Archive for May 26th, 2008
On This Day: Jesuits Banned In Massachusetts
Interesting historical tidbit today unseen for the military and business holiday. On this date in 1647, the Massachusetts Bay Puritans banned the Society of Jesus priests, God’s Soldiers, on penalty of death if caught. No Jesuits were martyred for disobeying the law, but anti-Catholicism prejudice lived on in Massachusetts and experienced a revival up during the Irish immigration of the 19th century. It wasn’t until Massachusetts produced a Roman Catholic president that state pride in it’s native son was felt, his religion be damned, or at least tolerated.
Psychiatrists Volunteer To Help Soldiers Come Home
It’s so reassuring that when help is needed, Americans step up to the plate. In a media cycle of condemning the US government for not helping our soldiers when they come home to re-enter civilian society, private psychiatrists are offering free services to military with emotional problems.
On this Memorial Day, America’s armed forces and its veterans are coping with depression, suicide, family, marital and job problems on a scale not seen since Vietnam. The government has been in beg-borrow-and-steal mode, trying to hire psychiatrists and other professionals, recruit them with incentives or borrow them from other agencies.
Among those volunteering an hour a week to help is Brenna Chirby, a psychologist with a private practice in McLean, Va.
“It’s only an hour of your time,” said Chirby, who counsels a family member of a man deployed multiple times. “How can you not give that to these men and women that … are going oversees and fighting for us?”
There are only 1,431 mental health professionals among the nation’s 1.4 million active-duty military personnel, said Terry Jones, a Pentagon spokesman on health issues.
About 20,000 more full- and part-time professionals provide health care services for the Veterans Administration and the Pentagon. They include psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric nurses, social workers and substance abuse counselors.
According to veterans groups and health care experts, that is not enough for a mental health crisis emerging among troops and their families.
“Honestly, much is being done by the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs,” said retired Army Brig. Gen. Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist. “But the need to help these men and women goes far beyond whatever any government agency can do.”
The VA says it has seen 120,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who have symptoms of mental health problems, half with post-traumatic stress disorder. Although rates are high from those two wars, most of the 400,000 patients seen in VA last year for PTSD were Vietnam-era veterans, officials said.
Civilian groups are trying to step in for troops from the current conflicts.
“There are over 400,000 mental health professionals in our great country,” said Barbara V. Romberg, a clinical psychologist who practices in Washington. “Clearly, we have the resources to meet this challenge.”
Romberg founded Give An Hour, a group of 1,200 mental health professionals donating one hour of free care a week to troops, veterans or family members. They have to commit to doing it for a year.
Romberg, in cooperation with the American Psychiatric Foundation, hopes to find 40,000 volunteers over the next three years, or about 10 percent of available civilian professionals. The effort to get the word out to those who need the help and to recruit and train volunteers is being backed by a $1 million grant from the Lilly Foundation.
Romberg’s group is the largest of a number across the nation.
Nearly 200 also have volunteered for the Soldiers Project, started by psychiatrists at the Ernest S. Lawrence Trauma Center of the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies – and now operating in Chicago, Seattle and New York.
The Coming Home Project in the San Francisco area has dozens of volunteers. A group of veterans, psychotherapists and interfaith leaders, it offers everything from retreats and workshops to yoga and other stress management programs as well as the counseling.
Thank you to all of the volunteers.
Smile: You’re On Google Maps
Live viewing of an automobile crash, a bikini car wash, a child possibly being shot by a pistol? What online sleuths have been able to find is more than directions on Google Maps.
Google collects the images for its Street View feature using cameras strapped to the top of vehicles, and some of the pictures uncovered by Street View sleuths even show the drivers of the Google vehicles paying tolls at interstate exits.
But other images uncovered in Street View are more notable for what is going on around the car. One sequence of images detailed by the Web site Gawker purports to show the many angles of a drug deal going down.
Tree Top View Of Kew Gardens
Can’t get to London this summer to visit the beautiful Kew Gardens? Click on the 360 degree panorama camera view from the comfort of your home. Don’t get dizzy!
Three different perspectives:
- Treetop walkway at Kew Gardens: Click to view 360 degree panoramic image
- Treetop walkway at Kew Gardens: Click to view 360 degree panoramic image
- Treetop walkway at Kew Gardens: Click to view 360 degree panoramic image
The £3 million steel structure, which runs for 650ft through the Capability Brown woodland at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, aims to help show the importance of trees to wildlife and the climate.
It is hoped it will be the highlight of Kew’s summer festival celebrating trees.
The creators of the Xstrata Treetop Walkway hope people may catch a glimpse of animals such as the purple hair streak butterfly, which is rarely seen because it lives its entire life high up in oak woodland, as well as woodpeckers and nuthatches.
The permanent structure, which also includes a “Rhizotron” underground exhibit to highlight the root-life of trees, follows on from the success of a smaller temporary walkway at Kew several years ago.
Putting the huge steel structure in the middle of woodland posed significant challenges for designers Marks Barfield Architects – creators of the London Eye – who had to sink foundations as deep into the earth as the structure is high.
The steel walkway had to be secured without damaging the roots of the sweet chestnuts, limes and deciduous oaks, some of which are more than 200 years old.
As well as getting close to the trees, the structure promises a bird’s-eye view of the site and the London skyline, including the Gherkin building and Wembley Stadium – when the weather and leaves allow.
Visitors to Kew will also be able to “tune into trees” through super-sensitive microphones, listening to them creaking and pulling up water from the roots, and see a series of other exhibitions celebrating trees and woodland.
Personal aside – The slideshow does cut the photographs off, and only gives a small view. You can see the entire photographs here from our Seventh Day Of Honeymoon at Kew Gardens. The first and last photographs are of the low and high tide of the river Thames in the morning and in the evening. The red fruit floating in the pond are cranberries from the United States, (which are not grown in England) showing the English how cranberries are harvested.
Cuba Has More Centurians Than Any Other Country In The World
What does Cuba have that the rest of the world does not have? Isolation from disease and germs, hard work, pedestrian lifestyle, limited food supply with ample fruit and vegetables, but little modern transfat fast food restaurants, and warm tropical climate.
Who says that global warming and Communism isn’t healthy? Michael Moore will be so pleased.
But France says they have the oldest: France’s Oldest Citizen 113 dies.
Solignac died early Sunday morning surrounded by her family, in a retirement home in Vorey-sur-Arzon in the central Haute Loire region, the town where she was born on September 7, 1894. Her funeral will take place on Wednesday.
She was married in 1921 to Michel Solignac, who lost a leg in World War I. Together they had a single daughter, and ran a small farm until Michel’s death in 1961 when Clementine Solignac moved in near her daughter.
Until the age of 106, she led an independent life, cooking for herself each day on a wood-burning stove and milking her grandson’s cows, according to relatives.
When asked about her age, she would reply “The good Lord has forgotten about me!”
France has a reputation for being home to some of the longest-living people on the planet. The oldest person on record was the Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 at the age of 122.The country’s oldest citizen is now 112-year-old Eugenie Blanchard, from Saint-Barthelemy in the French Caribbean, according to the INSERM medical research institute.
Currently, the world’s oldest living person is a US woman from Indiana, Edna Parker, who celebrated her 115th birthday on April 20.
First Individual Female DNA Sequenced
Finally after researching individual male genomes, gorilla genomes, chimpanzee genomes, dog genomes, cat genomes, and even a playtpus genome, Dutch scientists know how women work.
Illegal Immigrants Finally Hear The Truth!
Well, it’s about time that illegal criminals heard these words:
“I don’t doubt for a moment that you are good, hard-working people who have done what you did to help your families. Unfortunately for you, you committed a violation of federal law.”~ Mark W. Bennett, a federal judge, to 270 illegal immigrants sentenced to prison terms in Iowa.
How To Identify Potential Terrorists
Avant-Garde Schools Allow Students Vote On How They Are Taught
British students are in trouble as it is, and Greater Manchester Co-Op schools are going to allow students a say in how the schools are run? Liberals have done more to ruin schools, than any reason in history. No wonder that more than 250,000 qualified teachers in Great Britain refuse to teach in a British classroom.
Co-op executives hope it will be the first of several to adopt a formula under which every pupil will have a say in a democratic forum designed to come up with ideas about their school’s future.
The idea is to give pupils a glimpse of how a democratic institution should work so they can play their full part as citizens when they leave. The format recalls that of the independent Suffolk boarding school Summerhill, set up in 1921 by the educationist Alexander Sutherland Neill. All Summerhill pupils have a say in their curriculum and the running of the school.
Advisers to the former prime minister Tony Blair saw the trust scheme as an opportunity for businesses, private schools and faith groups to become involved in the running of state schools. Phil Arnold, the head of school development at Reddish Vale, said: “I think this is a real alternative for the way ‘trust’ schools operate.”
Members of Reddish Vale’s democratic forum will include pupils, parents, teachers and community representatives. “All pupils will have full voting rights,” said Mr Arnold, “as will parents/carers and all organisations we work with in the public, private and voluntary sector.
Didn’t any Manchester administrator research Neill’s success or was it a failure and completely ignored? I did research Summerhill and I found this essay on the non-merits of Summerhill and the utter libertarian attitude of Neill, a fervid fan of Freud.
Neill opened his first school in 1922 during a journey through Europe, but he founded Summerhill, near Leiston, in England, in 1924. The little school existed for decades without a change. Through some twenty books and countless articles, he related the daily life of the school, never missing an opportunity to provoke argument, repeatedly describing a place in which the adult had not imposed his will, a place for play where total disorder reigned.
A great deal of the damage done to the school was done by the children: ‘The wear and tear of materials in Summerhill is a natural process…and if a boy needs a piece of metal for a boat keel, he will use my expensive tools if one of them happens to be about the right size’. Journalists called Summerhill the ‘do-as-you-please-school’ (Hemmings, 1972, p. 140). Many of the visitors indeed saw the school as ‘a Kafkaesque universe with dilapidated and sometimes vandalized buildings’. (Vallotton, 1967, p. 9). Yet the school, with its wooden buildings, its large park and trees, seemed, especially in summer, one of the most pleasant of places, a real country school such as Ferrière dreamed of at the beginning of the century.
In this school, however, lessons were optional. The children could play all day if they so wished, or do handicrafts in the workshop. The evenings were set aside for dancing, theatre and entertainment. If it had not been for the threat of the school being closed by the authorities, Neill would have placed no ban on sexual relations.
Friday evening was set aside for the general assembly. During that meeting, which was chaired by an elected pupil, the children explained their problems and discussed them, working out their own rules. In this assembly, Neill’s vote, like that of the other adults, had no greater weight than that of a pupil. This, says Neill, was the secret of the success of an educational technique learnt through contact with Homer Lane.The originality, the provocation and success of the founder’s books were not always sufficient to protect the school from the risk of closure. After the Second World War, there was a dangerous decrease in the number of pupils and the Summerhill Society had to be founded in order to save the school. The education authorities never really accepted it. When they went back on their decision to close the school, some, as Hemmings (1972, p. 241) noted, interpreted this not so much as a mark of recognition as a kind of tolerance of ‘a mere relic’. Yet it was this same relic which, several years later, was to prove too small to take in all the pupils and visitors.
Humans are condemned to failure if they don’t heed the lessons of the past. Children need cohesive structure and the basics of education: readin’ ‘riting, and ‘rithmatic. They do not have the experience of age, nor do they place values on lessons that they will need later in life. This school will have a plan for failure for those who want to play all day. Oh let’s teach self-esteem and self-awareness and not teach discipline. That’ll work.
Sma' Talk Wi' T 