Trauma: How We've Created a Nation Addicted to Shopping, Work, Drugs and Sex | World. December 26, 2010 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. AMY GOODMAN: From disease to addiction, parenting to attention deficit disorder, Canadian physician and bestselling author Gabor Maté’s work focuses on the centrality of early childhood experiences to the development of the brain, and how those experiences can impact everything from behavioral patterns to physical and mental illness.
While the relationship between emotional stress and disease, and mental and physical health more broadly, is often considered controversial within medical orthodoxy, Dr. Maté argues too many doctors seem to have forgotten what was once a commonplace assumption, that emotions are deeply implicated in both the development of illness, addictions and disorders, and in their healing. Dr. In our first conversation, Dr. DR. And that’s what sets up the brain biology of addiction. DR. The War on Drugs Is a War on Poor People | Drugs. December 16, 2010 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. America's drug policy aims to reduce illicit drug use by arresting and incarcerating dealers and, to a lesser extent, users. Drugs are intensively criminalized among the poor but largely unregulated among the rich.
The drug war is nitro to the ghetto's glycerin. The reach of the penal system extends beyond the prison population to families and communities. In the absence of any serious effort to improve economic opportunity, particularly among young men with little schooling, drug control has become our surrogate social policy. The most important lesson policy-makers can take from this historic failure of social engineering is that the drug problem depends only a little on the narcotics themselves, and overwhelmingly on the social and economic context in which they are traded and taken. Change, however, is in the air. America: America: Why R Your Peeps So Dum? | Culture. If you hang out much with thinking people, conversation eventually turns to the serious political and cultural questions of our times.
Such as: How can the Americans remain so consistently brain-fucked? Much of the world, including plenty of Americans, asks that question as they watch U.S. culture go down like a thrashing mastodon giving itself up to some Pleistocene tar pit. One explanation might be the effect of 40 years of deep fried industrial chicken pulp, and 44 ounce Big Gulp soft drinks. Another might be pop culture, which is not culture at all of course, but marketing. Or we could blame it on digital autism: Ever watch commuter monkeys on the subway poking at digital devices, stroking the touch screen for hours on end? But a more reasonable explanation is that, (A) we don't even know we are doing it, and (B) we cling to institutions dedicated to making sure we never find out. Pearls Before Breakfast - washingtonpost.com. HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L'ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET.
By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play. It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by.
Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L'Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant. The acoustics proved surprisingly kind. ZhFvn.jpg (JPEG Image, 640x2372 pixels) 52 Year Old Who Came to US as a Toddler to be Deported | Immigration. December 6, 2010 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email.
Mike Burrows came to America when he was two years old, and has lived here for 50 years. Due to a technicality in harsh anti-immigration laws, he will likely be deported to his birthplace of Canada within weeks, a country that he has no current connection to and no memory of. I was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. My dad worked for a division of Capitol Records. Mike Burrows is the poster child demonstrating the hysteria surrounding the immigration debate in the United States. The Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) was passed in 1996, stating that those in the country without proper documentation would be deported for a period of time (3 years, 10 years, or permanently).
Mike was convicted of receipt of a stolen 8-track tape deck worth $50, a misdemeanor in 1978, when he was 18 years old. The Origin of America’s Intellectual Vacuum - Chris Hedges' Columns. The Origin of America’s Intellectual Vacuum Posted on Nov 15, 2010 By Chris Hedges The blacklisted mathematics instructor Chandler Davis, after serving six months in the Danbury federal penitentiary for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), warned the universities that ousted him and thousands of other professors that the purges would decimate the country’s intellectual life. “You must welcome dissent; you must welcome serious, systematic, proselytizing dissent—not only the playful, the fitful, or the eclectic; you must value it enough, not merely to refrain from expelling it yourselves, but to refuse to have it torn from you by outsiders,” he wrote in his 1959 essay “...From an Exile.”
“You must welcome dissent not in a whisper when alone, but publicly so potential dissenters can hear you. But they did not take Davis back. “Political discourse has been impoverished since then,” Davis said. “Repression does not target original thought,” Davis noted. The United States of War Criminals. By Mickey Z. / December 15th, 2010 People from poorer places and poorer countries have to call upon their compassion not to be angry with ordinary people in America. – Arundhati Roy More than half (53.3%) of US tax dollars go to a criminal enterprise known as the US Department of Defense (sic), a.k.a. the worst polluter on the planet. We hear about tax cuts this and budget that and all kinds of other bullshit from the US government and the corporations that own it…but the reality remains: Roughly one million tax dollars per minute are spent to fund the largest military machine (read: global terrorist operation) the world has ever known. What do we get for all that money? To follow, is but one tiny example that mostly slipped through the cracks earlier this year.
On July 23, 2010, Tom Eley at Global Research wrote: For those unfamiliar with the US attacks on Fallujah, first of all: You should be fuckin’ ashamed of yourselves. And you and I paid for it all. Hiroshima and Nagasaki? With Wealth Highly Skewed Toward the Top, US Ranks 12th in New Measure of Human Development | World. December 1, 2010 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Twenty years ago, in 1990, the United Nations began publishing an annual Human Development Report. The economists behind this new initiative -- India’s Nobel Prize-winning Amaryta Sen among them -- clearly saw themselves as scholarly subversives. They were openly challenging economic orthodoxy and that orthodoxy’s ultimate yardstick and holy grail, the “Gross National Product.” To register social progress, economic orthodoxy held back then, nations needed to simply hike their “GNP,” their sum total of economic goods and services.
But real human development, Sen and his colleagues countered, involves much more than economic growth. GNP cannot measure this real human development. The UN has been releasing an annual “Human Development Index” ever since, grading almost every nation in the world by a single number that reflects people’s capacity to live life to the fullest. 4 Scenarios for the Coming Collapse of the American Empire | World. December 5, 2010 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. A soft landing for America 40 years from now? Despite the aura of omnipotence most empires project, a look at their history should remind us that they are fragile organisms. Future historians are likely to identify the Bush administration’s rash invasion of Iraq in that year as the start of America's downfall.
But have no doubt: when Washington's global dominion finally ends, there will be painful daily reminders of what such a loss of power means for Americans in every walk of life. Available economic, educational, and military data indicate that, when it comes to U.S. global power, negative trends will aggregate rapidly by 2020 and are likely to reach a critical mass no later than 2030. Significantly, in 2008, the U.S. No such luck. By 2020, according to current plans, the Pentagon will throw a military Hail Mary pass for a dying empire.
WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN? By Jonathan Haidt. What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany's best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death.
People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Diagnosis is a pleasure. Downsize Nation: Welcome to the New, Smaller American Dream | Environment. December 7, 2010 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Editor's Note: Vision Quest: In these trying times of frustration and confusion, of Tea Party Right Wing ascendance, and too much Obama and Democratic party impotence and failure of the imagination, let's pause.
It's been two years since 34-year-old Jdimytai Damour was trampled to death by a frenzied crowd of Black Friday shoppers at a Long Island Walmart. But that wasn't the holy grail that James Truslow Adams had in mind when he first coined the phrase "American Dream" in his 1931 book, The Epic of America. Adams wrote that as the Great Depression was beginning to swallow many Americans' dreams -- and their fortunes. The end of the second World War ignited the spark of our consumer culture -- one that reached a conflagration by the 1980s as spending outpaced the median income and has ended, for many, in catastrophe in recent years. RIP McMansions.
Nation of Pill Poppers: 19 Potentially Dangerous Drugs Pushed By Big Pharma | Personal Health. December 5, 2010 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Since direct-to-consumer drug advertising was legalized 13 years ago, Americans have become a nation of pill poppers -- choosing the type of drug they desire like a new toothpaste, sometimes whether or not they need it. But if patients want the drugs, doctors and pharma executives want them to have the drugs and media gets full page ads and huge TV flights (when many advertisers have dried up), is the national pillathon really a problem?
Yes, when you consider the cost of private and government insurance and the health of patients who take potentially dangerous drugs like these. Seroquel, Zyprexa, Geodon, atypical antipsychotics Atypicals carry warnings of death in demented patients but are widely used in nursing homes. Ritalin, Concerta, Strattera, Adderall and ADHD drugs. Information for Healthcare Professionals: Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), Selective Serotonin-Norepinephrine Reuptake Inhibitors (SNRIs), 5-Hydroxytryptamine Receptor Agonists (Triptans) FDA ALERT [7/2006]: Potentially Life-Threatening Serotonin Syndrome with Combined Use of SSRIs or SNRIs and Triptan Medications There is the potential for life-threatening serotonin syndrome (a syndrome of changes in mental status, autonomic instability, neuromuscular abnormalities, and gastrointestinal symptoms) in patients taking 5-hydroxytryptamine receptor agonists (triptans) and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) or selective serotonin/norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) concomitantly (see drug names at the bottom of this sheet).
This information is based on reports of serotonin syndrome occurring in patients treated with triptans and SSRIs/SNRIs, and the biological plausibility of such a reaction in persons receiving two serotonergic medications. This information reflects FDA’s preliminary analysis of data concerning this drug. FDA is considering, but has not reached a final conclusion about this information.
Considerations Data Summary. George Carlin ~ The American Dream.