latest thing? We ask you to consider that maybe the non-stuff part of your life is really what matters: time with your friends and family, a sense of purpose in your life, working together with others toward shared goals.

At Patagonia, the outdoor clothing company, we're asking you to think twice about whether to buy a new jacket for yourself, your friends or family. Maybe you can get by with the one you already have? Or if your current jacket needs repairs, bring it back and let us fix it. Or if it's sitting unused in your garage or closet, we'll help you sell it (for no charge) to someone who will use it. Or if it's really worn out, bring it back and we'll recycle it.

Patagonia exists to make and sell things people want and need. The health of the business — and the livelihoods of everyone who works for it — depends on people buying our stuff. But we are also aware that, as environmentalist David Brower said, "There is no business on a dead planet."

And at the Story of Stuff, we aren't anti-stuff — we own and use stuff — but as this holiday shopping season starts, we encourage everyone to reexamine the stuff they do get. Appreciate the work and materials and energy that went into your stuff and eke out every last drop of use before replacing it. As anyone with gray hair will confirm, there was a time when having one toaster, one winter jacket, one couch that lasted years worked just fine. If making products to last for years worked then, why can't it work now?

We both recognize that economists and politicians want you to spend money to grow the economy. We know that redesigning products and our cultural norms may seem a herculean task. But it's easier than figuring out how to fix a planet whose resources are overdrawn year after year.

There's no one easy solution to ensuring a healthy economy and a healthy environment. It requires unlikely partners, such as a retailer and an anti-consumerism campaign, finding common ground and joining forces. It requires a commitment from our political and business and civic leaders to finding more ways we can all live within the budget of the one beautiful planet we have. But most of all it requires a commitment from you, from us, from everyone who makes, buys and uses stuff, to work together for a better future.

Annie Leonard is founder of the Story of Stuff Project. Rick Ridgeway is vice president of environmental initiatives at Patagonia Inc.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-leonardridgeway-blackfriday-20111125,0,2159130.story

Spoooooky ---- Are You Eating Genetically Modified Food???

2011-11-26T12:09:00.000-08:00

Dear Farm Aid,

I know the U.S. government just allowed a few new GE crops on the market — should I be worried?

Thanks for any info you can provide!

Jerry K.
Austin, TX

With a new mission to squash “burdensome” regulation and play nice with U.S. businesses, the Obama Administration has been in a frenzy green-lighting genetically engineered (GE) crops.

Just weeks into the new year, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced the full deregulation of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready alfalfa—a genetically engineered crop variety designed to withstand Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide. The move gave the OK for commercial planting to take place this spring without restrictions. A week later, USDA announced the deregulation of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready sugar beets, followed by the deregulation of Syngenta’s Enogen corn, a variety genetically engineered for biofuel production. Meanwhile, the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) is now considering the commercial release of genetically modified salmon.

With a new onslaught of GE products hitting the market it’s no wonder the public has some questions, as you do, Jerry. So, what’s the big deal about genetic engineering?

The short and not-so-sweet of it is this: GE crops present real risks, fewer choices for both farmers and eaters and offer unclear benefits except to the companies that develop and market them, and thus pocket major profits.

Risky Business for Farmers
One of the biggest problems GE crops have presented in the real world is the contamination of non-GE crops. The newest wave of deregulated GE crops presents a very real risk that such contamination will happen again.

Take alfalfa, which is pollinated by bees. Bees can generally cover a five-mile range as they buzz from plant to plant, collecting and spreading pollen. Since bees don’t tend to observe property lines or fences, GE alfalfa pollen could, for example, be spread to and pollinate a non-GE alfalfa plant, in turn contaminating a neighboring field with GE genes.

This cross-fertilization would be especially disastrous for organic farmers. If organic fields are contaminated, an organic farmer’s certification is at risk, since the use of GE crops is prohibited under the organic label. Losing organic certification would mean his or her goods can no longer be sold for the premium price that helps cover the higher costs of growing organically. Organic livestock farmers would face similar consequences if their cattle consumed contaminated alfalfa, and the organic industry as a whole could suffer from severe supply problems if organic alfalfa can’t be maintained with integrity. Canada’s organic canola industry suffered this fate, and is virtually extinct due to contamination from GE canola.[1]

GE contamination hurts conventional farmers too. A prime example occurred in 2000, when genes from Aventis’ StarLink GE corn showed up unexpectedly in the nation’s food supply and U.S. export markets. While StarLink corn only represented 1% of planted corn acreage, it ultimately contaminated at least 25% of the harvest that year.[2] Traces of StarLink corn also showed up in taco shells, even though the variety wasn’t approved for human consumption. The fiasco led to a massive recall of over 300 food products. Export markets started rejecting American corn and corn prices plummeted.[3] Corn farmers ultimately filed a class-action lawsuit against Aventis, who forked over $112 million in settlement. Three years later, StarLink genetics were still detected in the U.S. corn supply, well after the crop was pulled from the market.[4] Millers and food manufacturers are concerned the same thing will happen with Syngenta’s Enogen corn intended for biofuel production, which could contaminate corn for human consumption and seriously threaten foods processed with corn–based ingredients.

USDA recognized such risks when it conducted an environmental impact statement (EIS) for GE alfalfa. This past December, Secretary Vilsack acknowledged “the potential of cross-fertilization to non-GE alfalfa from GE alfalfa — a significant concern for farmers who produce for non-GE markets at home and abroad.”[5] Despite such concern, USDA approved the planting of GE alfalfa for this spring without any indication of how it will prevent the type of costly contamination that threatens to occur.

Into the Wild: “Superweeds” and other environmental hazards
In addition to the very real risks of GE-contamination, there are numerous accounts of superweeds developing from the overuse of Roundup herbicide on Roundup Ready crops. Fifteen years after Roundup Ready corn and soy first debuted, there are now at least 10 species of Roundup-resistant weeds identified in more than 22 states, as well as superweeds sprouting up in Australia, China and Brazil.[6]

Superweeds undermine the environmental benefits that GE crops are claimed to offer by reducing soil tillage, pesticide applications and soil and water contamination.[7] Affected farmers must now resort to more toxic chemicals, increased labor or more intense tillage of their fields to address superweeds on their farms. The newly approved Roundup Ready alfalfa and sugar beets will only exacerbate that problem. And as companies like Bayer, Syngenta and Dow Chemical work on their own pesticide-resistant crops (including one designed to resist 2,4-D, a component of Agent Orange!),[8] even nastier superweeds may be on the horizon, with even nastier pesticides being used to control them in the ever-escalating arms race against weeds and pests.

GE crops pose additional environment risks, such as threats to biodiversity or unintentional harm to other insects and animals in the ecosystem, many of which are beneficial to crop production. But remember, there’s absolutely no recall on GE genetics. Once they’re out there, they’re out there for good. What’s more, once a crop is fully deregulated, USDA currently conducts no monitoring of any kind to see if a GE crop has harmed the environment.[9] To date, we are completely unequipped to deal with all of these consequences. (For more on how GE crops are regulated, see this Ask Farm Aid column from 2009).

Do I eat GE foods?
What does all this mean for eaters? Do we eat GE foods? The quick answer is: almost certainly.

Remember that the vast majority of our corn and soy come from GE seed, and that these crops are generally used as feed for cattle, hogs and poultry, or otherwise used in the many processed foods found in grocery store aisles. Alfalfa is the fourth largest crop grown in the U.S. and is most commonly used to feed dairy cows and beef cattle.

So, if you drink milk, eat beef, enjoy the occasional slice of bacon with your breakfast, order chicken in your Caesar salad or ever indulge in processed foods, cereals and desserts with ingredients like high fructose corn syrup and soy lecithin, GE crops are part of your food chain. Unfortunately, you can’t be sure when you eat them or in what form, because there is no requirement to label foods with GE ingredients. As discussed above, the release of GE alfalfa also puts several organic foods at risk for contamination—further eroding our choice as consumers to avoid GE foods if we wish.

Little research has been conducted to examine whether GE foods present risks to human health—such as allergens or toxins—but it seems prudent that this be investigated rigorously before GE foods hit the market. Many countries, including countries of the European Union, Japan, Australia and Brazil, have banned the cultivation of GE crops or require labeling of GE foods as precautions.

Feeding the World? The Silver Bullet That Misses the Target
Defenders of GE crops argue they are desperately needed to feed the world’s ever-growing population and address world hunger. Some have accused critics of GE technology as being shortsighted Luddites at best, and irresponsible at worst.

But to date, GE crops have done little to address hunger worldwide—yield results have been mixed globally, and are nominal for America’s family farmers. A recent study of historical yield data in the U.S. found that herbicide-resistant genetics in GE corn and soy didn’t increase yield any more than conventional methods.[10] Perhaps more importantly, the GE varieties hitting the market aren’t focused on yield in the first place. Developing a crop for herbicide resistance or biofuel production is quite different than selecting for plant traits that encourage plant growth, drought resistance or other traits that would actually help address food security worldwide. Moreover, companies haven’t invested their dollars in the staple crops of food insecure populations worldwide, such as millet, quinoa or cassava. We will need much more than Roundup Ready alfalfa to solve world hunger.

The Seedier Side of GE: Who Benefits
So if farmers, eaters, the environment and the world’s undernourished won’t appreciably benefit from the government’s recent GE green-lighting parade, who will?

Most GE crops hitting the market are developed by multinational companies such as Monsanto, Syngenta, Dupont and Dow Chemical to increase their sales and push their related pesticides. For example, Roundup Ready crops are all engineered to withstand Monsanto’s toxic herbicide Roundup. With Roundup Ready alfalfa and sugar beets on the market, Monsanto can expect increased profits from its new seeds, as well as increased sales of Roundup herbicide to douse all those new seeds.

GE crops are also patented, which grants several privileges to corporate seed giants. For example, companies have repeatedly restricted independent research on the risks and benefits of GE products, which is perfectly legal under patent law, but severely limits objective examination of the efficacy and safety of GE crops.[11] If that weren’t bad enough, patents have given companies the power to pursue lawsuits against farmers for illegally “possessing” patented GE plants without a license. Monsanto has famously sued thousands of individual farmers for patent infringement when their fields were contaminated with GE genes.[12]

With the power to own and patent genetics, seed companies can demand even more control over the market as a whole. The seed industry has suffered enormous concentration of power in the past few decades, with at least 200 independent seed companies exiting the market in the last fifteen years and four companies now controlling over 50% of the market. This consolidation means farmers have far fewer options for seed varieties. Meanwhile, farmers have seen the sharpest rise in seed prices during the period in which GE crops rose in prominence.[13]

In this sense, the deregulation of new GE varieties comes as a slap in the face to the farmers and eaters who put their trust in the USDA and Department of Justice as they examined antitrust abuses in our food system this past year, including specific investigations into Monsanto and the seed industry. The newest wave of GE products will only further corporate control over our food supply, putting the interests of corporations far before the needs of farmers and eaters.

The bottom line?
Surely, this is a lot to take in. Genetic engineering is a complicated topic, with a broad set of consequences for our society. There are many questions left unanswered about how GE will impact farmers and eaters, and even less clarity about how these impacts will be managed.

Until our regulatory system and the biotech companies themselves properly address the risks inherent in GE crops, farmers and eaters have a right to reject them. Releasing GE crops into the fields without mitigating their risks is gambling with our health, our environment and livelihoods of family farmers.

Book review: 'Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life'

2011-11-22T17:06:00.000-08:00

Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life --- Book Review

Although her parents died when she was in her teens, Pat Nixon was determined to get ahead; She went to work so she could attend college. She was fond of acting on the stage and met Richard M. Nixon in a Whittier Community Players production of "The Dark Tower." They married in 1940; as a political wife, and eventual first lady, Pat was soft-spoken, dutiful and even tragic as her life fell in her husband's shadow.

All of this can be gleaned from Ann Beattie's book "Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life," but it is hardly at the center. Beattie begins by listing the 11 nicknames Pat, born Thelma, went by. "Names, nicknames, they're fascinating," Beattie explains. Surprisingly, she is not talking about the subject of her book, but about the process of writing. "Names, nicknames, they're fascinating to writers, but they also cause anxiety because they're so elusive, and because writers have to come up with so many of them."

The name of this book is elusive to a fault. More appropriate titles might have been "A Novelist Writes About Writing, Using Mrs. Nixon as a Starting Point," or "MFA in a Book: A Short Story Writer on Writing." Those seeking a richly imagined life of a first lady, with emotions and details and a story that moves forward from chapter to chapter, should look elsewhere.

Beattie, who teaches at the University of Virginia, is one of the most acclaimed short story writers of her generation (she's a baby boomer). She uses this book to impart her writing lessons, many of them in short, disconnected chapters. She provides close readings of major short story writers such as Anton Chekhov, Raymond Carver and Guy de Maupassant; sometimes, but not always, they are connected to aspects of Pat Nixon's history or persona.

Beattie has many creative insights, which directly address her writing process in general, and the writing of this book in particular. "Writing fiction about a real person tests my unexamined assumptions," she writes, "letting me see if, in the character I create, my preconceptions are reflected, reverse, or obscured."

Even louder than that voice of introspection is the voice of the professor, dispensing wisdom to ready recipients. "Fiction writers rely on dialogue to carry more meaning than the words themselves convey," she writes, continuing, "if the writer relies too much on things happening suddenly, the reader is likely to become skeptical." After imagining a conversation between Pat Nixon and Hillary Clinton making cookies together, she writes, "Mrs. Nixon baking cookies with Hillary Clinton is an example of an anachronism." This is followed by short chapters with similar endnotes explaining how they're examples of "irmus," "epizeus" and "charentismus," all relatively obscure rhetorical terms. Are you taking notes?

Yes, this travels far from the subject at hand, if it can be said that Pat Nixon is in fact the subject. Mrs. Nixon, who didn't want her husband to return to politics after his 1960 loss of the presidential election to John F. Kennedy, faded into the background after Nixon became president in 1968. Her muted presence, maybe veiled by a self-effacing properness, left a canvas so blank that it provides Beattie with the greatest of challenges: a character who is so uninteresting as to barely be there. Can she make a story out of an enigma?

In only a few chapters does Beattie genuinely take up this challenge, imagining Mrs. Nixon moving through the world, giving her enough room on the page to think or feel. In one of the most powerful short sections, she illustrates Mrs. Nixon's sad, anxious thoughts as the White House photographer gathers her family for some last pictures; her husband has resigned in disgrace, and a helicopter waits to carry them away one final time. It's just good enough to make a reader wonder why there aren't more passages like it.

As the book goes on, her husband intrudes. An intelligent, complex and deeply flawed man, he is more compelling than his wife as a character. His role as president, and the predominance of that in their lives, moves him further toward center stage. Yet while Beattie claims to have channeled his voice, it comes off not as empathetic but campy; he is better illuminated elsewhere. She makes one valuable connection, however: that Nixon, who ordered campaigns of fake letters to the editor supporting his views was actually a practitioner of fiction, on a grand scale.

Beattie turns to literature over and over, doling out writing advice, making proclamations about how fiction functions, using it as the key to unlock real people. Awkwardly, she examines the text of the plays the young Pat Ryan (not yet Nixon) appeared in to explain her personality. When Beattie enlivens her characters, they think about books as much as a college English professor might. The book may not enlighten us at all about Mrs. Nixon, but it reveals the erudite workings of writer and educator Ann Beattie.

Beattie writes with total assurance, as if she is giving a lecture. For those unfamiliar with the subject of writing, this could be an interesting introduction to how writers write. But it is a dangerous one.

Because she leaves little room for inquiry and even less for deviation, the book becomes one long-winded speech. Where there might be exploration, there is pontification. What might be confidence starts to come across as careless blitheness. Her interpretations are sometimes strange — graffiti always says what it means, the glass animals in Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie" are a symbol for Laura's hymen, the first novel was 1740's "Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded" by Samuel Richardson — and her thoughts on writing are individual, not truths that should be universally acknowledged.

More nurturing writing guides have come from the desk of Anne Lamott. And a fully imagined life of a first lady can be found in Curtis Sittenfeld's "American Wife" (2008), a novel loosely based on the life of Laura Bush. "Mrs. Nixon" falls short on both counts.

Ann Beattie's writing insights are the real focus of 'Mrs. Nixon,' which does little to enlighten us about the first lady.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/books/la-ca-ann-beattie-20111120,0,1461409.story?track=rss

Clarence Thomas & Ethics? Does It Snow In The Sahara?!

2011-11-18T15:04:00.000-08:00

Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) is turning up the heat on Justice Clarence Thomas based on new information that builds upon previous reports of his alleged ethical lapses.

In late September, Slaughter had sent a letter to the Judicial Conference of the United States to request official action on Thomas' multiyear failure to disclose his wife's income from various conservative think tanks and activist organizations. The Judicial Conference is the principal policy-making and administrative body for the federal court system.

On Friday, Slaughter submitted a new letter, this time addressed to Chief Justice John Roberts in his capacity as the presiding officer of the Judicial Conference, to update and clarify the September letter.

At issue is the fact that Thomas repeatedly checked a box titled "none" on annual financial disclosure forms in response to a question about the source's spousal income. Yet during those years, his wife, Virginia Thomas, worked for the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation and for the Tea Party lobbying group Liberty Central, which she helped found.

The first letter asserted that Thomas' nondisclosures persisted "[t]hroughout his entire tenure of the Supreme Court," which began in 1991. It was fair to infer from his "high level of legal training and experience," Slaughter wrote, that the justice's failure presented the type of "willful" behavior that federal law requires the Judicial Conference to refer to the Department of Justice for investigation.

Friday's letter, however, states that Thomas actually did report his the sources of his wife's income until 1997, therefore heightening the inference that the justice had not "misunderstood the reporting instructions," as he asserted in January when he filed seven pages of addenda correcting his omissions over a six-year period. Citing information obtained by the left-leaning watchdog groups Common Cause and Alliance for Justice, Slaughter wrote that "Justice Thomas accurately filed his financial disclosure forms, including his wife's employment, for as many as 10 years beginning in 1987 when he was Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission."

Noting in the new letter that the accurate filing continued through Thomas' tenure as a federal appeals court judge and his first five years as a Supreme Court justice, Slaughter wrote that "it is very difficult for Justice Thomas to make a credible argument that he understood the filing instructions for ten years but then misunderstood them for the next thirteen years."

Indeed, this new information appears to strengthen her argument to her colleagues that Thomas' actions -- or, rather, inactions -- were willful, therefore warranting a Justice Department inquiry. Only 19 other members of Congress joined her September letter; Friday's letter had the support of another 51 members.

Still, that is only 12 percent of the House, and all are Democrats. And with Justices Stephen Breyer and Antonin Scalia, as well as retired Justice John Paul Stevens, already waving away questions about their colleague's ethics, it is not likely that the chief justice or the Judicial Conference will accede to Slaughter's request.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/18/clarence-thomas-ethics-louise-slaughter-letter_n_1101854.html

Scalia and Thomas dine with healthcare law challengers

2011-11-16T05:03:00.000-08:00

The day the Supreme Court gathered behind closed doors to consider the politically divisive question of whether it would hear a challenge to President Obama’s healthcare law, two of its justices, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, were feted at a dinner sponsored by the law firm that will argue the case before the high court.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia speaks to a policy forum in Washington last month. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)

The occasion was last Thursday, when all nine justices met for a conference to pore over the petitions for review. One of the cases at issue was a suit brought by 26 states challenging the sweeping healthcare overhaul passed by Congress last year, a law that has been a rallying cry for conservative activists nationwide.

The justices agreed to hear the suit; indeed, a landmark 5 1/2-hour argument is expected in March, and the outcome is likely to further roil the 2012 presidential race, which will be in full swing by the time the court’s decision is released.

The lawyer who will stand before the court and argue that the law should be thrown out is likely to be Paul Clement, who served as U.S. solicitor general during the George W. Bush administration.

Clement’s law firm, Bancroft PLLC, was one of almost two dozen firms that helped sponsor the annual dinner of the Federalist Society, a longstanding group dedicated to advocating conservative legal principles. Another firm that sponsored the dinner, Jones Day, represents one of the trade associations that challenged the law, the National Federation of Independent Business.

Another sponsor was pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc, which has an enormous financial stake in the outcome of the litigation. The dinner was held at a Washington hotel hours after the court's conference over the case. In attendance was, among others, Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s top Republican and an avowed opponent of the healthcare law.

The featured guests at the dinner? Scalia and Thomas.

It’s nothing new: The two justices have been attending Federalist Society events for years. And it’s nothing that runs afoul of ethics rules. In fact, justices are exempt from the Code of Conduct that governs the actions of lower federal judges.

If they were, they arguably fell under code’s Canon 4C, which states, “A judge may attend fund-raising events of law-related and other organizations although the judge may not be a speaker, a guest of honor, or featured on the program of such an event.“

Nevertheless, the sheer proximity of Scalia and Thomas to two of the law firms in the case, as well as to a company with a massive financial interest, was enough to alarm ethics-in-government activists.

“This stunning breach of ethics and indifference to the code belies claims by several justices that the court abides by the same rules that apply to all other federal judges,” said Bob Edgar, the president of Common Cause. “The justices were wining and dining at a black-tie fundraiser with attorneys who have pending cases before the court. Their appearance and assistance in fundraising for this event undercuts any claims of impartiality, and is unacceptable.”

Scalia and Thomas have shown little regard for critics who say they too readily mix the business of the court with agenda-driven groups such as the Federalist Society. And Thomas’ wife, Ginni, is a high-profile conservative activist.

Moreover, conservatives argue that it’s Justice Elena Kagan who has an ethical issue, not Scalia and Thomas. Kagan served as solicitor general in the Obama administration when the first legal challenges to the law were brought at the trial court level. Her critics have pushed for Kagan to recuse herself from hearing the case, saying that she was too invested in defending the law then to be impartial now. Kagan has given no indication she will do so.

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-scalia-thomas-20111114,0,7978224.story?track=rss

Sushi, Coal, Mercury & You

2011-11-13T12:32:00.000-08:00

Rich Gelfond keeps his Oscar statue in a black cloth sack in the bottom drawer of his desk. He received it as CEO of the film-technology company Imax, for "the method of filming and exhibiting high fidelity, large-format, wide angle format, motion pictures," although when I read the inscription aloud, he feigns surprise, as if he's forgotten how he came to own it. "Is that what it's for?" he muses. "An Oscar's kind of like potato chips—when you have one, you need more. Kind of like tuna sushi."

Tuna sushi—and the devastating repercussions of Gelfond's onetime passion for it—has been the topic of conversation for the past hour, and Gelfond smiles slyly and a bit ruefully at his joke. With his round face, long blond eyelashes, and startled blue eyes, he seems placid but with an underlying current of energy, like a guinea pig who just drank a latte. For years he was an avid tennis player who also loved running around the Central Park reservoir or near his home in eastern Long Island.

But about six years ago he began to feel oddly off balance, as though he might fall at any moment. He tried running on grass instead of asphalt but finally had to give it up altogether. It was probably stress, he reasoned, opting to stick to tennis. It was only when he nearly fell over while trying to serve that he decided to see a doctor.

More symptoms came to light in the physician's office. Gelfond had a tremor in his hands and had trouble putting his fingers together. A neurologist, worried that the symptoms pointed to a brain tumor, ordered an immediate MRI. But there was no tumor, and as he underwent a battery of increasingly unpleasant tests and scans, Gelfond's symptoms worsened. His feet tingled (a condition called neuropathy), and his balance became so off-kilter that it made walking difficult. "If I was with someone, I would walk close to them so, if I fell, I could grab on," he recalls.

Then, six months into his illness, Gelfond's neurologist asked a seemingly random question: "Do you eat a lot of fish?"

As he underwent increasingly unpleasant tests and scans, Gelfond's symptoms worsened. His feet tingled, and his balance became so off-kilter that he could barely walk.

"As a matter of fact, I do," Gelfond replied. It turns out that he had been eating seafood at two out of every three daily meals as part of his healthy lifestyle. What he didn't know was that some kinds of fish—particularly the tuna and swordfish he favored—are high in mercury, a potent nerve poison. A blood test revealed that his mercury level was 76 micrograms per liter (mcg/L), 13 times the EPA's recommended maximum of 5.8 mcg/L. It was so high that he got a call from the New York State Department of Public Health, asking whether he worked at a toxic-waste site.

"I was just so frustrated that I was trying to do something good for my body and in fact I was poisoning myself," Gelfond tells me, leaning forward in his chair. "I had no awareness."

Neither did most of the people he talked to, including physicians. To them, mercury poisoning was something that happened to the mad hatters of the 19th century or to the victims of industrial waste in Minamata, Japan, in the 1950s. It didn't happen to 21st-century New York executives. Having found the source of his illness, Gelfond's neurologist had no idea how to treat it, and when Gelfond contacted other New York physicians, most told him that mercury couldn't possibly be causing his symptoms because adults aren't susceptible to mercury poisoning.

"There has been a tendency to say adults are resistant," says Michael Gochfeld, professor of environmental medicine at New Jersey's Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, which has treated a number of people who have gotten mercury poisoning from fish. "We don't really understand why some adults are sensitive and others seem to be quite tolerant."

The main prescription for Gelfond's mercury poisoning was to stop ingesting it. Once he eliminated high-mercury fish from his diet, his levels began to drop; within six months he was down to 18 mcg/L. One year after his diagnosis, he was able to walk without assistance. Six months after that, he was back to playing tennis. Today he says he's about 60 percent recovered. He still has trouble running long distances, and his symptoms resurface when he's fatigued. Mercury has changed his life forever.

"You never hear about fish. Tuna fish—it's just one of those things you wouldn't think to be scared of."

A few weeks earlier I'd spent the evening at a salon in Billings, Montana, watching stylists give people what amounted to very tiny haircuts. The Sierra Club was offering free mercury testing there and at other places around the country, and about 40 people had gathered at the Sanctuary Salon to provide hair samples for analysis.

The room was perfumy with hair products and buzzing with blow-dryers. Young women sat down to have a few strands of hair clipped close to the scalp, murmuring the usual things women say in salons: "I hate my hair!" and "Can you get rid of the gray?"

They also wanted to understand whether their own eating habits put them at risk. Tierani Bursett, 27, asked whether she should be concerned about the walleye she catches while ice fishing (she should). A local newscaster, who didn't want to be named, said she was "addicted to sushi" and wondered if she should be worried (yes). The mother of a four-month-old wanted to know if mercury passes through breast milk (it does), and an older man asked whether mercury is a concern for people over 60 (it is). Luzia Willis, one of the salon's manicurists, was feeling nervous about all the tuna she buys at Costco (with good reason). "Why is there extra mercury in the fish?" she asked. "What's causing it?"

But What Fish Can I Eat? Click image below to see the full chart.
John Blanchard (Sources: FDA and EPA)

The answer can be found all around her: at the Colstrip power plant east of Billings, which uses a rail car's worth of coal every five minutes (see "High Plains Poison," March/April 2010); in the coal-mining operations to the east and southeast; in the long chain of rail cars that chugs through town each night full of black ore bound for boilers across the country; and at the J. E. Corette power plant right in town. While there is always going to be some mercury in the environment—it occurs naturally in the earth's crust and can be released into the air during forest fires or volcanic eruptions—70 percent of what we're exposed to comes from human activities, and most of that comes from burning coal.

U.S. coal-fired power plants pump more than 48 tons of mercury into the air each year. The Martin Lake Power Plant in Tatum, Texas, spews 2,660 pounds per annum all on its own (it burns lignite, a particularly mercury-heavy form of coal). Compared with the vast amounts of mercury churning out of Asia, the U.S. contribution is fairly small—about 3 percent of the global total. Roughly a third of our emissions settles within our borders, poisoning lakes and waterways. The rest cycles through the atmosphere, with much of it eventually winding up in the world's oceans.

Inorganic mercury isn't easily assimilated into the human body, and if the mercury emitted by power plants stayed in that form, it probably wouldn't have made Gelfond and many others sick. But when inorganic mercury creeps into aquatic sediments and marshes (as well as mid-depths of oceans), bacteria convert it into methylmercury, an organic form that not only is easily assimilated but also accumulates in living tissue as it moves up the food chain: The bigger and older the fish, the more mercury in its meat. It takes only a tiny amount to do serious damage: One-seventieth of a teaspoon can pollute a 20-acre lake to the point where its fish are unsafe to eat. Thousands of tons a year settle in the world's oceans, where they bioaccumulate in carnivorous fish. Forty percent of human mercury exposure comes from a single source—Pacific tuna.

"Ninety-five to 100 percent of the methylmercury that we acquire in our bodies comes from the consumption of seafood," explains Stony Brook University professor Nicholas Fisher, director of the Consortium for Interdisciplinary Environmental Research, which oversees the (newly endowed) Gelfond Fund for Mercury Research and Education. (Seafood, in this case, includes fish from lakes and rivers.) When EPA researchers tested predatory and bottom-dwelling fish at 500 U.S. lakes and reservoirs in 2009, they found mercury in each and every one; close to half of the fish had levels so high they were unsafe to eat. Another 2009 study, by the U.S. Geological Survey, found mercury-contaminated fish in each of the 291 streams and rivers tested. Mercury pollution causes U.S. waters to be closed to fishing more often than does any other source of contamination.

In March, after more than 20 years of delay, the EPA proposed a new federal air pollution standard for power plant emissions of mercury and other toxics. The new rule, which was vigorously opposed by the coal industry, will require power plants to use "maximum achievable control technology" to filter mercury from their smokestacks by 2014. The result of a 2008 lawsuit by the Sierra Club and other environmental groups, the rule is expected to cost industry more than $10 billion to implement.

That may sound like a lot—unless you compare it with the cost of doing nothing. Dr. Leonardo Trasande, an associate professor of preventative medicine and pediatrics at Mt. Sinai Medical Center, did exactly that, in a study published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine in 2006. He calculated that between 316,000 and 647,000 American babies are born each year with mercury levels high enough to cause measurable brain damage. Because every drop in IQ results in a loss of economic productivity, he estimated that the mercury emitted by coal-fired power plants costs the nation $1.3 billion each year. As he explained in a Senate briefing in 2005, "those costs will recur year after year, with each new birth cohort, so long as mercury emissions are not controlled. By contrast, the cost of installing stack filters is a one-time expense."

Many of the same coal-industry supporters who question the science of climate change also deny that mercury harms public health. "To actually cause poisoning or a premature death you have to get a large concentration of mercury into the body," insisted Texas representative Joe Barton at a congressional hearing on the new EPA pollution rules earlier this year. "I'm not a medical doctor, but my hypothesis is that's not going to happen!"

The experiences of fish lovers like Gelfond and actor Jeremy Piven (who famously pulled out of a Broadway show, citing mercury poisoning) refute Barton's hypothesis, but theirs are admittedly extreme cases. After all, the average American eats less than one serving of fish per week. Many eat far more, however; one researcher extrapolated from existing data that there are up to 184,000 people in the United States with blood mercury levels above 58 mcg/L, a level at which they would likely show adverse symptoms.

The symptoms of mercury toxicity are fairly well established. They include lack of balance and coordination, trouble concentrating, loss of fine motor skills, tremors, muscle weakness, memory problems, slurred speech, an awkward gait, hearing loss, hair loss, insomnia, tingling in the limbs, and loss of peripheral vision. Long-term exposure may also increase the risk of cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases and reduce the concentration and mobility of sperm.

What's unclear is how much mercury it takes to make you sick. Nearly everyone feels fine when the level of mercury in their blood is below 5.8 mcg/L, which the EPA says is safe for pregnant women. And most—although not all—exhibit symptoms at 100 mcg/L. But some people show symptoms with levels as low as 7 mcg/L, and others feel right as rain despite being above 100 mcg/L.

Physicians speculate that susceptibility to mercury could be genetic, or the result of diet or stress. It also seems that people can have mercury-related impairments without realizing it. In an Italian study from 2003 comparing 22 men who frequently ate tuna with 22 who didn't, the tuna eaters (who had a mean level of 41.5 mcg/L) fared significantly worse on cognitive tests, despite having no outward symptoms of poisoning.

One thing that isn't in question, though, is that developing fetuses are particularly sensitive to the toxic effects of methylmercury. Two out of three large-scale studies have found that children born with it in their system have trouble with coordination, concentration, language, and memory—and continue to have the same deficits many years later.

Nancy Lanphear is a behavioral developmental pediatrician who works at a clinic in Vancouver for children with disabilities like autism or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Several years ago, a mother came into her clinic with a four-and-a-half-year-old girl who had cerebral palsy as well as speech and motor delays. But what attracted Lanphear's attention was that the child was drooling.

"I'm looking at this four-year-old and saying, 'This is mercury,'" Lanphear recalls, hypersalivation being a classic sign of mercury poisoning. The child's chart showed that a heavy metals screening at age two had found high mercury levels in both mother and child, as well as in the child's grandfather. The mother recalled being encouraged by her physician to eat fish during her pregnancy; she ate tuna or other seafood two to four times a week, sure that she was helping her baby's development.

"She knows that she's not to blame, that it was inadvertent, but there's still some grief there," Lanphear says of the mother. "It's not something that's going away, even though the child's mercury levels are now normal. The damage was done to the developing brain." Lanphear uses the story to remind obstetricians and pediatricians to be on the lookout for mercury poisoning in their patients.

The EPA estimates that at least 8 percent of U.S. women of childbearing age have blood mercury levels above 5.8 mcg/L. If you zero in on communities that regularly eat fish, the prevalence is much higher. In the Northeast, one out of every five women has a mercury level exceeding the EPA threshold. In New York City, it's one out of every four, and close to half of the city's Asian population have elevated mercury levels, as do two-thirds of the city's foreign-born Chinese.

High-mercury pockets also exist on the West Coast. Between 2000 and 2001, San Francisco physician Jane Hightower tested 116 patients who said they frequently ate fish. She found elevated mercury levels among 89 percent of them, with half above 10 mcg/L. Many of these patients had reported nonspecific symptoms like headaches, nausea, depression, and trouble concentrating, and had been searching for an explanation for months or years.

Since that first survey, Hightower has treated hundreds of mercury-exposed people from all walks of life. Among her patients was then-five-year-old Sophie Chabon, the daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, whose books include the best-seller Bad Mother. Sophie had been an early talker and walker, but then she seemed to hit a wall, suddenly unable to sound out words she used to know how to read and even forgetting how to tie her shoes. A blood test turned up mercury levels of 13 mcg/L. The culprit: twice-weekly tuna sandwiches.

As Sophie cut tuna out of her diet, her mercury levels dropped, and her stalled development surged ahead again. Now in high school, she has a passion for history, film, and French and shows no sign of any lasting effects from the mercury exposure. Still, Waldman fumes when she thinks about what might have happened if they hadn't caught the problem so early. "I blame our country for not [caring] about what we're spewing into the atmosphere," she says. "This is about coal, pure and simple. You wouldn't go and break your child's bones one by one, but we tolerate this kind of poison that's ruining their minds. It's insane."

While Hightower's wealthy patients tend to eat sushi and expensive tuna, swordfish, and halibut, poor Americans eat canned light tuna—often subsidized by the federal Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program—and fish they hook themselves in local rivers, lakes, or bays. Immigrants are particularly likely to fish for food, often without understanding the risks of eating their catch. The average Latino angler, for instance, consumes twice as much mercury daily as the EPA considers safe, while a 2010 study of subsistence fishing in California found that some anglers were getting 10 times that dose. The same study found that anglers with children had a higher mercury intake than those without, probably because families with more mouths to feed rely more on food that can be caught rather than bought.

The boardwalk in Ocean City, New Jersey, is a 2.5-mile strip of salt air and stimulation, with arcades and carnival rides, pirate-themed mini golf and fried clams. It was here that a young woman named Jaime Bowen stood in front of a microphone in June and nervously contemplated the crowd. A 31-year-old home-healthcare worker with two children, Bowen had gone to a Sierra Club-sponsored hair-testing event with an environmentally minded friend a month before, more as a lark than out of any real concern for her health. "It was kind of a joke going to get my hair clipped," she says. "Then, to get the results—it was a reality check."

Of the 36 people at the event who were willing to share their results, 8 had elevated mercury levels. Bowen was one of them. Hers was 1.37 ppm—too low to cause health problems, but higher than the EPA considers safe for women of childbearing age. (Hair mercury levels are evaluated differently than blood mercury levels, but a hair level of 1.2 ppm is roughly equivalent to a blood level of 5.8 mcg/L.) Now she was concerned about her two children, who, after all, ate what she ate. "You hear, 'Don't break that thermometer.' You never hear about the fish," she says. "I made my kids tuna fish sandwiches the other day, and now I feel horrible. Tuna fish—it's just one of those things you wouldn't think to be scared of."

And so Bowen stood at the podium, gripping the paper that held her prepared remarks. She talked about fish and her fears about her children's safety, and about coal. To her surprise, she looked up to see that people up and down the boardwalk had stopped to listen. "I did want them to know," she says. "I'm just a regular person—I'm not doing anything different than those people."

Behind her, the ocean sparkled, sending salty breezes drifting over the boardwalk. A seagull circled, white and gray, its bright eyes scanning the scene below: the crowded boardwalk, a fish-filled sea, and, tucked in a bay just a little to the northwest, the lighthouse-shaped smokestack of the BL England generating station, producing 450 megawatts of electricity, powered by West Virginia coal.

Dashka Slater is a regular contributor to Sierra. Her Web site is dashkaslater.com; she tweets @DashkaSlater.

This article was funded by the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign.

http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/201111/mercury.aspx

A Doctor Warns : 'Never Eat These Three Foods'

2011-11-10T02:55:00.000-08:00

When asked what one food he would ban if he could, PETA's chief medical adviser, Dr. Neal Barnard, responded with three: hot dogs, bacon, and ham. We'll let him tell you why!

In an interview with Forbes magazine, the bestselling author and president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine [http://pcrm.org/] cited those three processed meats as foods that no one, especially children, should ever eat.

In 2007," he says, "the World Cancer Research Fund and American Institute for Cancer Research released the most comprehensive review on diet and cancer ever published, prepared by the world's leading experts, and it was quite damning about the link between processed meat and colorectal cancer. In early 2011, an update to the report encouraged people to avoid processed meats altogether.

But the disease that's weighing on Dr. Barnard's mind and that has increased threefold in just the last 30 years isn't cancer—it's diabetes. And here again, meat is to blame.

Dr. Barnard notes that the fats that people consume, prevalent in meat, make muscle and liver cells resistant to the action of insulin, triggering diabetes. "The forecast from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is frightening: one in three people born in 2000 will eventually develop the disease," he says. "The medical burden is bad enough—the average person with diabetes loses well over a decade of life."

To read the rest of Dr. Barnard's eye-opening interview, visit Forbes.com. And to find tasty recipes that are 100 percent ham-, bacon-, and hot dog–free, visit our "Living" page.

http://www.peta.org/b/thepetafiles/archive/2011/11/09/a-doctor-warns-never-eat-these-three-foods.aspx

Switching To A Community Bank? Here's What You Need To Know

2011-11-05T14:18:00.000-07:00

David Meinert, owner of several Seattle businesses, including 5-Point Cafe, Big Mario's Pizza and Onto Entertainment, recently switched his business accounts from Bank of America and Chase to Seattle Bank. He says many small-business owners he knows are following his lead -- they have also been wanting to make a move but were just waiting for someone to point them to a good local alternative. So if you're fed up with the big guys and ready to transfer to a small bank or credit union, how do you find the right one? Attorney, author and small-business advocate Barbara Weltman provides these tips for a smooth transition:

Get referrals. Not all small, local, regional, community banks are created equal. Ask your circle of friends and associates for referrals. "Just as you would for finding a good doctor, lawyer or insurance agent, you have to ask around to find a good banker," Weltman says.

Beyond your immediate circle, be sure to also ask around at networking events. It helps that small banks are out there looking for you, too. "I've met a number of small-business bankers at local networking events," Weltman says. "They want new customers."

Research the fees. "Let's face it -- banks have to make money, so you're going to have to pay one way or the other," says Weltman. "Obviously, there are monthly costs you want to assess -- checking fees, check cashing fees, ATM fees, payroll deposit fees, direct deposit for employee payroll checks, business credit cards. They have a complete menu of banking services. You want to know exactly what it's going to cost you." Also, if you're planning on joining a credit union, ask whether they charge membership fees.

Ask about small-business programs. "A lot of banks want to attract small business with special features," Weltman says. Ask about low fee or no fee checking.

Communicate and negotiate. "If the reason you're moving is access to credit, it's better to have that talk upfront and to come clean for the reason you're making the change and share some financial information, to be sure it's really going to happen," says Weltman. The good news: "Because the small banks and community banks are more interpersonal, a lot of these features are more negotiable," she adds. "Ask 'what can you do for me?'"

Visit in person. Though a lot can be done online, Weltman says, "I'm old-fashioned. I think pressing the flesh makes a difference." Also, remember that one of the major benefits of banking with a small bank is the opportunity to have a personal relationship, so seeing how you click with the banker should be an important consideration.

Be patient. As tempting as it may be to stage a quick exodus from a big bank to send a message, making the switch may not be as simple as closing a Netflix account. Weltman says the actual changeover may take about three months or at least two checking statements. "Make sure outstanding checks have cleared," she says."It may take a while. It's not so much that it's complicated -- it's just a matter of making sure everything has cleared before you close up the old accounts." As a result, she warns you may have to pay duplicate fees for any period of overlap.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/04/switching-your-business-accounts-to-a-small-bank_n_1073036.html

Is McRib a McFib???

2011-11-04T12:06:00.000-07:00

The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) announced this week that it had filed an SEC complaint against Smithfield Farms, the large pig producer that supplies pork for McDonald's divisive, limited-edition McRib sandwich. The complaint, which is posted in its entirety online, alleges that the pigs' living conditions are cruel and unusual, citing reports of pigs covered in blood andsows being confined to tiny gestational grates, which are illegal in some states.

This isn't the first time animal rights' groups -- or even the HSUS -- has targeted Smithfield for its record on animal welfare. In December 2010, the HSUS got ahold of gruesome footage of a Smithfield Farms facility, leading respected figures like Mark Bittman to call for a boycott of meat from the company.

Indeed, this most recent complaint seems more like the latest salvo in an ongoing dispute than like a breaking development specifically occasioned by the McRib. An unsympathetic analysis of the HSUS action would probably lead to the conclusion that the group is tying its complaint to the McRib in order to drum up public attention for the cause. The sandwich, after all, has long been a lightning rod for press coverage.

That's not to say that the McRib is some kind of pristine product of nature, of course. Before the HSUS complaint surfaced, several media outlets had conducted investigations into the myriad of bizarre ingredients that go into the boneless "rib" patty at the center of the sandwich.

The pork bits that make up the meat include "tripe, heart and scalded stomach," which is bad enough. But the chemical additives that go into the sandwich are even worse. Allegedly, when the additives aren't binding lung and liver bits together, they're used for keeping yoga mats springy and shoe soles white.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/04/mcrib-lawsuit-humane-society-smithfield-farms_n_1075992.html

What Kim Kardashian's divorce says about marriage

2011-11-03T11:26:00.000-07:00

What do gay marriage and Proposition 8 have to do with Kim Kardashian? Not a whole lot on the face of it, yet somehow the news of the celebrity's divorce so soon after her wedding has led to a new chorus of anger over the passage of Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California.

Partners in same-sex relationships have pointed out in online comments that their partnerships, whether formally called marriage or not, have lasted decades. Other gay-rights supporters rage that it's people like Kardashian who harm the institution of marriage, not the gay and lesbian couples who want to wed.

Much as I support same-sex marriage rights, this argument doesn't wash and does no good to advance the cause. Opponents of gay marriage will simply say that both quick divorce and same-sex weddings cheapen the institution.

Beyond that, the argument for same-sex marriage shouldn't be about how long such marriages will last. Some marriages between heterosexual couples will end quickly, and so will some same-sex marriages. Some heterosexual unions are strong and loving, and others are fraught with problems. Same for gay and lesbian relationships.

The reason to support same-sex marriage isn't about whether such couples will form better households or stay together longer. It's that marriage is a basic civil right. Just as it cannot be withheld from couples based on their race or religion, it should not be forbidden to couples based on their sexual orientation. Whether those marriages ultimately prove to be stronger on average than heterosexual marriages is irrelevant. We don't ban adults from marrying based on a perception that their marriages won't last, and we shouldn't, whether they are gay, straight or Kim Kardashian.

http://opinion.latimes.com/opinionla/2011/11/what-kim-kardashians-divorce-says-about-same-sex-marriage.html

Leonardo DiCaprio Stars In Gay Love Story: "J. Edgar"

2011-11-02T12:03:00.000-07:00

To transform himself into an aging J. Edgar Hoover, Leonardo DiCaprio sat for hours at a time while makeup artists gave him liver spots, yellow teeth and big, bulbous love handles. He spends a good chunk of Clint Eastwood’s film “J. Edgar” that way, sweating and sneering in the unforgiving lighting of F.B.I. headquarters.

The part also meant memorizing endless monologues that needed to be delivered with Hoover’s own breakneck cadence. Additionally Mr. DiCaprio, who typically comes accessorized with a supermodel girlfriend in real life, had to wrestle aggressively with a man and then kiss him.

Oh, and wear a dress.

Leonardo DiCaprio, as the longtime F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover, with Clint Eastwood, the director. More Photos »

Faced with a role with demands like that, most superstar actors, even those eager to catch the attention of Oscar voters, would have turned and run. Look unhandsome and unheroic? Too big a risk, even with Mr. Eastwood at the wheel. But Mr. DiCaprio, at least the post-“Titanic” one, has made a career of highly risky choices, and somehow it keeps paying off not only on the awards circuit — he has been nominated for three Academy Awards — but at the box office as well.

“When I can’t immediately define the character, and there’s an element of mystery to it and still a lot to be explored, that’s when I say yes,” the 36-year-old Mr. DiCaprio said in an interview last week on a patio at the Bel Air Hotel here. “I like those kinds of complicated characters. I just do.”

Hollywood typically doesn’t like that answer. The star system may have become more subtle since the days of Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart, but it’s still a system: American actors are supposed to be more steady persona, less shape shifter. “The apparatus likes to box actors up,” said Brian Grazer, a producer of “J. Edgar,” which is set for release on Wednesday. “Once they become successful in one role, get them into picture after picture where they can do exactly the same thing.”

Mr. Grazer added: “To resist that, you have to make very hard choices. Most people are too afraid.”

It probably helps that Mr. DiCaprio has managed to retain a mystique about his personal life in the celebrity blogger era. Keeping that distance is something he works on. In an interview, for instance, he didn’t pretend to be a friend the way a lot of stars do. He likes his privacy, but this game also makes his performances more successful; people are more likely to accept him as a larger-than-life character if they don’t have a very clear idea of who he is off screen.

Mr. DiCaprio’s choices may be unusual, but he does have his own version of sticking with what works. The characters are mostly tortured, unsympathetic, larger-than-life guys created with the help of a tiny club of A-list directors, most notably Martin Scorsese. A urine-collecting Howard Hughes in “The Aviator.” A Zimbabwean smuggler in “Blood Diamond.” A mental patient in “Shutter Island.” A dream extractor in “Inception.”

“Leonardo could make a lot of money making mechanical genre pictures, but he wants to be challenged,” Mr. Eastwood said by telephone. “And it’s much more of a challenge to play someone who doesn’t have the slightest thing in common with you.”

Next on Mr. DiCaprio’s docket is the title role in Baz Luhrmann’s remake of “The Great Gatsby,” and he’s ready to play Frank Sinatra in another Scorsese biopic. “That is in Mr. Scorsese’s hands,” he said of a potential Sinatra film, pausing to pop a wedge of watermelon into his mouth and pour himself another cup of coffee. “I’m always incredibly game for anything that he decides to do.”

“J. Edgar” fits snuggly into this canon. The best biopics offer a portrait of person, warts and all, and invite viewers to make their own judgments about him, and Mr. Eastwood’s film strives to do just that. Hoover is depicted as a brilliant patriot who invented modern forensics and stopped at nothing to protect America through eight presidents and three wars. But the omnipowerful F.B.I. director was an impediment, to put it mildly, to the civil rights movement and worked as hard to distort the truth as he did to collect it (and file it away) to secure his power.

All of that is more or less fact. The treacherous part of “J. Edgar,” written by Dustin Lance Black, an Oscar winner for his “Milk” screenplay, involves the gray. Was Hoover homosexual? Nobody knows for sure. He certainly had an unusually close relationship with his F.B.I. colleague Clyde Tolson, played in the film by Armie Hammer (“The Social Network”). Even less clear is whether Hoover liked to wear women’s clothes, but Mr. Eastwood and Mr. DiCaprio decided to retain Mr. Black’s artful nod to the rumor.

“Obviously there’s a love story here,” Mr. Eastwood said. “Whether it is a gay love story or something else — well, the audience can interpret it. My intention was to show two men who really love each other, and beyond that it’s none of my business.”

Mr. DiCaprio’s risk taking is cheered by the Hollywood contingent that loves serious films, raising him to the level of deity for his willingness to make the kind of drama that is an endangered species at major studios these days. But a more business-minded crowd — agents, studio chiefs — says taking on all of these biopics is a mistake. The worry is that at some point Mr. DiCaprio will become uninteresting to audiences if he doesn’t pepper his road with a wider variety of roles.

Jeanine Basinger, chairwoman of the film studies department at Wesleyan University, calls this “the Paul Muni problem.” Muni was perhaps the top actor at Warner Brothers in the 1930s, starring as powerful characters in films like “Scarface.” He also had a penchant for biographical parts, winning an Oscar for “The Story of Louis Pasteur” (1936). But he developed a type of obsession with historical roles and faded.

Does Mr. DiCaprio worry about boxing himself in by trying to stay out of the box? If he does, he’s not admitting it. “Never. No. I don’t,” he said quickly.

Although Ms. Basinger raises the point, she’s not terribly worried herself. Few other actors have as much raw talent as Mr. DiCaprio, she noted, and the fact that he has been able to move from the 1980s sitcom “Growing Pains” to “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” to “Titanic” to “The Departed” bodes well for his future growth.

“He is always very strongly present as DiCaprio, yet he can really make us believe that he is another person,” Ms. Basinger said. “That’s incredible talent.”

Mr. DiCaprio’s Oscar nominations have been for “Gilbert Grape,” which he made when he was 19 years old, “The Aviator” and “Blood Diamond.” Veteran awards strategists (not working on behalf of “J. Edgar”) think he is a shoo-in for a nomination this year, along with George Clooney for his role in “The Descendants,” Alexander Payne’s look at a man trying to reconnect with his two daughters after his wife falls into a coma. But it’s still too soon to tell whether another Academy Awards ceremony is in Mr. DiCaprio’s immediate future.

Leonardo DiCaprio, with Judi Dench, who plays his mother in "J. Edgar." More Photos »

Will “J. Edgar” be a hit? Also unclear. But Mr. DiCaprio does have an insurance policy in that ever pesky “Titanic,” which will be rereleased in April in 3-D. If a 3-D conversion of “The Lion King” can generate almost $100 million, as it did for Disney last month, “Titanic” should easily make a major box office splash.

Mr. DiCaprio said he hadn’t thought about it much and had come to terms with being continually associated with the dopey Jack Dawson. “I’m not haunted by it, but it certainly follows me,” he said. “I’ve been to the Amazon, and people with no clothes on, and I’m not exaggerating, know about that film. I’ve accepted it.”

In person Mr. DiCaprio comes across exactly as you suspect he would. He was tired, arriving at a morning interview the day after flying back to Los Angeles from Australia, where he had been filming “The Great Gatsby.” But he was also playful — those blue eyes may have been jet lagged but they still managed to twinkle — and exceedingly polite.

“Bear with me while I come to my senses,” he said with a smile, adjusting the blue baseball cap he was wearing (backward, naturally). The next minute he was asking whether Sian Grigg, his Hoover makeup artist, could be given recognition in this article. “I’m sure she had multiple panic attacks trying to get me ready,” he said. “I could be quite squirmy.”

He lit up when talking about movies and people that have influenced him, particularly Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard,” which he said he discussed with Mr. Eastwood during the making of “J. Edgar.” They wanted to emulate how that 1950 film handled voice-over narration. But Mr. DiCaprio also seemed to go on auto pilot from time to time, answering in the way that actors tend to answer. (Lucky to be employed this, trusting your gut that.) And personal questions are not appreciated. Just why is it that he dates all of those supermodels?

He threw a look — um, duh, wouldn’t you if you could? — and then frosted over. “I’ve never really talked about that kind of stuff, and, very respectfully, I’m going to keep it that way,” he said.

He’d rather stick to “J. Edgar,” particularly that prosthetic makeup, which he found frustrating and claustrophobic. He estimates that he spent about two weeks of the 39-day shoot as “old Hoover,” which required sitting up to five hours a day in Ms. Grigg’s makeup chair. “To stay in character and to fight the urge not to rip it off at times and to not feel trapped inside it is extremely hard,” he said. “It’s like you’ve been slathered in honey and wrapped in a giant duvet.” (Told by a reporter that he had just created a new fantasy for his crazier female fans, he laughed.)

Mr. DiCaprio did months of research to be able to inhabit Hoover fully. He flew to Washington with Mr. Black to tour the Justice Department and one of Hoover’s former homes. Mr. DiCaprio also met with Cartha D. DeLoach, one of the only people still alive who worked closely with Hoover, and taped their hours-long conversation. (Hoover would have been proud.) “I wanted him to tell me how he walked, how he talked, what his hands looked like, what his desk looked like, what was above his desk,” Mr. DiCaprio said.

“The research of these roles is half the fun and half the challenge — maybe more,” he added. “It’s what makes it exciting to me.”

Mr. Black recalled that Mr. DiCaprio dug up obscure film footage of a young Hoover giving speeches and read through transcripts of his Congressional testimony. “I had gone with a more redacted version of those, leaving out some of the more flowery, Hoovery language,” Mr. Black said. “Hoover liked to weave a lot of illusions of slimy, slippery animals into his speeches at that time. Leo loved it. He said, ‘Come on, we’ve got to use this stuff.’ ”

(Mr. Black also remembers Mr. DiCaprio’s fondness for German chocolate cupcakes. “Some of those pounds on later Hoover were not prosthetic,” he said. “I’ll say it. Leo got a little fat.”)

DiCapriophiles will be quick to note that he does have some important things in common with Hoover, at least on the surface. Hoover, for instance, was very close to his mother, played by Judi Dench in the film. Mr. DiCaprio has a tight relationship with his own mom, Irmelin DiCaprio, who raised him in the Loz Feliz section of Los Angeles and drove him around to auditions.

“The difference is that Hoover’s mother told him what to do, and my mother listened to me,” he said. “My mother was incredibly supportive. She wasn’t a stage mom and really didn’t care either way if I was an actor. She just listened to this arrogant little kid saying he wanted to be an actor and didn’t laugh in my face.”

Hoover was also a man who lost himself in his own ego and his need to be the center of attention — something that Mr. DiCaprio, as a student of Hollywood, has to see as a potential fate for himself if he’s not careful. (Hello, “Sunset Boulevard.”)

Then again, maybe not. “It’s not something that I actively worry about,” he said. “I’m fully aware that every career is fleeting in some respects.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/movies/leonardo-dicaprio-in-clint-eastwoods-j-edgar.html?_r=1&hp

Would You Eat a Dog Disguised as a Chicken???

2011-11-01T16:56:00.000-07:00

Washington, D.C.'s Woof Walk dog event turned into a squawk stroll when a little dog named Mongo dressed as a chicken challenged dog lovers to ask themselves why they call one animal "family" and another animal "dinner."

While Mongo's assistants explained to Woof Walkers that chickens are as smart and social as dogs, one former chicken farmer backed them up, saying, "I know they are. I used to have thousands of them."

As that farmer can attest, some chickens are outgoing and fearless, while others are more reserved. Chickens can complete complex mental tasks, and they hand down knowledge from one generation to the next. Like all animals, chickens love their families, value their lives, and don't want to suffer and die.

If you wouldn't eat your dog, give chickens the same respect. Become a former chicken-eater—it's easy with tasty, you'd-never-know-it's-faux chicken, like Gardein Chick'n Filets, Boca Chik'N Patties, and MorningStar Farms Meal Starters Chik'n Strips.

http://www.peta.org/b/thepetafiles/archive/2011/11/01/would-you-eat-a-dog-disguised-as-a-chicken.aspx

How Pigs, Pollution & People Taint Our Fruits And Veggies

2011-10-27T04:58:00.000-07:00

Ashley Armstrong's parents haven't let her eat green salad in five years.

While other parents struggle to get assorted greens into their children's bellies, the Armstrongs have left salad off Ashley's plate since September 2006, when the E. coli from a bag of spinach nearly killed her. Then 2 years old, Ashley was left with just 10 percent kidney function.

"We were totally naive," says her mother, Elizabeth, who now serves on the board of the Center for Foodborne Illness Research and Prevention, a public health advocacy group. "We assumed that the food we bought at our grocery store was safe. We assumed that the FDA, or whomever, had checked to make sure it was safe. We've since found out that's not the case."

Inspectors failed to pinpoint the exact source of the E. coli outbreak that killed three people, sickened 205 and cost the spinach industry $100 million. About a mile from one contaminated spinach field, however, they found a wide range of suspects: high levels of the bacterium in free-range angus cows and their dung, and its genetic match turned up in local feral pigs, soil and surface water.

"There were so many different possible sources that we couldn't say for sure how the spinach got contaminated," Michele Jay-Russell, a food safety specialist at the University of California, Davis, told HuffPost. "But it raised awareness that cattle and wildlife intruding into the field or waterways could be risks for moving pathogens into the produce environment."

As far as Elizabeth Armstrong was concerned, all that mattered was that "somehow poop got in the plant."

It wasn't an isolated incident. Foodborne pathogens strike roughly one in six Americans every year, sickening 48 million, hospitalizing 128,000 and killing 3,000, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

And choosing local and organic options, even going vegan, isn't enough to guarantee safety. Between 1998 and 2007, produce sickened almost 27,000 Americans in the course of nearly 700 foodborne illness outbreaks, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The nonprofit group suggests that produce outbreaks now surpass the number of outbreaks originating in poultry, beef, pork or eggs.

In their wake, these waves of outbreaks helped prompt the U.S. government to implement new regulations, including some standards specific to produce safety.

Contaminated fruits and vegetables tend to be those that grow closest to the ground -- bean sprouts, lettuce and the like -- as evidenced recently by the suspected contamination of California romaine lettuce via manure-laden lagoons and of Oregon strawberries from deer feces.

Now, America's most deadly known foodborne-illness outbreak in more than a quarter-century has added a new danger to the list: cantaloupe contaminated by the bacterial infection listeria. Since the end of July, at least 28 people have been killed and 133 sickened after eating cantaloupe grown at Jensen Farms in southeastern Colorado. (An average produce outbreak can be linked to 39 illnesses, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest.)

"We have rarely, if ever, seen this pathogen in produce," says Sandra Eskin, director of the food safety campaign with the Pew Charitable Trusts. This outbreak marks the first documented case of listeria in cantaloupe.

Only since the 1990s has produce emerged as an "important vehicle of transmission," says Jay-Russell, noting the heightened attention after the 1996 outbreak of E. coli in Odwalla unpasteurized apple juice.

One of produce's problems is that people tend to eat it raw, and therefore it misses a "kill step" such as heating or cooking. Jay-Russell says that means that oversight has to focus on the entire "food continuum, from the fields to the fork."

LISTERIA LESSONS

In Centennial, Colo., Jeni Exley, her husband and their college-age daughter ate cantaloupe from Jensen Farms with no ill effects. In nearby Littleton, however, Jeni's 84-year-old father, Herb Stevens, was not so lucky.

Before his bout with listeria, Stevens was independent. Since battling the infection, with its attendant fever, muscle aches, diarrhea and other symptoms, he requires daily nursing care and a walker.

Stevens and his wife hadn't worried about their cantaloupes. The elderly couple always bought by the half: not so much that they'd have to throw any leftovers away; cut open to offer a sneak peek inside. But listeria is invisible to the naked eye and easily transferred by knife from the rough, contaminant-inviting surface into the flesh. Once inside, the fruit's low acidity further encourages the bacteria's growth.

According to a federal report released last Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration, the state of Colorado and Jensen Farms narrowed the listeria outbreak's root cause down to poor sanitation inside a packing facility used by the farm. Tests by the investigators, including experts in agriculture, veterinary medicine and environmental health, ruled out contamination in the farms' fields and irrigation systems, as well as any links to adjacent land use or animal intrusions.

Any of these pathways were reasonably suspect in this case, given listeria's widespread presence in the environment. Research led by Martin Wiedmann, a food science expert at Cornell University, found the pathogen in samples collected throughout New York state -- from sidewalks, parks, ponds, rivers, even the middle of state parks. Another study found that farmers brought listeria home on their clothing and shoes. To a lesser extent, listeria even landed in nonagricultural homes.

The pathogen is persistent, even hardy, withstanding cold temperatures and showing an ability to survive more than a decade indoors. "Bacteria are always trying to be one step ahead of us," says Jay-Russell of UC Davis.

Fortunately, as pervasive and aggressively adaptive as it is, listeria is typically only dangerous on the order of billions of cells, Cornell's Wiedmann said. And only certain subtypes, such as the monocytogenes strain identified on the cantaloupes, repeatedly appear in human outbreaks.

Jensen Farms adhered to safe practices in their melon production operations, such as the use of drip irrigation and plastic mulch to keep cantaloupe from resting directly on the soil, according to Michael Bartolo, a senior research scientist at the Arkansas Valley Research Center in Rocky Ford, Colo. However, there was still plenty of room for contamination.

On Wednesday's media call, Sherry McGarry of the CDC described a few likely culprits in Jensen's packing facility. The building's poor design allowed water to pool on the floor, and the lack of a pre-cooling procedure may likewise have helped incubate bacteria in condensation on melons moving from the warm outdoor air to cold storage.

Of course, that first microbe had to come from somewhere. McGarry suggested that low levels of listeria may have originally been present in the fields and subsequently been carried inside. A truck used to haul culled cantaloupe to a cattle operation was also parked adjacent to the packing facility, suggesting that feces may have hitched a ride.

"The investigation is still open," says McGarry. "There may be details that we are unable to provide at this time."

THE FOUR W'S

A wide range of human and environmental factors can in fact open the door for listeria, E. coli, salmonella and another foodborne pathogens to invade the human body. Eskin points to four general categories that account for most foodborne illness outbreaks: water, waste, wildlife and workers.

Pathogens don't live well on produce that is exposed to the sun and hot temperatures -- unless there's lots of water around.

In the wake of Tropical Storm Irene, Vermont farmers are tossing out perfectly good-looking potatoes and winter squash. The farmers know that if floodwaters come in contact with the edible parts of plants, there is danger of contamination from overflowing septic systems, wastewater treatment plants or soils laden with feces from dogs, deer or cattle. Even planting seeds during or after a flood can be risky.

Those factors are all key to pathogen development and spread, but scientists see one consistent starting point. "It's safe to say that most pathogens that make humans sick begin in the gut of an animal," says Pew's Eskin.

Many animals harbor and deposit microbes that are harmful to humans, but not always to the animal itself, explains Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia. From an animal's intestinal tract, the toxins can travel into feces and then onto an agricultural field through grazing, water irrigation or as fertilizer.

Close proximity between crops and cattle, especially if the grazing cattle are upslope of a field, may be particularly dangerous for produce. In 1985, the first reported outbreak connecting listeriosis to food was traced back to sheep that grazed in the vicinity of a cabbage field harvested for coleslaw.

Wild animals poop, too. "We don't grow food in a sterile environment or in a bubble. It's outside in the dirt," says Jeffrey LeJeune, a professor of food science, environmental and animal health at The Ohio State University. "If a bird flies overhead and decides that it's had enough to eat, it could leave a deposit on a melon or a tomato."

Fences can be helpful, but such restrictions on wildlife movement are controversial among ecologists. Jay-Russell suggests other approaches that have been adopted by many California growers, such as avoiding planting where there is a major wildlife corridor and walking the fields before harvest.

Other species aren't always responsible for contamination. Human waste, a likely contributor to this year's bean sprout E. coli outbreak in Germany, is also a consistent threat to the food supply. Produce can be at risk if a single worker doesn't wash his or her hands thoroughly.

"How many people touch a cantaloupe between the farm and table? A whole lot more than the number of armadillos that do," LeJeune says. "If we could solve all the problems of all of the animals, the problem wouldn't go away."

RECALLS PROMPT REGULATION

The government recently caught on to the fact that investing in prevention could pay off in terms of both lives and money saved. A 2010 report published by the Produce Safety Project at Georgetown University estimates that foodborne illness linked to produce costs the United States almost $39 billion a year.

"In the last three or four years, the CDC and health departments have picked up outbreaks that five years earlier would have never been detected," says Doyle.

They are also detecting the outbreaks more quickly, thanks in part to increasingly sophisticated DNA fingerprinting tools. In the case of the listeria-contaminated cantaloupe, agencies came together with a "quick and effective response," says FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg during a media briefing last Wednesday.

Yet many experts say the real measure of progress is not the ability to detect outbreaks, but to prevent them in the first place.

In January, President Barack Obama signed into law the Food Safety Modernization Act, which establishes regulatory standards for the safe growing, harvesting, sorting, packing and storage of fresh fruits and vegetables. FSMA takes into account both manmade and naturally occurring hazards, and includes requirements to ensure the safe import of food from foreign facilities.

In effect, the new law reverses the orientation of FDA's food safety activities from reaction to prevention. "That's huge," says Eskin. "By starting at the beginning of the food chain rather than the end, hopefully they'll need to do less responding down the road."

For example, the law will require inspectors to make regular visits to fields like Jensen Farms to identify sources of contamination before it has an opportunity to make anyone ill -- similar to regular restaurant inspections. It will also create the first-ever mandatory national safety standards for produce.

"Lessons from [the listeria] outbreak speak to the urgency we have in implementing the FDA's Food Safety Modernization Act, which gives FDA much-needed tools to build a new prevention-focused food safety system," said Hamburg. Since 1998, the FDA and USDA have issued guidance on "Good Agricultural Practices" for producers to follow, but such urgings have no enforcement behind them.

As they finalize the new food safety laws, Jay-Russell says federal regulators should draw inspiration from the Leafy Green Marketing Agreement, which California and Arizona put in place after the 2006 spinach E. coli outbreak. Experts from the two states, which produce 90 percent of the country's leafy greens, developed a wide range of food safety metrics, from how often to test irrigation water to the optimal method of composting and proper use of animal manures. Further, leafy green growers generally plant and grow in Northern California between late spring and fall, and then move on to southern California and Arizona for the winter to avoid floodwaters.

Despite its promise, some experts still have concerns over the new federal regulations. The FSMA exempts small farms, where contamination can easily go unnoticed.

"I'd love to say that if you grow food in your backyard and raise your own cows, you'd be safe. But that's not the way it is. Both small and large producers have to take precautions to keep feces out of our food," says Bill Marler, a lawyer who made his name as the "E. coli guy" representing victims of the infamous Jack in the Box outbreak in the early 1990s. He now represents dozens of victims and families affected by the listeria outbreak.

The outbreaks that make the news tend to be the big ones, and usually associated with large producers. "It's easier to pinpoint an outbreak when it poisons hundreds of people," Marler says.

United Fresh Produce Association spokesman Ray Gilmer says he agrees that "small farms shouldn't get a pass on food safety." Other than their opposition to this exemption, the lobbying group, which represents farmers, grocers and restaurant chains, is all for beefed up regulations. Gilmer said, "The produce industry came to the cumulative realization several years ago that it is in everyone's best interest to pass a new law and ensure consistently high enforcement of the best possible food safety standards."

As long as the new rules for production practices are "scientifically valid", he suggests there isn't anything they wouldn't be willing to do.

Lack of funding is also a threat to FSMA implementation. The House recently voted to cut 2012 funds for the FDA's food safety program, despite the agency's request for a raise to cover increased costs for improved technologies and more inspections, up to once every three years for facilities deemed high-risk.

The FDA only inspected about 15 percent of U.S. food production facilities in 2010. Before this year's outbreak, Jensen Farms had never hosted a federal inspector.

Eskin tells HuffPost that Pew advocated for "higher minimum frequencies for facility inspections." Still, she says, there is no "magic number."

"We have seen outbreaks at plants that were consistently inspected," adds Wiedmann.

Wiedmann suggests that it is most vital to invest in research, technology and tools to help producers develop safe systems. "If the government has the ability to quickly and effectively detect an outbreak and trace it back, then companies know that if they do something wrong, they will get caught," he says.

"The hard truth," says Wiedmann, "is that 100 percent safe food is virtually impossible as long as we grow food exposed to the environment."

LAST LINE OF DEFENSE

No matter how rigorous or enforceable the regulations, experts caution that some factors will always remain out of the government's control.

Food safety education for consumers, including proper hand and produce washing, "cannot be overemphasized," says Bruce Kaplan, a retired veterinarian in Florida and advocate for One Health, a movement that recognizes the interconnectedness of human, animal and environmental health.

Keeping animals healthy is also key. "It's a very small world and we're all interconnected in it," says Eileen Choffnes, a scholar and director of the Institute of Medicine's Forum On Microbial Threats. This December, the forum is slated to host a meeting on One Health's ability to improve food safety.

Vaccinating cattle against infection could help, according to Thomas Besser, a professor of microbiology in the Food and Waterborne Disease Research Program at Washington State University's College of Veterinary Medicine. So can simply providing them with contaminant-free food and water.

Unfortunately, developing an effective vaccine and providing cattle with "microbiologically clean water" are proving to be difficult tasks, Besser says, given how easily food and feces can contaminate an animal's drinking source. He is currently looking into alternative watering systems that go beyond the bucket, such as training animals to drink out of a hose or press a lever to get water.

Another lingering mystery is the apparent seasonality of microbes in some animals. Cattle in particular have been found to shed more pathogens during the summer and fall, notes Jay-Russell. E. coli nearly disappears in the winter.

"This seasonal variation is a big question," says Besser. "If we can find out what causes the summertime increase, and depending on what that is, we might be able to reduce the number of cattle infected by 90 percent."

Research into animal biology could help identify new strategies to prevent or treat listeria as well. Unlike other pathogens such as E. coli, listeria can sicken both humans and animals, explains Jay-Russell. Because sheep, goats and cattle develop similar symptoms to humans, she suggests studies of this parallel animal disease could lead to a better understanding of human illness.

A One Health perspective is useful in solving such puzzles, suggests Kaplan.

"Had One Health principles been implemented 50 years ago, there would be many people who would not have suffered, not have died needlessly as they continue to do," he says.

The latest deaths linked to the listeria outbreak from tainted cantaloupes were reported on Tuesday. It is "too soon to declare the cantaloupe outbreak over," given the long incubation period of the pathogen, Barbara Mann of the CDC said during last Wednesday's media briefing. Plus, there appears to be a steady stream of outbreaks to take its place.

"It seems that every couple of months, there is yet another foodborne outbreak, and it usually has a fairly large footprint, either in terms of the number of people sickened or the geographic range of product distribution," says Choffnes. "Even a single event can have a very large impact on not only human and animal health, but the economy."

Shortly after the cantaloupe recall came announcement of a listeria-based recall of chopped romaine, caught early thanks to a newly launched federal research effort to gauge food-safety conditions surrounding leafy green vegetables. And late last week, another sample test by the FDA uncovered contamination in bagged spinach, resulting in another preemptive recall.

"Food is not as safe as we think it is," Elizabeth Armstrong says. Shopping at a grocery store for her family, she says, is now "an act of faith."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/26/produce-contamination-illness-listeria-infection-loop_n_1033152.html

Ron Paul Defends Gays In The Military

2011-10-26T12:01:00.000-07:00

Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) said that heterosexual military servicemembers were "causing more trouble than gays" due to their superior numbers in an interview with the Iowa State Daily released Wednesday.

"Well, like I said, everybody has the same rights as everybody else, so homosexuals in the military isn't a problem. It's only if they're doing things they shouldn't be, if they're disruptive. But there's ... men and women getting into trouble with each other too. And there's a lot more heterosexuals in the military, so logically they're causing more trouble than gays. So yes, you just have the same rules for everybody and treat them all the same," he said, according to the paper.

Paul was one of five House Republicans to vote for the repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which officially ended in Septmber, and among 15 House Republicans in December. "To discharge an otherwise well-trained, professional, and highly skilled member of the military for these reasons is unfortunate and makes no financial sense," he said in May.

When asked by the Iowa State Daily on his position on gays, he said, "You know I just, I don't think of people in little groups like that. I don't think of people as 'gay' here and 'black people' there, or 'women' over here."

"Everybody is an individual person, and everybody has the same rights as anyone else. The government has no business in your private life, you know, so if one person is allowed to do something so should everyone else. The whole gay marriage issue is a private affair, and the federal government has no say."

Paul voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2004, which would have added an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning gay marriage. However, he continues to support the Defense of Marriage Act, which disallows the federal government from recognizing same-sex unions and allows states not to recognize another state's same-sex unions. He has said that the legislation protects a state from having to recognize another state's definition of marriage.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/26/ron-paul-gays-military-dadt_n_1032990.html

Monsanto & "Frankenfood"

2011-10-22T18:48:00.000-07:00

Monsanto, as you may know, is the focus of a recent documentary called "Food Inc.," a film unveiling the truth about America's genetically modified (GMO) food chain. Monsanto's GMO corn is banned from the European Union and Monsanto’s rBGH, the bovine growth hormone that produces more milk from cows, is banned in 31 countries because of the health risks — particularly beast cancer and prostate cancer. Those countries include 27 European nations, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Canada. rBGH is also believed to be the cause of premature development in women.

Wikileaks released a cable stating that the U.S. State Department planned on retaliating against France because France rejected Monsanto's GMO corn, and the U.S. government was afraid that the ban could reverberate across the European Union. Apparently the U.S. Government is concerned that Monsanto's presence in Europe could shrink because of France’s reluctance to subject its citizens to genetically modified agriculture.

The government of India has filed suit against Monsanto for what they refer to as "biopiracy," taking indigenous plants and inserting genes into them and then patenting them as intellectual properties forcing Indian farmers to have to pay for that which was formally free.

Vanity Fair did a wonderful exposé in 2008 on the plight of the U.S. Small farmer. In it, Monsanto is accused of polluting the U.S. agricultural chain by allowing GMO pollen to drift on to small U.S. farms against the wishes of the small farmers and then suing the small farmers when it's discovered that their crops violate U.S. patents owned by Monsanto. It's not that the farmers are pollinating it themselves, it's that the pollen finds its way on to the small farms whereby small farmers are completely unable to stop it. In short, Monsanto is accused of predatory agricultural practices further eliminating the small U.S. Farmer from the U.S. food chain.

Forbes also did a wonderful exposé on child labor in India and found that Monsanto uses child labor in their cotton fields. The excerpt:

"Jyothi Ramulla Naga is 4 feet tall. From sunup to sundown she is hunched over in the fields of a cottonseed farm in southern India, earning 20 cents an hour. Farmers in the Uyyalawada region process high-tech cottonseeds genetically engineered to contain a natural pesticide, on behalf of U.S. agriculture giant Monsanto. To get the seeds to breed true the farmers have to cross-pollinate the plants, a laborious task that keeps a peak of a dozen workers busy for several months on just one acre. And to make a profit the farmers have to use cheap labor. That means using kids like Jyothi, who says she's 15 but looks no older than 12. (Monsanto points to papers indicating she is 15.) To harvest the bolls three months later, the farmers use cheap labor again, not the machinery that is used to pick cotton in the U.S."

Monsanto's website responded to claims that it uses child labor by suggesting that when children offer up their labor freely, that it's okay so long as it doesn't "interfere with their educational opportunities." The excerpt:

"At Monsanto, we support the employment of young people who have freely chosen to work in the agricultural industry — either on a seasonal basis to earn extra income or as a full-time vocation — so long as it is legal and does not interfere with their educational opportunities.

Greed has an insatiable appetite, and it’s clear by that very excerpt that values play no role in Monsanto’s business practices when it interferes with profit. Those values, or lack of, are set by Monsanto’s board.

Jamie Hubley, 15, Commits Suicide After Bullying

2011-10-17T14:51:00.000-07:00

A gay 10th-grader killed himself this weekend after complaining about bullying at his school on the Internet, where he made a last blog post tagged as “suicide note.”

Jamie Hubley, 15, was out to friends and family in Ottawa, Canada. He had been taking antidepressants and was trying to get professional help. But on Friday, he updated his Tumblr blog for the last time and said his goodbye, before being found dead on Saturday, according to the Ottawa Citizen.

“It’s so hard,” Hubley wrote. “I’m sorry, I can’t take it anymore.”

Hubley’s death follows closely behind that of Jamey Rodemeyer, the 14-year-old student who had also written about life at school on the Internet. Groups such as the Trevor Project, which offers help to teens thinking about suicide via its Lifeline at (866) 488-7366, had worried that Rodemeyer’s high-profile passing could trigger a series of suicides called a “suicide contagion.” Hubley never wrote about Rodemeyer. But he spoke candidly about his own depression.

Hubley described having a problem with cutting that left his arms scarred, and he praised his parents in his final note but said he couldn’t wait the three years before he’d graduate from high school.

“People said ‘it gets better,’” Hubley wrote, likely having seen the video campaign meant to encourage kids to outlast bullying. “It’s fucking bullshit.”

Rodemeyer had also seen the It Gets Better videos, having even made one himself, but he hanged himself from the family swing set when it seemed bullying at school was endless.

Hubley said he was seeing a psychologist, was on medication, but his problems didn’t disappear. He talked more frequently about feeling ostracized and alone than being bullied.

“I hate being the only open gay guy in my school,” he had written earlier. “It fucking sucks, I really want to end it. Like all of it.”

But he was certainly bullied.

“Being open does not help at all,” he wrote before the school year started. “Yeah, someone will call me a fag. But one after the other, after the other … I can tell on them … Yeah. But they don’t give a shit. They’ll come back after their suspension (fun day at home, free day at school) and continue calling me a faggot. I’m not ready.”

http://news.advocate.com/post/11580677515/jamie-hubley-15-commits-suicide-after-bullying

New York Times Review Of 'The Rosie Show'

2011-10-14T18:07:00.000-07:00

Among the Lectures, a Bit of Shtick

Rosie O’Donnell’s new talk show, her first since 2002, is shown live and offers a mix of standup comedy, music, dance and one-on-one chats with celebrities about menopause creams and breast reduction. Especially compared with the solemn, mostly repurposed fare that clutters the rest of OWN, “The Rosie Show” is colorful and spontaneous: the funny cousin who shows up for a family ceremony late and lets suitcases of clothes, shoes and presents spill out all across the living room floor.

It’s not perfect television, it’s amusing television, and a reminder of why so many other OWN programs, beautifully shot and expertly produced, seem so dull.

Ms.O’Donnell’s debut on Monday preceded the premiere of another OWN show, “Oprah’s Lifeclass.” These are lectures built around clips of old interviews with the likes of Jim Carrey, J. K. Rowling and Ellen DeGeneres that Ms. Winfrey, seated in an armchair, uses to illustrate an “Aha!” moment.

Mr. Carrey, for example, told Ms. Winfrey in 1997 that he had visualized success and willed it to happen, writing himself a $10 million check as inspiration. Ms. Winfrey this week described Mr. Carrey as one of “our greatest teachers.”

Ms. Winfrey also used her own past as a morality tale, showing her famous weight-loss reveal in 1988, when she dragged a red wagon laden with 67 pounds of fat; on “Lifeclass” she said it illustrated “the false power of ego.” (She didn’t explain why it was any less egotistical to brag about feeling less compelled to lose weight.)

“Oprah’s Lifeclass” is “The Oprah Winfrey Show” with the life sucked out of it. Episodes of that series are also being reshown on OWN. And the best of them reveal all too clearly that her success didn’t spring solely from the New Age-y self-improvement lessons, but from Ms. Winfrey’s spirited interactions with guests and audiences. She wasn’t always so spiritually “mindful.” A lot of the time she was irreverent, bold and even at times shocking.

Ms. O’Donnell isn’t Oprah Winfrey, but she has a friendly rapport with guests like Russell Brand, Wanda Sykes and Roseanne Barr, as well as people in her studio audience, who ask questions that she answers in the style of the old “Carol Burnett Show.” Ms. Burnett is not Ms.O’Donnell’s only role model. She has often said she wants to recreate the kind of fun, easygoing talk show Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin used to host in the ’60s and ’70s. And like them, Ms. O’Donnell is willing to be silly, be it singing with shirtless male dancers or hosting nutty quiz rounds with celebrity guests.

The celebrity interviews are relaxed and often quite intimate. She and Ms. Sykes discovered that as little girls, they both fantasized about having children, not with a husband, but as single mothers. “I guess that’s what little lesbians tell themselves,” Ms. O’Donnell said.

Ms. O’Donnell always makes a lot of Spanx jokes, but even she seemed a little taken aback by the singer Gloria Estefan, who confided that she wears Spanx with a crotch opening and thus doesn’t need to use paper seat covers in public toilets.

There is a redemptive thread to this talk show as well, which is perhaps a requirement for all OWN programming. Ms. O’Donnell left “The View” in 2007, after only a year as a co-host, in semidisgrace after publicly feuding with Donald Trump and her fellow hosts Barbara Walters and Elisabeth Hasselbeck.

That debacle led to a confessional memoir, “Celebrity Detox,” about her struggles with fame and anger, themes that pop up as self-deprecating jokes in her stand-up comedy.

On the premiere of her show on Monday, Ms. O’Donnell performed a mock cabaret number with her own lyrics to “The Night Chicago Died.” (“Remember my problems on ‘The View’/I told Hasselbeck a thing or two.”)

She also discussed rehab with Mr. Brand, a former drug addict, and breast cancer with Ms. Sykes, who caught hers early and is in full recovery. But serious issues don’t get in the way of what Ms. O’Donnell does best: amiable, free-floating conversation that seems unscripted and unpretentious.

“The Rosie Show” is an OWN program that doesn’t ask viewers to look inside themselves; it just entices them to watch.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/15/arts/television/the-rosie-show-and-oprahs-lifeclass-on-own.html?hp

Bishop Indicted For Failure To Report Abuse By Priest

2011-10-14T17:39:00.000-07:00

The Roman Catholic bishop of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Robert Finn, and the diocese he leads have been indicted by a county grand jury on a charge of failure to report suspected child abuse in the case of a priest who had been accused of taking lewd photographs of young girls.

The indictment is the first ever of a Catholic bishop in the 25 years since the scandal over sexual abuse by priests first became public in the United States.

Bishop Finn is accused of neglecting to report abuse that occurred as recently as last year — almost 10 years since the nation’s Catholic bishops passed a charter pledging to report suspected abusers to law enforcement authorities.

The bishop has acknowledged that he knew of the existence of the photos last December but did not turn them over to the police until May.

During that period Bishop Finn and the diocese had reason to suspect that the priest, the Rev. Shawn Ratigan, might subject a child to abuse, the indictment said, citing “previous knowledge of concerns regarding Father Ratigan and children; the discovery of hundreds of photographs of children on Father Ratigan’s laptop, including a child’s naked vagina, upskirt images and other images focused on the crotch; and violations of restrictions placed on Father Ratigan.”

The indictment was announced on Friday by the Jackson County prosecutor, Jean Peters-Baker. It had been under seal since Oct. 6 because the bishop was out of the country. He returned on Thursday.

“This is about protecting children,” Ms. Peters-Baker said.

The bishop and the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph were charged with one count each, a misdemeanor.

Bishop Finn appeared in court at 1 p.m. and pleaded not guilty, as did lawyers for the diocese.

Bishop Finn said in a statement, “We will meet these announcements with a steady resolve and a vigorous defense.”

He said that he and the diocese had given “complete cooperation” to law enforcement. He also pointed to steps he had taken since the scandal first became public, which included commissioning a report to look into the case and reinforcing procedures for handling allegations of abuse.

Father Ratigan was arrested in May and has been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of taking indecent photographs of young girls, most recently during an Easter egg hunt last spring.

His case prompted a civil lawsuit filed in August that asserts that between December 2010 and May 2011, Father Ratigan attended children’s birthday parties, spent weekends in the homes of parish families, hosted the Easter egg hunt and presided, with the bishop’s permission, at a girl’s First Communion.

The case has generated fury at a bishop who was already a polarizing figure in his diocese, and there are widespread calls for him to resign. Parishioners started a Facebook page called ’”Bishop Finn Must Go” and circulated a petition. An editorial in The Kansas City Star in June calling for the bishop to step down concluded that prosecutors must “’actively pursue all relevant criminal charges” against everyone involved.

Stoking much of the anger is the fact that only three years ago, Bishop Finn settled lawsuits with 47 plaintiffs in sexual abuse cases for $10 million and agreed to a long list of preventive measures, among them to report anyone suspected of being a pedophile immediately to law enforcement authorities.

Bishop Finn, who was appointed in 2005, alienated many of his priests and parishioners, and won praise from others, when he remade the diocese to conform with his traditionalist theological views. He is one of few bishops affiliated with the conservative movement Opus Dei.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/15/us/kansas-city-bishop-indicted-in-reporting-of-abuse-by-priest.html?_r=1&hp

Rosie O'Donnell Is Back (With A Little Help From Oprah)

2011-10-12T12:25:00.000-07:00

Finally, the Oprah Winfrey Network has something like a twinkle in its eye.

“The Rosie Show,” which premiered live from Harpo Studios on Monday afternoon, has been touted as Rosie O’Donnell’s much-anticipated return to television, which may be overstating the case slightly. In the 10 years since her syndicated daytime talk show “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” ended, the former stand-up and sometime film star seemed to be going out of her way to shake off the “Queen of Nice” mantle she had crocheted for herself while sweet-talking celebrities for six seasons.

In 2006, she got cranky and righteous, locking horns with Elisabeth Hasselbeck on “The View” before walking off in a huff. She produced and starred in a Lifetime movie, launched a variety show so terrible it ended after a single episode, and wrote a memoir about how awful it was to be on “The View.” None of which guaranteed or even hinted that O’Donnell would be the one to haul up OWN’s disappointing ratings.

Which “The Rosie Show” might just do. It had a not-bad, pretty good, kinda funny, sort of smart debut. Not the sort of thing that would rock a major network back on its heels with joy, but it certainly provided an oasis of humor and sunshine amid OWN’s endless replaying of the self-congratulatory final episodes of “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

It was “nice Rosie” who showed up, in Diane von Furstenberg shmatte, as she said, and Prada boots, with the best hair cut she’s had in … well, ever, and the easy, zingy showmanship that has kept her afloat in fans even during the rocky years.

Wisely, she opened with a little stand-up, and sure there were Spanx jokes — the woman just cannot get over Spanx, which is of course a funny word and something to which many OWN viewers can relate — but it was lovely to see her back behind the microphone doing Penny Marshall impersonations and poking fun at herself for “the chubby person’s shirt pull.” There were questions from the audience — "just like Carol Burnett but not really because she’s a genius, and I’m just me” — which unfortunately included fellow Oprah acolyte Suze Orman (who seems to have it in her contract that she will show up on every OWN show or else).

Orman’s question led to a mildly hilarious song about how O’Donnell came to Chicago set to the tune of “The Night Chicago Died” (which, for TV critics of a certain age, alone made the show worth watching) and accompanied by a group of chorus boys who were soon shirtless, allowing Rosie to sing that “It’s true I’m gay, but I’m not dead.”

The rest of the show was devoted to official first guest and new O’Donnell “crush” Russell Brand and his admirable ability to act like a semi-strung-out dingbat while talking most sensibly and articulately about topics as diverse as the playing out of the commercialistic age, the emptiness of celebrity culture and the benefits of being a three-time winner of the Shagger of the Year Award. He also brought with him a pre-taped mini-tour of Friendly House, a recovery center for women, which allowed him to publicly advocate for recovery and praise its admirable director, Peggy Albrecht, but in a way that made a nice point about recovery without getting too maudlin. "This is the first time you’ve appeared on television fully clothed, isn’t it, Peggy?”

Which was a good thing, a tremendous thing because more maudlin is not what OWN, with its endless rotation of heart-wrenching/breaking/string-tugging reality shows, needs. Yes, O’Donnell and Brand were talking about addiction, a Winfrey-approved topic, but in such a lively way that people might actually listen. “When I was a drug addict, actively,” said Brand, cutting mercifully to the chase, “I was very annoying.”

Things ended in a very Rosie way, with a game show called “The Ro Show” during which Carol the receptionist began losing badly to the Stanford-educated doctor, so O’Donnell started cheating, which gave the whole thing a nice Password-at-home feel. Sure, the set is absurdly purple, and the Woman For Which the Network is Named showed up at the end.

But it was such good clean fun that for a moment one was allowed to forget that next period it was back to the life-lesson-learning grind, with “Oprah’s Masterclass.”

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/2011/10/rosie-odonnell-returns-to-tv-with-a-little-help-from-oprah.html

Born Without Arms, Man Plays Guitar With Feet And Inspires Students

2011-10-10T12:06:00.000-07:00

Tony Melendez struck an inspiring chord with Florida students when the armless man shared his musical talent.

WATCH: Man Born Without Arms Plays Guitar With Feet

Armless Man Plays Guitar

Melendez, who was born without arms and with a club foot, recently visited John Carroll High School and played the guitar with his feet, WPTV reports.

"I turn pages in a book, I can string a guitar, I could tune it, what a hand could do, this foot could simulate," said Melendez, who ditched his artificial limbs at a young age.

Melendez, who lives in Branson, Mo., embraced his disabilities at a young age and learned to play the acoustic instrument with his feet. He shared a message of self acceptance and perseverance with the Florida teens.

John Carroll senior Ryan Caddell said he was inspired that Melendez could:

"Turn it into something positive like that. It sends a really good message out to everyone who is watching."

Melendez plays more than 150 concerts a year and has performed for Popes on five occasions, according to the news network.

Read more: http://www.wptv.com/dpp/news/region_st_lucie_county/fort_pierce/toe-jam%3A-guitarist-plays-with-his-toes#ixzz1aOyx1f9G

Woman stabbed by husband is saved by breast implant!

2011-10-08T12:15:00.000-07:00

In another installment of our occasional series of breast implants meeting violent ends: A Russian woman stabbed by her husband was probably saved by one of her rather large breast implants.

Plastic surgeon James Wells holds a saline implant, left, and a silicone implant. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)

The 40-year-old Moscow woman's husband was allegedly aiming for the heart when he sunk a knife into her chest during a domestic dispute. But the knife was blocked by the silicone implants -- which, somewhat ironically, her husband had requested she get some five years before.

Though the contents within the woman's left breast did not leak, a plastic surgeon did remove and replace it. That's probably wise, because any cuts to the surface of the implant could cause the fluid to leak out, which can cause "a decrease in breast size, change in breast implant shape, hard lumps over the implant or chest area, an uneven appearance of the breasts, pain or tenderness, tingling, swelling, numbness, burning or changes in sensation," according to the Food and Drug Administration.

Silicone breast implants are meant to be pretty durable. But they're not indestructible. Take a woman whose implant exploded during a game of paintball, as I blogged earlier.

The Russia incident isn't the first time a breast implant has taken one for the team. A Times story credited Lydia Carranza's implant with possibly saving her life when a gunman opened fire in the Simi Valley dental office where she worked.

But Scott Reitz, a firearms instructor with 30 years of LAPD experience, added at the time, "I don't want to say a boob job is the equivalent of a bulletproof vest. So don't go getting breast enhancements as a means to deflect a possible incoming bullet."

Lest we forget, breast implants come with their own risks, as the FDA points out. Just something to bear in mind.

http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-breast-implant-stabbed-russian-woman-20111007,0,5423103.story

LAX: "Behind The Scenes"!

2011-10-04T12:00:00.000-07:00

It's a Thursday evening, and the landing lights of incoming LAX flights glow like torches from Westchester to the San Gabriels. Torch one, 200 lives suspended in air. Torch two, 500. Torch three, 350 awaiting their return to loved ones, bosses, business meetings, auditions and, for many, the soul-saving comfort of their own pillows.

Planes from around the world line up at LAX's Tom Bradley International Terminal. The terminal's food court is a good hangout spot for long layovers. It has the nicest views, most food choices and comfy seating.

This high-wire act is more than just symbolic of the seventh-busiest airport in the world. It speaks to the risks involved, the importance of procedure, the crushing, timed-to-the-minute routine.

Perhaps no entity in the world juggles as many disciplines as a major airport: security, meteorology, technology, mixology, pipe-fitting, sharpshooting, sushi making and more.

But who runs LAX? Bill, the fire captain. Gary, the luggage supervisor. Max, a Belgian Malinois with a nose for bombs — imperfect strangers you hope know what they're doing, got enough sleep and can put your worries ahead of theirs.

On average, LAX handles almost 1,700 takeoffs and landings a day (even more during holidays), and firefighters will respond to at least one of them at full throttle — they make one to two emergency calls a day here — part of the largely invisible world of numbing protocol and screaming scramble that keeps an airport humming.

As passengers, we breeze through this place almost 61 million times a year, hoping/praying/trusting that the people behind the scenes know what they're doing. But a modern airport shouldn't be such a mystery. With that in mind, here's a glimpse at the people who make LAX go and the daily challenges they face:

The 'war room'

Open since December, the Airport Response Coordination Center, or ARCC, is the airport's central nervous system. Operators here control the stoplights outside the terminals to regulate vehicle flow. From here, an incident desk deploys plumbers to the flood in a restroom in Terminal 2 or a leaky water fountain in Terminal 3.

In a smaller room steps away, a police officer checks hundreds of surveillance cameras that monitor entrances, checkpoints and runways. Zooms in, zooms out, tilts down, pans left. What's he looking for? Anomalies. Anything that doesn't make sense in the normal flow of a gigantic airport.

Every ID swipe is tracked, any ajar door. Pull a defibrillator out of its box and an alarm rings here.

In an emergency, ARCC goes into war-room mode, and staff from the Federal Aviation Administration, Transportation Security Administration, Airport Police and other agencies that run LAX move to an even tighter work space where they can work elbow to elbow and make decisions instantly from big-screen info they all share.

Where the units once operated independently in seven locations around the airport, they now work together at the ARCC, where an 8 a.m. meeting of the various agency reps kicks off each day.

Today, a Tuesday, LAX will see about 170,000 passengers, enough to fill a large stadium about twice over. A change in wind direction means the airport is on an "east traffic" flow, so planes are taking off to the east and landing from the west, opposite the norm.

Other than that, it seems to be a routine day, says Rodney Thompson, one of eight LAX duty managers employed by Los Angeles World Airports, the city department that runs the airport. Terminal 3 is being pressure washed. Fire sprinkler work will shut down parts of Terminals 5 and 6. An onramp to the 105 Freeway is closed — not under the airport's range of control, but a situation that will affect traffic flow.

Out on runway 24L, meanwhile, airport operations superintendent Michael Corlett calls the control tower for clearance, then speeds down the runway at 70 mph in a Crown Victoria, looking for debris or signs of runway deterioration, stopping quickly to pick up a stray 2-inch bolt on a taxi way.

The stultifying routine of a 24/7 operation, open every day of the year, and busier on holidays than any other time, is validated by such little discoveries as a 2-inch bolt that, in the wrong spot, could shred the tire of a 747 touching down at 200 mph.

A dog named Max

American Airlines employee Julio Ortiz is what the airline calls a "yada," sort of a concierge who works the Terminal 5 kiosk area, helping folks check in. Brandishing a hand-held computer, he can do just about anything someone at the ticket counter can do. The goal: to move people through the terminal and out to the concourses as quickly as possible.

That's good business, but it's also part of an overall security strategy. After 9/11, a RAND study on LAX called terminal areas prime targets for car and truck bombings. Staffing was increased, and self-help kiosks were added, all designed to speed the flow of passengers from the curb to the gate.

As you head to a TSA checkpoint, you might meet Max, a Belgian Malinois whose job is to detect explosives in luggage. Leave your bag unattended, then Max's snout will be there. Abandon your car at the curb for more than a minute, he or one of his canine colleagues, all TSA certified and tested annually, jump on that too.

Employed by the airport, not the LAPD, the Airport Police cover a 9-square-mile area around LAX, patrolling terminals, eyeing fences, stopping cars with expired tags, keeping vehicles moving. Their station is a mile from the terminals, and though officials won't say exactly how many officers are on patrol, the staff numbers in the low hundreds.

Even an officer's movements are monitored by undercover officers who make sure that Airport Police don't fall into routines — when they take their breaks or go on their rounds — that could be discerned by terrorists.

Augmented by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the FBI and Homeland Security, LAX is among the most heavily patrolled and relatively safe chunks of Los Angeles. Airport Police Officer Lance Schoenbaum says he spends more time helping travelers locate their vehicles in the parking garage than chasing bad guys.

"But you get everything here," he says, citing purse snatching, employee disputes, unlicensed cabs and heroin smuggling. Anything that happens on an aircraft is the FBI's responsibility, but the Airport Police usually respond first.

As police states go, the airport may not be especially menacing. But make no mistake: LAX is definitely a police state.

Passing through security

Airline security begins the moment you make your reservation and your name is checked against a TSA list. But the heavy scrutiny is done at the TSA checkpoint, staffed by shifts of 45-60 workers, where you are asked to remove your shoes, empty your pockets and put your carry-on items in plastic bins on a conveyor belt that takes them to be scanned.

The chatty TSA screener who initially checks your boarding pass? He's sweeping an ultraviolet light over your ID to be sure it's valid. He also may be trying to engage you in conversation as a way to detect any telltale nervousness or psychological issues.

"We had a big push for customer service, because customer service is a layer of security," says Ivan Cikos, TSA screening manager for Terminals 1, 2 and 3.

To ward off the side effects of too much routine, screeners are rotated every 30 minutes among the various checkpoint tasks — X-ray monitoring, conveyor-belt duty. Screeners also are tested every day by a "plant," who attempts to subvert screening procedures. Those who fail the covert tests typically receive remedial training, and such failures are taken into account during annual recertification.

The new full-body scanning machines are the result of those plants, says TSA spokesman Nico Melendez. Tests found too many prohibited items going undetected, he says, so late last year, 22 of the machines were installed in about half the airport.

For several years, LAX has also used specially trained "behavioral detection officers," who keep an eye out for unusual conduct.

Always a work in progress

Terminal 6 is a mess right now, more like an experience in a developing country.

Eventually, it will be the province of Alaska Airlines, but until renovation is complete later this year, this maze-like area of power tools and open ceilings is what you'll deal with.

It's a lesson in the various frustrations of this place. As airports go, LAX, which entered the jet age in 1961, is an antiquity. From taxi ways to terminals, it's all squeezed into one of the smallest footprints of any major U.S. airport: 3,425 acres compared to Dallas-Ft. Worth's 18,076. There is nowhere else to go but up.

Ideally, a terminal is closed during renovation, but the airport is too busy for that. So upgrades are done in small bursts.

You wish it all looked like the Tom Bradley International Terminal, already roomy and undergoing a $1.5-billion expansion to add nine new gates to accommodate bigger aircraft .

Terminals 4 and 5 are where mega-players American and Delta lease space from the Los Angeles World Airport and, by virtue of their size, run these areas as if they were their own.

Then there are Terminals 1, 2 and 3, co-ops really, where smaller airlines share what feels like a shoe box.

Annual passenger volume is still below what it was before 9/11: 61 million now, 67 million then. Yet the airport, which is celebrating 50 years of jet travel, makes more than $100 million in profit annually on fees it charges airlines to use its facilities.

That success springs from a hyper-technical, vigilant, fiercely proud workforce that gets a lot of important things right yet is unable to deliver passengers to long-term parking in a relatively efficient manner.

Lot C is a grim, sun-baked prairie served by shuttle buses that arrive unreliably and are too frequently driven by operators whose unsmiling faces often are the first and last ones you see at the airport.

The simple task of changing airlines can be an ordeal as well, requiring a walk outside amid diesel fumes and blaring horns.

"Let's face it," says aviation consultant Jack Keady. "No matter how pretty anything inside LAX is, the penal gray exterior, noise and crowds outside downgrade it."

Where do I go now?

For even the experienced traveler, the variety of check-in options, bag drops and self-help kiosks at LAX is mind-boggling.

All told, there are 92 ways to check in among the airlines in the cramped domestic terminals. United alone offers nine ways to begin your flight.

The quality of the directional signs to the various check-in options varies significantly as well, but a walk-through finds that Southwest's are dramatically clearer and easier to follow .

One particularly confusing facet is the checked bag drop-off. In some terminals, you can check your bag curbside. At other times, you tag your bag at the counter, then lug and leave it at the TSA X-ray machine in the terminal lobby. Occasionally, the counter agent tags the bag and puts it on the conveyor belt behind her, just like in the good old days.

The airlines call this third method in-line baggage-check, and it's one of the reasons the Bradley terminal, where the procedure is routine, functions smoothly by comparison. The in-line baggage check is slowly being adopted for domestic carriers, but implementation has been spotty and slow.

For checked luggage, every suitcase, every set of golf clubs, every wedding dress must pass through a detection device that checks for explosives.

When the scanner detects something suspicious, lights flash and the TSA attendant pulls aside the bag, swabs the exterior for explosive residue, then opens it up and digs in.

On a Thursday morning, the alarm goes off. It turns out to be a tool belt. The attendant places a piece of paper inside the luggage announcing that it has been inspected, closes it up and sends it on its way.

A netherworld of conveyor belts takes the bags to a loading dock, where they are placed on carts and taken to the gate.

At the gate, handlers follow a loading sheet telling them where to place bags in the aircraft's belly.

"Take a pencil and put your finger underneath — that's your center of gravity," luggage crew chief Gary Adams says. By balancing the load on planes as much as possible, he says, airlines can maximize aerodynamics and fuel use.

The gate keeper

If an airline had a chess master, it would be American ramp manager Pat Boylan, a 32-year veteran responsible for making the minute-by-minute decisions on when a plane should leave the gate.

This is acid-reflux work. There are dozens of audibles he can call. Gate changes require the redeployment of cleaning crews and caterers. If passengers were delayed by long lines at a TSA checkpoint, does he send the plane anyway, placing those late-arriving passengers on the next flight?

On a wall behind his workstation, a sign: "Flying is the second greatest thrill known to man. Landing is the first."

After Boylan decides to send a plane on its way, he gets clearance from the main control tower, which takes charge of the taxiing aircraft and queuing it for takeoff. Six-inch slips of paper containing each flight's route and aircraft type are passed to controllers as the plane leaves the gate. One controller may handle the taxiing process, another the actually takeoff. Out on the runway, it's first come, first served for takeoff.

Incoming flights, meanwhile, are picked up by LAX controllers while the planes are seven to 10 miles out, taking over from regional or national command centers.

The arrival of the gigantic A380s, with their 800-passenger load and 18 restrooms, is still an event, impressing passengers and air professionals alike. But the planes are so new that, in an emergency, LAX firefighters would not be able to reach the aircraft's second level to evacuate passengers.

This worries Capt. William Wick, one of the leaders in the firehouse that serves LAX. It worries him a lot. Because, in a potential emergency, access is everything.

'Here, you assume the worst'

Fire Station 80 is a gleaming, just-opened-in-November building positioned so that it can reach even the farthest point in the airport in three minutes, an FAA requirement.

"The urgency here is a little different," says Capt. Brian Allen, one of Wick's colleagues. "When you get an alarm at a regular fire station, you have an idea right away of what it'll be. Here, you assume the worst.

"It's a frickin' ballet, let me tell you," Allen says of the scramble to get to the airfield.

The alarm sounds about once or twice a day, usually as an Alert 2, the lowest level. An Alert 2 indicates a potential aircraft problem such as a sensor showing a faulty hydraulic system or a compartment door that didn't shut.

Alert 3s are the real deal, a full-on emergency, and months go by without one. The tower usually determines whether an alert is a 2 or a 3, though a pilot can also make that determination.

But even an Alert 2 can be cause for concern; for instance, when a sensor detects a problem and the pilot circles the plane, full of fuel, back to the airport, landing "heavy," Wick calls it, which in turn causes the brakes to overheat.

"That's probably our No. 1 call," Wick says. "They come in hot and fast. They have not used up all their fuel so they're hard to stop."

In most cases, firefighters will circle the plane after it has landed and use an infrared temperature device to detect abnormal heat sources. Black is OK. White is hotter.

Because crashes are rare — the last commercial crash at LAX killed 34 in 1991 — the 14 firefighters on duty at Fire Station 80 use an edge-of-the-airport training area to practice live burns and strategies.

One February morning, they gather to study the video of a 737 exploding into flames after landing on Okinawa in 2007, an Alert 3 situation that would probably require additional off-airport firefighters. Four people were injured in that explosion.

Wick's crew studies the video for wind direction, whether smoke is coming out the door, whether the pilot — the last to leave a plane — has abandoned it. Then they head out to their training area, where they put what they've learned to use, blasting water at a makeshift fuselage in what they call a "pump-and-roll" tactic in which the rigs move around the wreckage as they hit it with water.

On the way back to the fire station, Wick spots one of the new A380s that land about four times a day.

"How are we going to get 800 people out of that plane?" Wick asks. "See those three doors on top? We can't get to that."

LAX, which just approved the purchase of four new fire trucks, is in the process of ordering a stair truck, Wick says. At present, a cost analysis is being done on the stair trucks, which must be custom made.

"They get it," he says. "They know we really need that thing."

And like the many passengers he protects, Wick waits.

chris.erskine@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/travel/la-tr-lax-20111002,0,5015960.story?page=1&utm_medium=feed&track=rss&utm_campaign=Feed%3A%20latimes%2Ftravel%20%28L.A.%20Times%20-%20Travel%29&utm_source=feedburner

2011-10-03T05:52:00.000-07:00

At 102, therapist is too busy to stop working

2011-10-02T15:16:00.000-07:00

Hedda Bolgar thrives with grace, beauty and, just maybe, a little magic

Lately I've been wading into streams of mail from readers approaching death. Some are fighting it, some are afraid, some are ready to go.

Hedda Bolgar receives an Outstanding Oldest Worker Award at a ceremony in Washington, D.C. In her speech, she talked about how there’s dignity and purpose in work, and grace in aging.

And then I heard from two readers with an update on Hedda Bolgar. I wrote about the Brentwood therapist three Septembers ago, when she was 99 and still seeing clients. Bolgar, now 102 and still on the job, was just honored in Washington, D.C., where she received one of two Outstanding Oldest Worker Awards given this year by the organization Experience Works. She shared the spotlight with a 101-year-old man who's a custodian at a Maryland post office.

When I called Bolgar's home number, she picked up right away, sounding fresh as a daisy even though she'd just gotten home from D.C. Her calendar was a bit busy, with clients coming in four days a week. And Bolgar is preparing a spring course she'll teach on the trauma of forced migration, an issue she believes the psychoanalytic community has failed to adequately address.

But she managed to fit me into a small hole in her calendar.

Bolgar, who fled Europe when Hitler entered Austria, was dressed smartly and looked beautiful, and not a day older than she did on my visit in 2008. Back then, she told me matter-of-factly, "I've lived through revolutions, famine, war. Things like that." She also said she was "put on this earth to accomplish certain things" and "I'm so far behind, I can never die."

Not much has changed.

Though she says she's slowed down a bit, Bolgar is still involved with the Wright Institute, a mental health training and service center she founded in the 1970s, and with the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies, which she co-founded. She also still maintains ties with a psychotherapy clinic bearing her name, which was established for clients who can't afford treatment elsewhere. And Bolgar will be featured in an upcoming documentary on aging by filmmakers Laurie Schur and Lisa Thompson (for a sneak peek, go to http://www.beautyofaging.com.

Bolgar also spent a lot of time with researchers who quote her extensively in two new books: "The Second Century of Psychoanalysis: Evolving Perspectives on Therapeutic Action," by Michael J. Diamond and Christopher Christian; and "Uprooted Minds: Surviving the Traumas of Terror in the Americas" by Nancy Caro Hollander.

And at 100, Bolgar became computer savvy, exploring vast Internet catalogs on psychoanalytic research. She uses the email address Hedda101 because Hedda100 was taken.

"That woman is amazing," said Lita Levine Kleger of Experience Works, the nonprofit senior advocacy group that honored Bolgar. "She speaks extemporaneously and eloquently." And when Bolgar arrived in Washington, said Kleger, she made it clear she had work to do: keeping her obligation to clients back home by conducting therapy sessions over the phone.

In her speech in D.C., Bolgar talked about how there's dignity and purpose in work, and grace in aging. But she recognizes that not everyone is as lucky as she's been.

"I always introduce my lectures by saying that old age is really a wonderful experience as long as the body ages well and you don't have serious economic problems," she told me. As I have seen lately in writing about the diminished lives of suffering older folks — including my father — not everyone is so lucky.

The older she gets, Bolgar said, the more she appreciates her parents. Her mother was the first female journalist and war correspondent for a Swiss newspaper, and her father was a historian, labor leader and resistance fighter.

"What I grew up with was, if there's an unmet need in the world, you try to meet it, and if there's a problem, you try to solve it."

Bolgar's home today is a meeting place for colleagues and friends who embrace that ethos. She's not shy about her conviction that Native American poverty is an enduring American tragedy, and she has no kind words for the "lemmings at the edge of the cliff" who are cheering calls to shred Social Security and Medicare and shrink support for public education. Bolgar said it puts her in mind of the marauding gangs in Doris Lessing's "Memoirs of a Survivor," a dark fictional take on the breakdown of civilization.

That healthy cynicism and unflagging energy make Bolgar the envy of at least one longtime client. He's a man in his mid-80s who tells Bolgar he's chronically miserable and in failing health.

"He wakes up in the morning and all he wants to do is die or go back to sleep," said Bolgar, who has suggested that he do something useful, like reading to the blind or helping out at a school.

To him, said Bolgar, "I am a magical person. He wants the magic. I tell him there is no magic and he cannot accept it. He can not accept that he's old."

Bolgar said she's not afraid of death, "not that I want to accelerate it." She hopes it's not too "undignified or painful." And she wants to believe death isn't absolute finality, noting a mystical theosophy concept that the energy of each human — a permanent atom — endures.

If her life becomes about coping with pain, and she is "no longer using my body as an agent for social action," maybe then she'll be ready, Bolgar said. But not now.

Having twice shared the privilege of her company, I'm not sure I buy Bolgar's claim that there is no magic. Call it what you will, but she has something besides the luck of good genes. Her fountain of youth is a rare potion of curiosity, compassion and social responsibility.

Three years ago, Bolgar talked about all that she still hopes to accomplish. This time, she put it like this:

"I'm too busy to die."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-1002-lopez-bolgar-20111002,0,5869414.column

What's Behind The Wall St. Protest In New York City

2011-10-01T16:17:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK—The collection of people in tie-dyed T-shirts and star-spangled underwear have been camped out in a granite plaza in lower Manhattan nearly two weeks -- and show no signs of going away.

They sleep on air mattresses, use Mac laptops and play drums. They go to the bathroom at the local McDonald's. A few times a day, they march down to Wall Street, yelling, "This is what democracy looks like!"

It all has the feel of a classic street protest with one exception: It's unclear exactly what the demonstrators want.
An elderly group leads a march up Broadway towards Police Headquarters, Friday, Sept. 30, 2011, in New York. The "Occupy Wall Street" protest is in its second week, as demonstrators speak out against corporate greed and social inequality. (AP Photo/ Louis Lanzano)

"When all the bailout money was spent on bonuses and stuff everyone was outraged, but no one did anything because no one feels like they can," protester Jesse Wilson, 22, said this week when asked to take articulate the cause. "It's time for us to come together to realize we are the masses, and we can make things happen."

But he couldn't say what, exactly, he wanted to happen. Handmade signs carried by some of the demonstrators -- "Less is More" and "Capitalism is evil" -- hardly make it clearer.

On Saturday, the group shut down part of the Brooklyn Bridge when they spilled onto the roadway from Manhattan in one of their many marches. Police arrested dozens while trying to clear the road and reopen for traffic.

But does it matter that the protest is vague?

Academics and longtime activists give varying opinions.

"A lot of this revolves around economic justice, who gets what in this society, who has a safety net, who doesn't and how much corporate influence exists in Washington," said Bill Dobbs, an activist involved in the 2004 demonstrations at the Republican National Convention, and many others.

Dobbs and others say the group's lack of specificity serves a purpose because it invites outrage over a full spectrum of societal grievances. Indeed, some demonstrators say they are against Wall Street greed, others say they are protesting global warming and still others say they are protesting "the man."

The modern protester also expects an immediate response, thanks in part to technology, said Gabriella Coleman, a New York University professor of media, culture and communication who has studied some of the groups affiliated with the protest.

"We are in a cultural moment where people think the dictator will topple tomorrow, after four days of protests, and also the media is going to jump to pay attention," Coleman said.

There has been a growing swell of coverage in mainstream media, but there has been loud complaining the cause hasn't been championed fast enough -- or in the way protesters want.

Newspapers, The Associated Press and television stations have covered the protests, and editorials have both poked fun and lauded the effort downtown. National Public Radio, which hasn't aired stories, has fielded angry communiques demanding coverage.

"The recent protests on Wall Street did not involve large numbers of people, prominent people, a great disruption or an especially clear objective," Dick Meyer, executive editor for news, explained on NPR's website.

But observers say the approach can be difficult for media -- and the average person -- to digest.

"You should have a clear and convincing message, and know who is going to deliver it," said the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, a longtime civil rights activist who has participated in protests for decades. "One of the reasons to get attention is to deliver the message."

Misinformation has added to the confusion. For instance, a rumor sprang up on Twitter that the New York Police Department wanted to use tear gas on protesters -- a crowd-control tactic the department doesn't use. The organizing group that calls itself Occupy Wall Street retracted the claim, one of several such retractions over the past several days. On Friday, it sent out a message that Radiohead would be performing in solidarity for the cause. (The band's management said it wasn't playing.)

Clashes with police have resulted in about 100 arrests. Most were for disorderly conduct. Many were the subject of homemade videos posted online.

One video surfaced of a group of girls shot with pepper spray by NYPD Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna. The woman claimed they were abused and demanded the officer resign, and the video has been the subject of several news articles and commentary. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said internal affairs would look into whether Bologna acted improperly and has also said the video doesn't show "tumultuous" behavior by the protesters. The Civilian Complaint Review Board is also investigating.

A group affiliated with protest, Anonymous, later posted Bologna's personal details, including where his kids go to school. He has received threatening e-mails, said a police union spokesman, Roy Richter.

"Posting the information about a family police officer ... that's egregious and over the line," Richter said.

Coleman explained the move was likely the work of one or two individuals not acting on behalf of the entire movement, since the handle Anonymous is not a collective group that makes decisions together on how to act.

"A tactic like that has been received anywhere from controversy to celebration, because someone took action to the police's action," she said.

A real estate firm that owns Zuccotti Park, the private plaza off Broadway occupied by the protesters, has expressed concerns about conditions there, saying in a statement that it hopes to work with the city to restore the park "to its intended purpose." But it's not clear whether legal action will be taken, and police say there are no plans to try to remove anyone.

"We see it as our job to make certain that people can demonstrate peacefully," Kelly said.

Mostly, the protests have been peaceful, and the movement has shown no signs of losing steam. Celebrities like Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon even made recent stops downtown to encourage the group.

Seasoned activists said the ad-hoc protest could prove to be a training ground for future organizers of larger and more cohesive demonstrations, or motivate those on the sidelines to speak out against injustices.

"You may not get much, or any of these things on the first go-around," Daughtry said. "But it's the long haul that matters."

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http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2011/10/01/wall_street_protests_success_not_easily_measured/?page=1